Pertinent to my Interests

Last Thursday my youngest kid woke up and croaked out the words that I dread hearing from him because he’s always correct in his diagnosis: “I think I have strep.” Off we went to his favorite urgent care location and favorite pharmacy (you would have a favorite urgent care and pharmacy too if you got strep as often as he does).

The next day was Friday, and luckily the amoxicillin had kicked in and he was well enough to go to school. I happened to have my annual physical that day, something I had been dreading for many reasons but ended up going well.

On Monday morning I woke up with a rash on my arms and legs, and swollen, painful joints all over my body. I was alarmed, especially since I had just had a mysterious high fever and no other symptoms about a week before this. I’m not the kind of person who runs off to urgent care at the first sign of illness, but this was weird enough I felt an urgent care visit was warranted and that is how I ended up spending three hours at urgent care on Monday morning and then walking away without any real diagnosis.

My youngest kid had an appointment with the ear, nose & throat surgeon on Monday as well, after school. That doctor was running behind, and we ended up spending more than two hours at the specialty clinic.

And I have to go back today to follow up with my primary care doctor about my ongoing joint pain and rash!

This is why old people are tired all the time. It is exhausting to spend so much time at the doctor’s office. Waiting for the nurse, waiting for the doctor, waiting for the lab. I have great sympathy for those with chronic conditions who have to spend so much time managing their healthcare.

Anyway, having what basically amounts to arthritis in most of my joints this week has been an interesting experiment in getting old. Who knew that buttons could pose such a challenge? Squeezing out a washcloth is both difficult and painful.

Even more disturbing, my husband asked if I wanted him to come along to the appointment today. How sick does he think I am?! I have definitely not reached the “needs a companion at every appointment” stage yet, and don’t intend to for a long time, even if this is the beginning of something chronic (I don’t think it is).

On the positive side: every single medical assistant, patient registration specialist, nurse, doctor, surgeon, and phlebotomist that we have interacted with in the past week has been stellar.

When I was little, I accidentally dropped a small, plastic dinosaur out the back window of my dad’s 1987 Ford Ranger.

I was five years old and had been pretending that the dinosaur was running quickly through the woods, holding him up against the open pop-out window as we sped through the Cascade Mountains. My sister and I had a lot of plastic dinosaurs back then, most of them too big to fall through the crack, but this guy was a tiny ankylosaurus made of soft glow-in-the dark plastic. My fingers twitched the wrong way and suddenly he was gone.

I was frozen. Should I alert my parents and ask them to turn around and search for him? Would they agree to that? Would we even be able to find him on the side of the highway in the heart of the Cascade Mountains? Would they be mad? Would my sister be mad when she found out?

I didn’t say anything, but I still think about this incident regularly. It was the first time I remember realizing that disaster can happen in an instant. One moment he was safe in my hand and the next moment he was gone forever.

Maybe it’s silly to assign such weight to that moment. “Accidentally dropped a beloved plastic dinosaur out the window of a car” is not on the childhood trauma questionnaire. But I was five; I loved my plastic dinosaurs and I had not yet experienced the finality of death, which is the real before-and-after moment in a person’s life.

Is that little plastic ankylosaurus still out there somewhere, sun-bleached and brittle from all those years on the side of the road? Is he destroyed or smushed? Did a stranger find him while cleaning the highway, and did this stranger pause and wonder how this little guy ended up out in the middle of nowhere before she thrust him into the trash bag?

I wish objects had the power to tell their stories.

And if my sister is reading this: I’m sorry I lost one of our plastic dinosaur friends 35 years ago!

I started working retail in 2001, back when I was still in high school. I was at this little shop in my small hometown that sold patio furniture and pool chemicals and swimming toys and all sorts of junk that nobody needs.

There was no computer when I started. We were still using those little carbon copy slips to write out purchases. We calculated the tax with a calculator! Even more mind-boggling: we didn’t have a credit card machine. We had to set the credit card in this crazy little contraption and slide a mechanism over it to make an imprint and then have the customer sign the imprinted slip. It was bonkers.

We did get a computer system the next summer, and a real credit card machine that used the telephone line to dial out. Things went much faster once we could scan items, and I had a lot of fun entering inventory into the database and printing out new stickers whenever we got another box of junk.

