In Which Lo Decides She Might As Well Crawl Out From Under the Sofa

Grokkkk!   Auuuukkkkk!  Qweeeesgh!
Those are the sounds emanating from the throat of this unkempt, large, moulting bird struggling wildly while being slowly strangled by her own ineptitude and wondrous powers of procrastination and denial among other things.   I have just decided Enough Already.  I must put away my disappointment, disillusionment, distress and disgust at the machinations of the insane and unkind world and Murphy's Law and raise my bod up to keep on schlepping.

It's like this.

First,  I found to my great disappointment that I am not a candidate for the new wonder surgery to implant a telescopic lens in my macular degenerated eye.  I nearly qualified but it seems that they cannot do the procedure on anyone who has had cataract surgery.  Hells Bells, as my Daddy used to say.......I can hardly believe that there is a person over 75 (condition #1) who has NOT had cataract surgery.  Well, that took care of that dream.  But, the Doctor took pity on me and decided to refer me toyet another specialist......one who prescribes glasses for low vision patients.  So how come he didn't think of this months ago?   Dun't esk.

So, after another  4 hour excruciating examination (they are all at least 4 hours)   complete with the brightest lamps known to man being shone into my eye and drilling holes into my brain and innumerable additional photographs of my decrepit  macula ( how many pictures of one's macula does a person really need, fercrissake?)  and being assigned a prescription for  some lenses that may actually make it possible for me to read AND having my bank account depleted in a horrific fashion, I finally staggered home to await the new glasses in a week or 10 days  equipped only with the most expensive lighted magnifying glass known to humankind to get m  e through the interim.  That's the disillusionment, distress  and disgusted part.

Now, do not for one moment think that I am not grateful as hell for what vision I do have.......believe me, I am.   But you know what greedy, ungrateful wretches we humans are.  We always want MORE.

And speaking of ungrateful.......I am still not recovered from the disillusionment I suffered when my usually trusty caregiver presented me with the results of weeks, or perhaps months, of her labors to carefully transcribe the illegible entries in my aged personal phone book onto stick on labels using a felt marking pen and paste them onto pages in a newly prepared loose leaf binder with alphabetic separators and everything.  You cannot imagine my perplexity, puzzlement and volcanic rage when I eagerly seized the new tome and opened it to look up a phone number only to find that,while I could actually read the entries I could not find anything I was looking for.  It was only after 3 or 4 minutes of mumbled oaths and groans that I figured out that she had organized the entire book by FIRST NAME.  Oy.

No, there was no bloodshed, nor even any harsh words.  I am a totally civilized (read hat as beaten down, defeated)  soul.  I simply asked her gently why she had chosen to do it like that and she was just as flabbergasted as I had been and had absolutely no answer.  I decided that the book, as it was, would be useful in case the dreaded Dementia struck and I forgot the last names of everyone I know.   In fact, it was particularly good when I needed to look up one of my multitudinous Doctors since they were all neatly gathered under D (though not in alphabetic order....but never mind).  We are now working on Version 2 in which I will alphabetize the labels before they get applied to the pages......sob.

And after all that I have decided to finally crawl out from under my rock and temporarily rejoin this meshugina world...........don't  ask me why....I have absolutely no answer.....God help us all!