Well, I have repented or reinvented or something.

My oldest daughter, who lives in Florida, recently got a new computer, and when talking to me on the phone she revealed that she had found the ‘three score” blog and is reading it starting from the archives.

This aroused my curiosity enough that I went back and read some of the early things I posted and had a revelatory epiphany.   I can write the things that I post on FaceBook, or at least the same kinds of things.  I don’t have to get deeply into some thoughtful essay.  I think the last election, some of the things I thought about at the time, some things I even wrote about at the time but didn’t post and--- well I just got writer’s block trying to do something I really didn’t want to do.   The heck with it.

I have had a series of adventures, not big ones, but significant ones to me and I think I will just write about some of them.  I smashed my face into the concrete again, invested in a smart phone (which convinced me that one should mess around with technical things that are smarter than he is), got , literally, ripped off by a hospital, and Janet is having physical problems that concern me.  I will try to take a moment, at least once a week and probably more often, now that I have convinced myself that I can do this again without any physical body parts falling off.

The thing that is in my mind right now is a continuing theme for the blog.  Getting old is, literally, a pain in the butt, among other things.  It has recently been a moment of pride when Janet hands me a can of soda and asks me to pry it open for her.   For the last several months, I have had to use a coin, a pocket knife or an available piece of metal to pry open my own soda,, and am a bit humiliated when I have to do that which Janet could do as well as I.

I have been feeling a bit smug about having lost seventy or eighty pounds in the past year or so.  I smugly gave advice to others (which is good advice, but…) on not snacking, eating smaller portions, eating organic Greek yogurt, etc. etc. etc.     About Thanksgiving time I began to sense, from symptoms that are probably not appropriate  to discuss in this post, that I had a urinary infection.  I went to the Doctor.  He gave me a prescription for Cipro, had me come back in a couple of days to give a “sample”, and called me up the next afternoon to tell me that my bacteria were having such fun partying with Cipro, that I should cast out my Cipro, and he would have to give me a much more powerful medicine, a combination of a couple of different antibiotics, that were so powerful that he also gave me a prescription for  some extra strong probiotics because this new stuff was so powerful it would kill all the organisms in my gut that digest my food.

My regular pharmacy didn’t have the new stuff in stock so they called around and found some at Wal-Mart.  I went to Wally World and presented my prescription and waited for an eternity till they got it put together (side note:  Has any one noticed that in most Wal-Mart parking lots they now have parking places set aside for pharmacy customers specifying a fifteen minute parking limit?     What a farce?  No one who goes into a Wally world pharmacy gets out in fifteen minutes.)

At any rate when the prescription was finished they assigned me to a “counselor” of some kind to discuss my prescription.  She apologized that I had been kept waiting for so long but the she said, “Most people who need this prescription are not able to come pick it up personally, the prescription is picked up by some one else”   If they say that  wouldn’t it make you wonder?  It did me.

Even this stuff wasn’t completely successful.  Though I felt a lot better, and felt “symptom free’  my tests didn’t agree, and I was sent to a Urologist who gave me two other consecutive extra strong antibiotics.  It was well into January before everyone was satisfied that my infection was gone.

The troubling thing is, that even though I am still being very careful about the foods and the amounts that I eat, since my “cure”, I have gained a little over ten pounds.  I think, and at least one of my doctors concurs, that I have had a low grade urinary infection for well over a year, and that it should get credit (or blame) for most of my weight loss.  That is really disgusting.