I went to my (soon to be ex) general practitioner. She and the junior doctor she brought to work with her that day examined me cheerily and offered very vague suggestions as to what might be causing my bone tiredness, but nothing concrete or that gave me any confidence. In the end, they decided to take a liter or so of blood. I was hopeful that the blood tests would show some totally treatable thyroid related issue that would explain my exhaustion as well as the small but consistent spare tire (bicycle not truck) that I have aquired.

I waited impatiently for a phone call from the doctor’s office which didn’t come the following day or the next. I thought possibly that, like heart worm for dogs, no news was good news. But that wasn’t making me any less tired, so I phoned my doctor’s office. Her office person told me that there was nothing to worry about and that I would receive my results in the mail. Really? Mail? As in SNAIL? I had so hoped that my doctor might give a rat’s behind and phone me to personally discuss the results of my tests, but apparently that isn’t the way things are done in 1972 where my doctor has her office. I also asked to have the results faxed to me, but I never received them. Fax machines were quite rare in 1972, so of course.

Eventually the results came in the mail and everything pointed towards healthy. I had a slight iron deficiency which my doctor in her notes suggested might a result of heavy periods. She suggested an iron supplement. A totally reasonable suggestion if I still had a UTERUS. My hysterectomy, a small but rather significant detail, rendered her suggestion moot and forced me to phone her office, yet again. It also made my little tired head explode.

I finally had an opportunity to speak directly with my doctor after several phone calls and she was completely unapologetic. She suggested that iron supplements might still help – uterus or no. She also suggested that my anti depressant might be causing the borderline narcolepsy. When I hung up, I felt defeated. Of course I could decrease my anti depressant but that was kind of a last resort. I felt brushed off and abandoned by my doctor, like she was on to the next more solvable case. Then my phone rang and it was my doctor calling to mention that my family history of colorectal cancer and my personal history of polyps might indicate a bleeding polyp which could cause exhaustion. REALLY? This would have been nice to know when we were on your doctor “play date” like three weeks ago. Are you kidding?

I promptly scheduled a colonoscopy and fortunately was deemed clean as the proverbial whistle, which while relieving is a bit beside the point. Who operates like that? Oh, and still tired, did I mention? So ultimately under the supervision of a different doctor I did reduce my anti depressant.

So the good news is that I am now considerably less fatigued. The bad news is that I am now considerably more anxious with a side of neurotic. I also wasn’t able to pin my muffin top on a faulty thyroid. Oh, and now I need a new effing doctor.

Totally sounds like an ideal time to adopt a puppy, no?

While enjoying a weekend in South Haven, Michigan Bob and I made the fatal error of entering a pet supply boutique. We were innocently browsing through the collars and bowls, when a young woman appeared out of nowhere with a little black ball of fur in her arms. She placed the puppy in my arms after telling me that she was up for adoption and I was done. I can usually hold a puppy, enjoy them and then hand then back, but on several occasions in my life I have felt the need to bring them home. This was one of those occasions.

Elizabeth Virginia – we call her Betty – a lab/shepherd mix (or so we are told) came to live with us and if I felt slightly overwhelmed before her arrival then this would probably classify as full on chaos. But it is chaos with puppy breath, hilarious canine hijinks and sweet cuddly baby napping with a side of razor teeth.

Mike and Goose vacillate between tolerating her, regarding her with skepticism and actually trying to figure out how to play with her. She was so small when we first brought her home they were actually frightened of her. Goose walked around for days wagging his tail and growling at her.

For her part, Betty is having a pretty good time. We bought her a $10 dog bed at Marshalls and a pink blankie both of which she embraced immediately. She loves her brothers and want to be with them, but she is smart enough to back off when they correct her and hides under a chair when they play too rough. I would classify her as gifted particularly in the house-breaking area, but I may be biased.

Bob and I are now outnumbered and have had to change from a man to man (or dog) defense to zone, but we seem to have it mostly under control. Bob has been exclusively the one to get up in the night with his “Daddy’s little girl”, which is a little amazing and a lot appreciated. Our dog walker visits a second time each day for the time being and the rest is just canine wrangling: making sure Betty doesn’t jump into Mike’s bowl, watching for signs of squatting and ensuring that Mike and Goose don’t feel usurped by their new little sister.

I am still overwhelmed, but when the dust settles and no one is biting me or each other I am as happy as I can be. I definitely have much to be thankful for.

