December 6, 2007
Thursday
El Milagro: Today I walk right in and the machine isn’t ready yet but I can sit and watch the goings on until the machine beeps that it is ready for another customer. While waiting I hook up my earphones and listen to All Things Considered. Rosie the Tech comes over and we discuss last night… when Pete and I had our PAC meeting and then left and Joe showed up right afterwards and Rosie sent him down to where we were, not knowing we’d left… and how am I going to write up a newsletter on that? I ask if she knows which patient has been here the longest, cause I think we’d like to highlight that person for the December newsletter. She replies that she doesn’t know, but will call a tech who was here in the beginning to ask her.
Dr. Rowder, Jo the Nurse, and Jennifer the Dietician are making rounds and when they get to me I re-order my 3 month supply of allergy meds for the upcoming cedar pollen blitz that's supposed to be worse than ever, and we discuss my recent weight gain. Rowder approves updating my dry weitght to 73.1 --> or 161 pounds! Oh boy. All I can promise is that I will not wear a larger levi than 34" waist!
On ATC I listen to a report about Bush’s new democratic-style plan to bail out homeowners who were stupid enough to get into adjustable rate mortgages without considering how they would pay for the increase once their payments jumped. Now, as a good liberal, I must admit that there actually are uneducated or otherwise disenfranchised people who were sucked in to an ARM by unscrupulous lenders who probably shoved piles of papers over and said, “sign here, here, here, here, etc.” and “oh yes. This is the best deal you’ll ever get. Sign here, here, here,…” It is a good thing to help these folks keep their homes. I am surprised that the Bush administration would ride this horse, but I guess at this point those guys will do just about anything to get our minds off the war and their refusal to accept congress’ ideas on funding it. And, maybe the hidden agenda is not to help people but to help the investment bankers who have bought up these loans. It is notable that this saving of the poor people who took out these mortgages will only actually assist about 1/5th of those who will lose their homes… and that the bureaucratic rigmarole will cut out all but the most motivated of marginalized folk. Bush’s cronies would like, I’m sure, to help enough people to look good, if that goal is even possible for this administration anymore.
Tonight my BP is low. First reading when I arrived it was 90/86. We stood there looking at the machine and shook our heads “no”. So we took it again and it went up to 108/90. Throughout the session it stayed very low and who knows why. My brain whirls to figure it out. “I am very relaxed today. Maybe I took one and a half BP pills this morning. What else could it be?” and I ponder that for some time as a mental exercise. Also, my twitchy feet twitch a little so that takes some of my worry away from low BP… but actually the twitchiness is nothing like last time and by the middle to end of the session I notice myself noticing no twitching at all!
I watch and listen to the ABC News, turn down the next show, and then turn up Survivor, although I actually doze off for part of it. Then I wake up again and watch Gray’s Anatomy. Grays is getting so soapy I may stop watching, he said, eyes glued to Dr. McSteamy kissing a new intern. Tonight’s episode seems to be all critical surgeries with people flat-lining and the interns all kissing in the dark corners of he hospital. What a life.
Notes: In at 75.8 and out at 72.3
*Zaroli, J. (2007) What the mortgage deal does and doesn’t do. Retrieved Dec. ’07 online from the ATC website, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16981165
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