About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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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.
October 3, 2012
We were stranded between consultations for Doggle miles away from home and I hadn’t eaten a meal in several hours except for some fruit so PiC found a nearby food hut to tantalize my stressiness off the ledge. He’d been feeding me bits and bites and figured something tasty would be easier to get me to actually want to eat.
It was a bit costlier than our usual fare, but heck. A tenner more wasn’t going to break the bank and it kept me functional for the rest of a very tough day.
And look, pretty pictures for the blog too! Win-win-win!
A tin bucket of oyster crackers. Two of my favorite things.
It’s possible this makes me a huge doofus but I’m sure other things already put me in that category. I love oyster crackers, and I love tin buckets. *shrug* That’d be the 5 year old country girl in me.
A cup of clam chowder
Seems like we can’t not try the clam chowder wherever we go. And this time, highly touted by the highly excitable lady at the counter. As it turns out, she was hugely excited because she actually thought we were the same customers from the night before. Had to break it to her that we were new customers who were trying out the place for the first time, so she was really happy to see, well, strangers. But nice to meetcha!
The Maine Crab Roll
Confession: Some days my memory span = life span of a gnat. We vacillated long enough between two lobster rolls and a crab roll + a lobster roll that I just forgot what we ordered entirely. So by the time this came, I just thought it was an anemic looking lobster roll. I failed to appreciate the lobstery goodness. Then PiC reminded me it was crab. Ohhh…. uh. Yeah. Good job, me. It was fine for crab but it reminded me why I’m so particular about my crab. Go Maryland Blue Crab!
The Naked Lobster Roll
The Lobster roll was pretty delicious – I’m not usually one for lobster but I skipped the butter and mayo and with just a squeeze of lemon: perfection.
~~ ~~~ ~~
It’s just pricey enough that I wouldn’t go out of my way to find the Shack but it was really good. Their “rolls” – the bread slices that were cut into the middle of and made to be sandwich-like things were incredibly good. They had to be buttered and fried, they were amazingly soft inside and just a bit crisped and crunchy on the outside but not greasy.
Definitely a treat I’d bring visitors over to try.
October 2, 2012
It only took nearly three years before we finally did that lunch we’d always talked about doing: meeting up during the week and having a fun lunch away from the offices.
Boccalone is one of my favorite places to take people around to, if only because it’s so amusing. They have these salami cones full of an assortment of sliced deli meats for $3. Delicious.
It’s not an extensive menu but the sandwiches are well made and tasty. Pricy, though, and I really have to remember to bring my own water. A bit silly to pay a dollar for a cup of water.
Now this is something new – mortadella hot dog?
So you know I had to have one!
The best part about having meals with PiC is that he usually chooses the other thing I wanted. The prosciutto cotto sandwich was my second choice.
So the scar is pretty spectacular. I mean, the surgical site and incision is, anyway, it’s not a scar yet. But that’s starting at the end, or what is currently the “end” of a story that we’re still in the middle of. And I confess to being tempted to show you a photo but I have been accused of being gross for such things before.
Doggle seemed to be middling-fair end of the week but, to my eye, distinctly on the downhill trend, at a rate that I was most certainly not comfortable with.
You have to understand that his rate of decline was most important here because he was on more ameliorating medication than he’d been on during his first episode, significantly more, his baseline symptoms were far worse to begin with yet he was deteriorating more and more rapidly as time went on.
I’ve got some experience in this area. And I’ve got some old, long-time professional contacts in this area, too. So I emailed after the consult with a detailed description of the exam, then added my opinion afterward. That’s when I got the confirmation that my side-eyeing of the situation was indeed accurate.
Things literally got worse overnight. Sunday morning, Doggle had gone from a dog that could ambulate and push me around the night before to a dog that was struggling to stand on his own, struggling to walk more than six paces without his hind end falling and, struggling to keep his hind end from tipping over entirely one side or the other. A few times, he couldn’t and his entire body toppled over, and he was helpless to get back up.
