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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(The Bugs & Cranks train rolls on. In the station this time:
Wednesday Walk Watch: Week seWen: “This week’s Walk Watch has more ‘free swingers’ than a hippie love-in at Hef’s bath house.”
Now, back to the nonsense.)
A couple of weeks ago, I called the doctor’s office about the ouchy foot problem I was having. The receptionist, a shrewd little minx, heard my complaint and replied:
‘Well, as long as you’re seeing the doctor, we’ll just sign you up for a physical exam, too.‘
I agreed, partly because I hadn’t had a checkup in a while, and partly because it didn’t seem like she was giving me much choice in the matter. And the last people you want to piss off are the staff who work with doctors. I watch Scrubs; I know how the medical world works. And those people are loco. No, thanks.
“The woman could have suggested that I come to the office in a black evening dress and heels, sing show tunes during the exam and coo sweet nothings into the doctor’s stethoscope for an encore.”
Mostly, though, I agreed because the pain in my throbbing toe was clouding any other sort of judgment. The woman could have suggested that I come to the office in a black evening dress and heels, sing show tunes during the exam and coo sweet nothings into the doctor’s stethoscope for an encore. I’d have done it, just to have that stupid wonky foot fixed up.
And I’d have brought the crowd to their feet, too. Or their knees. One or the other.
Anyway, I accepted her terms, and said I’d go in for the full head-to-toe physical. On the condition that they begin with the toes. Do whatever you want to me, I told her. Just have the decency to start at the bottom and take care of the immediate problem, then work your way up. It’s the merciful thing to do.
So that afternoon, I gimped into the office and was shown to a room. Where the nurse proceeded to start the exam. At my mouth. By taking my temperature. I thought maybe she didn’t get the ‘foot message’, so while I was sucking mercury bulb, I figured I’d give her a friendly reminder:
‘Umgh… shyou know what’sch weally ovewheated wight now? My footch!‘
She just shook her head and gave me a look that said, ‘Hey — who’s the doctor here?‘
(Unfortunately, the look didn’t say it out loud, or I could have offered, ‘Neither of us, nurse. So maybe you could run along and find someone qualified to fix my toe now.‘
Not that I would do that, of course. I’m far too nice. Also, these people are trained in the use of various small and very sharp objects. She could probably even make it look like an accident. So I kept my mouth shut. Except for the thermometer. Of course.)
After measuring — and probably causing — my slight fever, I figured Ms. Ratchet would maybe move on down the road to my foot. Instead, she went for the arm, and hooked up a blood pressure cuff. I couldn’t help myself:
‘You know what really gets my blood flowing? Somebody fixing my foot.‘
This dance went on for the next twenty minutes or so — ‘You know what really gets my heartrate going?…‘, ‘Can I tell you what’d really quicken my reflexes?…‘, ‘Hey, I’ll tell you something I could really drop my pants and cough about…‘ — until she was finally done with her nursely workup. Then she left, and informed me that the doctor would be in soon.
Whether to look at my foot or put me out of my misery, she didn’t say. And I was starting not to care which.
Finally, the doc came in, checked out my foot, diagnosed the problem, handed me some info, diagnosed a painkiller, and sent me on my way. Rather anticlimactic, really. All in a day’s work for the good doctor — and my foot has been pain-free since I’ve been on the meds. Also, I can’t feel my face and I get tipsy after using mouthwash — so you know it’s the really good stuff. I’m thinking I should have injured myself earlier, frankly.
As I was leaving the office, though, he had one more trick up his hospital gown for me. This being an ‘official’ physical exam and all, he wanted to run a few tests to see how the old body is holding up. Cholesterol, triglycerides, swine flu, transmission fluid, LDL, HGH, olly olly oxen free… all the usual stuff. So he ordered up the tests, we agreed that I’d visit a lab near my house to have blood drawn, and I promised to get there as stat as I could. The next day, end of the week at the latest.
The next morning, our house went on the market, thus beginning a two-week odyssey of cleaning the place spotless each morning — the better to impress spur-of-the-moment househunters visiting in our absence — and hustling the mutt to her ‘doggy day care’ joint across town. Which is nowhere near the lab the doc and I zeroed in on. So it was just yesterday that I made it to have those tests done. And while I was at the lab to have blood drawn…
Well. That’s a story for next time. Tune in soon to see what sort of blood, sweat and… other stuff was spilled during that visit. It’s a page-turner. Really.
