Aww, crap

9.14.2022: Part 3

Shit. Show.

Shit show.

Shitshow

Shiiiiiiit Shooooooowwww.

You know 'em. You hate 'em.

We've all been part and parcel of many a shit show in our lives. Unavoidable, really. Gather more than three humans in one area, and you're almost guaranteed to have an eventual shit show.

It's such an awesome descriptor. There's really no equal to it. I can look up "shit show" on Dictionary.com, and it says this:

shit show or shitshow [ shit-shoh ] noun Slang: Vulgar. a chaotic event or situation, often one that turns out badly

Pretty accurate. But try that with Thesaurus.com and you get:

0 results for shit _show

did you mean: sideshow

No, you ducking ice hole, I did NOT mean sideshow!

100% not what I meant

See? No equivalent. Shit show is the descriptive term version of nothing rhymes with orange.

Me? I like to grade my shit shows on a scale of "Eh..." to "AYFKMWTS?". And in case you don't have an absolutely foul mouth (like me) AYFKMWTS? means "Are You F****** Kidding Me With This Shit?".

Sunday through Wednesday of this week, I was an unwilling participant in what had all the makings of an AYFKMWTS? show. Maybe even the star. Of the show. The.. shit show...... Yeah, you get what I'm saying.

Sunday was my little girl's 24th birthday. We had plans with our family for dinner and Sunday fun (read: macaroni ). My girls and my granddog Stitchie Boy came over. It was great. We missed Mike (that would be Stitch's dad), but he had to save lives at work (like that's more important than Sunday dinner, ugh!). Stitch and our dog Ginger are not on the same wavelength. Stitch is basically a playful puppy and Ginger is a judgmental bitch. Sometimes Stitch tries to play with Ginger. He does this by winding up his paw and slapping Ginger on the head. It's hysterical. She hates us all. She will eventually kill us in our sleep.

Stitchie Boy: the picture of innocence.

It rained a little. Rain isn't always a precursor to a shit show, but it helps! Then good things happened. Yanks won. Giants won. Mimi, Pop, DF and I got to visit with the girls and dogs a bit before the nephews and my Brudder and SisInLaw showed up and the real party started.

But all day, I had this thing. I didn't know what it was. Kind of felt like a had a pimple or rash or something in the Armpit of Cancer (as opposed to the Tropic of Cancer¹). As the day went on it got more painful, but I had STD (that's "Shit To Do", foul mouth, remember?) so I tried to put it out of my mind.

Before dinner, Abbey and I were on the deck having a glass of wine when all of a sudden a gotdam yellow jacket jumped on my non-cancer arm and stung me! It wouldn't come off either. I tried to dislodge it by shaking my arm up and down. Unfortunately for Abbey, the non-cancer arm with the bee stuck in it was also the arm holding the large cup of Montepulciano. Red wine everywhere. Bee still in arm.

Why didn't I put the bucket of wine down and kill the bee? I mean, it seems logical, looking back. At the time, I chose to whip my arm up and down, up and down. Wine went up. Wine went down. Bee still in arm.

So we moved on from that teeny tiny shit show, had a great dinner (thank you Mimi) and a great dessert (thank you Mimi and Abbey), and Happy Birthday Mo!

I love this happy kid.

When things quieted down I looked at the Armpit of Cancer (the left one) - no rash, but very swollen. I try ice, Motrin, elevation. I wake up Monday to a non-cancer arm (the right one) that's swollen, hot, and just gross at the bee sting site, and a left armpit that's still swollen and painful.

Now I gotta call the cancer docs. I don't know from cancer! What if this is something, and not just nothing? What if they say "your Armpit of Cancer has been infected by a bee hopped up on a very nice Tuscan red and you can't have surgery for 6 weeks!"?

Worth it.

So DF and I go to Yale on Tuesday to see the Oncology APRN. I tell her stories about my arms, both bee and non-bee variants. She's going to send me for an ultrasound to rule out any infection in the Armpit of Cancer and got me a bed (it was a chair) in the ECC, which stands for something but means an Emergency Room specific to cancer patients. How brilliant is THAT? I got the impression that it was very exclusive and very guarded. Like "Don't Talk About Fight Club" secret.

Obligatory.

So there we are. Me and my guy, in a rather cushy room on the 12th floor of Yale, riding it out. They're gonna do some bloodwork, gonna wait and see what they see. Just sit tight.

We wait. No one comes back. Finally, someone does. You want to guess what she told me? She forgot me. She said she forgot she was supposed to draw blood and was just sitting around waiting for an assignment. This is literally the third time this has happened to me at Yale. I should rob a bank. The next day no one would remember I did it.

When I was escorted into the room, I was offered either of the two chair/beds. I took the one by the window. It had a nice view of Long Wharf.

I tend to exaggerate. (see: everything I've ever said)

About 20 mins later, I got a roommate. This roommate was an older cancer patient who listened to Telemundo on his phone at an ear-splitting volume. In his defense, there was a curtain separating the three feet between our bed/chairs so why would he think I could hear what he was listening to? At one point, he paused the telenovela and Facetimed with many, many equally loud family members. Someone got a new dress and showed him. She also got a new binder. She was not a small child, but she was a loud one. This went on. And on. And on. Then he put ESPN on the one TV in the room (it was on his side), and Telemundo at the same time, but louder so he could hear it over ESPN (side note: just stating facts, I have no opinion on Telemundo or telenovelas - that part is irrelevant and included for context only. I DO have an opinion on people who are inconsiderate and think the whole world wants to hear whatever comes out of their phone's speaker. If this is something you do, STOP IT. It makes you an ice hole.).

This continued for a few hours. Hours. You read that right. Different APRN came in and I was tasked with picking up steroids for the non-cancer bee arm, and told I was free to go. I KNOW the ECC was way better than slogging through the un-Fight Club ER downstairs, but I wish I approached this visit differently and that's on me. I will, going forward, bring with me

1. headphones/ear buds

2. old lady reading glasses

3. a long stick to poke people with through the curtain

every time I have an appointment of any kind at Yale.

Off we go: get the meds, take the meds, wake up every 30 minutes to pee all night long.

But... not complaining. Just like ARod, steroids are my friend. My bee-stung arm is almost back to normal size after 5 doses and the red, blistery, itchy part at the actual sting site, is manageable.

Next? Ultrasound in the morning, to figure out what's up with the Armpit of Cancer. Turns out, nothing is wrong with the Armpit of Cancer! The ultrasound was a bit anticlimactic. It showed no change from the last time I had an ultrasound and once again, I am free to go. To work.

These past few days could have been a really, really bad AYFKMWTS? show. It wasn't. It was somewhere between "that's unfortunate" and "OHMYGODDDDD!".

I think it was right in the vicinity of "Aww, crap."

AND NOW, WE WAIT......

¹ From The Tropic of Cancer, a novel by Henry Miller, published in 1934:

We are all alone here and we are dead.

Also see: self-indulgent bullshit