Kidney Stones & Broken Bones

Sorry for the five month hiatus. Much as I wished it would not, my health has overtaken my life.  I wanted it to be in a "little compartment".  That was a crazy idea.  The only way to survive (at least for me) is to try & integrate it into my "real" life. I won't confront you with every little complication, but it has & continues to be a roller coaster ride & I hate roller coasters.  An eagle eyed Radiologist looking for something else found that I had a rather large kidney stone.  This kidney stone seems to be harder to treat than my cancer.  I think we are 99% of the way there though, finally.  Oh & I fell down the house  stairs & broke my ankle.  What a joy that was.  It's mostly healed now.  So maybe you can help me finish this "joke" "Cancer, a kidney stone, & a broken ankle walk into a bar...."

My oncologist put my chemotherapy on hold due to the kidney stone treatment.  He said "We don't give chemo to sick people"  Huh? Seriously, did he say that? I adore & trust him, but WTF?

I've learned a lot the past year.  Some of these things follow:
*you can never be embarrassed enough
*don't hire a friend to help you out.  It does not work.
*If you cry enough different places, your reputation starts to scare people into being really, really nice to you.
*money is extremely important, but don't let it rule your life.
*sleep is for wimps
*you should always be on alert for incompetance
*I think I qualify for medical marijuana
*Friends who butt in are good friends still as long as they value my choices over their opinions
Some other "friends" disappear for one reason or another.  Loss has been a recurring theme in my life, but didn't realize how fast a "friend" can disappear when you really need them. On the other hand, many people have stepped up and are being lifesavers.
*follow a doctor's instructions or fire the doctor.  I've done this twice.  I'm a good, compliant patient, but only for doctors who actually realize I am in the room with them.
*I am no doctor & should stop trying to apply logic to a medical problem
*Being sick with insurance sure beats the alternative.  I have been in both positions this year.  Currently & forever more I have great medical insurance.
I have two stacks of bills marked "paid" and "unpaid or partially paid" If I ever win the lottery, the hospital bill from August will move to the "paid" pile.  Will someone buy me a lottery ticket?
*Being sick forces you to be selfish, not necessarily selfish, but you have to put yourself first on the list which is hard when that is not your style.  If you don't put yourself first on the list, you're not even on the list IMO.
*If some complication happens to 30% of patients, it's going to happen to you.
*no matter how hard you try to get things prepared, when a woman leaves her house for the hospital, the house does not function.  Pretty soon, this just becomes normal & you are no longer surprised when you are asked how to fix a problem at home while you are in a hospital bed. I may be wrong, but don't think this happens to men.
*You can take a drug several times & still suddenly develop a true allergy to it.  I had my first and I hope last experience with hives. 
*Don't take a sleeping pill in the middle of the night & expect it to work.
* Most doctors are wonderful, caring people. Problem is when they are that, but not necessarily the best at what they do. This has only maybe happened to me once & I'm still in the process of figuring it out. 
*Broken ankle pills don't work on sore backs.
 
So I will try to be back to blogging here & I will also try to blog about things other than my health.  This is actually one of my goals now to help me feel better--to begin to engage in my hobbies again.

Crisis Mode

Yesterday I announced my health crisis on Facebook & Twitter.  According to my twitter BFF @NLitvin it was like "coming out".  I had been keeping this information closely guarded among a tight circle of friends & family.  I did this because I didn't want to become another "Cancer Blogger".  There is more to me than this. Anyway, yesterday was a tough day & I realized how isolated I felt, so I decided to tell everybody.  
My prognosis is good, I am a person of faith & am generally an optimistic person, but my surgery is next week & I am scared out of my mind.  I am a caregiver for my mother and I am making arrangements for people to look after her while I am in the hospital.  Yesterday I realized all I had to do yet before the surgery for my mom & the house we share and I had a melt down.  I am better today.  This afternoon I have a final pre surgery visit with my surgeon and am prepared with a list of questions.  My brother is going with me.  My cousin from Cleveland is coming to stay at our house & help my mother out.  I love them both very much.  Big thank yous to both of you!

