Rusty's Armory

Sunday dawned overcast and cool today and I stumbled into the kitchen to start the coffee maker,  then weigh myself, took my blood pressure, sugar, temperature, pulse and oxygen.  Stuck myself with an insulin needle, filled my coffee cup and ate a healthy cardboard cookie made for diabetics, then went into the studio to check the day.

But Snookums quickly poked her head into the doorway and announced that she was up, and I could have coffee with her if I wanted.  Translated, that means get your butt in here and spend some time with me.  So, I dutifully padded back to the kitchen table for conversation and took her vitals while we were conversing.

I have been remiss in that, but it is a very necessary morning ritual for us. And this morning I let us run out of coffee cake.  That is near the unforgivable sin in this household.  So sometime today I have to run into town and pick up a couple of them from the bakery.

However, a new medical service from my health insurance wants to stop by and examine the two of us.  I am not sure who they are, but like another service provided to me, it sounds like anything but health care.  They don’t dress wounds, they don’t change catheters, they don’t do blood draws.  But they come by every four months and take our vitals, apparently. 

I am already enrolled in another health care service that pretty much does the same thing, but if I am running a fever, apparently, they will come by and take my vitals.  Or I can make an appointment at the clinic and see a real doctor.  I am not averse to nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants, and sometimes actually prefer them.  But I don’t need my vitals taken four times a year by them.

Snookums is still making progress, but it is by millimeters instead of yards now.  I try not to be impatient with her, but sometimes it slips out of me, and I’ll speak sharply to her.  All my anger does is confuse her and I really need to stop doing that.

And now the cardiologists are suggesting a heart pump sometime after January.  He says it will really help with the reduced pumping capacity of my heart.  I am mixed about this, and if Snookums hadn’t had a stroke, I would have just said enough.  But now I need to be around for a bit longer because … well … I need to be around.  When I meet again later this month with him, I think I’ll tell him to start the process. It isn’t as invasive as open-heart surgery, apparently they do it with through a small incision, and the recovery doesn’t require a hospital stay.

… and one day follows another in my little corner of paradise.

Good morning!