That’s aside from the other obvious signs of neurological deficit, the dragging of the hind paws, the knuckling without correction, the awkward out-turning of one leg or the other as though it were a foreign object not truly attached to his body.
It was disturbing how he went from hours of trying to pace and fighting me to exhaustion Saturday night over being bed rested and crated to giving up from pain and discomfort.
And yet, it wasn’t easy to make the decision on Sunday to commit to surgery – it was a huge decision to put him under anesthesia again, to subject him to a major surgical procedure, to commit him to a serious multi-month recovery and rehabilitation effort.
The money was never an issue for me. I knew it wasn’t going to be debt so I was basically ready with cash in hand. We had already paid for the initial exam and associated costs: ~ $150.
Then the specialist exam and diagnostics (bloodwork, MRI): $2540
Quote: $4200-5000, or $4800-5600
It was a body blow to PiC, who has never dealt with major veterinary procedures and therefore their costs before. I had walked him through what I expected each line item to cost already but hearing it from the specialist, confirming I was right, was still a shock. It took all I had to keep my mouth shut and let him work through the equivalencies: “that’s one of X, that’s five of Z, that’s …”
In the end, that’s my dog and responsibility. That’s our dog. We’re not broke, in financial straits or in danger of being so, so there’s nothing more important to me than his life and health. That’s our dog’s spine and health and PiC would get there too. But he needed time that I didn’t need mainly because I already knew all of the health and the money stuff from my past life.
My difficulty was the pain he would go through and the reality of living with the decision. I’ve done various surgical procedures before with my other pets, though not to this magnitude and I know it doesn’t always go your way. Whether it’s the procedure itself or the recovery, things aren’t always routine no matter how “simple” it might be. I’ve watched other people, many times, make the call and I know, it doesn’t always go your way. So I don’t care how “routine” the procedure is for any medical professional, I know that surgery is a risk.
We talked it through and ultimately, given his condition and the fact that he was still not responding to the medications and if he continued not to respond, we were going to be risking his chances to return to function. Backed by the expertise of a close friend, a veterinary professional with more than a decade of experience who worked with many decades of top flight surgical experience, we chose to operate.
We left a deposit for the low end of the quoted range of the procedure’s cost. That’s a bit more than I preferred to leave but that’s one way to take deposits, 50% of the quote is another standard deposit method.
One of the things that I didn’t like about this clinic was that I had to push them to give me an itemized quote – who gives me a ballpark range on a procedure and thinks that’s sufficient? I want to see an itemized list. The front office staff were remarkably shoddy in many respects, but I think the tech staff were generally good.
Another thing I didn’t like was that it called itself a specialty and 24-hour emergency hospital, but for surgeries that are normally scheduled during normal hours, they charged an emergency surcharge during the weekend. Perhaps this is normal in the Bay Area but that’s certainly not my experience from Southern California. You’re charged for the emergency consultation and then if you need the surgery, you pay for surgery and any related surgical costs, and that’s the end of that. You’re not charged another $600 for nursing staff to be called in because the hospital didn’t staff for emergency services when they claim they offer emergency services.
Perhaps they are minor things but they reflect on the clinic and make me wonder if they are indicative of the quality of care. But we were in a bind and we were running out of time. I had to trust that, knowing in the past, we’d had horrible support staff with good vets before, that could very likely be the case here.
I was very nearly holding my breath the whole time. I most certainly wasn’t ready to deal with talking to people out loud – so I wasn’t taking phone calls from family or friends. Twitter was a lifesaver in that respect. Twitter, text and email.
Two hours later, we got the call and his procedure seemed to have gone well – and he was waking up fine. Hurdles 1 and 2, surgery and anesthesia were passed.
Day 1 post-op: he was eating and able to get up, anxious and wanting to leave. Hurdles 2, 3, passed. But a new one presented: Anxiety level and our ability to keep him quiet. For three months.
We ended up paying just under $5000 for the whole surgical package and came home with a dog in a sling, medication, small refund on the deposit and some hope for his back and legs.
He came home dazed, hurting, and scared.
