Prismatic edges

This week was such a tough week. As usual, I was not admitting it to myself. I was giving myself pep talks, thinking that some people have it really much worse, and taking deep breaths to hold everything together. 

And then, one evening, after I finished downloading to my support system, I started to experience this weird eye problem where I had blurry circles in my vision. They were surrounded by prismatic colored edges. Outside the blurry spots, sight was good. So, I diagnosed myself with dirty glasses - cleaned my glasses - and I went upstairs to make some headway on an architecture project at my computer. And you know what - I couldn't see around those darn blurry spots in my vision! After about 5 minutes, I started to get a little panicked - but then rediagnosed myself with stress related vision problems, laid down (- could still see the prismatic edges of the blurry spots with my eyes closed!-) but within about 20 minutes the blurry spots were gone. 

I have to tell you: it scared me. And it really makes me think. I just need an outlet for everything that is going on lately. I've been so hesitant to blog over the last 5 years! It's good therapy for me, but my life is so entangled with the lives of so many other people! Also, there's this lopsided aspect to blogging where you feel like you talk and talk, and nobody talks back, until one day when someone you never hear from - but who has been reading your blog - suddenly enters your life with all sorts of "wisdom" and you think, wait a minute....I'm not sure how I feel about your expertise on my life based on my blog...also, why am I the only one sharing? 

Another stumbling block: how can I say what I want to say here without upsetting or betraying others?

...Well, after my blurry spots with prismatic edges, I do believe I will go ahead and share for a little while. It will be therapeutic, until it is not. And then I will stop sharing. Also, some of the major players in my life right now are really unlikely to read this blog, so I will take a calculated risk that they don't visit. 

Back to this week. So, this week, as many weeks, the drama seems to revolve around my aunt, who was diagnosed with ALS about 19 months ago. ALS is a progressive, terminal, neuromuscular diagnosis with a typical 2-5 year prognosis. To catch you up, as quickly as possible, I should mention the following facts: she lives within about 30 minutes of us. Her husband passed away about 6 years ago and she has no children. She lives by herself. It is her profound wish to remain living in her house and die at home. This last fact cannot really be overstated. It is so thoroughly embedded in her (professional and) personal identity over the decades that any suggestion of anything else will get the suggestion-maker weeks of cold-shoulder treatment. This fact also drives every decision that gets made, as we all do ludicrous gymnastics to honor and respect this wish. And I would LIKE to say that she is very thankful for all our help. But she is NOT particularly grateful; mostly, she is angry. And she behaves as though we are the bad actors in her losses to ALS.

This week, she had an appointment with a cardiologist. She has had some heart trouble in the past. A few months ago her pulse started racing, as it has before: atypical atrial flutter. Interestingly, with this flutter, she experiences almost none of the symptoms that others would experience, like, say, shortness of breath. And she is constantly seeing doctors for the ALS, so: going to the cardiologist was a mosey-on-down-to-the-cardiologist type affair.  Well. It is actually is not much of a mosey these days; she needs a wheelchair to go anywhere and transferring (between, say, the car and the wheelchair, requires me to lift her feet and place her hand on the hand holds and perhaps lift her a bit by the hips.... You know, really, the moseying was our attitude. And it turned out to be a pretty fake attitude BECAUSE:

On the way to the cardiologist, she informed me that a mammogram and ultrasound scan that had been done last week showed carcinoma with some abnormal lymph nodes. This was not totally unexpected (the ultrasound and mammogram had been done for a reason), BUT if you are on the way to a cardiologist with your neurologically compromised aunt and you find out she has metastasized cancer, it feels like a Bit Of A Thing.

The cardiologist, unsurprisingly, suggested that we do nothing for at the flutter. Any option for treatment would include anesthesia, which is highly risky given her state.

It works this way, right?  For most of us: our bodies fail at the end of life and diseases snow ball. It can feel like a lot to people on the outside (like me); but imagine how it must feel to the person themselves? Well, one really can't imagine. 

