July 7, 2014
In the fifteen months we’ve been in office, what kind of luck have we had? Ginger?
– Toby Ziegler, The West Wing
I’m feeling a bit Toby today. It’s going to sound mean but I have PiC to thank for this post as we carry on our dance with Murphy.
Let this be a lesson to you: Get ye your first aid kits together!
He showed up at the front door bleeding profusely the other day, and I actually didn’t even notice the blood at first because I was surprised to see him at that time. Then I saw the blood.
Now I’m the klutz in the family, we all know that. I run into walls, fall off things, trip over mothballs. There’s just nothing I can’t fall over, into, or off of; it’s laughable. But since it’s always me, I’d really slacked off on getting together our medical kit because I’ve always been able to cobble together a passable bandage with what we had on hand. In the face of his hurts, though, I had to get myself to the store and stock up on medical supplies post-haste.
Walgeen’s is running a first aid supply sale in-store and at least some things are marked down online so while patching up most of PiC multiple times, we had enough left to for the home and travel kits, all for $55.
$40 of that is FSA eligible, can anyone tell me why bandages are eligible and anti-bacterial stuff is not? They’re both OTC. Weird.
I got a free first aid bag with the purchases so that was convenient since we only had a bag for the car. Filled them both these Buy One Get One 50% off finds:
* Rolls of gauze
* Tearable cloth tape
* Tearable flexible plastic tape
* Regular bandaids for the really minor cuts in all sizes
* Gauze pads – 4″ by 4″ for maximum flexibility if we’re facing big injuries.
* Neosporin – I’m going trade our second Neosporin for the Neosporin for Kids which is a double antibiotic instead of a triple. Apparently we don’t like neomycin anymore for injuries as people are coming up allergic to it.
I also picked up a couple seriously heavy duty bandages for profuse, artery pumping, life threatening injuries for the emergency kit, tossed one of those into the car kits, the other’s for the home EQ kit.
Still Need:
* Bandage scissors for bandage removals/cutting cloth as necessary for both human and canine
* Kid’s scissors from Target when they have their back to school sales for cutting up the gauze, etc.
Still need, but pondering quantities:
* Hibiclens – As it turns out, we are also now being discouraged by medical professionals from using hydrogen peroxide to clean wounds anymore as they find it causes tissue damage. I grew up being bathed in Betadine, I don’t think that’s still in favor either, luckily for us all. @stardotgeek confirmed that she’s discovered an allergy to neomycin recently and suggested the Hibiclens.
* Tylenol/Ibuprofen – I go through this stuff so quickly it seems like the ones in the kit would be forgotten and expire; I don’t like to buy the single dose packets since we have the enormous lifetime supply bottles.
***
The Minor Injuries clinic didn’t seem to do much good, other than supplying us with antibiotics for the infection I worry he’ll get and a handful of bandaging supplies, but I’m glad we went for the medications anyway. It’s a darn good thing very little about trauma/injuries turns my stomach because I’ve been changing his bandages three times a day and his injuries are gnarly.
Take it from me, you’ll want to pick up supplies on sale if you had to go through stacks of gauze pads and rolls everyday.
June 30, 2014
Hello, Murphy, we meet again.
There’s just nothing like a few unexpected events to remind you that preparedness in ALL things isn’t a terrible idea.
An almost hilarious Rube Goldbergian chain of events left us near the beginning of a long road trip sitting to the side of whizzing-by traffic, having limped as far as we could on a completely blown out tire. And this is after our rear windshield had just been MacGyvered after being all smashed all to hell. Huge chunks of glass blew back at least 12 feet, so now that I think about it, it’s a minor miracle that no one was hit by it. Tempered glass or not, the force with which those little square chunks were flung would have meant major cuts.
Kind of like how your life might flash before your eyes in a near death experience, it suddenly occurred to me how many things were missing from our travel/car emergency kit.
* Duct tape for broken glass
* Gloves for dealing with any broken or pointy bits
* Something approximating orange cones
* A full med kit in case someone DID get hurt.
And if this had happened late at night, we would desperately have needed:
* A really good flashlight or even a lantern for hands free work
* Flares
* Blankets/pillows while we were waiting for help
We already had food, water, and a package of wet wipes for getting post-car repair grime off, and luckily we weren’t left waiting on the side of the road blocking traffic for too long, but it was definitely a bad situation that could have been much worse. (Though the surprise $1k+ in auto expenses is NOT going to be fun.)
