Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Arrrgh!!!! @#$%!!!

I'll tell you the moral of this story up front - do NOT engage your doctor in chit-chat and banter, lest he forget to tell you things.

Today Dr. SL's office called me and asked if I'd had my CT scan yet.

I said, "Duh, whut CT scan?? Nobody told me about a CT scan!"

Apparently, in addition to the script for the blood test, Dr. SL wanted me to go for a follow up CT scan. He neglected to mention this to me last week, when we had plenty of time to get it done. We were too busy chatting, I guess. Nobody on his staff called me, apparently they didn't find out until his notes were transcribed. Now the earliest (and I do mean earliest) appt. I could get was for April 4. Girl goes back to work April 1 and she works at night. Which means she has to get up at the proverbial buttcrack of dawn to go with me for this test, then maybe grab a nap if she can sleep, then go to work. Exactly the situation I was trying to avoid with all of our careful planning. We can do it, but...damn. I also called the nice young man at SL's office to ask if the doctor will officially bless me to drive if my blood test results are okay. He promised to find out and call me back.

I really do want to play by the rules here, but I will confess to the entire internets that today I "stole" my own car keys out of my own purse and ran to Target for a couple of things. It's two miles away and I feel fine, and this is silly. I will not get on the interstate or take any long drives until the tests are done, I don't want to be overconfident. I understand that this is SOP for clearing a patient after a brain thing, but honestly, I'm more than a month post-op, I am 95% back to normal. My last scans indicated that the aneurysm was completely gone. The last remaining memory of the SAH (other than the patch of stubble on my head) is the smudge on the vision of my left eye, and it is now the size of a comma, I don't even see it anymore unless I close my right eye and look for it, and it doesn't interfere with anything but reading very small print. I am typing this entry without enlarging the text at all, so even that is getting better. So the no driving rule/abundance of caution/doctor's ass coverage is being taken with a huge grain of salt. I'm using common sense, I will not venture out of my immediate neighborhood or get on a busy road, but c'mon, I have to be able to get half and half and cat food if I run out. When Girl is working it's basically work and sleep, work and sleep. (This is why she's ready to go to grad school and switch to a day job that pays better.)

Speaking of that, we have been working on cleaning the clutter and excess from this house to get ready to move. If you live in a house for 11 years, you accumulate a hell of a lot of Stuff. It's just staggering how much stuff. I hardly know where to start.

The garage is basically a mess, but the rest of the house "cleans up good," it's not like we're the people on those home organizing shows where you can't even see the carpet for the clutter, and mountains of stuff is spilling out of every closet and piled on every flat surface. There are only piles on SOME flat surfaces here. But there is just too much stuff for two women who are going to take their respective dogs (and I get the cats, lucky me) and move into smaller separate abodes. Goodwill, garage sale - and then there's the stuff that is going into the trash. I get such guilt when I throw something away, it's awful, but sometimes that is the last resort and we have to resort to it. The garbage men are gonna hate us tomorrow, that's all I can say.

12 comments:

Sue said...

My garbage men are always happy. I cannot figure out why.

I am so glad you feel good enough to post. Talk soon.

Catherine said...

I've been posting more than usual, because I'm 1) bored; and 2) looking for things to do besides sort through my possessions!

Amie said...

I had the opposite situation when I moved in with Ken. He apparently thought I was just coming with nothing more than the cute little underwear and the cats, and didn't even clean out a drawer for me. I've spent the 3.5 years since then trying to slowly purge, with varying levels of arguements, and manage to fill two large trash bins to overflowing status every week. Even still it looks like the "before" shots of Clean Sweep or possibly a new show ("Torch That Dump!")

Catherine said...

I love "Torch That Dump!" That was Girl's suggestion for dealing with this - "Let's burn it down and start over." It is SO tedious to sort through a pile of my husband's old tools and such in the garage, because he was a packrat too - we all are. If it's good enough for a garage sale or Goodwill I don't throw it out, but there's a lot of stuff that is in the "What the F is this thing?" category that has to be trashed.

Unknown said...

The other day I opened my little girly toolbox to get an adjustable wrench. Not only did I find two of them, I found TWELVE screwdrivers - I never bought a single one of them! I feel like I live like a Clean Sweep dropout, too, but I'm in the process of "shifting."

Catherine said...

That reminds me - I need to pick up a toolbox, so I can put the things I'm keeping into it as I'm sorting and cleaning. My husband had an entire Ace Hardware on the garage shelves - mostly in the form of things that were needed for one project 10 years ago. "Clean Sweep Dropout" - I like that, too. I need to be ruthless in this process, because I am definitely downsizing into a two bedroom something and probably no garage.

Anonymous said...

I am a garbage collector and can tell you that we don't mind picking up large items or misc junk along with the regular household trash - it sort of breaks up the routine.

We also get a lot of people (including women) that stop to watch our trucks working when we fill the back with the furniture and other stuff and press the levers...assume you've seen the trash truck working before...

Catherine said...

Seen one, I broke one once! Seriously, years ago we put out a load of I can't remember what for the trash, they loaded it in, hit the compactor thingy and GRIND, GROAN, SCREECH! It broke. The noise was horrible, and I felt guilty about breaking it, but I'm pretty sure my trash did not actually cause it. I tell myself it was a coincidence. ;-)

Anonymous said...

You broke it?? That's next to impossible...on our trucks the crusher puts 3000 lbs of pressure per square inch on that trash..

Sometimes larger better made furniture resists momentarily before succumbing to the pressure as its forced down and pressed back into the rest of the trash.

Were you outside watching when it broke?

Catherine said...

I was inside, heard the screeching and looked out to see the guys standing around the truck like, "What do we do now?" in front of my house. They messed with it a bit, gave up and left. Nobody else's garbage got picked up after that. I don't remember what was in the trash but it wasn't furniture. I can almost always find a place to donate furniture.

So we joke about breaking the garbage truck whenever we put out a lot of stuff.

Anonymous said...

I bet...

The truck can be loud when its crushing bags (ever hear that spitting, popping sound)?

You ever been near the truck when its been crushing?

Catherine said...

I took the fact that they didn't pick up any more garbage after it made that noise like screeching twisting metal and they looked at it and drove off, to indicate that something was wrong with the truck. It was a long time ago, and became a household joke - we killed a garbage truck.