That was a great job. I had a great boss who was good at managing the business and respected all the employees. I had an alcoholic coworker who showed up on time every morning, was super sarcastic and funny, and would take regular smoke breaks and report back to me on whatever obnoxious tourist bullshit was happening on the sidewalk. I had another coworker who taught me how to swear effectively in Spanish, and another who introduced me to modern country music.

One time I was standing at the cash register and a little girl approached the counter with tears in her eyes and a broken item in her hands. She explained, with her parents standing silently behind her, that she had been messing around and had accidentally broken the glass lawn ornament. Ashamed, she said she would like to pay for the broken item. I told took the two glass pieces from her and told her she was very brave for coming forward and admitting her mistake; because she had been so brave and honest we would not be charging her for the item.

See, when you work in a small business in a small town you can make decisions like this. (But I have no doubt my boss would have made the same call.)

Another time I was working with my younger, smaller, less-white coworker, when a man came in with his two daughters. The girls picked out a squirt gun, but when my coworker rang it up and the total was about $3 more than what was listed on the sticker. Clearly an inventory error and as I made my way to the front counter to correct it the man started berating my coworker.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, just that he called her stupid several times and there were some bad words thrown in there too.

I had been intending to override the cash register and honor the lower price on the sticker (obviously), but the man’s behavior had caused adrenaline to flood my system and by the time I got there I had decided on a different response.

“Hi, I’m the manager on duty,” I said. “You need to leave the store.”

This only pissed him off more and he started directing his vitriol at me, screaming about how he was just here to buy a squirt gun for his kids and I had no right to kick him out. More swearing. I wondered how often he behaved like this in front of his daughters.

“No, we don’t allow customers to treat us like this,” I said. “You really need to leave before I feel like I have to call the cops.”

The man left, angrily ranting the whole way.

This is the proudest moment of my entire life, and I talk about it regularly.

One of the most infuriating things about the job was how customers would let their kids just run rampant around the store. Bored kids would rearrange our shelves and their parents wouldn’t make them fix it. Hyperactive kids would dash around the patio furniture knocking over things. We constantly found broken items around the store.

I’m a parent now, so I understand being on vacation and wanting to do some shopping and just wanting the kids to keep themselves entertained for a couple minutes so you can pick out new sunglasses. But also as a parent, I have to ask: what the actual fuck. Do not let your kids make a massive mess for someone else to clean up, even if that someone else is a small-town minimum-wage employee.

This is why I was so impressed by the parents of the girl who tried to pay for the broken item. I worked at that store for five summers and that was the only time anyone offered to pay for a broken item.

Why was I thinking about all this? Well, the other day I was leaving the house without my purse. I tucked my keys into one pocket and my credit card and my ID into the other pocket. But why my ID? I wasn’t going to the liquor store and it has been a decade since I’ve been carded anyway. I never use my ID, but I always bring it with me if I’m bringing my credit card too.

Do you guys remember back in the 90s when everyone was writing “Check ID” in the signature area on their credit cards? Do you remember that we used to hand our credit cards over to the retail staff and they would actually check to make sure the signature on the slip matched the signature on the card? Or at least they were supposed to?

I remember that. I especially remember people being absolutely pissed when I would see “Check ID” written in their signature area and I would ask to see their ID. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. You only want people to check the ID when it’s a thief using your credit card. My bad.

One time I asked to see a guy’s ID and he said, “it’s in the boat.” I looked at his soggy shirt, squeaky water shoes, pink face, and windblown hair and thought that was probably true. I let the charge go through.

I don’t write “Check ID” on my credit cards, but it wouldn’t even matter if I did because nobody actually hands their credit card to a clerk anymore. I don’t even sign my credit cards. And yet there I was almost 25 years ago taking imprints of credit cards on carbon paper and checking identification like a goddamn fool.

For some reason this was my big lesson from this job: always carry your credit card and your ID together. Don’t leave your ID on the boat.

Also, don’t be an asshole to my coworker because I will kick you out of the store and then tell everyone about it for the rest of my life.

I was with a friend and some acquaintances at the playground the other day, and my friend was mentioning that her sister had just chaperoned the French Club trip.

“Oh, where did they go?” I asked.

“Uh, to France,” one of my acquaintances chimed in with an amused tone that signaled the absurdity of my question. Where else would the French Club go?

