Once again whining about pain...

I'm so tired about whining about pain and pain pills, but believe it or not, I feel better when I do.  So here it is.  If you don't want to hear the whine, please, move along....nothing to see here.  This is more of a therapy thing.

Tomorrow I am going to Houston to see a new pain doctor.  I have no idea whether this is going to be a permanent doctor change, but I DO have to go according to my lawyer.  I'm glad.  Doctor Somerville has been terrible about treating me.  I have to fight every month for my pills, and half of the things that he's promised to me do not seem to get done.

I've lost about 50 lbs now, not even trying.  I think that's come from Low Testosterone, although many people experience weight gain from testosterone loss.  No other ideas why it's happening unless I"m having a real problem with the diabetes again.  It's running wild, I'm sure, since the doctor lowered my dosage so low again.  I felt so much better for a while while I was on the T, but now I once again feel like crap...tired all the time, and oddly, in pain much of the time I think from inactivity.  However, I have no motivation to get exercise!!!  It's so frustrating!

Strange crap happening in the world.  There were just shootings on Capitol Hill, which really isn't surprising.  I'm going to blog again later and check this out.

Long time, no see!

It's been a while since I've written in this blog.  It suffered when I decided to quit writing a comedic view of my life here in Texas, and it's since pretty much died.  I don't know if I can revive it or not, but I may just be able to do that and keep it as a day to day blog to keep people posted on how our "Life in the Hovel" is going these days.

Last I wrote, we were still in the one bedroom apartment across the complex.  (I say it like it's a massive building with lots of units...no.)  We are now in Apartment #1, which is the largest in the complex.  It's a two bedroom and costs us more than we can really afford, and definitely more than it's worth.  The landlords greedy widow has raised the rent by 75 bucks this past month, and while we can probably get a house for just as much money, there is no way that we could afford the deposits required.  Add to that the cost of the move, and it's just not a possibility.  So, we've decided to do our best and make a go at living in this nasty, cockroach infested hole.  I wish I knew why she though that it was worth so damned much money...Oh well.

Since moving here, a lot of changes have happened throughout the complex.  We've had a couple of complete tenant turn overs since I last wrote, and we now have a halfway decent apartment manager.  I say halfway decent because he is a caring man with the greatest of intentions, but with little funding to fix and repair the things that really need to be fixed and repaired!  Currently, aside from the bug infestation, we need all the plumbing redone, and the floor in the living room replaced.  We need actual flooring or linoleum replaced throughout the entire apartment.  A lot of electrical work has been done though, so I really can't complain too much.

I've satisfied my hobby needs by doing flower gardening.  Those of you who have read my garden blog know this already, so I will keep this down to a minimum.  I currently have container gardens in the backyard ,and an actual flower bed in the front yard.  I'll be starting a second shade flower bed here very soon.

We still have our dog and cat.  "Missy E" turned 18 last September.  She's getting really old and bordering on being incontinent.  She gets sick everywhere, and can't seem to hit the litterbox when she needs to use it.  This make the house a bit odiferous, to say the least.  We do our best to try to keep up with her, but it's just so discouraging.  I can't bring myself to put her down, but it probably needs to start being considered.  She's got a lot of the same symptoms that my last cat, Isis, had before I had to put her to sleep.  She's skinny, and she seems to only have one purpose in life...to eat.  She won't play anymore, but rather growls a her toys..lol!  If you knew her, you'd know that this is typical of her entire personality throughout her whole life.

Sasha is still Allergic to Texas, but it has increased by leaps and bounds.  Every summer she feels the need to yank out all the fur on her butt.  No idea why other than I think she itches down by her nub of a tail, and the only way to scratch that itch for her is to bite it.  She constantly is chewing on her feet and front paws.  I feel so horrible for her. I need to get her out of this state, but that's just not possible.

