Well, I really did a number on my right rotator cuff yesterday. I can’t raise my arm at all in two directions, with limited mobility in other directions.
During the night, I heard a commotion on my craft table and discovered Ginger peeing on it. Getting up to chase him off was quite difficult, and I ended up having to put weight on the injured arm. By the time I was done getting him off and cleaning the mess, I was in a cold sweat and feeling ready to throw up.
Yes, I did take painkillers. In fact, I went so far as to take one of my husband’s prescription pain meds.
It made no difference at all.
After a couple more hours of attempted sleep, things have improved. I will probably need to see a doctor, but I’m not sure where to go. I don’t really have one, and my interim doctor isn’t in the clinic on Fridays, anyhow. I really don’t want to spend hours waiting in an emergency room, either.
My daughters are taking shifts to be available to help me. My younger daughter has the day shift. She fed and watered the outside cats and tried to do a head count. She counted about 20 or so, which has been typical for our warmer days of late.
My daughter is cooking breakfast for me now, so I will have to de-cat myself and get up. I have been trying to at least lie down, if not sleep. Oddly, lying on my left side has been more painful, and not just because of my arthritic hip. I just can’t find a good position for my right arm that doesn’t strain the joint. Lying on my right side, I can at least find a position that supports the shoulder, rather than strains it.
My husband was able to have his phone appointment with the doctor. The line sucked while he was on it, but he got it done! The doctor will now consult with the pharmacist to figure out what med change is workable, with what is available. The pharmacy simply can’t reliably get one form of his pain meds. They can still get the other form, though, so they may simply adjust that prescription. These are an opioid, so going off them completely is not preferred. He’s done that before, and it has terrible effects on his intestinal tract.
The second good news.
We have some contact cleaner and I fussed with the cordless phone and base charger for a while. It’s now plugged in and the handset is charging. Everything seems to be working fine.
The not so good news.
As soon as my husband finished his call with the doctor, the phone died again. Basically, it’s acting as if he never hung up. The line is open and crackling.
The good news.
I was able to use my cell phone and wifi calling to make another service call. Not only did the call work, but there was a tech available for this afternoon! He or she will be here some time before 4pm.
So I went to open the gate and, since I was out anyhow, shoveled some more paths. Especially the path to the box on the side of the house. They will have to check that one, first, but the problem may be somewhere else entirely.
It’s not even 1pm yet, as I write this. It feels like it should be 3 or later, already!
I guess I’m not making it to my mother’s. I can’t even call her, since the tech is going to call me on my cell phone, so I need to keep the line clear. Maybe I can try using my husband’s phone. Hopefully, my sister will be able to help her out. We shall see.
I’ll be happy once all this repair stuff is over with!
I checked the weather before heading outside this morning.
We are well sheltered from the wind, for the most part, but it doesn’t take much for that “RealFeel” to drop.
We gave up on keeping a thermometer in the cat house, as they kept knocking it down, but I’ve left it outside, in the top of the shelf shelter, so it’s completely sheltered from wind and sun. I remembered to check it this morning.
-21C vs -24C isn’t much difference on a thermometer, but there’s a difference when you’re in it!
The sunroom thermometer was just below zero, still. I noticed there was no food at all left in the sun room, and the heated water bowl was low, even though it was refilled last night, but there was still plenty of food outside. The big heated water bowl was quite full, too. I could see cats in the window of the cat house. Clearly, they are staying indoors as much as possible! I do still see cats coming out from under the storage house. The remains of the basement under there would provide decent shelter, too.
It could be a lot worse, though. We are expecting a high of -17C today. The roads have been plowed, and I hope to get to my mother’s to do some grocery shopping for her. The city we used to live in, however, is expected to hit temperatures of -41C! That’s before windchill, too! That’s just deadly cold.
I tried to go to bed early last night, but of course, things messed that up.
One of those things was the phone.
With the line repaired, I returned the phone base to my bedroom/office. I set it up in a different spot on my craft table, where it would be more visible while I was in bed.
Which is why I saw the blinking red light.
Yup. The “hold” light was blinking again.
I picked up to check the line, and got just a crackling noise.
The bottom of the handset was also wet.
I grabbed some paper towel and found that where the handset rests in the base and charges had a puddle.
