The return to real life…

My text color today is brought to you by "FALL", which has arrived with a bang!! We had about 4 inches of rain and then it turned really, really cold (in the 40’s and for me, at this time of year….is really cold!) I want the summer I never got, back!!

So, I’m back from my travels and they were fun and distracting and seemed to improve my mood. There were some wonderfully comic moments, and laughter seems to be a HUGE medicine for me.

First of all, Pepi was not happy to have been in his crate the whole trip to Dallas, but he will just have to get over it. He wants to ride in my lap, AND bounce around all over the place, and I don’t consider that safe driving, so in his crate he went. He actually settled down after a few minutes of whimpering. I stopped at the Texas rest stop and walked him and let him potty, and he once again whimpered for a few minutes after I re-crated him, then settled down. It is funny how he seemed to KNOW when we were almost to our destination…he started crying piteously when I was about two blocks from my friends house…how weird is that? Anyway, we got there and he got to play with another dog and two cats on the first couple of days, and then on Sunday, he got to play with two more dogs and two more cats when my friends sister in law brings HER dogs and cats when she comes to visit her mother. Now, I understand the dogs. When she comes to visit, she stays all day, and with dogs that would be a bit difficult…but I STILL don’t understand why she brings the cats???? oh well, not my decision. Anyway, Pepi thought he was in hog heaven. He truly enjoys playing with other dogs and they were not hysterically loud, so it was fun to watch. I had originally planned to come home on Monday, because I had a meeting on Tuesday in OKC, but thought about it, and called my son and asked if he minded if I came on Monday to OKC, so I just drove from Dallas to OKC on Monday, and that was much easier. It was the first time for my son and his fiancée to see Pepi, and it was fine. We do have one problem that I hope will go away. Pepi has only been neutered for 2 weeks and I know it takes 6 weeks or so for those hormones to get out of his system. My son’s dogs are both females…although both of them were spayed as puppies. Well, Pepi fell in LOVE with Hera, who is a HUGE Great Pyrenees/Akita mix. She is a sweet heart, but as I said, she is HUGE. Pepi stands 8 1/2 inches at the shoulders. He spent his entire two days there trying to hump Hera. Hera seemed to have no idea what he was trying to do, and she thought he was both amusing and annoying, and tried playing with him at times, and at other times just took her paw which is almost as big as Pepi, and swatted him away, which sent him flying across the room! Fortunately, he bounces. He also continually came back for me. There was one time when Hera was standing at my feet while I petted and loved on her (she is STILL my baby…) and Pepi was behind her humping her leg, and I don’t think she even felt it with all her hair!! It was actually REALLY funny.

I ended up staying until Wed. He and his Fiancée were both off on Tuesday, and he wanted me to walk him through making Chicken Paperkash (another recipe of Leisah’s) so he could play with it and try and figure out if he could find a way to offer it as a lunch special at the restatraunt. I think he worked something out. I think he is going to make it using boneless skinless chicken thighs and breasts, and he added a couple of things to the dumplings and rather than cooking them in water, he cooked them in chicken broth and then fried some sage leaves until they were crispy and used them for a garnish and it was REALLY good. It is easy to make in large batches and it will hold well for a couple of hours…so next week will be the inaugural week, so we shall see how it goes over. I think if it stays this cold and damp it will go over well…He made an elegant presentation with a boneless breast and a boneless thigh with a boned leg with just the end bone still attached to stick up and make a pretty presentation, atop a pile of tiny dumplings in the creamy sour cream sauce with sauce over the whole thing and the fried sage leaves on top!! Pretty and elegant at the same time. We figured out that it cost about 2.20 a serving to make, including serving it with roasted fall veggies and they will get 9.99 per plate…so it is a good money maker. His boss seems VERY happy with these new and innovated specials that he is making…so somehow, this Hungarian peasant dish, has become French bistro fare!! He always offers a soup/salad special for lunch, but he is attracting a much larger group of men for lunch with his specials like fish and chips (I think I told you about that) and now this one. Men seem to like heartier food for lunch. Can you tell I’m proud of him????

