Pills, Pools, Progesterone, and Public Access

As you may imagine, I have a pretty whirlwind week behind me. I generally hate to do "disjointed bits of stuff" blogs on Tuesdays, I feel like I should write some coherent piece of brilliance (which I never seem to do anyway). But here are a few things from the past week.

Pills:

Friday I found myself at my mom and dad's house being the Pill Nazi. When Mom was in the hospital, something became very apparent very quickly to my sister and I, and that thing was that Mom needs to get a handle on all the medicine in her life. My sister bought her one of those "old people pill holders," a term I hedge on using because I've found myself within the last month buying not one, but two old people pill holders (OPPH). I don't take any medicine per se, but I pop vitamins all day long, and if I get busy I tend to forget them. Therefore I bought two OPPHs, one for home and one for work, to house and remind me of the multivitamin, calcium, vitamin C, fancy-ass expensive iron, vitamin B12, and I-Caps I'm supposed to take daily. Guess what. I still forget, but I'm getting better.

Anyway, Mom's OPPH is very advanced, much nicer than mine. It's huge, about the size of a notebook, and has, horizontally, all the days of the week, and vertically, "morning," "noon," "evening," and "bedtime."

Now about Mom in the hospital. I kind of blame them and not her. She was of course supposed to take her medicines with her when she went in last week, and she did, in a plastic bag. The morning of her heart cath she and the nurses went over everything she takes, it was all written down and scheduled, and that was fine. However, they didn't take her plastic bag of medicine away from her, they left it right on the table by her bed, beside Huckleberry Hound. And so when my mom decided it was time to take one of her medications, and the nurse wasn't right there with the pill, she'd reach in the bag and grab one and take it. We spoke to Huckleberry about biting her hand, or even growling, when this happened, but Huckie's way too nice to do such a thing.

So when the nurses would come in with her medicine, she would say she'd already taken it. Which is good, I guess, but to be honest, none of us knew if she was double-taking or missing out or what. So the sister and I decided when we got home someone had to be the Pill Nazi. And for some strange reason, I just assumed it would be her. I mean, she's older, and she tends to be the General where these things are concerned.

However, as of Friday she had not volunteered to be the Pill Nazi, and so I realized it would fall to me. And I headed over there after work to get out the big OPPH and the 17 bottles of medication and have at it. Heil me.

And as a task, it wasn't the worst thing in the world. I guess what was bad about it was that she's now on a little combination of Plavix and two low-dose aspirin per day, a combination the doctors stressed to her could not be missed under any circumstance whatsoever, lest she get a blood clot in her stent, have a heart attack, and die. So there I was counting out pills and realizing that basically my mom's life is in my hands.

I spent about an hour counting pills, helping Mom decide when in the day she wanted to take what pill, writing it all down, and putting pills into the OPPH. And I was getting good at it. I was becoming a Pill Nazi to be proud of. Then Dad decided to get into the act. He decided I didn't know what I was doing.

Yes, Dear Old Dad, who raised two daughters and then came to the conclusion that neither of these daughters he raised can do anything right. I'll never understand it.

As one would, I started the pill-placing on Sunday morning. And I ran out of one pill. So I realized that since it was Friday, I had to count how many pills I had of that one type, remove them from their dose boxes in reverse order, and place them starting on Friday to make sure she'd have them on her days she needed them. Seemed very simple to me. Not so to Dad, who, after originally declaring the whole OPPH was a "stupid idea" and that "she's always done fine so far" (remember, my mom had to go have her stomach pumped a few months ago because she took a shitload of the wrong pill), now decided I needed to completely empty the OPPH, start again on Friday, and, well, things went way downhill at that point in the evening.

I told him I knew what I was doing. He swore I did not. I told him to mind his own business. He told me, "Well, I'll just leave, then." To which I replied, "Well, one of us is going to have to, and I'm holding the pills." He left. Of course, he came back a scant five minutes later, but wouldn't talk to me, which was fine, because I was counting out pills and holding my mom's life in my hands.

He finally got over it when I got all the pills placed, went over them all with Mom, every single day at every single time, and got up to leave. But I'll never understand why this man thinks the girls he raised, who own land, are gainfully employed, and can drive, buy liquor, hold a checkbook, and everything, are apparently do-less.

