Getting things done

It was one hundred degrees today and I feel like a new person. The ear hissing is still digging into my skull every twenty seconds but I don't care. It feels so great to be warm. Like a cold-blooded lizard, I'm reveling in the heat. I was born to die in the desert. Someday maybe I'll get my wish. Meanwhile, here in Portland, if the city doesn't burn down first, we'll have a few days of heat, and being warm always makes me feel like getting things done.

To that end, tonight I ambitiously embarked on a new project: making a new face mask. The two masks I made back in March from old plaid cotton pajamas are holding up well, but I feel so . . . what's the opposite of possessing style and panache? That. You know, like, oh, plaid? That's so early curve. I really want one of those jet black masks that suck all the light from the room. Besides, a 2020 accessory wardrobe really should rock a selection of stylish face coverings. So I got busy.

I pawed through my box of old fabric scraps and found some black cotton knit containing liberal spandex . . . just the thing to cling but still let in a little air. I held two layers up to the light. No light seeped through. Perfect! I found the pattern my sister sent me a couple months ago. I arranged and pinned, snipped and clipped and sat down on Grandma's old sewing chair to start sewing.

If you've ever sewn on something stretchy with a twenty-year-old plastic Singer that cost $79.99 new, you know that it's all about pushing and pulling at the right moment to coax the weak tired machine over the lumps. The cool thing about this stretchy jersey is if you cut long strips, the strips automatically roll into skinny tubes that make perfect ear loops or ties. First I sewed the mask pieces together. Then along the top edge I inserted one of those wire gizmos that close the top of coffee bags. You can shape them to fit the bridge of your nose! How cool is that. To really put paid to the whole thing, I sewed it in purple thread. 

I used to be a professional seamstress in one of my former lives, no lie, but you wouldn't know it by what came out of my machine tonight. Jet black it was, there's that. Can't deny it. The purple thread looked ridiculous but when have I cared how I looked? I stopped caring when I turned fifty, which was a long time ago. The cotton knit was thick and bulky but the nose piece really held its shape. I took the mask to the mirror for the fitting.

I took off my glasses and looped the loops over my ears. I stared at my reflection. Something didn't seem quite right. The thing seemed to droop. I couldn't keep the loops around my ears. My ears seemed to be bending forward. Were the loops too big? Too stretchy? It seemed to me that the arch over the bridge of my nose was too high, which made the ear loops positioned too low. I folded over the top edge of the mask, making it four times as bulky and peered over the top of it into the mirror. Better, but still not quite right. 

I fussed in front of the mirror, tugging and pulling, huffing and puffing, and finally figured out what was wrong (besides the fact that I was hyperventilating because the fabric was too tightly knitted to make a good mask): My ears were simply too high. It's my damn ears. They are like elf ears without the points. When did that happen? 

Apparently my ears sit too high on my head, compared to my eyes. If I looped the mask over my ears, my eyes were covered. (This would not be an ideal mask design. We all know it is hard to drive without being able to see—hard, but not impossible.) On the other hand, could it be my nose? I don't know. I do have quite a large nose. Maybe if my nose were smaller, the mask wouldn't need such a pronounced arch. My ears are Lilliputian compared to my proboscis. I'm feeling out of balance. 

It's so embarrassing that my sewing skills are so rusty. I used to sew clothes for a living. No kidding. I really did know how to sew once. I never really enjoyed it, well, let me be honest: I have despised sewing since I learned at age nine in 4-H. Still, you'd think I could figure out how to make a workable face mask. 

In my defense, I do have some challenges. The vertigo and ear hissing are distracting, but I hope that will someday resolve. In addition, now that I'm well north of sixty, I can't see up close, with or without my glasses (hence the purple thread). On the bright side, my fingers still work okay, especially when it's ninety in the Love Shack. But now my darn ears have migrated upward. I really can't imagine how that happened. 

Speaking of getting things done, tomorrow is my mother's ninety-first birthday. I'm ready. I plan to hang some colorful balloons outside her window while she is in the dining room eating dinner. If I can find something chocolate and gluten-free that resembles a cupcake, I will put a candle on it and ask the nursing home staff to present it to Mom as she finishes her dinner. Whether they light the candle will be up to them. I have already notified the owner of the facility that I will be parading outside the dining room holding a Happy Birthday Mom sign. I think I can figure out how to attach some balloons to my straw hat. I'm guessing I'll do a little dancing. Maybe the other residents will think I'm a clown or something. If I can make them smile, that would be great, even if they think I'm a nut. I can think of worse things.