I usually don’t think I need a AAA membership but PiC’s really helped out; we could not have singlehandedly swapped out the tire safely in under 15 minutes without that power car jack and an extra set of hands. PiC didn’t want me out on the road with him so he would have been dealing with it in the heat alone :/
This doesn’t happen often but if it happened with just me and Doggle, we would have had a struggle getting that tire changed out. It might be time to revise my opinion on a AAA membership.
What would you recommend for an emergency car kit?
Donna Freedman just wrote about this a short while back…
June 11, 2013
Say hello to the klutzoid
It was like a scene from one of my You’re Awkward as *#$(@ nightmares. Or a really stupid, scripted tv show.
Rushing out to meet my friend, I grabbed a super bulky bag, shoved my feet into flipflops and locked the door behind me, leaving my phone behind because I was only running out for a second. I never leave my phone behind, not even to take out the trash or get the mail. But THIS day ….
As the elevator door opened, I juggled the dangerously slipping bag to get a better grip on it. In hindsight, I should have just dropped the cursed thing.
To my slow-motion, too fast to screech or catch, horror, both the bag and my awkward right hand smacked my kangeroo sweatshirt pouch at just the “right” angle to bounce the house keys right out of the pocket. They hit the wall, slid down, bounced on the ground and fell. Right into the elevator shaft. I heard it more than saw it: *smack* *jingle* *smack* *splash* as it descended to the unknown depths.
I stared at my friend. She stared at me.
Locked out. Keys invisible to the naked eye. PiC not due home for another hour.
My friend could barely contain her horrified, chagrined laughter but it fell on deaf ears. My otherwise benumbed brain was too busy trying to figure out how to break down the elevator shaft, or fish around on the lowest floor in hopes that the keys would be hookable.
No such luck, of course, there was no way to find them peering down into the two inch chasm. I always knew that thing was a disaster waiting to happen!
Stupid tax, stupid tax, stupid tax!
The call to the management company was possibly worse than kneeling on the floor of the elevator calling it names. They’d charge $400 just to call out the maintenance guys, plus labor.
Abandoning the keys would be a security risk – when they finally did come out for a routine check-up, chances were good they would find the keys and then someone would have a set of keys to our lives. Fantastic.
Replacing the keys and locks? Start at $200 for a key fob for the car, and keep adding the costs up from there.
This was too stupid, even for me. It fell into the realm of horrifically embarrassing, even, because it wasn’t just me leaning on the locking door dramatically sobbing quietly. I was keeping my friend hostage to the errand she couldn’t run without getting in our place.
Always have a spare
Neither cost was something I was prepared to pay. It’s more than we budgeted for an entire year of stupid tax/fees!
Luckily, we did have a spare set, otherwise we’d have been pulling out the credit card and docking my allowance. After a few rounds of calls, the company finally conceded that we could wait for a routine maintenance check, whenever that happened, but at least when it did happen, they would retrieve the keys at no extra cost. In a month, or three.
We’d just have to keep phone stalking them until that call was scheduled.
True story: It’s actually possible to be relieved and so angry you could spit at the same time!
In the end, it took a few months of nailbiting and waiting to get a confirmation the elevator servicefolk were coming out and we’d get our keys back without the hefty stupid tax attached.
Please, share a stupid/stupid tax story, stupidity likes company just as much as misery does.
Keys now go into a zipper pocket and get zipped in. Always.
October 6, 2012
There’s a question of whether you can truly believe what a blogger’s saying if you don’t know his or her real name, or see his or her face, of whether there’s disingenuity in hiding behind a pseudonym online.
I’ve been thinking, lightly treading, one moment to the next, about whether or not there’s any point, a benefit, to considering shedding my pseudonymity, whether, if I wanted to take a new, fresh step in my writing, that would be the right step.
Bloggers are doing brave writing, soulful pieces about their journeys; Clare and her discovery process with alcohol: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3; Andrea’s recent revelation about her PTSD. They’re able to write in the open, under their names and I admire that.
But having always been an anonymous blogger, an open identity looks like open and perhaps treacherous waters from here. Many PF bloggers have come out into the open and seem to have enjoyed the process; why not consider it?
Would it enrich my writing? Would it enrich the experience of blogging?
It’s an interesting thought exercise. On the one hand, I haven’t had the experience of people caring enough to want to be open and honest with people in my real life about my health, my thoughts about my health, and experiences stemming therein. I certainly couldn’t have been this open about my family’s life with money with, well, anyone. More of you know that genuine and authentic side of me than anyone in my real life.