Pools:

Believe it or not, yesterday was July 28th, and yesterday was also the very first time this year I've had a swim. As you longtime readers know, this is my near-daily summer exercise, done in laps always in multiples of three, for some reason.

However, the beginning of summer was cold, the middle was rainy. I was mowing, pool pH levels were off, and there was always something else going on.

It was very hot yesterday, and I decided I was going to swim, no matter what. And I did. Well, for a bit.

I swam for about 20 minutes and boy, am I out of shape. My shoulder hurt right off the bat, I was winded after about ten minutes, I was thrashing around in there like a speared marlin, and finally, thankfully, it began to rain. Sometimes I can swim in the rain, if it doesn't impede my sight, but this rain was needly. Like little needles hitting my skin, or at least I told myself that, so I packed it up and came home, dejected. Not that I had to quit, but that I wanted to quit. I normally hate to have to stop swimming around, back and forth, mind focused on nothing more than counting laps.

I went back today and had a much better time of it. I swam for about 40 minutes, did about 10 more of what I call "kick laps," which means holding onto my water bar-bells and doing laps only by kicking, then I did about 10 minutes of water bar-bell resistance stuff with my arms. It was nice.

And in what will shock you all, and me too, to be honest, I didn't count laps. I didn't worry about doing 30 or 39 or 42 or 45 laps. I just swam. I went for time. That means I have to find something else to be anal about.

Progesterone:

Now, I have my moments of sheer exasperation where my sister is concerned, there's no denying it, but along with that I've always been up front in saying that we are also capable of really having a good time together. We were, of course, thrown together during the whole Mom Hospitalization Thing, we shared a room at the hotel and hung out together when Mom was in surgery, or sleeping.

When I got to the hotel on Sunday night, the sister was already there. She had the TV tuned to "Mad Men," a show she loves and I had never seen. I wasn't keen on watching a marathon of episodes of a show I'd never seen, but didn't have the gumption to challenge it, and so I laid on my assigned bed and watched. Sister told me about all the characters, their stories up to that point, stuff that had already happened, and I found myself really getting to like the show. We watched till just past midnight, when we knew we should be asleep (we had to be up at 5:30), and of course, I promised myself to watch the show's season two premiere this past Sunday and forgot.

Even though we turned the TV off around 12:30, we still didn't get to sleep till around 3:00 because we just got the damn helpless giggles and giggled for 2 1/2 hours, till our bodies ached, over the fact that we're both so damn old we can't stand to sleep under covers anymore. Now, I've always been one who likes a cold room, but the sister never has been. However, she is four years my senior, and whatever old womanly things I have beginning in my system are now raging in hers, and when I got to that hotel room she'd already arrived at, it was about 40 degrees and the air conditioning was going so hard it was rattling the windows, blowing the curtains, and sounding like an airplane getting ready for takeoff. And fine with me.

But when we got into bed, the sheets and blanket were tucked under the mattress so tight, and so far up the bed, we couldn't move once we were tucked in. It was like lying in a manila envelope. The sister and I both have a theory, a theory about old women trying to salvage at least 10 minutes of sleep a night - "If you can just get one leg out of the covers, you have a chance." OK, it's not so encouraging, but it's something.

Anyway, these sheets and blanket were tucked in so tight we were in our beds, feet and arms flailing, and we couldn't get anything out of the sheets. It took about 20 minutes of mass body pandemonium before we could emerge a leg. And even then, along with all the sounds of an overworked air conditioner you'd hear a random, "Shiiiiiiiiiiit," or, "Holy God in Heaven," or, "Is it me? Is it just me?" till we both finally fell off, well, maybe not fell off to sleep so much as just blacked out from the lack of oxygen in all that giggling.

Public Access:

And speaking of fun with the sister, we found ourselves together in a different room in the same hotel on Tuesday night. A room just like the first only everything was reversed from where it was the other night, and the air conditioner was quieter and seemed to work better. The sheets were still stapled to the mattress, up to our necks, and we still had to pull and tug and kick and giggle our way to some kind of comfort.