But you’ll probably want to wash your hands first. And definitely after.
Permalink | 1 CommentI may have mentioned (ad nauseum) that my wife and I are in the process of selling our house. We’ve never sold a house before, having popped our proverbial real estate cherry on our current abode.
(No. Don’t try and picture that. You’re only going to hurt yourself.)
Not knowing quite what to expect from the process, we naturally expected the very worst. We figured we’d wind up with seller agents without the requisite experience — “What is this ‘condominium’ word you keep saying?” — bloodthirsty cutthroat agents on the other ends, and ridiculously difficult buyers, if any at all.
“We braced ourselves to have the house spend months on the market with zero interest, then to endure a contentious negotiation where we’d be forced to give up half our furniture, the car, the dog and a rented parking spot in exchange for a tiny fraction of our asking price.”
We braced ourselves to have the house spend months on the market with zero interest, then to endure a contentious negotiation where we’d be forced to give up half our furniture, the car, the dog and a rented parking spot in exchange for a tiny fraction of our asking price. Meanwhile, we’d spend the sale proceeds, our life savings and a hefty loan to squeeze into a ramshackle crapshack studio thirty miles outside of town, after spending six months living out of an overcramped storage bin because none of the real estate sharks would deign to sell us a place.
Hey, we both saw The Money Pit. We know how this real estate dealie works.
Now, I don’t want to jinx anything before all the papers are signed and the keys are exchanged, but so far, it looks as if we’ll have a somewhat smoother ride than expected on the home-moving train. In fact, you could say this train’s been an express, with comfy seats and lots of room and a nice dining car, in case you need a snack. Also, the booze is free and the conductor comes by to give foot rubs every half hour or so. And she’s Swedish, so that’s a nice touch. I couldn’t choo-choo-choose a smoother transition. So far.
Like I said, I don’t want to jinx this.
So I won’t go into detail about our current situation, other than to say that we have both a party interested in buying our house and another party willing to sell us their place, with paperwork already in progress for both transactions. And the new place is a condo, which we really wanted — and in our old stomping (and renting) grounds in Brookline, which was also our strong preference for location, location, location this time around. You might glean these not-so-secret housing desires from a post I wrote around four-and-a-half years ago, after we’d been in our current joint for maybe eighteen months or so:
Antennae on the Potato Salad? That’s a Paddlin’!
Note the wistful longings for life back in ‘walking territory’, and where we don’t mow our own yard or worry ourselves about the shade of paint on the building’s exterior. If all goes well, we’ll be back to our old ways by the end of the summer. I’ve got six fingers and four toes crossed that everything goes to plan without a hitch. Because if this train derails, we’ll be back in that ramshackle studio somewhere on the Maine border, wondering where the hell all our money went and what our dog and car and dining room table are up to these days.
And I’m really hoping to avoid that. Keep this engine on the tracks, conductor. And don’t be afraid to work the pinky toes down there. I want to enjoy this ride.
Permalink | No Comments(Two bits of B&C goodness since last time:
Wednesday Walk Watch: Week sWix: “When you’re toiling past the middle of May taking fewer walks on the season than Joel Piniero, Derek Lowe or Chan Ho Park, you’re really putting something special together.”
Kris Medlen, Renaissance Man: “Luckily for Medlen, the game’s not in Colorado — humidor or not, who wants to start a pitching career there?”
Now back to your regularly-scheduled dose of drivel.)
I’ve been told that I give lousy directions. This is surprising to me, for two reasons:
A. I’m a reasonably eloquent guy.
I’m sure Hemingway or Oscar Wilde could get you to the Home Depot down the street more compellingly, but I like to think I have enough word smarts to get across the directions I’m trying to convey.
(Though not quite enough to come up with a better term for ‘word smarts’, apparently. Baby steps, people.)
“And while I occasionally still get tripped up on the whole righty-lefty thing, I’m happy to use those little pointy things on the ends of my hands to make myself clear.”