Day 2 post-op: slept, drugged and dazed. We jumped up every hour or two to check on him when he lifted his head, or shifted a foot. We do not have this co-parenting, taking shifts thing sorted, or in any way down. We are zombies by morning. 5:40 am: I am oozing out of bed to try and give him medication. Forget jumping. Who has the energy for that?
The whole day was 98% keeping him calm and quiet, interspersed with learning how to get him up because he couldn’t figure out how to stand in less than ten minutes without hurting himself, walking in a sling holding up about 40% of his considerable bulk without unbalancing him or throwing out our backs or hurting ourselves, encouraging him to walk when he was too tired, scared or confused to.
He’s got no bladder control thanks to one medication he’ll be on for three more days so we have a ten foot radius of potty pads layered on top of each other, on top of towels on top of blankets.
I’m the medication unit so three times a day I’m making sure he gets dosed; unless he also needs a sedative when he gets so anxious and amped up for whatever reason and is in danger of harming himself.
This week is, as we were warned, going to be rough. I expect that could probably be said about more than just this week, but we’ll see.
After this week, we’ll also need to see about a real rehab plan depending on how well he does.
The price we pay for a dog to have a little fun, hm? 🙂
September 28, 2012
This started as a post about some of the shopping I’d been doing and the expensive things I/we want but couldn’t pull the trigger on. And it sort of still is.
But it’s also about how I’m glad that my habits and instincts are still in the same gears so that this on-and-off heartburn will fade so I can work, plan and worry over the pup in peace.
~~~~~
I’ve been buying a few things these past few months. And there are a few more things we’d like but I’m not sure I’m ready to commit to them since, for some reason, Big Change triggers the Poor Lady Syndrome in my head and I instinctively pull back on spending.
BOUGHT:
The purse – May
It tickled my funny/irony bone that I was so reluctant to share evidence of my handbag purchase, despite knowing that I wouldn’t buy another one for years, despite knowing that it’s been years since my last purchase, etc., because after I admitted to it, WellHeeled and Stacking Pennies shared similar purchases.
Oh, they didn’t spend over-the-top as much as I did. My needs were more restrictive (very lightweight, crossbody as well as handbag, black for professional use, durable for travel) and more time sensitive so I couldn’t shop sales but it’s also possible I started this chain reaction since WH was the first person I showed the bag to. 😉
Since you asked to see it:
The only thing I didn’t like was the logo on top. But it’s lightweight enough and the right size that I can carry it for lots of things, not just professional events, so it’s getting used pretty frequently. I do get the “take better care of your things!” noogies though, which makes me a bit grumpy and want to go back to using a cheap $10 canvas tote. That’s why I used cheap totes so much, so I don’t have to care. If a leather bag can’t take a little use, then why’d I pay so much for it?
The Avengers DVDs ($30) and The West Wing Complete Series ($90) – September
I have never bought DVDs for myself – as much as I enjoy consuming certain kinds of media, it’s rare for me to want to buy and own it. I’ve got to seriously love it to want to have to store it. And I have a decade long love for The West Wing that hasn’t diminished. I’m so happy to have gotten another WW watcher in Katie of Girl with Red Balloon! When it went on super sale on Amazon, despite not being Blu-Ray (we have a regular player and a Blu-Ray player), I got itchy fingers. I could pre-order Avengers and buy West Wing outright. Even if the last season has always been nearly impossible for me to watch.
UPDATE: Got a refund from Amazon last night. The price dropped since I ordered the DVDs so I have received $10.79 back.
After the slightly traumatic medicating last night, and Doggle finally dozed off, we snuggled in front of the Blu-ray player that PiC fixed and enjoyed a few short scenes. Who said you couldn’t buy a bit of bliss?
IN SEARCH OF:
The Roasting Pan
Our $30 roasting pan has served its duty, through dozens of roast chickens, and even our first married roast turkey, but PiC has finally had it up to HERE with cleaning a slowly rusting out rack and pan.
