The Cat Who Gave No F**ks

My post-op mileage was up to about two and a half, which is ridiculous because I’m usually good for about four or six, and then the heat hit. Apparently having big chunks of meat scooped out of you screws up your temperature regulation more than I would have thought, because the heat index seems to be the critical difference between being able to knock out the mileage and me calling the Engineer for a rescue because I’m starting to get a big head and a sense that I’m radiating heat, like a two-bar electric fire.

It’s just frigging HOT out.

I know I’ll make it home without a bailout if I can get the home of the Cat Who Gives No Fucks. He or she (a grey tabby, so gender indeterminate) hangs out in the yard most afternoons, more rarely in the mornings. A couple of hysterical dogs, probably littermates, who look as if there’s some Jack Russell in there, live at the same address and can be heard raising the rafters anytime anyone passes the yard, even if they’re inside the glassed-in porch. They have a dog bed which has been strategically elevated to the level of the window sill and  patrol the yard in all directions, losing their shit in the key of C sharp anytime anyone passes the corner of the chain-link fence. If they’re outdoors, they fling themselves against the wire as if they think they’re Dobermans in a movie and Chuck Norris is about to vault over into the secure installation. It would be cute if it weren’t so noisy.

The cat gives zero fucks.

Seriously, this cat, who typically flops on the walk leading up to the house but has sometimes been seen in a decrepit lawn chair under the one shade tree, has absolutely no reaction to all this canine commotion. The dogs are yelping, the dogs are slamming the fence, the dogs are launching themselves like sugared-up toddlers in a Moon Bounce.

The cat does not move.

My eyes are bad enough now that I sometimes can’t see the cat at first, motionless grey cat in dim shade, and sometimes the Engineer has to point it out. Most times I’m by myself, and I lean on the corner post of the chain fence, enraging the dogs, and take off my mask for a moment like someone who’s just got to stop and breathe, but I’m really only looking for the cat. There is something about that cat’s preternatural calm that I envy and wish to be granted. Maybe it can share.

I probably will never find out its name. In my mind the cat is Zerofux, after a great Merovingian war leader.

Last week I actually spotted the cat outside the yard — it looks like it has a few years on it — slinking under the porch next door, the only shade worth mentioning on the block at the hour. Cats are famously indifferent to extreme heat (I’ve had to pull two back from the brink of heatstroke), but even Zerofux had had it.

It’s not just me. It’s hotter than Hell’s boiler room out there. And I still have a few fucks to give, but they’re going fast.

Not Safe For Work

[If you are easily offended please skip past this. It is TMI, NSFW and WTF.]

So what happened was, we ran out of lube. Around midnight on a Monday. At that point, you’re stuck. Kind of literally.

See, here I am with these hips that were overhauled back in February and were shot to hell and back months before that. Hips with the outrageous, inexplicable, corrosive arthritis that I had are almost impossible to abduct — if they were my jaw. I’d have been on a liquid diet — and, well, you can imagine that some things just do not fucking work.

Like fucking.

It figures, I thought for all those months, depressed and bitter and pouring another hit of cinchona-laced bitters which were the only thing that really took the edge off the pain. I get this great guy and the whole wheelhouse comes to a screeching halt. God hates me.

So getting the chassis repaired meant so much for so many reasons. I can chuck weights around again. I can eat hills again. And, well, does the expression “crazed weasel” mean anything to you? “Demented mink?” (It’s something about the mustelids.) So, the ladies out there will know what I mean, you batter the blossom too hard and too often and the adjacent plumbing finally goes into revolt, and you either feel like you’re peeing wire brads or you actually do pee something that looks like motor oil.

Feature me at the Urgent Care at eleven on Tuesday morning, explaining to the layers of ancillary medical personnel that you have to go through, well I just had both hips replaced in February and everything finally works again and fifteen years younger boyfriend demented mink crazed weasel etc. etc. and I have this bladder infection.

Med tech who has just taken my blood pressure (200/110, in case you want to know what being around doctors can do to someone who can throw a perfectly normal reading at home) looks at my chart, see’s I’m sixty-four, and says almost worshipfully: “I want to be you when I grow up.”

Physician’s Assistant comes in, a nice guy I’ve met before, who turns out to be a former orthopedic PA and is yea interested in the hip story. I drop trou and show him the incisions and quote the surgical report, which I have mostly got off by heart at this point. Devoid of articular cartilage was an especially memorable line. I always enjoy it when people ask wide-eyed Both at once? Like I was going to go through that twice.

I explain the genesis of the current predicament. Too much friction. “If you have Amazon Prime they have a great selection and it’s there overnight,” he says, and writes for an antibiotic. I like this guy.

The tech comes back in to take my pressure again. It’s down to 185 over 100. For once, medical people believe me when I say being in a medical setting makes me orbit. Everything from the asshole ER doctor who had four nurses hold me down to a table by all four limbs when I was a preschooler, to the last gynecologist I saw who began shouting swears at me in the middle of the appointment (I think she had early dementia because she abruptly sold her practice less than a year later). Everyone in between has been just about as bad. They hate people who actually know something about bodies and ask questions, and it always ends up with them yelling and chewing you out and calling you names. Gets pretty goddam old, I can tell you.

I like PAs, on the other hand. They get it.

The tech looks at me reverently again. “I really want to be you when I grow up,” she says.

I think they have been selling tickets to me, HIPAA be damned, because as I leave there’s a sort of congratulatory smile on the faces I pass going out to surrender my copay. For the record, the drugs worked fine.

I didn’t even get a chance to show them my delt shot.

 

Just Leaving This Here

We are now at Day 8 of rehab, if you count the promenades I did around the hospital, and an unfortunate side effect is that I spend way way too much time scrolling through Twitter on my phone, resulting in a barrage of the daily news that is probably socially responsible but goddam exhausting.

This gem, surfed up by the Engineer, encapsulates my state of mind. Impressive upper range, too, even if he needs a little work on containing the tone of the high notes.