So far as I know, I don’t have any kind of thick, impenetrable accent. And I use all the local Bostonified versions of various direction-giving terms — like ‘rahndabaht‘ for ‘traffic circle’, ‘stahp light‘ for ‘traffic signal’ and ‘ehfing retahds‘ for ‘other drivers’. And while I occasionally still get tripped up on the whole righty-lefty thing, I’m happy to use those little pointy things on the ends of my hands to make myself clear.
(Fingers! Those are called fingers! I say, I’m getting word smarterer every day. Huzzah.)
2. I rarely know how the hell to get anywhere.
So the vast majority of the times when I’m asked to give directions, I just shrug my shoulders and walk on by. It’s only when I really, truly, deep in my heart of hearts believe that I know the way that I’ll attempt to share. And given my backwards sense of direction and memory like a rusty sieve, whatever you’re looking for pretty much has to be within eyesight for me to be of any use. That, and I can tell you the way to get to my house.
Usually. If we’re close by. And you don’t mind going the wrong way down a few one-way streets. Or cutting through a playground. There’s just too damned many turns otherwise.
Still, people routinely tell me that my directions are nearly useless. I mention all of the right streets, and if you already knew where you were going, you might be able to interpret my gibberish as directions after the fact. But if you’re relying on me to get you somewhere, then you might as well just stay home, apparently. Or buy a GPS, for crissakes. Like it’s my job to get you people where you’re going, anyway.
For most practical purposes, I’ve been taken completely out of the direction-giving loop. My wife tells people how to get to our house.
(And avoiding the playground crossing, even, which is a huge plus. According to the local cops and concerned parents groups, anyway.)
In other situations, I defer to whoever’s around that looks remotely competent. Out with friends — let one of them navigate for a stranger. Sitting in the office — some co-worker can get you to that new restaurant, probably. I’ve got important non-direction-giving work to do over here; surely you can see that. Out on my own, with any doubt in my mind — I dunno, man, go ask that squirrel over there. Maybe he knows where the high school is. You don’t want my advice, trust me.
Every once in a while, though, a perfect storm of navigation querying comes along. Like this morning, on my way to work. As I was strolling the few blocks between my car and the office, a truck turned the corner ahead of me and pulled up alongside me. The driver leaned out and asked:
‘Hey, buddy, do you know where XYZ hospital is?‘
As it turns out, I know very well where XYZ hospital is, seeing as how it’s right next to the hospital I work at. The local city planners have seen fit in their wisdom to cram all of the local hospitals into a three-block area where I work — the better to treat you for any ailment, once you’re within range, I suspect.
Of course, the large areas of town relatively far away from this little postage stamp-sized mecca of critical care are pretty much screwed. But those people knew the score when they decided to live on the outskirts, right?
(‘Oh, if only you’d have gotten here sooner, Mr. Johnson, we might have saved your legs. But you had to go and buy a condo out in the boonies, and now I’m afraid we have to Cap’n Dan you. I would really have a stern talk with my real estate agent, if I were you, sir.‘)
City planning snafus notwithstanding, this was one rare occasion where I actually knew the directions I was asked for, it involved very little navigatory work, and the destination was quite close by. There’s no possible way to give poor directions, from where I was standing. So I jumped right in:
‘Sure thing! Just turn around, take this right, cross the riverway, and you’ll see signs for the hospital in a couple of blocks.‘
He seemed satisfied with that. Given my dismal record with such things, maybe I should have asked whether he had any questions, or if anything was unclear. Maybe he’d like a diagram, or I could pull the squirrel in to explain it in a slightly different way. But the guy nodded, looked fully on board with the plan, and took off again, presumably to pull a U-turn as I said, to start the directions.
As for me, I continued walking — on the very same route I’d just given him. The two hospitals really are side-by-side, and once you make the right, it’s a straight four-block shot to the bullseye. The traffic was light today, so as I walked, I kept an eye on the road to make sure the guy made his way in the right direction. I didn’t see him pass during the first block — but then again, it’s a little tough to turn around on the street he was on, and that light at the turn is pretty long sometimes.
He didn’t pass during the second block, either. But there is another light back there. And maybe he got a cell phone call and pulled over to talk or something.
Third block? No sign of him.
Fourth block. Nothing.