Wipe it Away

You know what I miss? 

Disinfectant wipes. 

Truth be told: I've always felt a guilty pleasure about using them. It's sort of ridiculous, right? Premoistened single-use toweletts in a big plastic tub – or plastic wrapping – how wasteful!! How bad for the environment! How toxic! And yet... yet...(they are so convenient!)...I sort of love them. 

The last several months – while they have been challenging to get and expensive to buy, even when one does find them – I have been consciously repeating the refrains about the environmental evilness and unneccesary-ness of single use disinfecting wipes ad nauseam. Meanwhile, the unconscious side of my brain works on why I love them so much. 

Early on in the pandemic, Fritz decided we could make our own disposable disinfectant wipes. We saved our empty containers. Fritz found a place on online to buy towelettes that wouldn't disintegrate when pre-moistened. We mixed up our our own disinfecting solution. Noah named it "Tub of Pool" because after it's pungent aroma. And when it stopped smelling like Pool one week later, we learned all about the shelf life of chlorine. 

These attempts at make-our-own disinfectant wipes have just reinforced the brilliance of the ones I used to buy, pre-made, in the store. The pre-made towelettes have just the right amount of durability. They are the perfect size. They wipe away the hourly-accumulating mysterious brown smudges in the Wyse Household with efficiency and thoroughness. And I know – I know – I'm just foisting extra work and damage on Mother Earth when I say this...but...it's one less piece of laundry for me to do.

sigh.

For six months I've told myself to get over it, find some new methods, grow a spine. But it's just not happening. If only I could wipe away my addiction as easily as the brown smudges in my house. 

Contact, Contacts

This Stay at Home stuff just DRAGS on and on. I mean, I suppose we could start going out more, but, like many people, we don't really feel safe enough yet. Watching other states' infection rates surge, and our own state's infection rate creep back upward, the best strategy seems to be avoid contact with others. We wear masks, we wash hands, we socially distance. And we DO stay (mostly) at home. But it's really getting old. I try to tell myself this is a stamina competition, because, really, the only way I can muster any enthusiasm is by making it a competition.

There are a few reasons I've ventured out lately and most of them have to do with my aunt and her medical needs. That means I've been to the hospital and a few doctor's offices. I have to steel myself a bit before I go; I try to remember that these medical places are the last places that want to be identified as a location having an outbreak. In theory, they should be more cautious and more safe than the grocery store. In practice, I don't know...sometimes, I feel like these medical places are so desperate to resume business that seeing patients is a risk they take merely for the income.

Case in point for useless appointments - the one I had with my ophthalmologist, who refused to issue me a new contact lens prescription. It had been three years since my last contact lens prescription. (I wear my glasses a lot.) But last year, I'd gotten a new eyeglass prescription. You would think that they could have written a new contact lens prescription based on the glasses. But no, they needed me to come in for a contact lens fitting. And to test my vision. AGAIN. And after lots of fogging up of the their eye testing machine (because that happens when you wear a mask), and dilated pupils, and trying on contacts that were the wrong prescription but the right diameter, and yada-yada, they discovered SURPRISE! my eye balls are the same size they were three years ago and SURPRISE! my eyesight is the same as last year. I was pretty furious by the time I left, because it was all such a lot of unnecessary exposure, as much for the people working in the office as for myself.

I would have continued wearing my glasses indefinitely, were it not for the fact that I thought I should start running. I feel determined to keep running, just so I can say I did something worthwhile while avoiding people. Anyways: one day I went running with neither glasses (which are just inconvenient) nor contacts (because I was trying to save the few pairs I had left). Then I tripped and fell while running. Unlike my kids, I discovered it took my two-score-and-three-year-old body WEEKS to heal. I was reminded that I am old enough to be cautious about injury. AND I should probably wear some sort of prescriptive vision correction, lest I trip and make contact with the pavement again.