“Gort! KLATU BIRATA NIKTO! KLATU BIRATA NIKTO!”
I’m also drinking lemonade. (I love lemonade.)
Other than all of the above, virtually nothing has been going on here. Hospice life can get mighty boring, people, with everybody waiting for you to croak. Monday through Friday my C.N.A. shows up every morning at 9:30 (or thereabouts) to give me a bath, an R.N. stops by once a week to take my blood pressure (when she remembers to bring her equipment), after which I eat a bowl of (usually Campbell’s) soup and fall asleep. Today it was Vegetarian Vegetable with alphabet pasta. Then Sam changes my diaper, and I’m still alive. That’s all, folks.
TUESDAY, 1/7/2020, 6:30 A.M. It’s always something, isn’t it? Since finishing that last paragraph, I: 1) had a semi-pleasant bedpan experience; 2) ate a couple of White Castle sliders; 3) started watching 1933’s Little Women, pictured below, starring Katharine Hepburn; and 4) drank a dose of Polyethylene Glycol in an effort to poop good. (Pooping good = joy for bedridden women of the senior citizen persuasion.)
I’d like to make a shocking confession about the 1933 version of Little Women, and I hope you can keep it under your hat: KATHARINE HEPBURN SUCKED. Her acting was atrocious — those facial expressions! — and she played Jo March as an angry, petty, self-absorbed bitch. The 1949 version of the movie with June Allyson (as Jo) and Elizabeth Taylor was far superior.
Incidentally, “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott was one of my favorite books as a child, and I’d been reading it cover-to-cover at least once a year by the time I finished junior high school. I knew all the characters well, and the only screen version that did the book justice — in my view, anyway — was the one from 1949.
Well, yee-haw … SAM WAS IN BED TAKING A NAP! The phone was still ringing in his hand just now when he staggered into the family room, stark naked. I was never so happy to see him in my entire life, and the fact that he was naked made it even better. (I love seeing Sam naked!) He had already been home for more than two hours, and the best news is … NO CAVITIES, either!
As long as I’m writing about “dental hi-jinks” I’d like to offer a quick recap of my own personal dental adventures, particularly after my overall health began to nosedive during the last decade. In 2010, under general anesthesia, I had my last six upper teeth — which were extremely shitty, annoying to look at and more or less useless — extracted by an oral surgeon and replaced with a denture.
By 2015 I was completely housebound, hadn’t been to a dentist for years, and had seven remaining lower teeth (no molars), three of which were actually loose. They scared me half to death. While my health continued to tank I had recurring nightmares about teeth breaking off at the gumline, or waking up with a raging toothache and not being able to get to a dentist.
In January 2018, following my first emergency hospitalization that year (for sepsis, cellulitis and congestive heart failure), I did some research online and discovered a “mobile” dental team here in Dallas that visits nursing homes and makes house calls. Two weeks later they came to Howdygram headquarters, extracted my seven lower teeth with local anesthesia — right here in the family room! — and my life-long dental shitshow finally came to an end. (The aforementioned shitshow began with an abscessed tooth when I was a tot at the tender age of 18 months.) Throughout my entire life, including the teen years, young adulthood, adulthood, middle age and beyond, every special event and/or vacation was marred in some way by a variety of dental emergencies … a broken tooth, a chipped molar, a crown falling off, a busted bridge, a throbbing toothache, an infection, and so on.
Now that I don’t have any more natural teeth it’s still a joy whenever I’m reminded that I’ll never have another goddamn dental emergency … even after all these years!
Time to get on with my day. Thank you for reading this, and if you’re going to remember the Alamo please do so as quickly as possible. Enough already.
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