I finally crossed the last street before my building — the last intersection he should have gone through before turning to reach XYZ — and entered the building. Four blocks. Maybe six minutes elapsed. And a three-item set of dead-simple, no-muss, you-could-explain-it-to-a-first-grader directions that should have taken thirty seconds to put into motion. And which one of us had gotten entirely assed up.
I’d like to think — not knowing the guy and thus able to postulate that he could, in fact, be a lobotomized ADD-addled orangutan in some kind of disguise — that it was all his fault. But he was in an old pickup truck, and I’ve never known a monkey to drive a stick before. Especially the ADD ones. And especially after their frontal lobes have been put through the blender.
Alternatively, I could believe that the guy was kidnapped or truck-jacked just behind me, and never made the U-turn to follow the directions. But I’d just been walking that street, and there was nobody back there. Besides, who the hell jacks a beat-up old truck, anyway? Is there a black market for Hank Williams 8-track tapes I don’t know about? Unlikely.
So I’m left to believe — or have confirmed, once again — that I just give crappy, unfollowable directions. I still don’t see the problem. I mean, I could follow my directions. I just followed my own — on foot, no less. But something crucial evidently gets lost in the translation from my brain to someone else’s, and hitting that squirrel up for a map starts to look awfully good to people.
Frankly, it’s just damned frustrating. Such a simple thing to do, and I’m apparently unable, even in the simplest case, to get anyone successfully from Point A to Point B. And now some doofus stranger was reminding me of that, and ruining my whole day in the process. I actually wanted to go back toward my car, comb the neighborhood for that guy in the truck, and tell the bastard he could go to hell.
Of course, I’d never be able to tell him how to get there, so what’s the point, really? Stupid guy looking for the hospital, anyway. Probably bought a house on the outskirts. Meh.
Permalink | 1 CommentApologies to anyone who tried to leave a comment over the weekend. A wee little technical problem — fixed now, I’m happy to say — kept all of the programs on the server from working. Including the posting scripts, which is why the ‘Weekend Werind‘ was also rather conspicuously absent. But all the hamsters have been properly fed now, and the duct tape doubled up on the corners of the server box, so we should be good to go again.
“I either need to stop turning around, or find body parts less likely to hold long grudges.”
Just don’t shake the screen too hard. We’re not exactly working with Deep Thought here, after all. It’s a fragile system.
Speaking of ‘fragile’, I had a semantics discussion earlier today with my wife. Or tried to, anyway. As usual, she cut through the language difficulties to tickle the crux of the matter directly. Here’s how it went down:
I’ve been having some troubles with my foot recently. A trip to the doc and a couple of meds cleared that up nicely, but this ailment is just the latest in a long line of recent ouchies, hurts and boo-boos needing kissing. It seems like every time I turn around, my back or neck or arm or one of my toes objects to the activity and gives me grief for a few days. I either need to stop turning around, or find body parts less likely to hold long grudges. In the meantime, I’m stuck with my aches and pains, it seems.
Still, I don’t let that sort of thing stop me. I’ve got a full schedule of softball and volleyball and billiards leagues scheduled — the modern trifecta of ‘fat old man sports’ — and a bad wheel or wonky wing isn’t going to keep me away from my appointed dates with aging mediocrity. It was this distinction, the propensity for more nagging injuries as I careen over the hill versus not missing the very activities that are causing said sprains and strains, that I tried discussing with my wife.
With the usual results.
When I mentioned to her my latest minor malady — a right knee that doesn’t bend painlessly, since Sunday afternoon — she offered a ‘helpful’ observation:
“Wow. You’re really getting frail in your old age, aren’t you?”
Point, her. That’s my little sweetie muffin, all right.
But I had a question. Did she actually use the right term there? Is it fair to call me frail, if I’m not (yet) slowed down by most of my self-afflicted injuries? I called for a semantic point of order:
“Now hold on. Am I ‘frail’, or ‘fragile’? I yoink something or other all the time, but I keep playing. Which one is that called, ‘frail’? Or ‘fragile’?”
“I think that one’s just called ‘stupid’.”
My girl, she was never much one for semantics.
So now I’ve got a brand new ailment to worry about. I’m not sure how well I can play 8-ball tomorrow with a badly bruised ego, but I’m prepared to give it a shot. Can somebody just point me in the right direction of where to put the ice pack tonight? I should really try to keep the swelling down on this thing.