On the other hand, of those who care, there’s nothing they can do and I chose not to enlighten them to the depths of my health journey and the related life choices. Mostly, it was years of knowing that if I added one more thing to the list of things for my parents to worry over, that they couldn’t fix and had to feel guilty about not being able to fix, I couldn’t live with myself. So the encroaching, progressing and overwhelming chronic pain and fatigue issues were all safely tucked away under the hood. They were never to know that it was more than just a bit of pain I just couldn’t shake, that it’d ever gotten worse than the pain they knew about, the pain that started when I was 13. Not the chest pains, not the vertigo, not the breathing problems, not the weekends of being flat out steamrollered, unable to lift limbs for the exhaustion, nor the parade of pharmaceuticals that wouldn’t breach my crushing defeat. They were to know nothing about it. Not when just the fact that I worked incredibly long hours with the little pain they knew about was so distressing.
I kept up a facade for so long that I’d forgotten it was there.
It was a sharp shock remembering this past week that knowing me, my name or my face or even knowing me since birth don’t lend itself to knowing much about me.
I got into a tiff with my dad over, of all things, weddings.
PiC and I had a very quiet courthouse wedding last year with only a handful of people. My side was represented by my parents and very close friends. The rest of the extended family saw the engagement ring at the funeral soon after and then the lying started.
It’s ironclad tradition to have an engagement party, oh well, Mom was so ill we just had to have a quick and small one. They all, of course, felt left out, but what could they say during funeral arrangements?
Then the questions, because, it’s my family and if we did a formal engagement, the date must already have been set.
Oh, well we can’t possibly think about planning anything now, obviously.
We have to wait a while, now, we thought we’d have Mom around for a while…
Oh, I hear someone calling my name, gotta go.
We never got around to planning the reception. Life and grief and work and everything got in the way. I still can’t really bring myself to want to plan one, yet. I had the worst times thinking about planning it while Mom was struggling with losing her very self.
He brought the subject up the last time we were back home and my throat closed up.
It came up again, this time with the “your aunt and I will take care of all the arrangements,” “you don’t need to worry about the guest list, I’ll deal with it,” and after several attempts to put on the brakes gently, to interject some sense into the runaway train that leads to the 18-hours of Miserable Asian Wedding, trying to compromise before it turned into the Scary Vision of Stress, he said “well, everyone just has to suck it up and deal with it.”
He didn’t know. He doesn’t know how deep my wells of grief are intertwined with my helplessness to save her and my helplessness to save myself.
I lost it.
“NO. No, because if I ‘just deal with it, I will DIE. I can’t even do normal stuff because I’m sick. I can’t even live a normal life now, get dressed, cook meals, eat meals, drive a car, walk to and from the garage without planning which things I can do in a day without falling over, so no, I Can’t. Just. Deal. With. It.”
I shouldn’t have. I really really shouldn’t have. I was tired, I was short-tempered, I had completely forgotten how much I had hidden even from him. Because in all these long years of chronic pain, fatigue and mystery illness, I hadn’t even told him that it wasn’t just the initial joint pain that he knew of in one isolated area anymore. That it was everywhere, that it was fatigue, and shortness of breath, and chest pain, and dizziness, and and and.
And he didn’t know that my years powering through work and school and work and moving and taking care of everything and more work, that was all on the Scholarship of Faking It. He had no idea that I’ve been slowly falling apart for nearly 20 years.
Because I deliberately didn’t tell him, in case he let it slip and Mom found out and worried herself into an earlier grave. /Sigh. And now I feel horrible for telling him because he’s been having survivor guilt, guilt for making my life difficult all these years, guilt for being dependent on me. And I know that. But I just ran right over him.
And of course he felt terrible over it.
So now that’s out and we both feel worse for having it out there in the open just making us both feel bad.
It’s more complicated, of course, than just a secret held too long, grief clouding judgment, guilt clouding judgment, a father feeling he’s neglected his duties. It’s all of that and more.
At the end of this, I don’t think I see a way for me to be a better blogger when I haven’t even figured out how to be a better, more open person yet.
September 26, 2012
“If money is no object…”
It’s actually not the money part that terrifies me. Rather, when you hear that, you know that what comes next is going to be a serious treatment or procedure that is going to cause your baby additional pain and no little anxiety and fear.
Doggle had a mini-vacation with friends he absolutely adores and they utterly adore him, therefore spoil the stuffing out of him. And we appreciate that to no end.
