Friday, June 10, 2022

Friday, June 10, 2022 

 

   I slept well. I felt like I could lie in bed forever and doze. It sounded lovely. No challenges. No frustrations. No pain. Ah! Dead! When I thought I was dead after an accident when I was ten, I thought, "Thank God it's over!" While I consider myself a reasonably happy person, life is a challenge and a disappointment in many ways. Some rewarding moments and moments that are easy, but there are still the others that made me angry. I have very little cause to be angry. I remain among the luckiest people on the planet in many ways.

   Paulette stopped by to pick up my water bottles to fill them with Kangen water. 

   Yvette slept up here again last night. She kept a distance from Josh until his Covid test came up with a clear result. Today, his test came up negative. Yay! Yvette went downstairs to lie in her own bed for the first time in days.

  B stopped in while I was listening to Terry Gross to see how I was doing. He brought a plate of a chicken Alfredo with broccoli from a friend of his whose son I tutored. 

  The home care PT called to make our second appointment for Monday afternoon. She said to make sure that I kept up my dosage of the hydrocodone, or I could wind up in such severe pain. I would have to go to the hospital. I thought to check how much of the prescription I had left. Four pills!!! If I took what's left every four hours, I would be out by tomorrow afternoon. I tried to call Kaiser prescription to get a refill. I could pick it up early Monday morning, having given them the 24-hour notice. When I placed the order, they said they couldn't fill it without a doctor's approval. That means I couldn't get meds until Tuesday. Let the fun begin! I was cutting back on the Vicodin, down to half a pill every six hours. Now, I don't have a choice. I am hopping mad. I can see them say I should have known. Excuse me. I'm on drugs. I'm out of it. Why should I have known? It said on the bottle to take as much as two at a time. That led me to believe I would have enough to last. 

   I called to speak to the advice nurse. When the receptionist asked, I told her I wanted to have a prescription okayed. She told me the advice nurse couldn't do that. I told her they could get hold of a doctor who could. I already had that experience.

  Yvette came up, and I told her of my situation. We called people we knew who had had medical procedures requiring pain killers. Several people responded. That was comforting. One friend had a stash. He was cautious not to misuse or distribute them to others who might. He brought a bottle over. It was a pharmacy bottle, not a prescription bottle. He got these when they were still handing out narcotics for pain like candy. I said, "Mike is thrilled," meaning he was glad I had what I needed. But then it didn't feel like that. I felt he was upset. I thought to check the expiration date. Sure enough, 9/19. No wonder he was jumping up and down in agitation. We checked online. These pills were good for five years after the manufacturer's printed date. Wow! Hopefully, I won't need them anyway.

    The phone ran at 12:30 am. It was the Kaiser advice nurse. When I called earlier, I had the option of asking for a call back instead of waiting. This was this callback. I knew better than to hang up.  I did that once because I didn’t need to speak to them anymore.  They called back but I had to wait in line to speak to someone. Tonight, I turned down the volume as much as I could and still heard the hold message over and over. "All the nurses are busy speaking to others, etc." I must have fallen asleep. When I woke, I still heard the hold message. When I checked, I saw I had been on the line for two hours and thirteen minutes. I hung up. They didn't call back. They need to revise their system.