Weekend, Vacation, and Life’s Little Kicks To The Nuts

The weekend started out rocky.

Found out Thursday that my dad is going to have to have a total hip replacement. After being in constant pain for what feels like a very long time, he went to the Ortho walk-in clinic in town to get looked at. He’s been having pain running down his right leg for a couple years now, with back pain thrown in for good measure. Up until the last year or so he’s attributed the leg pain and loss of strength to his lower back.

Back in 2019 my dad had fallen off of their roof after a storm had left a large portion of tree there. Being the stubborn 72-year old that he was, instead of calling either of his adult sons to come over and help he put on the slickest rubber boots he could find and went up to do it himself. Of course he slipped and rolled off the roof. Fortunately for him he landed in the bushes, but at 72-years old even a drop into the bushes can be serious. He did go to an ortho doc not long after that, but the doc had said there wasn’t anything they could do, other than some physical therapy.

So he dealt with the discomfort, found some stretches that helped, and rode his incumbent bike everyday. Things improved, but over the last couple of years the pain and stiffness got worse in his leg. He walks gingerly and hunched over, and sometimes feels as if his leg is going to give out. I even gave him my son’s gas station cane he bought while we were on a road trip a few years back, just in case he wanted the extra support. I convinced my dad he needed to go in and just find out what’s going on, which he did last week. Turns out he’s got bone spurs on his hip due to calcium deposits. His body produces too much calcium. The doc said if he’d waited another year or two they couldn’t have done anything as his hip would have fused.

Dad goes in one the 20th of this month for his pre-op; blood tests, chest x-rays, EKG,…all the good stuff to make sure he’s up for going under the knife. I’m relieved he went in, and I think he’ll feel an instant improvement…after he’s healed up a bit of course.

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Friday morning at work my 20-year old gives me a call. She tells me she’s been having a hard time breathing; wheezing, tight cough, and her inhaler wasn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. She’s had allergy-induced asthma since she was three. As she got older it became less intense and not as scary, but those first few years were like walking a tightrope. If she were to even go into a room with cat hair she could go into a full blown bronchial spasm.

Anyways, she asked what she should do. She doesn’t have her own primary care doc yet, so I said go to the hospital’s walk-in clinic where she lives and get checked out immediately. She did and they gave her a prescription for Prednisone(steroids), which I told her they probably would do that. They also did a chest x-ray(I’m assuming to rule out pneumonia.) I told her that it sounded like she was heading into a full blown asthma attack, and that something had triggered it.

She recently got a dog at the animal shelter, a pitbull/husky mix named Frankie. Frankie is huge at just a few months old, and has super fine hair(the kind of hair that bothers both of our allergies.) Frankie is a sweetheart, but unfortunately probably isn’t the best for her allergy problems. Ever since she got the dog her eczema has gotten worse and it seems so has her asthma, building up to last week’s scary breathing issues. Now there’s a lot of factors that could have played into the breathing. The last three or four weeks the air quality has been awful here, between the heat and the smoke from the fires up north, people with compromising breathing issues have had a rough time(me included.) Between the dog hair and crappy air quality it was the allergy cocktail that put her over the edge.

She’s got an appointment with the allergist next month to get re-tested, so hopefully they can get her back on allergy shots which will make life with Frankie a lot easier and less deadly. The steroids are doing the trick, as the breathing has improved tremendously and her eczema has cleared up from steroid cream the dermatologist prescribed.

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Saturday morning I had to take our elder pup into the vet. For the last week and a half his left eye had been seeping. I marked it up to allergies, but last Sunday we noticed his eyeball was red in that eye. Apparently dogs can get pink eye. I had no idea. I did know that they can get Tonsillitis, as my childhood dog Klaus came down with it. My wife called the vet Friday morning and they said they could see him Saturday morning. My wife had a board meeting Saturday at 9, so I loaded our Otto into my car on that rainy morning and we headed in. After a quick look the doc said it wasn’t Pink Eye and that more than likely it was allergies. She gave me some antibiotic drops to put into his eye three times a day, and prescribed some Benadryl, one pill in the morning and one at night(as of Monday morning his eye has improved tremendously.)

