Not much to write about in the last couple of weeks. We thought James had a UTI again, but it turns out to be "prostatitis"—once again caused by long-term use of the Foley catheter. They put him on a month's worth of Cipro, but that's not the problem: it's causing him severe pain when he sits down. The guy who didn't want to see pain medication and hid it in the back of the drawer is now taking it regularly and he said it does very little to help. The problem is that his entire job is sitting; he has to sit to take calls. And he can't stand up long due to his back problems. So he's pretty damned-if-he-does damned-if-he-doesn't.

Of course if the original plan had come to fruition, on Monday he would have been having surgery and maybe getting over this crap. But his cardiologist wants to be very careful and doesn't want him to have the surgery until it's been a year since his heart attack. We appreciate that. But his urologist wants to get this through before Kaiser jumps ship at Northside Hospital and transfers to Emory Midtown (the thought gives us both the shudders). Supposedly Northside is no longer large enough for the amount of patients Kaiser sends them.

He's still alternating teleworking and going into work. He teleworks on rainy days (the power chair isn't supposed to go out in the rain) and on doctors' appointment days, and he also worked at home while he made sure he didn't get woozy from the pain medication. His big problem, as I mentioned, is the sitting. Tomorrow we are going to go to JoAnn and buy a piece of thick foam for him to sit on. His most comfortable seat is at the side of the bed, which is a foam mattress. He's been teleworking on a Serta padded chair with a pillow on top of a cushion, and that doesn't help. Last weekend he tried to go down to his hobby room and work on a model, and he could only bear the chair about an hour. So this is kind of put a kink in the works to go to DragonCon, too. He's managed it with the chair, and thinks he could manage it with the chair and the catheter (he just has to keep drinking). But he can't sit still, and he doesn't know how he would manage through panels.

So he's miserable and I'm miserable because he's miserable which means he's miserable for making me miserable and we're just going in circles. It's not a happy revolution because we're feeding off each other's depression.

I've been trying to pull myself out of this loathesome post-accident depression with mixed results. I've gone back trying to get in my minimum of 30 minutes a day "vigorous exercise," which would be easier if Tucker wasn't so reluctant to accompany me. I pretty much have to coax him through half the walk, at least the outbound leg. He walks fast enough coming home. In the morning I've been leaving the subdivision and crossing the street (no sidewalk on our side of the main road) to walk down to the stop sign in one direction and the day care center in the other, and Tucker doesn't like the sound of the cars thundering by on their way to work. (They do thunder, and drive a lot faster than they should.) And of course I'm doing the decluttering thing, just a little slower than I have been. Monday has become my "clean the bathrooms" day and Thursday my laundry day. Somewhere during the week I'll wash the kitchen floor.

The success list is mostly minor, but all mine:

• Finally fixed a stained glass leaf that fell and cracked more than a year ago. It's a bit battle scarred (I had to fill in some missing chips with glass paint), but back up on the door. And I replaced the useless suction cups that held up all the leaves in the doorway and replaced them with Command hooks so no more leaves should fall down.
• Located my cassette splicing tape (if it was a snake it would have bitten me) and fixed an old cassette tape. (Found my hand rewinder, too.)
• Washed the floor in the foyer and cleaned off the bench.
• Updated a bunch of web pages and sorted my computer graphics into more appropriate folders for future web updates.
• Loaded necessities in the new car.
• Bought a new Magic Bullet for James for his birthday. His died, and the BOGO unit we got didn't work right out of the box. Unfortunately we can't return it because we got it in 2005. The old one lasted that long.
• Shelved a bunch more books.
• Turned in old glasses to the Lions Club.
• Donated another box of stuff (mostly old desk decorations from work) to Goodwill and have another box started already.

So, not much.

Tonight when James finished work we had supper at Folks and then we did the rounds at Michaels (I bought a gift for someone and James got wooden stands for his models) and Five Below. On the way home we had a gorgeous combination: a bright orange-and-pink sunset spread all over the western sky while in the southeast the moon rose like a light-saturated glass globe. So lovely!

Labels: chores, decluttering, health, shopping

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