There was even a small puddle under the phone, which I could not see until I moved the base.
Now, my first thought is, a cat peed on it. But I’m not sure how. For starters, there was no visible sign of it. How can a cat pee into the phone base, without peeing on the handset? There was also no smell, and the puddle underneath looked like water. Plus, there was no space for a cat to position themselves in such a way as to pee on the phone without knocking things all over.
The alternative is that somehow, my bedside water bottles spilled, but those were still closed and upright.
So it had to be a cat, yet couldn’t have been a cat. !!
I took the whole thing out, cleaned it up as best I could, then set it aside to dry. Then I used a corded phone to test the line using the jack in the living room.
Still crackling.
So a job for today would be to call the phone company again. Before starting this post, I was going to try doing that from my cell phone. My husband went through it, trying to figure out why the wifi calling wasn’t working on my phone. He ended up doing a reset somewhere, and that seems to have done the trick.
Before calling, though, I checked the phone.
We have a dial tone again.
I want to test the other phone and see if it’s still working, but my guess is, it will need replacing.
We need to have a working phone, though. My husband has a phone appointment with his doctor today. He primary pain meds are getting hard to get, so his doctor wants to try him on something else.
Something that actually works better would be nice. Still, even that could be worse. At least it takes the edge off his pain enough to function, somewhat.
I have 2 weather apps on my phone. One of them changes every time I open it, leaping from -30C to -16C, then back again! There is a new version of that app, but I ended up unistalling it because it sucked so much. The other one cane with my phone. It reads -26C right now.
We will be rescheduling my husband’s eye appointment. Between not being able to plug in the block heater and the highway conditions, it’s not worth it. I thought we could do it just fine, looking at the earlier forecasts, but boy, where they wrong! I hate canceling on the day of an appointment, though, but when it comes to weather conditions, most places are okay with it.
On the plus side: I got some shoveling done around the house, so the sunroom doors were left wide open longer than usual. As I was coming in, I saw the thermometer, which is against an outside wall, was at “only” -15C. Which means it had been even warmer, earlier. Now that the doors are tied off, it should warm up again.
I counted 26 or so cats this morning. Twenty of them were in the sunroom. I was pleased to see all three of the smallest kittens in there, though they are all super fluffy cats. I saw Adam and Driver today, and they are so fluffy, they look like Siberian cats! They look so huge! I didn’t see Brussel this morning, but when I saw her last night, she was looking equally massive and fluffy. Their winter fur is really doing the job!
I had a chance to chat with the Cat Lady today. They are still settling into the new house, of course. I asked about the idea of officially becoming a rescue.
She did not recommend it!
The only benefit, really, is at tax time. They ended up spending more out of pocket for expenses. Dealing with fosters is hard (she had to drop several fosters), and there is the constant drive for donations. The phone is constantly ringing with people having unrealistic expectations.
Then there are the adoptions. To give an example;
One of the sick kittens they took from us never fully recovered. We had not expected it to survive at all, but she saved him. He’s doing great, but his lungs are damaged and week, do he’s prone to respiratory problems.
He has been adopted out, three times.
He is now permanently back with them.
One woman who took him promised she would care for his vet needs, fully informed of his condition.
She brought him back the next day, after he sneezed blood.
Another woman was told by her vet to euthanize him. Rather than do that, she brought him back and requested another kitten.
This particular kitten had bonded with their dog, and they adore him, so they were happy to have him back, but there’s a reason they have 27 permanent cats now.
Actually, I think it’s more than 27 now.
She just spent another $2400 they don’t have on surgery for another cat, who is currently recovering in a bathroom with an open catheter.
They have several other cats that are unadoptable, due to high medical needs. The amount they spend on special cat food and medications, out of pocket, blows me away.
So becoming an official rescue would not actually help our situation.
*sigh*
I’m glad I talked to her about it, first.
Oh, I just heard my husband talking to the eye clinic. Appointment for today is off.
Thank goodness, at least his cell phone works.
Tomorrow, the tech from the phone company will be coming by to check our lines. Hopefully, by the end of the day, the landline will be working again.