Again we needed to get to sleep fairly early, but we found ourselves channel surfing in the bed at around 10:30. Cooking, movies, news, baseball, music videos, boring stuff, and then we hit Channel 78. That's really all we knew about it, it was Channel 78. We found ourselves watching, well, I found it on youtube later, watching this very thing. We laid there in our respective beds, mouths hanging open, silent, until our eyes finally caught up together and we lost it in howls of laughter. What the hell show was this? The music clip (if you didn't care to follow the link, though you really should), was some men on a porch playing banjos and guitars, singing about "Grandpa's Crack," because a revenuer caught Grandpa making moonshine and now Grandpa makes crack, singing this tome to Grandpa's crack while a girl did a jig on the porch of a dilapidated house. That clip ended and led us to two men in a studio, men in bibbed overalls and sporting fake "Billy Bob" teeth, teeth that fit so badly they wouldn't stay in while the men were talking and therefore we couldn't understand a word the men said. That clip led to this one (which you should also watch, because really, you need to know what we were seeing to understand the reaction), called "Dragstrip Angel" and contained a chorus that has perhaps the best lyric in the world, "Dragstrip Angel, Dragstrip Angel, killed on the quarter mile."

Finally the sister could take it no more and climbed out of our stapled sheets to see what network we were watching. "Oh my Lord. It's local access."

Well, that explained a lot, but it was still about the weirdest thing I've ever seen on the TeeVee. Well, up to that point in my life.

Because at 11:30 the Billy Bob teeth guys ended their show and another show started, something called the Charles Cullen Show. I know this because it said so on the screen. It also said it was written by Charles Cullen, directed by Charles Cullen, the music was by Charles Cullen, and on and on. The Charles Cullen show was the scariest, worst, and most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my life, and oddly enough, I mean that in a really good way. If I had access to this show on my television I'd watch it every night, even the repeats.

According to his website, which you'll never guess but it's called charlescullen.com, Mr Cullen is a musician and chicken farmer. His show is a combination of musical numbers and skits featuring puppets. I don't know if the puppets are made by Mr Cullen, there was nothing I saw that said "puppets by Charles Cullen," but one puppet was a ventriloquist's dummy named Mr Stitches, and Mr Stitches was an evil, evil puppet. He told us that all those sounds kids hear in the night that parents tell them are the wind or the heater is actually him coming to get them. There was another set of puppets called The Puritans, and they're on youtube as well, although this is a different sketch than we saw in the hotel room.

The musical numbers were something along the lines of this, although this song, about Mr Cullen being shot in the head while performing, was a little gorier than the one we saw. The number we saw was called "Grandaddy Bought Me A Copperhead," and was about, believe it or not, Charles's grandaddy buying him a copperhead. At a sale at the Pentecostal Holiness Church.

And like I said, it was awful and bizarre, but there's a certain comfort I find in knowing there are people like Charles Cullen in the world, and even more comfort in knowing they live right here next to me in the Bible Belt. So raise your chickens and make your puppet sketches, Mr Cullen. Next time I'm in a hotel room in R'noke, which, no offense, I hope is never, I surely will look for your show.

Thankfully, public access ended at 11:30 and we got to finally fall asleep.

The next day my sister and I were having lunch in the fabulous hospital cafeteria, which had huge windows and overlooked the hospital grounds. An old, weathered, half-rusted van came driving through the parking lot.

"That looks like a van Charles Cullen would drive," I said.

"No. If it was his, it would say 'Van owned by Charles Cullen' on the side," she replied.

See? We have fun.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Acrowinners, we have acrowinners! So, if people really were ideally suited for their jobs, what would GW be doing instead of being president?
- Honorable Mentions go to the dishy Michelle, with her "Dying Peacefully, Amen," and DeepFatFriar with his "Dromedary Piss Analyst," though I think DFF is a little lofty is W's abilities.
- Runners-Up go to Patrick (my little Patrick), with his "Dethroned President At-large," and LilyG, with her "Driving People Around."
- And this week's winner is Kellie with an ie, with her "Dog Park Assistant."
- A couple of you came close to my own for that, which was "Deputy Parking Attendant."
- Thanks to all who played! You've all done very well!