The Nielsen Company has asked ME to be a “Nielsen TV Family”. I’ve been randomly selected. They even sent a $5 bill to encourage me to fill out the questionnaire. Ok, so it’s a questionnaire “to become a Nielsen TV family”. I’m not sure if I will actually become a Nielsen family.
But if I do, I promise it will be the end of mail-order adult-diaper and diabetes-supply commercials on the Game Show Network. They’ll start advertising…whatever the heck is this that I’m interested in…Barry Manilow cassette compilations…oh, wait, they already do that…(ok, they don’t, but they might as well).
But seriously, if this is the excitement I have to look forward to in my life, I’m really ****ed. Still, the POWER of being a Nielsen Family…that would be awesome…
(Note to my diabetic friends…I’m not making fun of diabetics…just Wilford Brimley…and how GSN caters to all types of people who sit on the couch all day…including myself in this demographic…)
I missed work today, and I don’t know how to go about describing the overall state-of-being that kept me in bed most of the day. It’s all very frustrating, as my state-of-being, overall, is not going to improve. Some way, some how, I manage to get past this blech on more days than not. Today, I did not.
Here’s a list of “10 Symptoms of Kidney Disease“. I don’t want to reprint them here or speak to them individually, because then, as if I have any shame, it becomes TMI. Let’s just say that I generally have about 7 out of 10 of these. That’s not even including the common effect of “irritability” which probably makes me even more unpleasant than usual to be around.
I like my new car, but I’ve been in no mood to celebrate it. I’ll be blunt and inelegant. I can’t afford this new car. It’s a “mid-life crisis” purchase. I got the car that I can’t afford that I’ve been thinking about getting for four months so that I could feel like I got something I wanted. It’s textbook irresponsibility. It’s textbook repeating-one’s-mistakes. Seven years ago, I bought a Prius because no one had one yet, and I thought, after a long period of feeling like I was beyond the curve in all sorts of areas, having a distinctive, environmentally-aware vehicle put me ahead of a least A curve. I wanted my car to make a statement about me, since I wasn’t particularly pleased with anything else I could say about myself.
In 2009, I hardly think the type of car I drive wins me any points from others. It’s just for me. I had this cool car that had no horsepower but gave off almost no emissions and got 40 MPG, and I wanted another one. You’d think if I have so much insight into what my thought process has been, pun intended, I’d have resisted the purchase and opted for something more sensible. My old car really was dead to the point where investing in its repair would have been a pointless endeavor. But my reasonable desire to avoid car worries for several years and have a car that represented something about me could have been accomplished with a few-years-old Civic or Fit. I just had to go all out. I wanted the Insight. Heck, I wanted the EX (pricier) trim of the Insight. It has a USB stereo input, after all!
I am admitting all this for reasons that aren’t quite clear to me right now. It doesn’t help me to let the world know just one more way that I’m an idiot. Unlike most people I know, I don’t think much about saving for retirement or planning for ten or five years from now…or one year from now…or one month from now…because I just can’t imagine a bright future for myself. So I’ll buy a car I like that I can sort-of afford at the moment, even though there’s no way I’ll be able to afford it should dialysis start kicking my ass in a couple of years and I have to curtail my work hours…or if that starts happening in a couple of months.
Anyway, so asinine decision-making and health-tangent aside, here’s the chronology of my automobiles:
December 1992 – June 1996 : 1986 Chrysler LeBaron (sedan)
June 1996 – July 2002 : 1993 Honda Civic
July 2002 – May 2009 : 2002 Toyota Prius
May 2009 – ???????? : 2010 Honda Insight
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Toastie’s Prius
July 29, 2002 – May 19, 2009
117,800 miles
I was told there was an electrical short. It would have needed a new inverter and catalytic converter. I don’t pretend to understand how all that stuff works. I had to believe the diagnosis from the dealer, since the local mechanic I had gone to couldn’t tell me diddly. The repair cost would’ve exceeded the car’s value. So I had little choice but to give up on it, even though Toyotas and Prii ought to last a lot longer than seven years
Of course, I had plenty of choice in what to replace the Prius with. I’ll get into that another time, as that’s related to an internal monologue I’ve been having with myself about cars for the past four months. Also, any sympathy I gain from the sad tale of my Prius will surely be lost when I try to justify how I decided upon my new mode of transportation.
I’ve got a 12-year-old cat whose diabetic and a 13-year-old cat with hyperthyroidism.
Today, I took my 9-year-old bordador to the vet to try to figure out what’s he always groaning about. I know he’s got the pretty typical hip dysplasia that older dogs get as well as some arthritis. Now much pain that’s been causing him, it’s difficult to know.
Today I started him on Rimadyl to see if it alleviates arthritic pain. If it works, it’ll cost $80 a month. That’s almost as much as all my medications cost.
I don’t know if it’s just a fluke, but so far, this evening, Herman is lying on couch and unusually quiet.
This post is also an excuse to share some recent pics of the handsome guy…
I saw my nephrologist today, and we decided I’d hold off on dialysis a bit longer. For the benefit of anyone reading this who’s here mostly because of my occasional PKD/kidney disease/dialysis post, my creatinine today was 6.8, which is the “best” it’s been in 3 months. It’s generally been between 7.0 and 7.5 over the past 15 months, since the February 2008 kidney stone. (This translates to roughly 10% kidney function, which means Stage 5 End Stage Renal Disease and time to consider dialysis and transplant).
The intracystic hemorrhaging continues, and it’s got my hematocrit down to 31%, which is contributing to my general feeling of fatigue.
So despite trying to be open to the message that dialysis doesn’t need to be so awesome, and that live can be lived, it’s still not an undertaking to begin unless it’s really a necessity. I don’t know exactly when I cross that line when it will be necessity, but I’m apparently not there yet.
Unfortunately, it feels like life is pretty much work->eat->nap->TV/internet->sleep->wake->work, and I would like to try to extract some more meaning from the day. Working on it. Always working on it, believe it or not. I know I’m always talking like I’m giving it up. That’s part of what’s so frustrating; I’m expending at least a great deal of mental energy trying to pick myself up, and it’s exhausting and deflating when efforts continually leave me spinning my wheels.
Let me end on an unrelated note. Presenting Herman from a couple of nights ago. He was happy for some reason. Maybe he was just enoying Spaceballs, which was playing on TV.