The one thing that has remained constant in the mater of men’s drawers is that colored briefs of any sort are a deal breaker. Should one arrive at the pant removing portion of an evening to discover tighties of a different color it is acceptable to throw a flag on the play. Colored or, perish the thought, patterned undies are grounds for disqualification. I know for a fact that this has been the subject of many morning-after, snicker girl talks. Patterned boxers are acceptable but if you are going to wear brief or really even boxer briefs, I am going to have to insist upon white.

So imagine my horror when I came across this while shopping for Bob’s undershirts:

and these:

and then these:

After way more consideration than anyone should really give underpants, I still just don’t know what to say.

I find more often than not that Hallmark has not anticipated the sentiments that I wish to convey to my satisfaction. Not only are most cards on the saccharine side, I find rhyming offensive. I don’t know why, but for some reason a card that rhymes seems less sincere than one that doesn’t. It is, I realize ridiculous, in that I have written neither.

The real problem began for me years ago when shopping for Father’s Day cards. All the standard cards spend a considerable portion of the message thanking the father in question for all sorts of activities that just didn’t apply in my situation. My father and I never, save two months after I was born, lived in the same house. He never helped me with my homework, taught me to ride a bicycle, gave me boyfriend advice or any of the other myriad of Ward-Cleaver-like behaviors that are acknowledged in the typical father’s day card. Which isn’t to say that he was a bad father, he did the best he could under the circumstances. Unfortunately for me Hallmark didn’t make a card to thank a well intended, absentee father.  I spent most of my Father’s day cards shopping expeditions reading cards, getting to a certain point and shaking my head “no” and replacing them in the rack. Ultimately I would usually settle on a card that I could just as easily give a coworker, something from the “Simply Put” category.

Lately I have come across a new card-shopping obstacle: booze.  Now I don’t begrudge the rest of the population a drink or three nor do I think that the universe should begin to celebrate exclusively with diet ginger ale just because I do, but the percentage of birthday cards for women that mention alcohol is kind of scary. I spent half an hour today looking for a birthday card. I had to bypass the one’s suggesting that my wishes for my friend’s birthday included her getting liquored-up which really limited my choices. Not that I have a problem with her getting liquored up for her birthday if that is what she wants to do, but my wishes for her are a little more big picture. There were cards that referenced wine drinking, others with illustrations of cosmos and even one that casually referenced a blackout.  I was not indignant by any means, but I was a little frustrated.

I eventually found an appropriate if somewhat vanilla card. While it didn’t speak to all my hopes and dreams for my friend, it did ultimately meet my card requirements as it did not reference liquor and it did not rhyme. I thought I was out of the woods until when shopping for a gift, I found this picture frame:

Really?

When the power goes out in our home the carbon monoxide detectors emit a sort of chirping signal. Unbeknownst to us, this noise sounds to dogs much like messages warning of the apocalypse. The first of such warnings, I mean chirps, came at 3:15 that morning and I immediately had two large trembling canines on my chest weighing in at about 140lbs total. I slipped out from beneath my protectors and removed the battery from the offending detector, but over the course of that night there were two more detectors that sent them reeling again. When the power finally went back on the three detectors began to chirp again (this time for lack of batteries) which prompted both dogs to try to climb inside my clothes.

That was, thankfully, the only time out power got knocked out this summer, but Chicago has had an unusually large number of extremely thunderous and very lightening-y storms this summer. Mike, being the eldest, reacts to both thunder and lightening in a protective manner. He barks at both and generally behaves as if he would like to kick some storm ass. While I appreciate the sentiment, it is disconcerting if not jarring to have him bark each time the thunder claps or lightening flashes especially at 2:00am. The other side effect of Mike’s protective barking is that it sends an already nervous Goose over the edge. Goose, who will pace and pant at the first thunder boom, begins to tremble as Mike tells the storm to “bring it”. The more violent the storm the closer the dogs want to be to me and while I am glad that I represent comfort and safety, my boys are not lap dogs and sometimes comforting them in downright painful.

Enter the Thundershirt, an ingenious t-shirt for dogs that claims to help calm them in stressful scenarios. The Thundershirt comes in varied colors and sizes and being optimistic consumers, albeit comletely sleep deprived after the last 3:00am storm, Bob and I went out and got a couple for our boys.

