30 October 2021
It's been a while since I've sat down to continue this saga but I have a lot of very good excuses. I'll wrap them all up into one big update.
SATURDAY
When I make a latte on Saturdays, I use a small white porcelain pitcher that always makes me think of my Uncle Houze. He used a stove-top Atomic espresso pot, which he admired for its pressure gauge, to make espresso and when I told him I had finally figured out how to steam milk by using the right vessel (my little pitcher), he was delighted.
It is funny how you associate memories with things.
And Saturday there I was snaking the bathroom drain again in the hope that the gurgling I'd heard when running the kitchen faucet would resolve itself. Snaking doesn't remind me of anyone but on a recent visit Andy said it reminded him of me, since I had recommended it years ago.
It pulled up a little dirt this time, instead of grease. Hmm, I began to suspect the vent might be blocked with dirt.
We had a very nice day after that. I bought some mussels at the market and we had them steamed their own juices in a skillet with fries and my lemon/garlic/salt aoili (that's the recipe).
Even Cal won a football game.
And dinner was a home-made pizza with pork sausage from the butcher, mushrooms and calamata olives. With a chopped blue cheese salad. And I didn't hear any gurgling from the kitchen when I did the dishes.
After dinner, we watched Grumpier Old Men with Sophia Loren.
Couldn't have been a better day.
SUNDAY
The the atmospheric stream swooped down and knocked us for a loop.
The baffle in the bathroom bangs like a cherry bomb, a rapidly like a machine gun, letting us know the gusts are above 60 mph. I had weighted it down so it wouldn't do that unless it was a severe storm.
And we start hearing sirens from the fire trucks running all over rescuing people from flooding. That goes on all day and into the night.
The house trembles from the wind and the rain is torrential. I consider hiding under the bed but eventually get up and make brunch, although looking out the window is not reassuring.
Inexplicably Joyce cancels her Monday debridement using the app on her phone. She doesn't want to go, she says. You have to go, I tell her. I email Dr. Tong that we'll be there. But I'll have to call in the morning. Assuming morning comes again.
I help her wash her hair in the basin downstairs before taking a shower myself and hearing the drain gurgle when the wind gusts. At least some air is getting down the vent, I think. And maybe we're getting free plumbing service.
I put the laundry in (I have become a Quick Wash fan) and move it to the dryer after the 15 minute cycle. Halfway through dryer, we lose power for 40 minutes.
That wasn't so much an issue for the laundry (the dryer was warm) as it was for the TV, which was distracting us from the storm.
Meanwhile there are noises all around us. Bangs and scrapes and all sorts of things. Later we'll discover we lost 40 feet of fence to the west and our neighbor's green bin flew into our yard while his palettes blew over into our alley. And, most surprisingly of all, the cover of our Weber barbecue flipped over with both grills inside the turned over top. I would have liked to have seen that trick.
In the afternoon the winds die down while the rain continues into the evening and through the night. But it feels like a blessing now with no wind.
MONDAY
I keep an eye on the clock so I can call the clinic when it opens to undo the cancellation. But the phone number on the Web site goes to a physician assistant's voice mail. Thinking they just haven't opened yet, I wait a bit and try again. Same problem. It's just the wrong number.
I get the right number and call. No, we can't come at 10:30 because that's been taken. By us. No, by someone coming in for a drainage. How is that possible? You can come at 11. No, we can't come at 11. We have a home nurse scheduled at 11:30 to replace the Wound VAC dressing that the clinic doesn't do. Can you come Tuesday. No, we have dressing changes on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday schedule.
How is it you have no idea who we are after a year?
She has to talk to her supervisor. The supervisor does the right thing, bumps the drainage patient to 11 and gets us in at 10:30. Joyce has certainly been bumped to later enough times herself.
And it's a good thing we go because Jennifer the Physician's Assistant had a lot of debriding to do. The city itself needs some debriding after the storm, it seems. Our ride to the clinic and our ride home showed lots of tree branches down, closed streets and flooding. We were lucky to get through.
I'd texted Salwa when we left the clinic and she arrived two minutes after we got home, perfect timing. She lost her power for 24 hours (after, I should tell you, contracting Covid-19 at her wedding and spending her Mexican honeymoon in quarantine with her husband, who also was infected, which is why she didn't return to work until a week later than she expected).
I do an hour and a half of cleanup around the house after she goes.
