Well, it was a week things got done.

Some of them I might have wanted to avoid.

Some of them I didn't. I did get to cancel Snowy's appointment with the new vet. I don't want to find a new vet for him without being able to check them out, and how can I do that if the vet is only doing curbside visits? I want to check out the office, see if it's clean, see how the workers act when they see customers, see how the animals react to them. Our vet says Snowy can be given a polyoma shot whenever he might come to board, he just can't get a checkup right now. So I am hoping he stays well until my current vet either gets a new avian vet or I can find one. There are none that I can find on this side of town; I can either drive forty-five minutes or more northeast, or go down into Buckhead (and with all the car break-ins in the latter place, why would I want to go to Buckhead?).

Did get more stuff thrown away, including ten-year-old "PC World" magazines James had in a file box under his bedroom window! What on earth...? I changed the bed. I shredded more stuff. I swapped out the old "pigtail" compact fluorescents in the front porch lanterns for real LEDs, with the help of the exterminator, who showed me how to get the tops off them. Over the weekend I finally got new cotton sheets to replace the dreadful microfiber ones we have now with the fitted bottom sheets that won't stay on the bed! I took down the winter decorations and put up the spring ones.

And I had just just finished putting away the winter decorations and sweeping the foyer. I was taking the broom back to the laundry room, preparatory to getting the dustpan and brush...and missed a step. I went backward, banged my back against a solid wood stool we keep outside the laundry room door, and whacked my head on the doorframe of the laundry room. Ow! My hand went to the bump already rising on my head and I immediately yelled out to James, "Come help me, I've fallen!" I heard him say to the customer he had on the phone, "I'm going to have to let the level two guy take this call; my wife just fell and I need to help her." Then I took my hand away from my head and it was covered in blood.

Well...crap. "James! You need to call 911! I'm bleeding here!"

So the rescue squad came and the firemen, too—it was too absurdly funny because the firemen remembered James from his fall in December and kept asking "You've got high blood pressure, right?" James said, "No, that's me." "You've got diabetes, right?" James again: "No, that's me, too." "You've got kidney trouble..." James: "No, that's me, too."—and they had to haul me off to Emory St. Joseph. It wasn't a bad trip and they didn't even test me for COVID, I just got popped in the back and waited a bit and finally the doctor came and said she was going to numb my head, clean the blood off, and put four staples in, then I'd have a tetanus shot because I couldn't remember when I had my last one, a CT scan just to make sure I hadn't busted any blood vessels in my brain, and an x-ray of my back, and then off I could go. They even sent someone in to bill me for the emergency room visit so I could go home as soon as they got done. Well, it's a pity they didn't numb my stupid lizard brain, too. The lidocaine and the staples were nothing, as was the x-ray, but when they laid me out flat on the CT scan platform and started raising me up, my eyes saw that ring getting closer and closer and scrambled off the platform at light speed and full freaked out panicked so badly that I drove my heart into palpitations. They finally took me back to my cubicle where my heart finally steadied down after fifteen minutes and they offered me some atavan to get through the CT scan, but I've had that before and it doesn't work on me when it comes to the claustrophobia reaction, and I spent the rest of the time there sobbing at my own stupidity. Several nurses tiptoed in telling me it was okay, that others had bad reactions like that, but I just felt dumb and vulnerable.

James finally got to pick me up at 8:30 and I went home feeling as stupid as I've ever felt. The lidocaine worked really well and even after it wore off, where they gave me the tetanus shot hurt worse than my head. James said if I couldn't sleep lying down he would sit up with me in the spare room like I sat up with him when he banged his head and hurt his shoulders, but the pain was no different lying down than sitting up, so we went back to bed.

I was so careful with that ladder and the stepstool replacing the bulbs on the porch and I went and missed a dumb stair! Argh.

And the worst of the whole thing was when it came time today for us to get our second COVID shot James was allowed to have his, but I couldn't have mine because of the tetanus vaccine. The doctor was afraid having two vaccines within four days of each other would spoil the effectiveness of one or both. So now we have to truck all the damn way out to Gwinnett County again at the end of the month!

“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”

Labels: birds, decluttering, decorating, pets, seasons, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:27:00 PM

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