Well, it took a while to make a dent in clearing storage space in my computer. It seems to have made a difference already. It looks like most of the volume wasn’t even photos or video I take casually. It’s all those trail cam files. I keep way more than I need to! At some point, I’ll have to go through a major delete session. Especially with the files going back a few years. I really just need to keep any files that have our vandal in them, but he has so many vehicles, I don’t recognize them all. Plus, I do like to keep the files that caught wild life, too!
I have some morning cuteness for you to start with, though!
When I first took the cat bed out of the cage and set it next to the one the cats were all crowding into, they ignored it for quite a while. Eventually, though, the cat puddle spilled over, and now they are using it. As I was coming in from my morning rounds, I spotted these two on it and had to take a picture! The black and white has now named Patience. The tortie still needs a name.
Anyhow. Time to catch up on yesterday!
I headed to my mother’s early (checked the truck’s tires first; they’re down a bit, but not enough to need topping up), stopped long enough to go over her shopping list, then did her shopping for her.
I usually bring food for us to have for lunch, and my mother insists on paying me back, even though I tell her she doesn’t need to. She’s been increasingly fussy, though. The best fried chicken and wedges she loves so much, she’s decided are the cause of her “heart” problems (it’s not her heart, but she doesn’t understand anatomy and refuses to believe all those test results showing her heart is incredibly healthy and strong), so she now refuses to eat them. The Chinese food she loved, she now refuses to eat because she’s decided they serve cat meat, and the family that runs it is… well… Chinese. There’s a chicken restaurant that she used to go to regularly, but she said their food always gets to her cold (not an invalid complaint; at least for their chicken dinners). She did love their pizzas, but the last couple of times I brought pizza, she was aghast at the price. Which has gone up quite a bit, and she is convinced it’s because they’re cheating people and the government should make it so all pizzas cost the same. She also thinks restaurants all buy their pizzas frozen from the same place, apparently. Basically, all the options in her town have been slowly eliminated for one reason or another. The last time I was there, I brought a couple of croissant sandwiches and a Chef’s Salad from the grocery store for lunch. I asked if she wanted me to do that again, and she said no. It costs too much (it didn’t cost much at all), and she had food.
Well, I hadn’t had breakfast yet, and I don’t want to eat her groceries, so after I picked up what was on her list, I was going to pick up a submarine sandwich. It was big enough to share, if she changed her mind. Then I remembered the have a hot food display with whole rotisserie chickens, chicken pieces, nuggets and the like, so I decided to see what was in there, thinking maybe there was some hot food I could bring back.
I’ve never seen these in the display before, but they had complete meals available! A big piece of chicken and thigh, a generous quantity of mashed potatoes and a generous quantity of vegetables, for $6.99 !!! I put back the sub sandwich, then grabbed one meal with beans and carrots, and one with peas and corn.
When I got back to my mother’s, I found she had been busy heating up leftovers and putting together a lunch for us – breakfast, for her also! I’m glad I picked up the dinners. Her list was short, but as I put things away, I found her fridge pretty empty. It’s not that she can’t afford to buy groceries. I think it’s more because she keeps cutting more and more foods out of her diet, because she’s suddenly decided they are bad for her! At least she did have some hamburgers made with beef my sister gave her (beef is one of the foods she’s decided to stop buying, opting instead for more processed meats!), so I sure as heck didn’t want to be eating a protein she needs for herself!
She actually did seem happy with the dinners, too – especially when she saw the price tags on the containers. So we had ourselves a good lunch, and she was all set for supper, too.
My sister had visited my mother yesterday, and changed her bedding for her. I got an email letting me know she found bed bugs. *sigh* My mother’s building is run by the province’s public housing department, which subsidizes rents, so there is one provincial number to call. They did have a separate maintenance number, which I made sure to add to my mother’s phone list, since calling the main office is an exercise in frustration. The automated system just punts you to voice mail, but the voice mail boxes are always full, so you can’t leave a message, anyhow. The maintenance number gets you to a real, live human being – eventually.
The head office for public housing is located in the smaller, closer city, rather than the big city, where the legislature and most government offices are. When I mentioned that this office is for the entire province, my mother refused to believe me, saying it had to be just for our region, because if it was for the entire province, it would be in the bigger city. She simply could not accept that a government department’s head office could exist outside the capital city of the province. I tried to explain, but she was getting herself worked up, so I dropped it. A very strange thing to get upset over!