Permalink | 1 Comment(Bugs & Cranks goodness that I neglected to mention last night —
The Twenty Percent Solution: “This guy could make Rick Camp hit like Albert Pujols. And look snazzy doing it, too.”
Wednesday Walk Watch: Week fiWe: “Who’d have thunk ‘Cristian’ and ‘charity’ would be mutually exclusive for more than a month?”
Now back to our regularly scheduled nonsense.)
The dog is officially a load.
Oh, she’s always a handful. We’re used to the ‘handful’ routine. The walks, the feeding, the begging for Snausages and peeing on just the right particular corner of the lawn — that’s old furry hat by now. And we nursed her through several months of lymphoma treatment, which wasn’t especially her fault, so we didn’t call her a ‘load’ just for that.
Of course, if there are any dietary choices that could be risk factors for developing lymphoma, then perhaps she’s not entirely innocent. She does seem to enjoy drinking from the toilet and snurfling through the trash when we’re not looking. Also, she spent a year or so as a puppy making a habit of eating poop. The dog’s not exactly a star Atkin’s pupil here.
But she was sick. So we didn’t call her a ‘load’.
These days, she’s all better. No more chemo, down to bi-monthly vet visits, and all of her various doggie tests have come back clean.
“That poop over there is just ground up pig tendons and donkey gristle that’s been slow-filtered through the golden retriever down the block. Make the right choice, girl.”
Well, probably not ‘clean’, what with her being a dog and all. I mentioned the trash snurfling, right? Nasty business, that. But the tests come back free of cancer, and that’s the news we’re looking for. For a goofy mutt of her advanced age — she’s a little over ten now, which is somewhere up in Abe Vigoda land in dog years — she’s as healthy as a horse.
Which stands to reason, since her kibble is probably mostly made from horses. Or Abe Vigoda. But I digress.
The point is, the pooch is healthy these days. She is, however, on a bunch of vet medications for various nagging canine ailments, and that’s where the dog really comes out of her mild-mannered, happy, sloppy sappy shell.
And becomes a load.
See, these meds come in pill form, mostly. One is a powder capsule, and another might be a gelcap of some kind, but they’re all little bits of apparently foul-tasting medicinal product meant to be ingested on a regular basis by our flaky fuzzy friend. Only she doesn’t want to ingest them, because none of them taste like kibble or Snausages or our kitchen trash can. Or poop, apparently.
How on earth any creature can happily snarf down poodle turds — and right off the dirty ground, too; I mean, who knows where those things have been? — and just a few years later turn its nose up at some little stupid pill because it ‘tastes funny’ is beyond me. Heaven help me, I just want to reason with the poor animal. I want to say:
‘Look, dog — here’s the thing. These pills were specially formulated by very smart people to keep you healthy, so you can run around around underfoot and piddle on the carpet and slobber on our blankets for as long as caninely possible. That poop over there is just ground up pig tendons and donkey gristle that’s been slow-filtered through the golden retriever down the block. Make the right choice, girl. You can do this.‘
And yet, she can’t.
To be fair, her scat-scarfing days are well behind her. But given any option whatsoever, she will absolutely avoid any sort of mouth-related contact with anything that tastes like, smells like, looks like, has touched, came from the same shelf as, or rhymes with any of her various medications. This leaves us with two avenues to pursue:
A.) Give her no option whatsoever.
That one is my choice, and it came to that once or twice early on. We gave her a pill; she refused the pill. We popped it in her mouth; she spat it on the floor. We picked it up, pried her mouth back open, popped it in and massaged her throat until she seemed to have swallowed it.
And she spat it on the floor, then ran upstairs and hid in her crate. Where we found her, pried her open again, popped it in again, massaged her throat again, and she finally, grudgingly swallowed it. See? Simple.
There are only two problems with this approach. One, my wife isn’t on board with it, because she doesn’t like to be ‘mean’ to the dog. All those ‘we’s above are really ‘me’s, since she objects on principle to forcibly prying the dog’s jaws apart, and on sanitary grounds to sticking her fingers in there once they’re open. Smart girl. I could probably learn something from her.