Well, my high school didn’t have trips to France. We had field trips to fish hatcheries and the Pacific Science Center, and our big 8th grade trip was an overnight to Long Beach. I asked where the French Club had traveled because in my mind it was absurd to assume that they had gone to France. Who takes groups of high schoolers to France?

Later that weekend I was at an open house with my husband, looking at real estate in our neighborhood.

“Oh, is this the pantry?” I asked as I approached a big set of cabinet doors.

“No, that’s the refrigerator,” the realtor responded with eyebrows slightly raised. His tone let me know that he had now written me off as a potential buyer. How can someone who can’t even recognize a high-end refrigerator clad in cabinetry afford this nice home?

It’s weird living my adult life in a new location and new tax bracket. To some extent, I will always be a stranger in a strange land who can never quite master the cues of my foreign home.

Maybe my kids will go on a school trip to France. Maybe someday I will abandon my $10 cat earrings for something with large diamonds and the realtors will start offering me champagne and great interest rates.

I think deep down I’ll always be wowed by rich people refrigerators and high school trips to Europe.

I took my young cat to the vet on Tuesday, just for his annual exam and vaccines and such.

Have I mentioned that I’m pretty sure our veterinarian is a witch?

I love our veterinarian. She looks to be about 600 years old, is less than five feet tall, and has the high crackly voice that I associate with witches. All she needs is a gnarled stick for a cane and a house made of candy in the woods.

Clearly she is not the candy-house-in-the-woods sort of witch because I have looked at a lot of real estate in this city and never seen such a thing. Also, I don’t think that sort of a witch would go to veterinary school.

But what sort of a witch becomes a veterinarian? I like to picture her growing up on the outskirts of a village in some country where they use a Slavic alphabet, hands slightly twisted and gnarled even as a young girl. The village cats must have been her familiars, and she fed them and took care of them. She learned how to set a broken kitty cat bone and how to feed orphaned kittens. It’s not too far a leap to picture her coming to the United States at the age of 500 and deciding it was time to go to vet school.

I love our witch vet. The first time she met my older cat she took one look at his grey tail with the little white tip and exclaimed “Well, someone has been painting!” When she noted this week that my younger cat had gained a pound since his last visit I apologized and explained that “he really loves his tiger treats.”

“Well, that’s okay; he deserves it!” she said, petting his tiger stripes admiringly.

He does, and she would know since she’s been loving and caring for cats since before the Reformation.

I was sick all weekend and am just this morning feeling like I have turned the corner back to the world of health and accomplishments.

It’s amazing how overwhelming life is when you’re sick. I would lay on the couch and picture the healthy people of the world going about their day–loading groceries in their cars, making dinner for the family, shoveling snow–and wonder how they could possibly do these things. Only a superhero could accomplish such wonders! But yesterday I made the bed and did laundry, and today I see that a grocery store trip is not out of the question so I guess I’m basically a superhero now too.

I always see people talking on the Internet about the “man cold” and how their husbands turn into giant, nonfunctional babies when they get sick. In my house it is the opposite. When I am sick the world stops turning and my entire to do list gets ripped up and burned. I am unwilling to push myself at all. Meanwhile, my husband will still shovel snow with pneumonia. He’ll onboard large doses of Sudafed so that he can make it to happy hour with a client. I’m not sure I have ever seen him take a real sick day with the exception of when he was recovering from his various eye surgeries.

I do feel badly about being such a baby when I’m sick, but honestly I don’t see the point in pushing myself when I’m already miserable. The kids can eat cereal for dinner two nights in a row, literally nobody cares. Appointments can be rescheduled. There were many years when the kids were little that I could not opt out of the very physical work of caring for small children while I was ill. And someday I might have pneumonia but still be forced to flee a war zone or nuclear meltdown. And I bet then I’ll wish I had taken it easy when I could have! If I have the luxury of shutting down 99% of my life for three days while I’m sick, why shouldn’t I?

Of course, I am prone to sinus infections, so the end of the battle with the virus does not correlate with the end of the entire war. Yesterday I started up with Sinus Infection Avoidance Protocol Level 3. This is the lowest level of my sinus infection avoidance strategies and calls for twice-daily use of the neti pot and Flonase. Level 2 calls for regular dosing with NSAIDs, and Level 3 brings Mucinex to the table. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.