And no, I'm not just talkin' about the Texas heat. At the risk of pissing of the gods or whatever and having them punish me by showing just how much worse things can be, I'm going to blog about my shitty summer thus far.
We went to Greece right after school got out. STOP ROLLING YOUR EYES!!! Everyone always rolls their eye when I bitch about going to Greece because most people don't go to Greece so they have the Travel Channel fantasy in their head and not my reality. The reality is that I have to be stuffed to the gills with xanax to even get on a fucking plane going outside the U.S. anymore. Thanks Bin Laden and Thanks Bush for making Americans ever so popular even with the non-Muslim extremists. Then it's the long ass haul over there, hours and hours crammed on the plane with no where to go, weird fucking people and always, always, always, someone's awful, awful kids. Although, the return trip is usually when we get the worst kid behavior. Must be something about how you are crossing the international date-line or some shit. Anyway, in Greece we're basically stuck in Athens because my in-laws are elderly and can't get around much and would (rightfully, I suppose) take great offense if we took off for more pleasant parts. Athens is noisy, dirty and smelly and I've seen the Parthenon and the Acropolis more times than I can count so they hold no particular thrill anymore. I am a 43-year old woman with a bad back - one degenerated disk and two bulging disks in the lower back - and I am relegated to sleeping on a twin cot with a 2 inch thick mattress for 10 days. Needless to say I pack enough drugs to land me in federal prison for 25-to-life if I was even caught with them. Actually, I have prescriptions, so I'm legal, but I'm sure they would raise questions. Anyway, we get that trip out of the way and I kiss the ground at DFW airport when I get home, looking forward to a long, lazy summer of Starbucks, community pools, playdates and Rescue Me on FX.
Within a week, I'm at the dentist with an abscess. This abscess is in a part of my mouth where I've probably laid out $10,000 since my kid was born dealing with a relentlessly screwed up tooth. Bone implants, multiple root canals, botched crowns, etc. - had I known back then that this tooth would be such an odyssey, I'd have yanked it then. Instead, I'm yanking it 10-years and probably ten grand later. Expensive lesson, but those are usually the ones that last, right? On the upside, I got some pain meds. Get tooth yanked. Only get laughing gas because shitty insurance won't pay for me to be sedated and I'm too cheap at this point to pay the extra $200 myself. It didn't hurt, but it was definitely traumatic. No matter how hard I sucked on the laughing gas, I wasn't laughing, and I couldn't rid my mind of the image of my dentist up on the chair with both feet planted on either side of me, tugging with all his might to get this friggin' tooth out of my head. There's just something horrifically disconcerting about that. Then he had to pull the roots out one by one. Fucking tooth. Upside: more pain meds, haha.
Then the worst so far. My 8-year old shepherd mix, Luke, was coughing and not eating well and just generally not his spastic self. He's never been sick a day in his life so I blithely figured he had a small piece of tennis ball caught in his throat. His main thrill in life is tennis balls but he sometimes takes them apart. So I take him in thinking this will be a quick and simple thing. Twenty-four hours later we have a fatal cancer diagnosis. He has a malignant tumor in his chest, just in front of his heart that started bleeding into his chest causing the coughing and lethargy. The vet stabilized him and we were sent home with orders to keep him comfortable and to love and spoil him until the "time" comes, which could be days or weeks or two hours from now. That was last Thursday.
Friday morning my kid gets up and within five minutes comes running to me sobbing, saying that he's sure he's got fluid in HIS chest, he can't breathe, what's going to happen to him, etc.? He definitely had something respiratory going on but I think mostly he had a panic attack related to what's going on with the dog. But instead of making him wait and worry until we can get an appointment with his pediatrician, I take him to the "doc-in-a-box" around the corner where I have them see me too, since I seem to have a lot of respiratory crap going on too. I get a steroid shot in the ass, he gets some antibiotics and off we go. Saturday I felt great enough to go for a walk, all the sobbing over the dog has left me about 11 pounds lighter and dehydrated. Sunday, I crash bigtime. Monday manage to drag myself to the doctor and find out I have the fucking flu again! Probably my kid had it too, he just got over it a little faster. Another shot in the ass, another round of tamiflu, which makes me want to puke for some reason, and here we are on Wednesday.
Today is a good day, though. I took Luke back to the vet because I was afraid he was having trouble breathing. If the tumor begins bleeding into his chest again, it will put pressure on his lungs and he will have trouble breathing. Being that I never particularly paid attention to how he breathed before all this got started, I didn't have a basis of comparison, so I was worried that he seemed to be laboring. The good news is he's fine, lungs sound good. He's no paler or anemic than he was last week. How do you tell a dog is pale? Their gums - should be a nice healthy pinky, coral color. At his worst last week, Luke's were off-white. So maybe my summer is taking an upswing....