My Mother is still alive and kicking.  She's in a nursing home called "Sunnybrook" (reminiscent of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) in a private room for now.  When the place fills up though she will have to have a roommate.  I go to see her two to three times a week, but for her it never seems to be enough.  She doesn't complain about how often I visit, but you can see it in her eyes when I leave that she doesn't want me to go.  It's very sad.  I'll write more about this soon.

Right now I need to close this up.  I'll write more tomorrow, or perhaps later tonight.

Ciao!

Landlord has a stroke.

Today I got some sad news.  It appears that my landlord, Mr Martinex, suffered a fairly severe stroke last night.  Apparently he had some sort of blood infection and a vessel broke in his brain, sending the infection soaked blood over a good sized piece of his brain.  While I do not know the significance of the infection and how that effects his brain or his stroke, I'm sure it cannot be good.

Mr Martinez has become a good friend over the years.  He's one of the few people that showed confidence in me and Dana being able to make it here in Corpus Christi...  He's been our landlord since we first got to town.  It was a rough road at first, but as he got to know us and vice-versa, our friendship and trust in eachother increased, and it was really nice to be kinda tight with him.

He is man well into his 80's, and I'm afraid that he was already plagued with issues of skin cancer.  I believe that he had other cancer too, but was too proud and strong to tell us about it.  Lately he'd been working on our apartment complex and made some very major, much needed fixes to roofs, walls, gates, and all sorts of interior things too.  We were starting to feel like we weren't living in a slum anymore.  It's getting better all the time.

Today I send out prayers to him.  I hope you get well Mr Martinez.

Mom's dying...very slowly.

This is hard for me to write, but it's best that I write it here, in this blog because it's happening "In the Bluff" and I don't want so much publicity on it. It's going to be really really hard for me when it happens.

My Mom IS dying. I guess I'm just finally coming into the accepting mode and hitting a bit of the all natural "grief" that comes when you finally quit fighting and realize that it's actually happening. I have no idea how much longer it's going to take, but this afternoon during a nap I had a dream that brought it totally to my attention. And that just plain SUCKS. I awoke from that nap by sitting bolt upright and starting to cry. The realization was just so much like a smack in the face.

And it's not like I've not been aware. Hell, I've been going over to Mom and Dad's house ever other day for 4 months now. I've noticed lately that I'm going less, and now I see that she's getting worse and I wonder if that's why I've not been going over as much as I was before. Dad doesn't seem to be upset by me not going over there either, and I would think that he would be. Maybe he's actually aware of what my brain is doing, but I doubt it. Today he also admitted to me that if she is dying that maybe it's for the best to not try to keep her awake, or to put her on sleep schedule...or keep her from taking those pills that she loves that keep her asleep all the time.

I don't understand though. It's as though she's given up on life, and that just doesn't make sense to me. It almost feels like suicide in a way. It may not be an actual suicide, but lying in bed just waiting to die isn't living, and refusing to get up and move and to TRY to enjoy what little life you have left is just beyond my comprehension! I don't understand it, and in a way I don't think I ever WANT to be able to understand. I have a feeling the only way to do so is to be in that situation myself, and no...I don't want that kind of understanding.

Of course now I go through another process...one of shame. I find myself ashamed of so much (and of course now I am tearing up, because of this shame) that I wish I had done during my lifetime to try to make my Mom proud of me...to honor her. I'll never be able to hand her a manuscript to my book and tell her to read it and tell me what she thinks. I'll never be able to let her read the dedication and enjoy the realization that I wrote it for her, because she was the inspiration that made me continue writing because she won't be there. This is so saddening that it's maddening, and that makes me cry.

I find myself mourning right now, but I'm not mourning her death, but rather the loss of her. She's not really my Mom there anymore lying in that bed. If I handed her that manuscript, she couldn't read it. She's already gone too far into her own journey. For that, I mourn.

My Mom has taken a bad turn.

It's been about six months since I've posted in this blog, and much has happened since then. But this blog is the only blog I have that remains somewhat private, so I need to write this here.

