Yes, I’ve been on radio silence for months. I’m tired when I get home every evening, and I just don’t feel the cacoethes scribendi. I lie in bed and listen to podcasts, follow my Twitter feed, and watch YouTube videos. It hasn’t helped that for the last month I was in a cash crunch and couldn’t afford to refill my Brintellix prescription for three weeks. Brintellix is a crazy effective antidepressant, but it’s also crazy expensive. On my less-than-optimal Imperial prescription coverage, I have an $80 co-payment just for that one drug. (I finally got paid and refilled it, but it’s still a drain.)
My neck surgery happened in early May. It went very well—so well that I’m practically pain-free in my upper body for the first time in decades. I was away from the Empire for two weeks; one in a neck collar and one without it. I got to spend only one week in the collar rather than six because I agreed to let the surgeon put in a plate to stabilize the fusion site. (This means I am now eligible for manual screening at any metal detector.)
That was the good medical news. The less-good medical news came in July, when my ophthalmologist finally got pressure readings confirming I have early glaucoma in my right eye only. (Obviously I have a Lopsided Anatomy.) He gave me Lumigan drops to put in daily, which have worked excellently. At the beginning of August my right eye pressure was at 21 mm/Hg and the left at 17. Last Wednesday he measured my right eye pressure at 14 mm, while the left (which I haven’t been treating at all) dropped to 15 mm in sympathy. ExpressScripts, of course, is fighting him about covering the prescription because they reflexively fight covering any brand name drug.
And surgery crashed and burned the household budget. There’s the surgeon’s bill I don’t have money to pay, there’s the remaining anesthesiologist’s and radiologist’s bills I don’t have money to pay, and the summer heat has cranked up the light bill to obscene amounts (the current one is for $571) and I can’t pay that either. And never mind needing money to replace the stove, and to get a chunk of sewer pipe replaced underneath the house that has a dime-sized hole eaten in it, and get the toilet in our bathroom that hasn’t worked in eight years hooked up again, and get the toilet in the third bathroom, which is leaking and rotting the subfloor underneath it, fixed, and spend $600 or so putting a new catalytic converter in the car so it will pass inspection, and and and …
We’re two weeks into the new school year, and M is far far happier being at McCallum and back among her friends from Lee than she was at Kealing. She’s not near as comfortable walking the multi-cultural line as T is. And the teenage search-for-identity thing has kicked into gear; recently she started asking her friends to call her “Alyks” rather than her birth name. L ignores this, and I’m trying to program myself over but fail about half the time. I’m more apt to call her Alyks when her friends are around or within earshot; something about their presence prompts me to remember better.
There are more things that have gone on which I could tell, of course, but if I told everything I know, then whatever would I have to talk about?