And two, the dog needs these pills twice a day, and there are four or five of them per med session. And given that the process of eventually chucking a pill down the mutt’s gullet takes around twenty minutes or so, I’d have to quit my job to become a full-time ‘canine pill administerer and neck massage technician’.
I’ve had a lot of ambitions in my life. Owning that particular title is not one of them.
So instead, we go with: 2.) Disguise the medications as something the dog finds tasty.
And that’s where the dog really becomes a load. Because as it turns out, our mutt is a finicky snacker.
Not a finicky eater, mind you. She’s been on the same brand of ground-up hog hooves and sawdust for several years now. She’s got no problem getting snout-deep in a bowl of that stuff when mealtime rolls around. But when you’re prepping her a ‘treat’, to make the medicine go down? Weeeeell, now it just depends on what she’s in the mood for today.
In the beginning — her pre-lymphoma, low-volume med days, say — a simple Snausage would do the trick. Push a pill deep into the heart of one of those, toss is in the dog’s general vicinity, and it’d be scarfed down before taste buds, tongue or teeth had any idea what was going down. Gobble ’em all, and let the duodenum sort ’em out. That was our pup’s motto.
That lasted for a few years. And then, like a switch was flicked — or more likely, one of her three sputtering neurons finally keeled over — the dog simply went off Snausages. Quit cold turkey. Didn’t matter if they were hiding pills or not, she eventually just decided they weren’t worth the risk any more, and stopped eating them.
Thus began an escalating arms race that continues to this day. We must be in the ninth or tenth cycle by now; only my wife knows for sure. But when the Snausage trick had run its course, the missus looked for something else to use, instead. Early on, it was cheese. Kraft American singles, to be precise. One slice could be split into quarters and pressed into a ball, each portion concealing a pharmaceutical payload squished within. That lasted for a while, until it didn’t, any longer. The dog would actually turn up her nose at the sight of a tasty hunk of semi-soft cheeselike food. It boggled the mind.
So my wife slathered them with peanut butter.
I can’t say I would have made that particular leap from point A to point B. But she did, and damn if it didn’t work. The mutt smelled those and sucked down pills like an octagenarian hypochondriac at the old folks’ home. For a while. And then, not so much.
That’s when the missus started balling up little bits of bread, and smearing those with peanut butter. And god only knows where it went from there. Hunks of meat, dijon mustard, a box of takeout egg foo yung — who knows what she’s employed to get those pills down the dog’s throat? Frankly, I should eat so well — and especially when I have to take some sort of medicine or other. All I get is a glass of water and a pill in the hand. Where’s my skirt steak wrapped in bacon and smothered in cheese sauce, I ask you? And can I get one every morning with my Flintstones?
Of course, what makes the dog a big fat load is not that she gets these treats in the first place. It’s that she can’t ever seem to be fricking happy with any particular ridiculously sumptuous morsel, and eventually refuses them outright. And tonight, I stepped on some crusty bit of barely-gummed food that had a doggie pill of some kind inside. I don’t know what the treat was, exactly. I only know that it smelled better than, oh, any meal I’ve had at any time in the past three weeks. That includes a dozen or more tasty lunch burritos, and some pretty damned good pizza, just off the top of my head.
And the dog wouldn’t touch it. You’d think it was rat poison, or an overripe durian fruit dangling from my fingers. Whatever it was, I thought about finding a few more bits of it, zapping it in the microwave, and calling it ‘dinner’. Pills and all — how much could a heartworm pill and half a dose of dog incontinence meds really hurt me, anyway? It’d be worth finding out, if the stuff tasted half as good as it smelled. And the mutt? Not remotely interested. She gave me a look, as if to say, ‘Frankly, my dear, I’d rather lick terrier turd than eat that garbage.‘ Some dogs, you just can’t reach.
So I guess it’s time for my wife to make the next move. Could be filet mignon this time. Or a nice dip in caviar. Maybe a creamy alfredo sauce, and homemade raviolis to hide the little pills. And someday soon, no matter how delectable — or how much I happen to drool over it — the dog will sniff it gingerly, scrunch her nose, and refuse to eat it. Under any circumstances.
Have I mentioned? Our dog is quite simply a fricking load.
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