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Gretchen's bad back and poison ivy rash
Tuesday, June 6 2017
The trauma Gretchen suffered trying to restrain the dogs Ramona and Neville yesterday when they'd treed a bear wasn't entirely clear until today. Her back was such a wreck that she put out a message to her friends asking if any of them had muscle relaxers. She also tried to take advantage of the fact that we have employer-provided health insurance to obtain a prescription. But nobody was willing to write one without seeing her, but that would mean a doctor's visit and hundreds of dollars in expense because that's the kind of world we now live in. Eventually a doctor wrote her a script for "prescription-strength ibuprofen," which was a complete waste of time. Any fool can decide to eat as much over-the-counter-strength ibuprofen as they want, thereby achieving doses well into the prescription-strengthosphere; a doctor's blessing of a molecule doesn't make it any more effective.
In the mid-afternoon, I ran some errands for Gretchen because her back was in no state for driving. My first destination was the newish CVS in Uptown Kingston, where I picked up that useless prescription of extra-strength ibuprofen. It cost $25, which was in addition to the $50 Gretchen was charged by someone on the phone to write the script. Then I picked up a pair of books for Gretchen at the Hurley Library. That place is so lax and informal that the young nacho-eating woman at the counter gave me the books even though we didn't know each other; all I had to do was say Gretchen's name.
My last errand was up Johnson Hill and Lapla Roads, which run parallel to Dug Hill Road a little less than two miles to the southwest. Kate had said she had some cyclobenzaprine (a muscle relaxer). Unfortunately, I had never been to Kate's house. She has a weird reluctance to invite people over, though she's been to our house dozens of times. For some reason Google Maps decided to send me up Trinity Way, which was wrong. (There was a nice house at the end of that with a red Prius out in front and a raised-bed garden.) I called Gretchen and she suggested I go up to the end of Quarry Road, but of course none of the houses were correctly labeled and I'd been given misleading information that Kate's house was the only real house and that everything else would be trailers. At some point a big friend cream-colored Labrador retriever appeared on road behind us, throwing Ramona and Neville into a tizzy (previous tizzies on this same drive had been provoked by a three vultures eating roadkill on Lapla and some deer on Trinity Way). If Kate hadn't spontaneously appeared with that dog (and it wasn't even her dog), I might not have ever found her. She gave me three pills in a tiny bag that would later be lost, maniacally hunted for, and then found.
On top of all this, there was a minor crisis in the remote workplace. The donor database was throwing errors because of some code I'd just released. An include wasn't being found by a cron job and it errored out with every run. My boss started messaging me about this when I was still in some Lapla deadzone, and so I couldn't even really reply (thereby simulating presence in the workplace). I wasn't going to be able to fix the problem until I was back at my computer anyway. Moral of this story: don't run errands to places one has never been before during business hours. It all seems a bit funny now, but at the time I was pissed. Gretchen has a way of coming up with several errands when I'm just going out to do one thing, though it was hard to be mad at her when her back was as fucked up as it was.
Gretchen was initially skeptical of a couple attempts I made to do some light massage of her back (I used a rapid stroke in hopes of somehow jiggling her muscles back into their proper confirmation). But she admitted to feeling better after both such sessions. The first of those allowed her to walk the dogs this morning (though I'd been on call in case the dogs encountered another bear). Gretchen has a physical therapist named Nina Silverman whom she swears by. But Nina's powers aren't magic; there must be something I can do to achieve the same effects. I could be wrong about this, but I suspect that a substantial component of the superior results Gretchen gets with Nina comes from her having greater faith in an expert. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Nina is great at what she does. I'm just saying that I wish Gretchen could somehow pickup on her secrets and communicate them to me. It's great that I can handle all our plumbing, carpentry, masonry, firewood, electrical, computational, and malware needs. It would be nice to be able to also fix Gretchen's back on the many occasions when it is causing her trouble.
In addition to issues beneath her skin, Gretchen also finds herself battling a widespread poison ivy rash, a consequence and retrieving Ramona from a chipmunk mine in the bushes behind Ray & Nancy's place (where poison ivy is everywhere). I'd suggested Gretchen take a bath to sooth her muscles and her skin, but when she went to run a tub, the water proved too cold for bathing. The boiler is off for the season, we haven't had sun in days, and evidently our electric just-in-time hotwater heater no longer has the power to raise water temperature from the upper 40s to bath temperature (115 degrees Fahrenheit, more or less).
This evening Andrea, in an effort to do something useful for us, launched into something of a kitchen-cleaning jihad. In the process, she discovered additional pockets of the kitchen that have been or are now infested with mice. That wasn't surprising. She also discovered lots of old and forgotten things, some contaminated and some not. Some food flavoring that she and Gretchen threw out filled the house with the smell of cheap blueberry muffins. That's how it smelled in the laboratory, though down in the kitchen the smell was so strong that it had more of an industrial quality. As she worked, Andrea was watching a Chappelle's Show episode on her MacBook, which kept making her erupt in laughter. This was a bit distracting for us upstairs as we tried to watch an episode of the third season of Better Call Saul.
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