They say there's a Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times." I don't know if there really is, but times have been interesting in a Chinese-curse way lately.
Norman's and my 10-year-old niece, Aria, had her appendix burst on the day that her whole family and Norman were supposed to go on a family vacation in the Adirondacks. Instead, Aria went to the hospital, and Norman went to his sister's house to watch Aria's twin brother, so Aria's parents could be with her in the hospital.
She was on intravenous antibiotics for more than a week and couldn't eat or drink for nearly a week; in the age before intravenous hydration, she'd have died. She had complications from surgery, so she had to have a second surgery to address those complications and to remove the pockets of infection that the first surgery missed. She spent 12 days in the hospital and was very sick, poor thing. She's back home now, though, and seems to be doing well, which is a great relief for all of us.
While Norman was gone, our air conditioner broke down. Like many modern appliances, our air conditioner has a computer that's supposed to report what's wrong with it, so the repairman can replace the defective part. Our air conditioner's computer reported "none of the above." Gee, how helpful!
It took a week for the repairman to come, and he seemed very discombobulated by not having the problem spelled out for him. Repairmen used to be like physicians -- they looked at the symptoms and figured out the problem from that -- but now they just do whatever the computer tells them to do and don't actually know how to diagnose a problem. After several hours of poking around, the repairman decided that BOTH of the fans on the central unit had failed at the same time. This seems unlikely to Norman and me, since the unit is only four years old and is under warranty for five, so the fans should be made to last at least five years. And TWO of them failed AT ONCE?
In any case, the repairman had no replacement fans and couldn't get any for two weeks. So the A/C has been broken since August 7th, and we're not scheduled to see the repairman again until the 26th. IF he manages to get the fans by then, and IF the fans really are the problem, then we should get the %$#@ thing repaired three weeks after it stopped working. If he can't get the fans, or if the fans aren't what's wrong, then who knows when it might be repaired?
To add insult to injury, the A/C repairman who failed to fix our machine gave me a cold while he was here. It laid me flat for a couple of days, then went away, which is not the usual course of a cold for me. That makes me wonder if perhaps it was Covid, which my vaccination vanquished after a couple of days of fighting. In any case, I seem to have recovered from whatever it was.
I'm wildly over-sensitive to heat, to a degree that people who've never met me in real life have a hard time believing. I lose half my brain and become lethargic and cranky at anything over 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 C), and yes, I know that's bizarre and extreme. My grandmother was the same way, and I seem to have been unfortunate enough to inherit her genes.
This means that the A/C isn't a minor matter for me; it's a necessity for me to be able to sleep at night or to cook dinner or to be able to have my mind with me basically at all. When we got the central air conditioner four years ago, Norman wanted to get rid of all of our window air conditioners. I insisted that we keep one for emergencies, which he thought was crazy. Well, I'm not looking so crazy now!
Norman put our one remaining window unit in my bedroom when he came home from his sister's house, so I've been cool enough to sleep at night for the past few nights (although it's really horribly noisy). Norman is not sleeping well at night and has put a mattress on my floor, so he can sleep in the air conditioning if he needs to. He hasn't actually slept there yet, because he doesn't want to listen to my CPAP machine all night, but I'm having trouble sleeping because I keep waiting for him to come in. So even with the A/C in my room, I'm not sleeping as well as I might, though I AM very grateful to have it.
We're living on frozen dinners, because we don't want to cook and add heat to the house. And I haven't been able to exercise! I had been so proud and happy to have developed an exercise habit just a couple of months ago, but I can't exercise when it's 90 degrees with 90% humidity, so I haven't been able to do more than ten minutes a day since the A/C went out. I'm really bummed about that; it feels so unfair that I've FINALLY developed this good habit, only to have it snatched away from me.
My 88-year-old mother has been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which means that her heart is beating wildly out of rhythm and too fast. She feels dizzy and exhausted all the time. They put her on medication to try to fix it, but that didn't work. They shocked her heart twice, but that didn't work. Now she's on a new type of medication, to try to strengthen her heart before they try shocking it a third time. I'm very worried about her, but it's hard to get information out of her. Half of the time, she doesn't feel well enough to talk on the phone; the other half of the time, she deliberately minimizes what's going on with her so as not to worry me. I keep telling her that I'll worry LESS if I have ALL the information, but that doesn't seem to sink in.
My cousin, who has a tendency towards drama that sometimes manifests itself in confabulation*, told me today, "Your mother will be dead by Thanksgiving." Gee, thanks, Rayna. That helps so much. I mean, it might be true, but she doesn't know that, and thinking that way isn't really helpful.
Yep, interesting times. But probably not interesting to read. Sorry! I haven't really got the energy to be interesting to read right now...
*Someone who confabulates makes things up, but they aren't deliberately lying; they believe the fairy tale that their mind has created.