Honestly, the miracle Thundershirt does not completely eliminate Goose’s and Mike’s storm related anxiety, but it is greatly reduced. This could be either because the Thundershirt people are geniuses or because any anxiety Mike and Goose feel from a thunderstorm is overshadowed by the humiliation they feel wearing these:

]]> http://www.dianarepublic.com/2011/09/06/canine-stress/feed/ 1 http://www.dianarepublic.com/2011/07/12/whats-up-doc/ http://www.dianarepublic.com/2011/07/12/whats-up-doc/#comments Wed, 13 Jul 2011 01:51:12 +0000 princess http://www.dianarepublic.com/?p=1538 I went to the emergency room Saturday morning, not part of my weekend plans. I had a pain above my ankle that was so severe it made me cry to put weight on it. It started with sort of a soreness and escalated to an actual pain. Bob consulted Dr. Google and decided that it could be a blood clot or thrombosis. Admittedly I didn’t have all the symptoms that were listed, but blood clots sound bad and Bob isn’t one to take these kinds of chances so after some reluctance off we went.

The big city emergency room was not particularly busy as we arrived at 9:30am on a Saturday and a very nice admitting nurse gave me a wheelchair. She took my vitals and told me it wouldn’t be long before a doc saw me. Surprisingly, she was telling the truth. She couldn’t vouch for the kind of the doctor, I suppose.

The resident sent to examine me, however, was a delightfully dismissive and condescending young lad. He explained that I didn’t present with any symptoms that would indicate a blood clot (other than the unexplained pain in my leg, that is). Note to all: do not mention WebMD when dealing with medical professionals. Dr. DBag, as I will refer to him going forward, completely checked out when that website was mentioned. He proceeded to make me feel utterly ridiculous for having sought treatment at all, at one point asking what exactly made me decide to come to the emergency room. In my mind I replied, “I was just jonesing to waste the better part of a beautiful sunny day in a hospital gown being talked down to by an Ivy League punk like you”, but I think I said something about pain and being scared.

When Bob asked about tests to confirm that there was no clot, he said something about “proper use of resources”. Apparently he had already diagnosed me as some hypochondriacal housewife who was looking to refill her Vicodin prescription. Dr. DBag thought I was a waste of “resources” as well as his time. I felt terrible about not having presented with something exponentially more complicated or life threatening. Damn, if only I could have been a hermaphrodite with ovarian cysts and testicular cancer or at least a fancy gun shot wound.

Dr. DBag is the reason people are reluctant to go to the hospital to have things checked out. Well, that and lack of health insurance coverage. Luckily the attending physician was much more inclined to reassure us, even if he had to use some precious “resources” to do so. He ordered an ultrasound as well as an xray. I actually felt the xray might be sort of unnecessary as I hadn’t injured myself, but I was thankful that he was inclined to rule out whatever an xray might rule out.

When all was said and done. I had no blood clot and nor had I broken my ankle. The latter I knew, the former I was relieved to hear. I was not relieved to hear it from Dr. DBag with his patented condescending delivery. I really had hoped to prove him wrong, without having to be diagnosed with ankle cancer of course. Dr. DBag sent me off with instructions on how to care for a sprained ankle. That I don’t have a sprained ankle apparently was not particularly important to him. And by the time I left the hospital my indignation had healed the pain in my leg and I was able to walk on my own, further reinforcing Dr. DBag’s assumption that I was just hysterical and delusional.

Some people are just not suited to patient care. I know I am not. Based upon my observations, the young doctor should probably move into research. His bedside manner is more suited to lab rats and test tubes. Making someone second guess seeking medical advice is never a good idea. If I had been a frequent flyer to the ER, it might explain (not excuse) his indifference, but I think their fancy computers could tell him that I wasn’t. While I was not willing to drop dead to prove my point, I wonder how smug Dr. DBag would have been had his indifference missed a real diagnoses.

In the weeks before the sale, I organized and priced and planned for the sale. I worked like a dog. Wait our dogs don’t work hard. They don’t work at all. I worked super hard.

I even coerced Bob into cutting loose some of his treasured baseball caps and T-shirts. This was no easy feat. I borrowed tables and a canopy. I read an article on how to hold a yard sale; accept early offers because that is when the serious yard sale shoppers are out and keep your cash in a fanny pack so no one can lift it when you are distracted. On Saturday morning I was ready to unload piles of electronics, glassware and clothing, all with little price tags. My head danced with visions of dollar signs.

There were clearly thousands of dollars of treasures under that canopy. Analog televisions, old DVD players, obsolete cable boxes and an outdated Direct TV DVR were all for waiting for the hoards of tinkering electronics junkies to take home.

Dishes and glassware and luggage were all prominently displayed for those who prefer the shabby chic of mismatched items.

Bob was at the ready to manage the crowds.

Some shoppers came but the hoards of tinkering electronics aficionados not so much. A cab driver came by and bought an old blue tooth headset and a fax machine. A neighbor furnishing her son’s new apartment took some glasses and mismatched flatware off our hands. But overall it was more of a trickle than a swarm. I may have overestimated the market for obsolete electronics or possibly the yard sale sector of the economy hasn’t rebounded quite yet.