Jeff Lewis Interior Therapy- Cat Episode

Over the weekend I watched one of my favorite Bravo personalities, Jeff Lewis (@JLJeffLewis) on an episode of his show "Interior Therapy".  Jeff is a successful "flipper" & designer with a particularly endearing schtick combining saying outrageous things, egotistic/selfish comments & behavior & constantly pushing limits of good behavior.  Is he irritating? Of course he is, that's part of what makes him successful.  His assistant Jenni (@JenniPulos) calls him a bully on nearly every episode. What makes up for all of this bad behavior? He is funny, well usually he is funny.  Everyone around him seems to cringe along with his viewers at some of his outrageous behavior. However, none of us can seem to wait to see what happens next.
He finally reached my limits of acceptance during this cat episode.  He somehow got himself invited into a fully dysfunctional family with 3 children, 7 cats, a recovering addict husband & a wife who is obviously clinically depressed.  The gist of the show was that the house was in chaos, over furnished, dirty, & with out of control children. The youngest child has some kind of breathing issues requiring nebulizer treatments.  No doctors were interviewed.  The source of the breathing issues according to the husband were allergies to the cats.  (Recent research indicates children raised in homes with pets are actually less likely to be allergic).  The husband said he had put up with the animals for 18 years & he was done.  I have no idea what he has inflicted on his wife for 18 years. The show focused on everyone pushing the wife to get rid of some of her rescued cats. The husband threatened divorce twice.  The interior therapy team refurbished the garage as a cat lounge with a cat door to an adorable large outdoor secure pen. The goal was to get the cats out of the house & away from the baby.  It was large enough for all 7 cats, but somehow no one would quit until they badgered the wife into giving up 3 of her cats. 
I tweeted Mr Lewis "Always thought you were funny until the cat episode.  #bully"  He retweeted my tweet with the comment "You're right, next time I will give away the baby" Needless to say I have heard from dozens of his minions accusing me of caring more about cats than children & sucking up to Mr Lewis at the same time. 
They missed the point by a mile.  This family needed a live in therapist & maid & should not have been subjected (or subjected themselves) to reality television.  The Interior Therapy team is deluding themselves that they helped this family at all.  They really think all of that dirt was from the cats? Depressed people frequently do not live in the cleanest surroundings with or without pets. I have direct knowledge of people collecting animals. It is a severe problem, but I don't think it was this family's primary problem.  If this couple is still living together, I would be most surprised. 
They could have taken away all of the cats & the end result would not be changed.  Have you ever cleaned a loved one's home thinking they could keep it clean if you only gave them a clean slate? Hopeless.  The dirt & disorder are not the problems, they are symptoms of the problem. 
So, all of you judgmental followers of Mr Lewis, stop & think.  Issues are more complex than 140 characters.  Why not ask me what I meant, rather than assuming I prefer cats over children.  I do not. 

Nearly Burned Down the House

I used to live in Wichita, Kansas.  One summer, I was house sitting for my parents.  A wasp appeared out of nowhere in the TV room.  I HATE and am very afraid of any stinging insect. When I see this wasp flying around inside the house, I freaked out. I don't remember how, but somehow I managed to get rid of it.  Whew, big sigh of relief! Not so fast.  Before I knew it another & then another showed up.  Now I was really freaking out.  Then I noticed that they were coming into the TV room from the fireplace.  We only had a mesh screen on that fire place, not glass doors like we do today.  I decided they must have made a nest in the chimney & that I should build a fire in the fireplace to incinerate them or make them leave out of the top of the chimney. It took a lot of courage to put kindling & wood into the fireplace because I knew how close those nasty things were.  I light the fire and breathe another sigh of relief.  (You would think I would learn that breathing a sigh of relief is just a precursor to another problem, but .....) Guess what happened? Yes, the entire colony flew DOWN the chimney, escaping the flames & flying into the TV room.  If I was freaked out before, now I was nearly crazed.  I had no idea of what to do.  I went to the laundry room where we had various insecticides & picked the can that is designed to shoot a steady stream a long distance so that you can attack a nest you might see on the side of your house.  I started spraying the critters as they came through the mesh fire place screen.  Well, you can see what happened next.  I got too close to the flames with the insecticide & the fire started traveling towards me along the arc of the spray.  I stopped doing that right away.  I could have burned down the house or the can could have exploded in the my hand.  I retreated shutting the doors behind me.  I don't think I had the courage to go back into the room until the next day.
 I called an exterminator.  He was a very nice man.  I told him the situation, what I had done, & that I wanted him to do what he needed to do to make sure they were gone.  Get this, he says "Let's build a fire in the fireplace".  I was shocked, but said OK as long as I didn't have to be in the room when he lit another fire.  I left him in the room with the doors closed.  He started a fire & there were no signs of any more wasps.  I either had killed them all or the the smart ones flew out of the top of the chimney. 
I guess I should have been an exterminator.