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So since Thursday night it’s been a lot of ailments, allergies, asthma, and ortho issues. Not with me, but with those around me. Nothing like medical problems to remind you of your mortality, huh? It could all be a lot worse, I know. Out of all of those my daughter dealing with asthma is the scariest. I can remember before we’d taken her to see an allergist when she was just 2-years old, my wife had called me at work and asked me to listen to her breathing over the phone. She put the phone up to my daughter and it was a sickly wheeze with fast breaths. I told her take her to the ER immediately and call the pediatrician. The night before they’d gone to the home of a woman who gave dance lessons in her basement. She had cats, and our 2-year old was in the basement and must have gotten a good lungful of cat dander. By the next morning she was in a pretty serious state. At that time we hadn’t gotten her tested yet, so we had no idea what was going on.

We stayed in the ICU with our daughter hooked up to an IV and oxygen for most of the day. The pediatrician let us take her home, but only if we promised to give her breathing treatments every four hours for the rest of the weekend. So began the nebulizer years. We eventually got her into an allergist and her allergy prick test revealed an extreme allergy to any animal cute, fuzzy, and with fine hair. So everything little kids love. It was years of asking ahead if friends had cats or hamsters or rabbits, and there were a few birthday parties she couldn’t attend because of that.

Allergy shots and prescription allergy meds would help with keeping her protected in case she was around any cute, fuzzy creatures. We also always had meds for her nebulizer in case a breathing treatment was needed. And then inhalers after that. As she got older the issues got less and less. And it helped that as she got older she knew when the onset of something serious was starting up.

Like last Friday.

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After the initial wobbly beginning to the weekend, it ended up being a pretty decent one. Saturday afternoon my wife and my oldest and I headed to Goshen, got ice cream, then went to see Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. I loved it. I was a big fan of Anderson ever since I first saw Rushmore back in the late 90s. He was one of those movie obsessions of mine, along with the other Anderson named Paul Thomas, Scorsese, DePalma, and the whole 70s filmmaker crew. I kind of fell out of my obsession with Wes around The Grand Budapest Hotel, but after watching The French Dispatch a few months ago I was all in again. Asteroid City looks incredible and has a kind of weird meta quality to it that I loved. Also, it’s great to see Tom Hanks in the Wes Anderson cinematic world.

After we got home I made some flatbread pizza and the wife and I watched Top Gun : Maverick. It was fine. Some great action sequences, for sure. I’m at the point now where Tom Cruise doesn’t quite even feel human. He’s the same nearly in every movie. Last one where he didn’t play an action automaton was American Made. Plus his connection to Scientology just puts me off to no end. Very problematic for me. I’ll take him at face value and continue to enjoy him in Mission Impossible flicks because they’re just really well made pieces of cinematic blow ’em ups.

Sunday I took a 4 1/2 mile walk. That felt pretty good. The wife and I watched some TV and ate breakfast, then I spent a couple hours painting. I haven’t been painting or drawing all the much lately, so I need to rectify that. Not blown away by what I came up with, but it was something.

I ran into town Saturday afternoon to grab a couple items and on the way listened to Genesis’ Invisible Touch. I won’t go into much detail as I think this is going to be a future post, but that’s one of those albums that when I hear it it takes me back to the end of 6th grade and the first half of 7th grade. So many songs off that were huge radio hits; “Invisible Touch”, “Land of Confusion”, “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”, and “Throwing It All Away” were massive songs, and ones I’d hear all the time on the bus going to school. I think I was pretty burnt out on them at the time, but now I’m surprised at how much I like those tunes. Same with everything they put out from Duke on. Even Collins’ debut solo album was pretty great.

Anyways, more on that later.

I’m less that two weeks away from my trip down south with my best friend. Our hiking/unplugging weekend trip is most anticipated. Can’t wait to get out into the woods and do some all day hiking. It’s beautiful in Brown County. We used to go down there nearly every summer with the kids and always loved going. The last time we went was October of 2020, and it wasn’t great. The cabin smelled like an ashtray because of the dank fireplace, and the basement smelled like dog piss. We enjoyed it as best we could, but it killed our excitement to go back. Might have to try going again next year, see if it improves any. Some of my favorite memories of going on vacation with the kids was going down there.

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Well that was the weekend; the good, bad, and neutral. Scary medical stuff aside, I’m thankful for any time I get outside of the four walls of my 9 to 5. That world gets weirder and weirder as time moves on. The date of our impending closing keeps getting hazier and more complicated. Leaving at 2pm everyday is always a highlight. Music, art, books, movies, and spending time with my family are the salve that keeps it bearable.