I moved to the bluff in April of 2010 because my Mom and Dad lived here; Mom was sick with COPD and I wanted to spend what time there was left with her. Well, it seems as though we've come to the end. I'm sad, but I've had some kind of strange peace settling over me and holding me together for the past several days now.

Mom came home a week ago Friday in an ambulance, and we were all introduced to Hospice nurses later that evening. It was hard, especially since the woman who was assigned to us was a larger lady who we couldn't find an acceptable chair for. She was also a bit on the crude side, using humor that wasn't necessarily proper for a new patient who would just be becoming associated with the hospice service.

So, now it's been a week, and it's all becoming this long, drawn out, nightmare. Mom is fighting getting better. She could get better, but for some reason she's rejecting the idea. She's becoming enamored with ativan, a drug to fight anxiety attacks for when she has trouble breathing. It's not an addiction, but when she takes one at the lowest dose it knocks her out for crazy amounts of time! Ugh!

Today (which is two days out from when I first started this post) she was a lot better. I know that they say that people have one good rally before they pass away and I'm really hoping that this isn't hers. I spent the whole day sick yesterday with something fairly insignificant, and wound up having to wear a mask and stay away from her for the most part today. She was kinda like her old self though, and it was nice to see her again.

I miss her...the regular old Mom.

So many changes!

It's been a while since I've written here, so I figured that I'd better. It's been almost a year since I've moved to the "Bluff" and only the faces have changed around the complex here.

Since Ruby originally left, there have been two tenants in the apartment next door to me. Steve and now Pam. Pam has three boys that she trying to raise in the one bedroom apartment, and two dogs that are just as big as her boys. One of the dogs is a pit bull mix, and the other is likely a black lab pitbull mix. I'm not sure that the black one has pit in it...not completely anyway. I guess I bring the dog thing up because it's the thing that bugs me the most. Neither of those two dogs likes Sasha, and one of them has already bit her ear. It makes walking her a real challenge, since you don't know when they are walking their dogs, and when they are going to be on a leash, or when they are going to be running loose. Our landlord, Mr. M, doesn't seem to mind too much about either.

There seems to be some kind of curse on the apartment next to Judy (I can't remember the name I've given her in the story.) It started out being home to an old lady that had two daughters and a couple of grand kids too. She moved in her daughter, but the grandkids stayed elsewhere. That was great fun. The old lady was a collector of shopping carts, and until recently we had like five of them parked around the apartment complex. She eventually got sick of her daughter and moved out. The daughter stayed however, and one of the very first things to happen to her was her air conditioners got stolen. We now wonder if they weren't repossessed by rent-a-center. The daughter was a real mess. She yelled and screamed at everyone. She was injured, much like myself, and she used people with her injury. She managed to talk the landlord into leaving the apartment with her stuff in it for almost two months without taking any rent for it. All her stuff inside, and nobody home. Wow.

Dana and I are getting along alright. It's hard here, with there only being three rooms between us and the animals. The animals are having a very difficult time getting along though, as tempers are starting to spark more often between them. As I said though, I'm surprised at how well Dana and I are doing despite only having three rooms between us to live in. We've actually come really close to arguing, but we've not quite come to it yet. It's odd...when we realize that we are getting close to an argument, we managed to talk ourselves out of having it and just say the things that are bugging each other. At least that's what I've been doing. I really shouldn't talk for him...

So there you have it. It's now the 9th month here in Corpus, and all is bearable, just barely.

Not AGAIN?!

Those of you who know me know that I'm on pain medication, and that I will most likely be on pain medication for the rest of my life. I've had two back surgeries, one in 2001 and another in 2006, and the last one didn't go quite as well as planned. I've had some nerves that have been dislodged from their correct locations, and the pain just never stops.