It was shortly after noon when this was all done, which means we had a couple more hours before her phone appointment with the doctor. I knew where was a chance she’d call early, though, and sure enough, she did. In fact, from the time, I think she was making these calls on her lunch break!
I set us up on speaker phone, and the first thing the doctor asked was, why did we have this appointment? I told her about the tests results that were supposed to be sent to her, and she said she had nothing on file. The last tests results she had for my mother were from September. !!! Then she said she would check online. Our province’s patient medical records are all digital now, but they’re sort of all over the place. She had to log into a system outside the clinic to find the test results.
They came back normal.
All of her tests and scans, including the one the test that needed 5 days to complete, came back normal.
My mother is ridiculously healthy, as far as their tests go.
So we went over my mother’s symptoms again, and mentioned the prescription she gave my mother to test out made no difference. We talked options and possibilities. One of them is to have my mother referred to a specialist, which is my mother’s choice.
The doctor, however, would have to see my mother in person and do a physical exam before she can make a referral.
My mother was starting to lose it at this point. With so many holidays over the next while, it was either making an appointment very soon, or in January.
Given the test results, this is not an urgent situation, so we’re going with January. I will call to make an appointment, later.
The whole call took less than 10 minutes.
As soon as it was done, my mother was all “I don’t want to see this doctor! I’m not going back there!” This time, however, her reasoning was legitimate, and not just her racism emerging again. She even said, she’d apologize to the doctor, but between her own English and the doctor’s strong accent (plus, she talks fast), my mother simply can’t understand what she’s saying. As it was, I was struggling to understand her at times, too, and kept having to ask her to repeat herself, and I can’t even blame my auditory processing issues for it, this time. I had the same problem when we were talking to her in person.
I still need to find myself a new doctor, too, so I’ll have to make some phone calls to various clinics and see if any of them have doctors open to new patients that would be willing to take both me and my mother.
My mother was also frustrated that we had two days with this waiting, for just a few minutes call!
As we were talking after the call, I got a 1 hour reminder from my phone, for the appointment.
I’m glad we set the new appointment for the afternoon instead of the morning, so that this time I was actually there when she called early!! My mother could not have handled this call at all, on her own.
But it was done, and we have some next steps to take.
I spent some time looking things up related to some of the other options the doctor mentioned that she can do herself at home. Some of what I found, she physically cannot do, but there is enough that she can do, that it’s not much of a concern. Then she started to talk about what other foods she should stop eating, and I had to play interference on that one. For starters, there is nothing diet related when it comes to her symptoms, but in her mind, everything comes back to whatever food issue she’s developed, based on something she saw on TV, read in a “women’s” magazine, or hear from her neighbours. It’s all pretty messed up. Even now, she will sometimes randomly tell me, I need to eat more soup (she has no idea how much soup I do or don’t eat). Why? So I will lose weight. She saw some guy on a daytime talk show, decades ago, saying something about eating soup to lose weight. I recall that particular fad, and this was a very long time ago! But it’s in her mind and, because some self proclaimed expert said it on TV, that magically makes it true, and she believes that if I just ate soup, I would lose weight.
Funny. She complains about her own weight, but doesn’t apply this magical advice to herself!
The thing is, she hears and reads all this stuff and latches onto it, and has decided that any ache or pain or whatever she’s dealing with, is directly related to a food of some kind, therefore she must cut it out. She could break her leg, and think that means she ate the “wrong” thing for breakfast. Very frustrating! Especially since she should know better. A lot of stuff she now believes is “bad” is stuff she helped grow, raise and process for almost her entire life. We butchered our own cows and ate lots of beef when I was growing up, but now beef is bad?
Anyhow. I’m getting distracted.
Once we were done talking about the call and next steps, I was more than happy to head home, and my mother was more than happy to send me on my way, so she could go for a nap!! She did give me some Christmas cards to mail for her at our post office, because she no longer trusts the staff at the post office in her town. I was okay with that, as I turned out to have a parcel in the mail, anyhow. I’m glad I looked at her cards, though, because she had a wrong address for my nephew. I’ve since confirmed the correct address, fixed the envelop, and need to go back to the post office after I’m done this.
As for my parcel in the mail, it was a different brand of lysine for the cats. The previous brand we tried was more granular, instead of the fine powder we were getting before, from a supplier that seems to no longer supply lysine at all anymore. The granular is fine if it’s being mixed into wet cat food or dissolved into water, but it doesn’t stick as well when tossed in dry kibble.