I think I had a couple of good things happen this week with my SS claim. When I was on my way home on Wed. I pass through a "no mans land" for cell phone service, so when I came back into the service area, there was a message from the SS office, asking me if I planned to keep my planned appointments that were scheduled. One was yesterday and the other is Monday. Now, when I received the appointments in the mail, there was a return form that asked that question, of which I returned the very next day. So, I was admittedly irritated that somehow that message had not been received, even though it was sent back in a timely manner. So, when I got home, I dug out my letter, and called the number shown on the letter. I explained to the guy (that turned out to be the guy that is handling my case) that I had returned the letters the next day, and he was apologetic about the fact that the agency that gets all the medical information and makes the determination is a state agency that is contracted to the feds to do this, but all the mail goes to some central fed location and often doesn’t make it into the computer in a timely manner. He was telling me that he was glad that I was going to be able to make those appointments and cared enough to check on the confusion, because the disability applications in this state are up 22% and currently, medical appointments are WAY behind, and if I had not shown up, or tried to reschedule, it would have been well after the first of the year. He said there were currently 1100 people in the que. We began chatting (you know on a good day, I can talk to a rock…) and somehow, we chatted about genealogy, (found a family connection with my husband) about my planned move to OKC, which is where he was and he gave me advice about areas to buy and not to buy and even offered to keep his eye open for sale by owner houses that I might miss in my most desired area…and on and on and on for over an hour. During the course of that conversati

on, he was looking at my file and somehow, I said a couple of things to him about previous employment that he asked about and somehow during the course of that conversation, he found some loophole that makes him not have to consider my last two employment situations. Now, don’t ask me to explain all this, I have NO clue how this process works, but HE was happy and said that this would help me a lot in my claim. I also know that I am now a PERSON to him, and not just another "Claim", and that is ALWAYS a good thing.

I also had my physical…and as best I can tell, this guys job was to take my physical conditions that I am claiming and determine if what he saw, matched with what the diagnosing physicians had reported. Most of that is simply cut and dried. I have what I said I had, and it is pretty easy to see and back up with conclusive tests that were done in recent years. The one area that I had some concern about is my diagnosis of Lupus, since it was diagnosed many years ago, and I was treated with certain drugs, until the side effects from the drugs made it no longer feasible for me to be treated with those drugs (I took both steroids and a drug called methotrexate for years, until I developed diabetes, and now can’t use either of those anymore…) and the newest drugs for the treatment of auto-immune disorders are not available to me, because I had tuberculosis as a child and those drugs could reactivate my TB. So, consequently, I am simply being treated for the symptoms as they occur. The problem with all of this, is that all these diagnosis’s and treatments were done in New Orleans at Tulane Medical Center by a doctor that has since died and all those records were washed way in Katrina. The diagnosis is fairly difficult to make, as it involves lots of tests and mostly ruling out lots of other things…but their does seem to be ONE factor that is common to Lupus and Lupus alone, and that is a thing called the "butterfly" mask. It is a skin condition on my face that I usually cover up with makeup. I did not purposefully NOT wear make up yesterday, it was more that I was tired and the weather was bad, and I didn’t want to be going there, and saw no reason to "dress up" for this guy. Anyway, to make a long story short…he was questioning the diagnosis a bit, and then suddenly looked at my face and said "oh, you have the whole butterfly mask going on. I guess THAT is pretty definitive". And another check mark went on my file. This is pretty important, because even though I’ve been lucky and have no heart or lung involvement from this disease and my kidney stuff has been pretty well controlled in recent years (with the exception of a recent exacerbation that I think has happened since they received my records from my Dr.) Lupus is still listed as a terminal illness, and should go a LONG way in helping my claim. So, it takes some of the pressure off of my Psychological evaluation that is on Monday. If this Psychologist decides I’m NOT crazy as a bedbug, (which I question my ability to hide, but you never know…) hopefully, my physical condition will be enough to qualify me…

It is often hard for me to make people understand how there are days when, given the pain meds that I take, I can function pretty well. I time my activities around my pain meds or I time my pain meds around my activities. But, there are also days, and they are frequent, that I am just not functional. Where laying down is not something I desire, but something I require. And that several days of just normal "busyness", require a week or more of recovery. And on those rare occasions (the one that comes to mind the most recently was the Interim Job I did at our campus ministry), when I push the envelope, big time, landed me in the hospital overnight and a return to doses of steroids that are REALLY bad for me. I also had another recent one (the one I was referring to) where I ended up with seriously impaired kidney function, that required both rest, steroids and a temporary use of insulin to counteract the result of the steroids on my blood sugar. As much as I would LOVE to have a regular job, and have had offers that would have allowed me to keep up, pretty much the "lifestyle to which I have become accustomed to". it would ultimately kill me. Or more likely, end up with me either being fired for taking too much time off, or my quitting because I didn’t feel like I was doing the job adequately, and I would end up exactly where I am now…so it just seems more sensible to do it now.

So…that sort of catches you up with where I am right now…a little bit better again than I was a couple of weeks ago…but not exactly where I would like to be. But I wonder…are any of us EVER exactly where we would like to be??? Hmmm, that is one to ponder.

Y’all have a good weekend, and to my Canadian friends, Happy Thanksgiving!!