Friday, October 29, 2021

  Friday, October 29, 2021

 

   I slept straight through to 4:30 again. I spent the remaining hour meditating, exercising my feet, and dozing. 

  I had an eight am Zoom appointment with the young woman who lived with me for six months after Mike died.  She is back in Switzerland now, where she is from.  I emailed her to confirm the date. She canceled at the last minute, saying she was expecting an important phone call. Also, she was tired.  

  I had a dental appointment at 11.  I was about to jump into the shower when I got a text from the receptionist, saying they had an earlier time. I left immediately.  I thought the artificial teeth I ordered were in already. No, KC had made an in-house clear retainer for me to try. She explained the retainer would impact my speech. I might not be comfortable with that.  Before I ordered this expensive item, she thought I should try it.  How thoughtful! I wore a retainer when I was an adolescent; I knew I would have to adapt.  I was able to do it easily.  This retainer is clear. You can see my teeth.  I wanted the retainer to cover my uneven discolored teeth.  This didn’t quite do that.

   The retainer snapped into place. Then KC couldn’t get it out. It was a little too tight. She had to have Chris do it.  OMG!  He had to wrestle it out of my mouth. My lip got pinched several times.  

   I stopped by Costco down the road from the dentist to check out the futon I forgot to look at yesterday. Mei told me the futon was in stock again.  It’s reasonably priced, something like $450; however, the frame is metal. Anything metal is in jeopardy here in Hawaii.  All metal rusts. The aluminum refrigerator door gets rust spots.

   I stopped at Costco on the way home, right down the street from the dentist, to pick up essential supplies. As I was driving home, I thought to call KC and tell her I wanted to see how the clear retainer looked on Zoom.  While it didn’t look fantastic, it did mask the difference between my capped teeth and the five remaining natural ones.  It might be enough.  The problem is when I model blending, I need people to see my mouth clearly.  I think my bottom teeth look gross. KC said she had already thrown it out. I asked her to make another one.; I would pay for it. In fact, I’ll pay for the first one she made and all their time.  While I have the money, I would prefer to be generous.  If I can use the clear retainer, it would save me a bundle.   

  When I got home, I showered in preparation for my PT appointment with Katie.   When I saw her, she was impressed with the difference in my feet. I did the exercises she gave me and used the acupuncture pen on the outside of my calf. Katie told me that calf muscle connected to something on the bottom of the foot. No surprise there.  Yesterday, the second metatarsal on the second toe of my right foot looked swollen. Today, it looks almost normal.  

       Last week, Katie suggested I put padding in the shoe to lift the first metatarsal.  I tried but couldn’t find a way to make it work.  I tried to glue a pad to the inside of the shoe.  The surface was too bumpy; nothing stuck.  Then I tried putting a pad between my toes, so part of it leaned to be under that first metatarsal. That didn’t work either. Kati had a solution. She used two heel lifts together, taped down with Kinesthetic tape. It worked like a charm.  I paid for the two she put in my shoe and bought six more. 

  She also gave me a squatting exercise I may be able to do.  She is challenging the limits of my left hip.  Can I get more flexion, or is it fixed? I told her I would have a consultation with the orthopedic surgeon on November 4.  It finally occurred to me I wanted him to address my problem with Michael’s muscles (the one he wrenched) and my spinal curvature. Katie is not in favor of surgery, probably for anyone, but particularly not for me.  Given my high degree of kinesthetic awareness, she said I would not be happy with the artificial joint. She also reminded me of the experiment done to determine the efficacity of orthopedic surgery.  Some people had the complete surgery, hip or knee, and some were only cut open. (I assume this was all with patient consent.) The difference between the two procedures was not appreciable.  Was the impact of the bogus surgery psychosomatic, or did those cuts do something to the soft tissue, which worked just as well as the full surgery? Either way, surgery promotes tissue damage.

   Judy spent some time arguing with me about my decision not to have surgery. She said that if there is a shortage of medical services, the elderly will be denied service.  Ah! I was way ahead of her.  I envisioned a situation where our civilization was so degraded that there were no medical services, and I had to run from flowing lava. Guess I would be screwed! I can’t imagine that at 80+, I would be able to outrun the lava even if I had the hip replacement. 

    I had the W & M sisters Today in the late afternoon. First grade M was hyper. She ran to her room to get an award she got at school.  She was overstimulated from the day’s celebration, Halloween. She said there was a parade. I worked with her applying Phase I to the words in the story she wrote. She could read the single-syllable words. However, she couldn’t identify the sound of -er. She also read her as hair and then as here.  We are having problems, the standard ones. Then, with remaining time, I had her read Carpenter stories #3, 4, and part of 5.  

    Fifth grade W told me that her teacher has the kids in pairs while one reads and the other, the nonreader, times the reading and marks the missed words.  She said she was doing better. When she read for me, she made several small errors Today, but nothing that interferes with comprehension.  I moved more quickly through the fifth-grade material I had prepared.  She had some problems with comprehension with the more advanced material. I have to speak to her mom about what she wants me to do with her 5th-grade daughter.

    As I did my evening walk, I saw a car pull out of a driveway of a newly purchased house.  The woman parked in the street, crossed it to get her mail, and got back in the car. Then she jumped out and stood there by the driver’s side door. I rushed to catch up.  Someone new on the block. I had to check this out. I introduced myself, “I’m Betty. I’m the neighborhood yenta.”  

   She was standing there trying to get a loose gecko out of her car.   When she put the mail she had just collected on her lap, it ran down her leg. She didn’t want to drive with the critter running loose in her car.    Her name is Hannah. She has three children, 12, 10, and 4.  They had spent the last two months gutting the house. The previous tenants had trashed it. I told her what I knew about them.

   Jenny and Andrew were the primary leaseholders. The house had five bedrooms which they rented.  The house has a pool. Every evening, the other tenants were around the pool drinking and talking loudly. It was known as the party house.  Hannah told me there was chicken poop all over the house. Ah, that was Andrew. He kept chickens as pets.  They make great pets. They love to be in your company, even hugged, if you can ignore the poop and the bird mites.

   I came across a passage in Batcheler’s Buddhism without Belief. He talks about watching the breath differently.  What he said was nothing new. Goenka talks about not controlling the breath but just watching it. Batchelor puts a different spin on it by saying, ‘be surprised.”  That sets up a completely different mindset.