More than Tired

I take my mother to the doc today to get an epidural in between her lumbar 4 and lumbar 5 vertebrae.  Cortisone.  Fingers crossed.  If it works, she will be out of pain for awhile.  The treatment lasts around six months.  Then, I guess, you do it again.  We need to be to the office at 8:30.  My mother has been worried about this for days.  We had dinner across the street last night, and my mother was saying all kinds of wild things.  She said I told her she couldn't eat, that I said we had to be there by seven, neither of which were true.  When we got back from dinner, she thought we needed to get ready to go.  She went to bed at 8:30.  At ten, when I was shutting down the house, she got up and asked if it was time.  

Maybe her mind will be better if she is not in such pain.  

The hearing aids are another matter.  She won't wear them.  We go back to the ENT on Wednesday.  I told her I would take her, but when they call her back, I was staying in the lobby.  I didn't care to hear her lie to the audiologist.  She was free, I said, to tell them whatever she wanted.  

My mother is a stubborn hillbilly.  

Here is the photo, one of them, I put up on the magnetic chalk board in my kitchen as I consider getting this haircut again.  The one that makes people like Mr. Tree ask in astonishment, "Was that you?"

As my mother reminds me, I was younger and had a thicker head of hair then.  That's a funny phrase. . . "head of hair."  I think that is a hillbilly way of talking.  I need to send the photo to my beautician and ask her if I can still sport such a look.  In my imagination, I think, I believe it will make me look younger.  Not "younger," exactly, but less like the homeless man I am starting to look like now.  My beautician had a hip replacement, so I haven't seen her in over two months.  The blonde is becoming something else.  If I wear my hair down, I look like Buffalo Bill Cody, so I tie it back which makes the roots of my hair more prominent.  I haven't cared so very much since I go nowhere anyway, but it has gotten hard to look in the mirror.  People tell me I look "tired."  I am.  This sole caretaking feels like it is killing me.  I am reduced to sitting in my mother's house for too many hours a day.  

As the song goes. . . what a long strange trip it's been. 

Otherwise, things go swimmingly.  The carpet in my mother's living room is wet again.  I've been dicking around with the a.c. drain lines for a week.  I pour vinegar and half an hour later a gallon or two of hot water.  The line drains.  I've had all sorts of advice on how to clear them from hooking a compressor up to the drain line and blowing it clear to attaching the garden hose to it and flushing it out.  At the hardware store, everyone there told me what they do.  

I'm about to give up and spend the grand on putting in a pump and new drain lines through the attic.  

Meanwhile, I still have to get the carpenter back to my house.  And I've decided to get a new roof.  Mine is only ten or eleven years old, I think, but it has never been a good roof and I see no benefit in waiting a few more years.  

Cha-ching!

"What else are you going to do with your money?"

Nothing, I guess.  I'm just sitting with my mother waiting on the apocalypse.  

Are you out there having fun in Trumplandia?  Are you able to ignore the cacophony and get on with living the dream?  

The MAGA dream is of med beds (link).  The MAGA faithful believe they exist.  How they can look at Trump and think such a thing is true strains credulity. . . but I want one.  I need one.  Good god, my fortune for a med bed.  

Rather, I must ready myself for an early morning trip to the doctor's office.  Well, not to his office, but to the place where he will do the epidural.  It is not surgery.  She will not be put under.  She will be awake with a local anesthetic.  The entire thing, they said, should take an hour.  We'll be back before lunch.  

And then I may go back to sleep.  People tell me I look tired.  I think it is more than that.