This new brand is a fine powder, and I’m quite happy with it. It dissolves very quickly in their water, and when tossed with the dry kibble, sticks to it much better. Hopefully, this means the outside cats will actually eat more of it, instead of it falling off the kibble when I set it out! It’s working out so nicely, I think we’ll be putting this brand on a subscription. It came in a 500g bag, which is bigger than what we had found previously. We’ll see how long a bag lasts, first.
Now it’s time to grab a food of some kind, and see what other maintenance I can do on my computer!
Today, my mother had a telephone doctor’s appointment to get the final test results from her recent ER visits. The previous results would have already been sent to her doctor, but there was the one culture test that takes 5 days to get results. Today would have been enough time for that test to be completed, and the results sent to her doctor.
Her appointment was for 10:30, but I left early to do things like put gas in the truck and pick up a breakfast/lunch of some sort at the grocery store, since my mom has been complaining about the prices of take out food. I ended up getting a Chef’s salad and a couple of croissant sandwiches. They didn’t have a lot of prepared food to choose from, that early in the day.
When I got to my mom’s, I was about half an hour early. My mother told me that she’d had a phone call at 9am, but she didn’t get to it in time. No message was left, but she thought it might have been me. It wasn’t, so I checked the call display on her phone, which only showed the number, date and time, but nothing else. I tried to do a reverse look up and, sure enough, it came from the town the clinic is in. That was as much as we could find out, but it was likely the doctor, calling 1 1/2 hours early! It was also just after the clinic officially opened.
Still, we figured since she didn’t get through, she’d call at – or close to – the appointment time. We also knew that it might be late, if things got busy with her in-person patients.
After half an hour past the appointment time, I called the clinic, just to make sure. It was confirmed that the doctor did try to call in the morning. I ended up being transferred to someone else and I explained the situation again. She looked up the information, then assured me that she would let the doctor know to call us, and that we were waiting for her call.
So… I guess she wasn’t going to try calling again, after not getting through to my mother earlier? It seems my mother’s name wasn’t on the list anymore.
We waited.
And waited.
My mother was starting to get really tired, so she tried to lie down for a nap, and I waited with her phone.
And waited.
At least I got to watch the latest Tasting History video that went live today. 😁
The clinic doesn’t answer their phones between 12 and 1. It wasn’t even 12:15 when my mother started saying that we should call again. I explained their telephone hours to her, but she had a hard time understanding the concept. She did, at least, understand that there was no point in trying to call until 1pm.
When 1:00 rolled around, I called again, just to see what the status of things was.
It was confirmed that my mother was still on the list of people that would be called – and I was assured, my mother would be called.
The doctor, however, was in the ER.
The clinic is part of the hospital building, and the doctors take turns being the on call for the ER. Today was her turn.
The receptionist was really apologetic, but there was nothing she could do – there was no way to know when the doctor would be able to call. Meanwhile, I still had errands to do for my mother, and I couldn’t stay there all day, waiting.
We ended up rescheduling the appointment, this time in the afternoon. I’ll be coming back to my mother’s for it, the day after tomorrow.
When I asked about the stuff my mother had wanted me to pick up for her, she said to forget it. Just go home! She was more than ready to try for a nap again, feeling very tired and very frustrated.
So I’ll do the errands for her on Thursday. I think I’ll go over in the morning, do the errands first, then wait for the call with her. If I wait until after the call to do the errands, it’ll be dark by the time I’d be heading home, and I’d really prefer to avoid that if I can. Yes, I did get deer screamers for the truck, but there are an awful lot of deer out there this year.
The end result is, we still have no idea what her test results are, and what next steps can be taken to figure out what is going on with my mother.
When I got home, I found my answering machine blinking, but no message. My caller ID, however, gives more information, and I could see that the call was from the clinic. The doctor had tried to call me, immediately after trying to call my mother, but I was already on the road to my mother’s place at that time.
On the one hand, I can appreciate that she tried, but it frustrates me that a telephone appointment is not being treated as an appointment, but a free-for-all. We’ve had some telephone appointments for myself and my husband with similar issues. The call comes in much earlier, much later, or not at all! So it’s not an issue with this doctor in particular.