I finally gave him the nod to get rid of the old pan which means I won’t be able to roast anything for a bit, which gives me the shivers in general as that’s about half my cooking! It was fine going on cleaning boycott but his ogling pans at price points $250, $300 and $400 was a whole other story. Out of Sur la Table with you, sir! We were only in there because of clearance sales anyway.
Unless we have grandchildren who will inherit that $300 pan, I’m sure there’s a perfectly good roasting pan to be had for less. (Though I suppose it might be argued that a roasting pan is worth more than a purse. In fact, I would be willing to make that argument now… drat.)
Undergarments
I hate shopping for clothes, and women’s undergarments both annoy and aggravate me. I know that sounds like the same thing but they cause distinctly different feelings of distaste. Nevertheless, I still find myself in need of well constructed undergarments once in a while and the time is coming. The problem with that is they cost a fair bit of money. Even with discounts, the ones that fit aren’t discounted much, there are very limited brands that make good fit and last a while so I can expect it’ll be about $60 per. Never mind, it’ll have to wait.
~~~~~
I knew it was specifically the job change that had me shying away from spending – just like when you’re grieving, my gut says not to make major decisions. My instincts say that during any transition that feeling to spend is just a trigger, not a real need and so firmly sit on that until the dust settles because I probably didn’t really need that stuff anyway. (It helps that I can envision being surrounded by clutter.)
With the exception of my birthday, an unfortunate bit of timing with that, I stuck to that pretty well and I’m awfully glad of it now.
I don’t mean that I regret my birthday, it was a perfectly lovely time and probably the best birthday I have ever had. Just that I never spend money for my birthday and we had to go and spend it up this year, didn’t we? What’s so special about 30 anyway? 🙂 Ah well. It was a good time.
All of which is to say … I’ve made the first calls for quotes and scheduling. Doggle’s exam and diagnostics alone put us in the first quarter of the [brace yourself] ten thousand dollars I am estimating this could possibly cost. Forget heartburn. I may well have a minor ulcer.
Except you know what? This is why I don’t spend on other things we don’t really need. This is why I save on the big stuff, small stuff, and what people would call “nickel and dime”, and the pennies too. Every bit adds up. So while I’m not wealthy, my cushions are there.
So I challenge myself to cash flow this. Because that’s what this PF-blogger dog mama does. Any and every frustrating thing is a challenge to beat.
He’s had a few rounds of meds and those went really well. I’ve got that mojo back. And we’ll see how it goes from here.
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.
September 25, 2012
As usual, there’s a slew of things to take care of when leaving a job. I’m reviewing the list and slowly checking things off:
1. Health care: Already transferred medical, dental and vision to PiC, so I don’t need COBRA.
2. FSA: I kept this with my own firm.
A) I’ll need to make sure that I can be added to PiC’s account as a spouse. Pretty sure it’s not under the dependent clause. The language doesn’t sound like it but there does appear to be a provision for the spouse and family to use the employee’s actual FSA account.
B) I’ve got 90 days to complete any claims against my own account. Frustratingly, even though I still have access to the account administration system, there’s no way to tell them to stop emailing my old work email address if they need to contact me through that system.
3. 401(k): Time for another rollover IRA. All of my accounts are with Vanguard, and my last rollover IRA had enough in it to be converted to Admiral Shares (woo!) so I’d like this to go right into the Admiral Shares.
However! I have a baby Rollover IRA still sitting in a STAR fund because it was only a little over $3000 so it’ll never qualify for an Admiral bump of anything.
As much as I hated the fees from this small company, we had a decent match so I contributed enough to get the full match. After 2 plus years, I have about $16,500.00 in this account. That would be more than enough to add to and convert the STAR fund into a respectable Admiral something.
4. Final Check: Last days worked and vacation are paid out. It’s standard that sick time, if separate from vacation, doesn’t get paid out. Action: Deposited that sucker, soonest.
Unlike my last job where I spent years not taking any vacation, and therefore ended up with about a month to cash out, I only had several days of vacation saved. It’s a nice extra bit of cash, I don’t need an unbudgeted cash infusion just because, and it’s not like I didn’t enjoy the vacation time I did spend!
Is that everything?