When this happened and I submitted it as a work injury, I had a helluva time making people understand that I truly WAS in a lot of pain. Rather than accept that fact and help me, the Doctors decided to make my life miserable by writing in my charts that I exhibited drug seeking behavior. If you know anything about pain doctors, as soon as they see that the words "drug addict" come to mind. For me, however, that was not the case! I was actually hurting!

It took 2 years and a LOT of arguing and fighting in front of lawyers and my insurance company to make them believe that I wasn't some sort of addict to downers, but that they made me function. Without them, I would sit in a chair, rocking slightly and crying for day after day because it hurt to even move! Finally though, I went to see Doctor Baldi at Broadlawns and he explained what was happening to me, why it was happening to me, and told me that it was a legitimate thing that I was experiencing. Hooray for me! I had a champion! And he did a great job for me, prescribing me enough pain medication to keep me out of pain, but not overdoing it. He went by what I asked, and we even reduced my intake of medication on a couple of medications because they weren't needed or it was too strong.

I move to Texas, and my first problem is that I cannot find a new pain doctor that will take Iowa Workman's comp insurance. I run out of medication, and not only start to go through withdrawal symptoms, but also start having this unbearable pain again. Finally, the Work Comp insurance company comes through with a doctor in Houston of all places, and asks me to drive about 450 miles roundtrip once a month to go to this doctor. I reluctantly agree.

This guy doesn't believe in using pain medication, so Oh boy, I'm obviously going to have problems. To my surprise he admits that I will probably need something for the rest of my life. He takes me off of all the medications that I had been used to, and puts me on Methadone and Hydrocodone, at a much lesser level than what I'm used to taking. Having no other choices, I agree to take what I can get (I was scared to change from soemthing that worked) and see how it goes. Much to my surprise, I'm able to get by with these two drugs. I'm reasonably sure that my insurance company breathed a sigh of relief too, since my drug expense went from about $1200 per month to about $300 per month.

Today I go for my fifth visit to this new doctor. We sorta have a routine now. I go in, he comes in, asks me questions, writes me two new scripts, and then I leave. This week was different. I go in, he sends in his resident to ask questions, then comes in and tells me he can't help me anymore because he got a letter from the insurance company telling him about how I've been seeing other doctors to get more pain medication behind his back!

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I'm now a doctor shopping drug addict, according to the work comp insurance company. I cannot believe the nerve of these bastards. I don't work. The only way I can afford medication is to go through them, and they think that I'm running around seeing other doctors? Wow. I cannot believe it! I beg him to hear me out and believe me. I'm NOT seeing any other doctors, and the only medication I'm taking other than what he's aware of are my diabetes drugs. There are NO narcotics that I'm taking that he hasn't signed off on or been aware of. He agrees to help me, but I have to drop a UA right at that moment. I laugh and tell him I'll drop a UA whenever he wants me to, because I don't even drink! (I do admit to having about 1/4 of a glass of wine on my mother's Birthday though...Lambrusco. I was feeling woozy after 1/4 of a glass, and wound up dumping it out!) So, I do the urinalysis, get my prescriptions and leave, FURIOUS.

I guess my next move is to call my lawyer. I'm innocent of what they are accusing me of, and I have no idea why the insurance company would make a move against me like this--everything is as it always of, and even cheaper than it was last year at this time. I am so frustrated and don't know what to do.

I think what bugs me the most is that they have now created a rift between myself and my pain doctor. The relationship between he and I HAS to be one of trust, and they have introduced this bit of doubt to him, ruining the start of a good relationship. I HAVE to continue to see him, as there is no one else I can see, and now he thinks that I'm a freaking junkie. That really hurts, and it's not true. u

People, please know this. If you have someone you know that is injured and NOT taking vicodin by the handful, then he's or she is probably NOT an addict in the traditional sense. People DO get hurt, and HAVE to take medication in order to kill the pain. PLEASE don't judge them before you know and understand their situation. Most of us really only take what is prescribed to us. It's the freakin' druggies that make it bad for those of us who NEED these pills to keep from hurting.

Grrrr. What am I going to do now?