Ah, well. It is what it is.
I just can’t help but feel my day was completely wasted for it, though.
My daughter and I left really early for my eye exam, just to be on the safe side. The drive is normally about 45 minutes. Road conditions were good, but the farther south we drove, the denser the fog and the worse the visibility. The town my appointment was in was completely enveloped in fog. The city, another 15 minutes drive away, would have been even worse!
Since we got there so early, we had time for lunch, and to check out a couple of stores. I still got to my appointment almost an hour early. I’m glad I did, because they were able to take me in early. There was the pre-test stuff, which included a field of vision test, this time. I haven’t had one of those in well over 20 years. Then I got the eye drops and stayed in the waiting room to give them time to do their work. Even with all that, it was still earlier than my appointment when the doctor came to get me. I have some extremely mild hemorrhaging in my eyes that she wanted to check again. They seem pretty much unchanged. My field of vision test also seemed fine, though she didn’t have any previous tests to compare to, of course.
She wants me back again in 6 months, partly for a regular eye exam, but to do the field of vision and dilation tests again, and be able to compare.
Since I was taken in so early, it was still light out for our entire drive home. Being a passenger for a change, I tried to get some pictures out the window. In town, the visibility had actually gotten worse, but once we were on the highway and heading north, the visibility improved.
One good thing with everything being covered with hoarfrost. Deer are highly visible!
We even got back early enough to pick up a parcel at the post office, before they closed.
So now I sit here wondering if my eyes can handle working on another garden analysis post.
Considering how they feel, just from writing this, I think they’re still way too dilated!
Ah, it feels so good to be using a keyboard again! I really don’t like using my phone to tap out blog posts. 😄
Would you look at this bunch?
There’s always quite the rush of cats in the sun room when I first come out with my little bin and scoop to feed them. They’ve usually tossed things about over night (or the racoons have!), so I now put the bin down in the ground and let them have at it, while I pick things up and put them back where they belong. Then take scoops of kibble from around usually 3 or 4 cats eating out of the bin to fill the feeding areas in the sun room. Even after that’s done, I usually still have one or two I need to bodily remove from the bin so I can take it outside. There is a black cat that now lets me pet it and even move it around while it’s eating. I think it’s the one I posted a picture of recently. I’m not 100% sure, though.
This morning, every time I tried to do a head count, I got a different number. However, my first head count, done while they were all still voraciously eating, rather than running around all over the place, I got 38, and I’m almost positive I did not double count any of them. Once they’ve had at least some food, though, they start running around and then some start disappearing.
Then there are the ones that don’t disappear. They instead settle down in the sun room, with full little bellies, and settle in for a nap!
I’ve managed to touch the back of that fluffy grey tabby in the top right a few times while eating. He (she?) would run off, but not as quickly as usual. When not eating, I can’t get close enough to touch.
I think my daughter and I will need to head out earlier for my eye appointment today. I can see on the security camera live feed that the fog is getting thicker. We had fog alerts starting last night. After my mother was done at the hospital, we were hitting fog on the drive to her place. In one stretch, I turned off the main highway to cross over to her town and immediately drove into a wall of fog. We kept driving in and out of fog banks the whole way, but it did seem to clear up as we reached her town.
When I was driving home, I started driving through fog banks again. In some places, the ground was clear, but the fog hung like a ceiling, above.
When I came out to do my rounds this morning, there was a light fog. The trees are covered in light hoarfrost. I expected it to get lighter as the day went on, but nope. It’s getting denser!
So glad we’ll be taking the truck, and not my mother’s car!
My mother and I ended up in the ER for just under 6 hours.
She got her scan done – it turned out to be another ultrasound – and we were sent back to the ER waiting room until the results came in.
The problem is, for people waiting for scan results (we weren’t the only ones), they get squeezed in between patients with more urgent needs. Plus, only a doctor can discuss the results, not the nurses, and they were really busy. All 14 ER beds were full.
So what I thought might take a couple of hours, ended up much longer!
On the plus side, the cafeteria was open, so my mother did actually get a chance to eat. It was closed when she was there with my brother, yesterday. It was a real demonstration about just how hungry she was when she agreed to have a quesadilla, the only hot food option available. She had to ask what it was and agreed to have one. My mother will normally flat out refuse to try anything new, so this was a big deal!