TUESDAY
During Adobe's online MAX event, I learn I'll have to run Catalina, which is not supported on my 11-year-old MacBook Pros, to run the latest Adobe software. There is a very good patcher to install it on both of my laptops, though, so I resolve to explore it. It does mean I'll lose my favorite spell checker and my tablet but it's inevitable, I suppose. Trauma, that is.
But I'm also able to get out for a little walk.
Late yesterday Alice called to say her mother is in the hospital with a bowel perforation. They are doing a biopsy but suspect it is inoperable cancer. So this morning she and Dan drove to Houston to be with her.
They couldn't fly because they had to take the dog with them, she said.
I take a walk about noon and half an hour into it, I get a text. I take a look at my phone and see it's from Dan. He's a grandfather. Eva Mundstock was born at 12:29 after 12 hours of labor. Eighteen inches and 6.7 lbs., we learn later from Alice.
They were on the road to Houston so weren't able to be there but their daughter Rachel and her Adam raced down in the middle of the night to take care of Eric and Rachel's dog. Once Eric got into the hospital, he couldn't leave. And that dog can't be left alone either.
WEDNESDAY
We have a little trauma with the dressing change. Salwa struggles with it. It just can't get suction. So she replaces the lily pad and it gets to 125 lbs. but the pump is laboring.
I have to go to my mother's to do the usual weekly chores and pay her bills. The furniture restoration did come out very nicely. So nicely you begin to notice the other spots on nearby surfaces that could use a little lacquer.
A nurse from the county is coming to give her the flu shot (which she calls a small pox vaccine) but I can't stay, of course.
When I get home, someone is examining the fence for an estimate, so I go over and we chat about it with Brian, who lives there, and Betty, who owns it, and Bill the contractor. We resolve not to replace it until early next year. Neither of us can afford it with the price of lumber.
THURSDAY
Salwa's dressing doesn't make it through the night. First the VAC complains its battery is "dangerously low." Joyce forgot to plug it in. It's a new battery so it lasts all day but it needs to charge overnight.
But there's also a leak in the foam area. I patch it after listening for it but the VAC can't get suction. I give up and turn it off so we can get some sleep. A few hours later, it leaks. So I put on a wet-to-dry dressing.
I do update Salwa and we discuss it in the morning. We think the Coloplast she applied to the edge of the wound to protect the skin from the foam may be the culprit and she calls the clinic to see if we can discontinue it. Sure, as long as the foam doesn't touch the skin, she's told by someone named Kathryn.
I have Catalina running on my travel MacBook Pro, the 13-inch model, and start tweaking it to see if I can do real work in Catalina. The spell checking is going to be wrenching. But there are issues with the new Adobe software and an updated PHP and a new version of MySQL to install. But I've started to use it. When I iron out all the issues, I'll do the update on my main box. I expect.
But I spend the afternoon in the yard, three hours of sawing branches down and raking up debris. I clean up the fence to the extent I can, filling twice the size of the bin with bags of waste. We did lose an 18-year-old variegated trumpet plant near the fence but the trunk had become diseased and I was just seeing if I could save it by pruning it back. Nope.
Meanwhile Joyce talks to her sisters Carol and Judy.
I do a wet-to-dry dressing change in the evening to tide us over until Quoia comes to do the VAC dressing tomorrow.
FRIDAY
Well, we do have our annual Halloween treat of seeing the grammar school kids arrive in their costumes. And even better this year, the entire school parades around the block, class after class. so we get a good look at the fronts of their costumes, too. We mostly just see the backs as they walk up the hill to school.
After my morning news posts on Photo Corners, I dash down to Costco for mineral water, pasta, nuts and allergy pills, then fill the tank and zip over to Trader Joe's to restock the pantry before Quoia comes over in the afternoon.
It takes me two hours, both places packed with shoppers. And gas lines, too. Must be Halloween. But I get back by 1 p.m. on the dot.
Quoia gave us a 1 to 2 p.m. window but at 2 she texts that she's running late.
It takes her an hour and a half to remove the wet-to-dry dressing and replace it with the VAC dressing but she does an compassionate and technically sound job. The VAC gets suction and the pump sounds like a heart beat instead of a jack hammer.
"You're a sweet couple," she tells us. And we feel like reaching for liver pills or something age appropriate.
Alice calls as we're eating a late dinner to tell us her mother is home and on morphine every hour as needed. It makes it hard to communicate with her but the pain is so severe she needs the drug.
She asks how things are going since I haven't posted anything in a week.
Well, I have now.