November's Closing

Wow. The end of another month. They just keep slipping by like greased, spinning wheels. I would have to say that the events of the past months of fall have not been the best for me nor my favorites, what with two favorite dogs having died, having a mysteriously caused broken rib, and just recently having my sweet daddy pass away. All this grief and stress has been hard and unrelenting in a bam, bam, bam sort of pummeling that has made mush of my head some days, and others have been better.

I did do a lot of writing the other day and kind of worked out some of the things that I wanted to remember about the events and feelings surrounding my dad’s recent funeral. It was nice to get it out and have it down, if for no one else ever to read, but me some day, when the memories get fuzzy. There were things that needed to be jotted down, so they could be let go of, purged, and released. It felt good, and I fairly instantly, was probably the most relieved and relaxed I have felt in months. I went to bed after dinner that night and fell into a deep coma.

The next morning, which was yesterday, I woke up way too early, in my seriously snoozing self’s opinion, when the alarm chirped on the cell phone, calling Mark and me (as assistant in charge of toting this and that), to a photo shoot he was to do for a retail business. Once up, a problem immediately revealed that our chilly morning wake up and turn the heater on routine wasn’t happening. My usual warm and toasty closet vent was blowing very cold air. Not good.

Outside was in the low thirty degrees and inside was not much better, so a call to our friendly neighbor guy who does hvac work was in order when we returned.  The dogs fed, Jack stuck with his still twice a day insulin shot, dogs out, us bundled up to face the day, then off to town we went. The shoot finished, it was back to the farm for Mark to drop me off to the still very chilly house. I placed a call to the heater man and headed to the barn to feed, still only to feed, with no riding until rib issue is gone.

As to this continuing saga of this stupid broken rib thing of mine, the past month or so of dealing with it and doctors has once again confirmed my lack of faith in the abilities of modern medicine and its quacks in general. Timeline, to review, October 10th I got off the sofa at night and screamed and thought pulled muscle. A week later, after having ridden horses for four painful days, I call my gp doc’s offfice and was told my doc was on vacation, (no surprise there) and they told me to go to emergency room or a clinic. I went to a Doc in the Box place and had xrays done. A clean break was right there to see. I was told to return in a few weeks to re-examine. Once again, weeks later, I called my gp doc for advice, and again I was told to hit the clinic place. My confidence level was a bit low there so I made appointment with a real ortho doc and waited over two hours to be re-xrayed and then was told that I had no such silly fracture and just to take some steroids. No break? Say what? I had seen the plates, the sucker I had seen was cracked clear through. There was no arguing with this very arrogant fellow, so I went away still puzzled.

After talking with a friend who is a radiologist about my mystery broken, and my now newly diagnosed “unbroken” rib and asked him what he thought. He said to go get a cd of the original pictures and bring them to him. Of course the Doc in the Box did not get the exact picture of the view that I had seen of the big rib break, but had sent another view out of the eight or so that had been taken that day. This one, thought, showed the bottom floater rib point fairly well crunched. “There, is a fracture”, he said. I told him about the other plate and since I did not have that evidence, all he could say is that yes indeed, I did have one definitely cracked up one, and most likely another. That was just great, but the bigger question looms, so why does is take an entire cadre of men in white to not get the same diagnosis? It is no wonder why our medical world is in such bad turmoil, and I am not encouraged that it will improve. I wait, and hope that my rib will.

Needing some activity to ward off the day and the coming night’s chilly temps, I spent a large part of the remains of yesterday multitasking and making lasagna, which is to me pure comfort food. Both Jack and Heidi gave me great help with the clean up of all the various pots and pans required to produce such a wonder. Once done, I poured a nice cup of chocolate almond milk, set it on the counter to close the fridge, and proceeded to knock it off the counter top, right onto Jack’s little fuzzy head below it. This of course scared him, as everything does, and he started to scamper away before he smelled the chocolate and he dove into the mess, tongue just licking away. Since dogs aren’t supposed to tolerate the brown stuff very well, I shooed him away and began trying to wipe up the mess with the single most useless, and very cheap, paper towels possible. Meanwhile Jack is circling like a shark, and I notice that he is leaving little Jack chocolate paw prints all over the kitchen floor, having stepped right into the spill.

Finally, the floor clean, and mopped, and Jack’s foot de-chocolated, my hvac man knocked on the door. Diagnosis on this problem was easy and simple and did not require a committee of over educated and unfocused incomp doctors. He said it was a rusted hole in the heat exchanger. Fortunately this little repair is still just barely under the ten year warranty, which was a really good thing, and is not likely to break the piggy, but we will have limited heat tonight and until it can be fixed. So it was a bundled up night inside the house, with warm food for the soul, a nice toasty fire to sit by, and that was just fine with me. As I have learned, it could always be worse.