I also almost drained the battery on my phone, distracting her with things on Pinterest. We tried watching a few short videos, but that was pushing her attention span to the limit, so I went back to Pinterest.
End result, when they finally called her in?
Nothing.
They found nothing wrong in their scan.
Now, with her symptoms, there is obviously something wrong, but they have no idea what. They took a sample for a culture test, which takes 5 days, so see if there’s a bacterial cause. They will phone my mother only if they find something wrong. Meanwhile, all the data will be sent to her doctor, and I will be booking an appointment for her in the near future – but not too near. We’ll see how it works out, with the Christmas holidays.
As for my mother, it seems she’s ridiculously healthy. Not bad for someone who is 92, very round, with busted up knees, and constantly complaining to us about various health problems, and is convinced the doctors are hiding things from her, like that she has cancer or something (she doesn’t). At one point, as my mother was being taken to an examination room, even the nurse that was supposed to be leading the way, only to have my mother race off ahead of her, commented on just how fast she is!
Anyhow.
Once she sees her regular doctor, she might get referred to a specialist to try and figure out what the heck is going on.
Funny how my mother complains about her health so much, but she’s had these symptoms for months and ever thought much of them. She figured they’d go away on their own.
*sigh*
Meanwhile, tomorrow we have to go to yet another town for my eye appointment, which means I won’t have the time I need to finish any of my 2023 garden analysis drafts. It might be a couple of days before I can get back to those.
This has got to be the busiest December for outings we’ve had since moving out here!
I woke up in pain. Every joint. Even my finger joints where hurting and didn’t want to bend.
I’m about a 6 on the above chart. My husband fluctuates from 7 or 8 on a good day, to 10 on a bad day, so I really don’t have much to complain about.
At least I remembered to take pain killers this morning.. I was intending to take pain killers after finishing yesterday’s blog post, got distracted and completely forgot until I was taking my evening prescription and supplements before bed.
I’m not sure why I’m in so much pain this morning. It’s not related to my fall. My knee feels good enough that I forget it’s still injured and start to kneel onto a chair or my bed with it. In fact, right now, it’s my other knee that hurts more, just with ambient pain. It could be the change in temperatures and barometric pressure. We’ve reached our expected high of -3C/27F already, and tomorrow is supposed to reach a high of -8C/18C. My desktop weather app includes the pressure, but without knowing what it was yesterday to see how much it has changed, I can’t say one way or the other.
On a more pleasant note, I also woke up covered in kittens. At least four of them at one point, snuggling against me. Well, three against me. Snorri in particular much prefers sleeping on me over sleeping with the other kittens. Usually on my hip, but one time I had my feet out from under the covers, and he decided my bare ankle was the place to be!
He’s so small, he could actually do that, and I could barely feel his weight! Even The Beast (aka: Tiny) is significantly heavier than Snorri, and she’s still too tiny to let out of the room! We are letting Soot Sprite out regularly now, though.
So it looks like I’m not going to get a lot done today. My daughter took care of the outside cats for me this morning. Thankfully, we’ve got our prescription refills getting delivered today, so I don’t have to drive into town for them. I’m glad my husband called his refills in earlier. Yesterday, we got a call from the pharmacist about his pain meds. He gets it in both slow release and “take as needed” versions. The pharmacy not only needed an updated prescription for it, but they needed the triplicate paper prescription, as it’s an opioid. The problem is, they sent a fax for the refill, and got no response. They even tried our old doctor at his new clinic, and we’re not patients of his anymore. My husband called his new doctor’s office and, according to their records, they sent the refill information just a few days after the pharmacy requested it. How they could fax in a triplicate prescription, I don’t know, but I guess they’ve got something worked out. With his new doctor in the same town as the pharmacy again, they’re just blocks apart, and I recall the clinic would simply walk the paper prescriptions over. He called the pharmacy and they double checked, but never received the fax. So the clinic sent it again, and it’s all straightened out. He’ll get his pain meds with his bubble packs today, as usual.
Well, I guess this makes today a good day to work on my 2023 garden analysis drafts. It should be interesting to go through my early planning posts and see just how different our garden turned out to be, from how it was intended this year!
The Re-Farmer 