Unfortunately, he came home with a hurt back, a reprisal of last year’s limping pain, only worse because this time he’s actually vocalizing pain when he sits down too hard, he’s hunched up most of the time and can’t really bear weight on his rear legs. This from the stoic dog that doesn’t emit a peep when he runs into things, gets stepped on, has had children swinging on him, accidentally smacked his head into cabinets, whacks his head on the kitchen table with a THUD every other day. He’s in real pain. Seeing him shuffle or scuttle, afraid to walk normally, slipping and falling when he least expects it, hearing him trip and fall when he turns too hard is just killing me.
We took him to the vet for an exam. The results were alarming. He had a physical and the interpretation of the x-rays from last year was much more strongly worded. As usual, Doggle didn’t react to the physical exam, but the vet felt the physical confirmed what he felt he saw in the x-rays: a serious disc/vertebral issue. This was definitely not what we were told last year and put this way, I would have proceeded to the suggested more aggressive follow-up route last year, the one the other vet said wouldn’t be necessary if he responded to pain meds, because “a serious back problem” says he is a high risk for recurrence, instead of just a one-time oddity that is life as usual with a relatively senior dog.
While we opted to take a more conservative approach last year and that resolved well enough, the last thing I wanted was for this to recur, and to run the risk of causing serious neurological or neuropathic problems!
I didn’t bring home this dog to start losing him less than two years later!
This is my puppy. He’s my heart now. I can’t bear the thought of … well.
So we’re drugging him for two weeks to alleviate the pain and discomfort. He’s loving that. (No, he’s not. He’s already accidentally chomped my finger while trying to spit them out while I tried to shove the pills back in his maw. We were a bit of a mess. Normally I’m great at pilling him so that he doesn’t taste the nasty ones but I let myself get all distracted and wrung out over the what-ifs & screwed it up spectacularly. So I have a sore ring finger/nail to show for it.)
Meanwhile, I’m asking for a second opinion, and another recommendation for a good place to go in case this is the right thing to do. And checking the treat stash to see which other ones I can feed him while he dissociates his favorite ones with disgusting meds. We (I) may need to mix up some special Mom’s baby food and rice dinners for a few days too while he gets used to being on medication. He’s having enough trouble standing physically speaking, I don’t know if he’s going to be able to mentally muster the motivation to eat.
I really really don’t want him to hurt anymore, I really don’t want this to happen again and I hate that it did this time. This is breaking my heart.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In the end, the money part scares me a bit too. I live in the Bay Area now and not only do I not have any kind of friend, professional or any other kind of animal health care discount that might have slightly defrayed costs in the slightest, pricing is between 25-50% higher than it is down south. – heart attack –
An office visit alone goes from $30 to $50. I go into the vet office and come out $160 poorer, 90 minutes later. Going to a specialist? I’m not joking when I anticipate the office visit alone starting at $100 and treatments starting in the thousands.
Back in my youth, teens and early twenties, I could only afford as much vet care as we needed for my dog pack by working really hard and being creative. (Not that I didn’t just repurpose my own pain meds for Doggle today. This is totally legitimate. He was getting prescribed the same meds I can no longer use and they are exactly the same thing.)
But now, if we’re going the specialist route, we’re paying for it straight up, and this will sting. *deep breath* Wish us luck?
** 11:30 pm: That was fast. The second opinion consultation has already come back. Get us to a specialist now before the damage is irretrievable. Ok.
July 23, 2009
It’s been nearly a week and I still haven’t mustered the courage to try and figure out how much this one’s going to cost.
On the way home from the airport, a huge chunk of asphalt or rock popped up from the right lane, and smashed into the lower right corner of my car. I was fairly certain that it mostly hit the bottom of my car, but as we drove on, I could hear an ominous whistling. Upon close inspection, the object did hit the bottom of my car which is already *ahem* damaged and still unrepaired, but even worse! It’s smashed the housing for my daytime running light. The bulb is fine, but the housing is completely destroyed.
Big. Fat. Sigh.
I’m not even going to deal with this until Comic-Con is over.
(still thinking about it, though….)
March 4, 2009
Clearing up the insurance details:
Auto insurance refunds:
$115, check received
$153, check requested
Policy Premium increase:
$142, lovely
Still to be determined:
Car payout, less the $500 deductible, less any assessed decrease in value, less the remaining loan amount.
The check should be arriving sometime this week, and we can begin car hunting in earnest. Sharing is caring, but sharing a car all the time makes for crazy.