As it turned out the sale was a modest financial success. We had to carry loads of crap right back into the house quickly to avoid a sudden thunderstorm, but most of the day was actually quite nice. We had some drive by shoppers and a couple of guys who hollered from their open car windows asking if we were selling tools (Who sells tools? Have you fixed everything?) Many neighbors stopped by to chat, look at our old junk and some actually bought something. After a long winter hibernation it was really nice to check in with people on our block, especially this newcomer.

We have been to Maui before a number of times, but that didn’t stop well-meaning acquaintances from offering all sorts of suggestions. “You should check out the volcano at dawn.” Um, that would mean getting up at 4:00am to take a bus to Haleakela (no doubt an amazing sight). I do not need to do anything that requires that I get up at 4:00am (except pee) when I am on vacation. “Have you driven the road to Hana? You just have to.” Yeah, we tried that once and it didn’t go well. We made it about a third of the way and bailed. I believe harsh words were said and the ride back may or may not have been uncharacteristically quiet.

I am blessed (on many levels) to be married to a man who likes to vacation the way I do. We like to kick back in the sun by a pool and read and listen to music and make each other laugh. And we are really good at it. Mostly we just mock one another, but we are not above observing (or eavesdropping on) our fellow sunbathers particularly if they speak loudly on cell phones.

Our agendas usually differ when naptime comes around. I like to take a post sun snooze. This is usually when Bob can knock off whatever wanderlust he has. This time around it was the beach. I suspect it had as much to do with the occupants of the beach as it did the actual beach, but Bob was mildly obsessed. I like the beach in theory and I did join him for one beautiful sunset on the beach, but I am not a big fan of sand.

Sand is a pretty standard component for a beach and then there is the salt water and the things that live in it and the inferior washroom facilities.

Beautiful yes, but sandy and sticky. Sorry, but compared to a nice clean swimming pool where I can see the bottom complete with adjustable lounge chairs twenty yards away from refrigeration and clean restrooms, well, for me the pool wins every time.

On the subject of naps, I indulged in a nap every single day. I also slept no less than 10 hours each night. Now I know the sun takes a bit out of you, but seriously I slept approximately 12 hours a day, each day, for seven days straight. I was unconscious for half of my vacation. And honestly I was pretty happy about it. So between all the sunning and sleeping there was little time for paddle boarding or surfing, though this truck claimed to be able to teach even me:

And the top of this truck’s display implied it would to teach Goose and me:

After a week of sleeping and relaxing and eating and watching of sunsets (they have one every single night) we returned tanned and rested to…. more 56° weather. It seems that unbeknownst to us spring was canceled this year. I guess we will just have to hold on to our vacation memories until summer arrives.

There were lots of dogs.

It was an awesome day!

It wasn’t pretty – let me tell you. It was super cold and so were the Bears (bah dum bump). But the real disappointment to me was not the players or the game. It was the fans. I had worried about the behavior of the Packer fans, but the ones I saw celebrated appropriately. On the other hand to hear some Bears’ season ticket holders, you would think that they hadn’t won a game all season. A woman in my section called them “losers” as she left midway through the forth quarter. Had she looked at her ticket, she might have confirmed that she was in attendance at a “championship” game. Chicago sports fan can be completely irrational when it comes to a loss like this.

Then to add insult to injury the fans, the media and even his fellow NFL players turned on the quarterback, questioning his toughness. Really? I know he is not going to win Mr. Congeniality any time soon, but he isn’t running for office. He is a quarterback not the Bachelor. The guy has been sacked something like 58 times in one season, more than anyone else in the league. He was even one of the only three quarterbacks to have the privilege of being pounded into the frozen University of Minnesota tundra a few times. Yeah, he is a total wuss.

I won’t listen to sports talk radio. Even in the best of times it is painful to listen to these sad beer-bellied wanna-be’s second guess a professional sports team’s decisions based upon their experiences from that one season of football they played in seventh grade. In the wake of this loss we should fire the coach (again), axe the general manager (again) and castrate the quarterback. But as it turns out, I don’t have to listen to sports talk radio. I just have to walk into the lunch room in my testosterone filled office. So that’s what these guys do on weekends.

Anyway I sat Shiva. I wailed. I mourned the loss and I came to grips with the end of the season. And now I am done with football until next year. No Super Bowl for me. I am not a fair weather fan, but I am not just a football fan either. I am a Bears fan.