Permanent List

Several months ago, I was in a slightly mean mood.  I made a list on Twitter called "Permanent List" of public figures who had just annoyed me one too many times.  This is by no means a list of every one I disagree with, just a select few who I think have earned this distinction.  As you can see, the list is bipartisan & not strictly political.  Feel free to ask me what they did to get on the list, but in Martin Lawrence's case it was a terrible misogynistic joke he told on Saturday Night Live 20 years ago.  I tried to repeat it to someone yesterday & it's just BAD, trust me on that one.  I got into a "twitter argument" with Bianca Jagger about a year ago.  I did not put her on the list, though because I'm still hoping for a rematch with her.  She has me blocked on Twitter now :(  We were in a "discussion" about inflammatory rhetoric & she felt my disagreement with something she said was somehow meant to stifle her freedom of speech.  (what about mine?) She then used a made up word which I immediately mocked & that's when she blocked me.  I wish I could remember what word she used that I made fun of.  It would take a LOT of time hunting on Twitter made more difficult by the fact that she has me blocked.  I have other things to do with my time. 
Stay tuned, my next entry will be about my battle with the chimney wasps in Wichita, Kansas when I almost burned down the house. 
Permanent list link:  https://twitter.com/pamsiegelzarte/permament-list/members

Passover memories

Several years ago I wrote these memories for a Chabad Passover class.  We all recalled our most vivid Passover experiences.
I lived in the small town of Lincoln, Illinois from about the age of 18 months until the end of 8th grade. There were approximately eight Jewish families in Lincoln.  The seders were always at our house.  I am sitting at the same dining room table as I write this.  When I think back, the table seemed so much larger, cause I was smaller, I guess. 
We always had matzo ball soup the first night and borscht the second.  My mother makes the world's best charoses (with lots of Mogen David).  Later on in our lives, she always had to make extra for us to take back to school with us.  One year very early in our lives, our father of blessed memory led all of the children in a conga line around our table to pretend we were crossing the Red Sea.  We always wanted to do it again.  It was most fun the first time because it was so spontaneous.  In the days before plague bags, magic tricks, masks, etc our seders were lots of fun.  In later years we might occasionally go to a community seder, but those were BORING! 
A few years ago, my mom tired of all of the preparations, and I gladly said it would be my turn now.  We've kept everything pretty much the same except now everyone indulges my fondness for frog decorations, vegetarian fare, & we use the Artscroll Children's Hagaddah for the benefit of my niece and nephew.  We still have lots of fun!
Now back to making charoses.  I'm still trying to make it taste as good as my mom's. 

Let Me Introduce Myself

Some of you may know me from Twitter, Facebook, or real life.  My name is Pam (not Pamela PLEASE).  I am a baby boomer who now lives in Tucson, Arizona.  I've lived lots of places but we'll save those stories for another time.  I have a Master's Degree in Speech Language Pathology from The Wichita State University.  I've attended other schools, but those are stories for another time also.  Currently, I live in my mom's house & act as her caregiver.  She is my good friend & the best roommate I've ever had. We are so lucky that my brother & his family live in Tucson also. I have a niece and a nephew,twins, who are now 10.  They call me Tante Pam.  I am Jewish, striving to be more observant every day (a work in progress, though the kitchen is kosher).  We have 3 kitties Copernicus, Cinnamon & Snowball.  I love to cook, do some crafts & watch the flora & fauna in our yard.  I am what is considered politically progressive, although I pride myself on the fact that my views are not predictable based simply on that label.  I am a pescatarian (a vegetarian who also eats fish). I am currently the Secretary on the board of our Home Owner's Association (Please don't hold that against me...). Mostly our board meetings are about weeds (I'm not kidding.)
I always thought I didn't have the skills to write.  I think my English Composition classes did that to me.  Recently, a friend encouraged me to write about myself.  She thinks I can write & that I have interesting stories to tell. I hope she is right. There are voices in my head I wish I could emulate.  My story telling idols are Molly Ivins, Nora Ephron, & Erma Bombeck.  As you can see, I am no stranger to sarcasm.  It's the only foreign language in which I am fluent.
Lately I've been doing a lot of things for the first time.  Yesterday it was Reflexology, tomorrow, who knows?