The End

In which I detail all my ailments in great detail like the old person I now am.

Well, over the past week, my body just completely fell apart. It was bound to happen eventually, but I didn’t expect it to be so concentrated.

First, I got my bloodwork back mid-week, and my cholesterol is, per the nurse who called, “extremely high.” I have six months to get it down with lifestyle changes, after which we’ll move on to medication. Not a shock given my lack of exercise and terrible diet over the past year, but still irritating to experience a consequence.

Then, on Friday, I finally visited the orthopedist (a foot expert one) about said foot. I tend to delay care, but it’s not because I have any anxiety about the doctor. It’s because I have learned that unless you have a broken bone or a clearly diagnosable disease, doctors always give you sort of vague advice that you could have figured out from googling on your own and it’s a big, time-consuming hassle to get it from them. Particularly if they don’t really know what’s wrong, they’ll order a million tests and possibly send you to specialists and each of those things eat up essentially a whole work day, and none of it ever helps. I work in tech support, and I know when someone is just distracting me with questions and attempts, while all the time hoping that I will forget or give up because they don’t actually know how to solve the problem.

In this case, after eating up a whole day driving into Austin and back, I was told that there was nothing clearly on the x-rays so to try a metatarsal pad and if that doesn’t help, we’ll do an MRI and a follow-up. The particular metatarsal pad they told me to try cannot be obtained online and is only sold at a running store off Burnet Road (which is far).

So after delaying care because the initial appointment was going to be time-consuming, I got a recommendation for….three more days worth of appointments and errands. Only retired people have the time to pursue health care.

I know that if I were to actually do all this, at the end of it, they would say, “huh, nothing super clear here, but we’ll try rest and physical therapy” and that would involve more appointments, and wouldn’t work either. Eventually I would give up and/or it will just sort of heal on its own. So I am just going to skip to that part.

Then, Saturday night, I was watching The Rehearsal and eating some muesli with soy milk (because cholesterol) and the back half of my front tooth just sort of crumbled into my mouth. This is because after not having gone to the dentist for two years because of the pandemic, I finally went several months ago, and the hygienist somehow took a chip out of my front bottom tooth. I didn’t notice it had happened until I got home and it was small and not noticeable, and I sure as shit didn’t want to line up a bunch more appointments and have conversations, so I let it go. But now the rest of the tooth has kind of flaked off to be in line with the chip, so my tooth has a ledge out of the back like it’s got a false second story on it. So now I have to get this fixed and am faced with a dilemma — find a new dentist to fix it since these fools chipped it in the first place, or have the old dentist fix it and pay for it? By the way, I had no cavities and have never had a cavity in my life, so the only thing I got out of finally going to the dentist was this catastrophe I’m so fucking glad I went!

After my tooth broke itself on some soft oats, I went to sleep and for the first time in my life, had a horrible burning sensation in my chest that kept me up all night and I woke up several times having to swallow repeatedly to keep from vomiting. Is this what heartburn is?!?!? It sucks, I hate it! And THEN, the next morning when I lifted Edith off the changing table, I wrenched my back somehow and suddenly felt like I’d been stabbed with a thousand knives. I couldn’t move for a good twenty minutes; I sort of waddled around sucking air through my teeth. I couldn’t get Edith into her chair for breakfast so I threw some Cheerios on the floor for her. I thought I had experienced back pain before, but I had not! I finally understand what all you whiners have been crying about all this time!

I don’t know what’s going to happen next, am I just going to disintegrate into a pile of dust on the floor? I feel like I’ve angered the gods somehow. Anyway, usually the way I handle an injury is to just get really furious at it and demand twice as much of the injured area to really show it how stupid it’s being. So I intend to work out a lot this week and also chew on ice all day. We’ll see how it turns out.