The chronic malcontent butchers the scientific method

Howdy, blogbots. How are you holding up in this bizarre war of masked versus unmasked? Have you figured out which team you are on or what exactly we are fighting for? In light of everything plaguing human civilization, including this new plague, politicizing facial coverings sure seems like rearranging deck chairs. I can't assimilate any of the strife so I'm opting out for a while. My sister sent me an excellent video of fluffy white sheep grazing in a green vineyard under a blue sky. Have you seen it? I recommend it if you are feeling like committing murder. 

Speaking of wishing you were anywhere but here, I'm sure you are tired of hearing me whine about vertigo and ear crackling. Yep, still going on. I've had no luck treating the vertigo, even after carefully studying the mechanics of the inner ear. Just goes to prove the old adage, knowledge avails us nothing. You'd think I'd have everything figured out, considering my lofty education level. Inner ears are complicated mechanisms, and my "knowledge" is in the social sciences, not the medical sciences, which explains so much about me. Including how I've haphazardly applied the scientific method in my attempts to treat my malady.

You've already read about the many treatments I've tried, most gleaned from those helpful folks out in cyberspace, thank you, all you BPPV and ear crackling sufferers. Sadly, the only thing that reliably produces silence is immersing my head in hot water. The golden silence gained from tubbing lasts a good fifteen minutes. Not quite long enough to get to sleep but certainly better than zero. I've tried without success to replicate the conditions outside the tub by pouring hot water into my ear while leaning over the kitchen sink. I get wet but the hiss goes on. I admit, I've considered hot oil and hot wax, but I'm pretty sure that would lead to a sheepish trip to the ER, which is not where we want to be at this point in the burgeoning plague. 

Ever hopeful, I've been trying other things willy-nilly without keeping good records, so I can't really tell what might be working. For example, someone on the Internet suggested chewing gum. I went to the store to buy gum. Gum is an impulse item, found near the cash register. Who knew! Generally I ignore everything that is not related to arranging my groceries on the conveyor belt according to how I want the items to appear on my receipt. It's easier to do my record-keeping that way—the zucchini and broccoli aren't disrupted by the toothpaste and coffee filters. Nice and organized, you should try it. 

Anyway, so there I am actually forcing myself to look at the impulse items. I have no idea what I'm looking at. I see something that looks like it could be bubble gum. I don't care, I grab it and toss it on the belt. When I get home, I'm sort of excited to see what it feels like to chew gum. I haven't chewed gum in years. What a miracle it would be if chewing gum was all it took to open up my dysfunctional Eustachian tube. I opened the package and discovered what I had purchased was some sort of chewy candy. I sucked on it, disappointed, peering at the package. Two hundred and forty calories! Per piece! I spat it out in the trash and chucked the package after it. 

I refused to admit defeat. On my next weekly foray into the dangerous grocery store, masked and gloved as usual, I applied myself again to the challenge of identifying gum at the checkout line. I found some! Sugar-free, this time, spearmint flavored. That sounded good. I bought the economically priced jumbo pack, feeling rather pleased. When I got home, I peeled off the plastic, unwrapped the silver foil covering, and popped a stick into my mouth. Yum, spearmint. Weird, though, to be chewing on something that wasn't intended to be swallowed. Still, I'm not a quitter, so I chomped diligently on the wad, monitoring my ear to see if it seemed inclined to settle down.

Like a mail-in election, results were not immediately forthcoming. I tried again with another stick. Then I had lunch. About an hour before it was time to visit Mom at the nursing home, I started feeling some alarming pains in my gut. Things clenched and unclenched, as they are wont to do, I won't give you the sordid details, but I was pretty miserable standing outside my mother's window, clenching my butt cheeks while she was in her bathroom trying to unclench hers. (I am sure I have never written the word clench so many times in my life.) As I danced in agony on the pavement, I called the Med Aide on my cellphone to send help to Mom stuck in her bathroom. She got help, and ten minutes later, she collapsed exhausted on her couch. I made it home, and after another trip to my bathroom, I looked up xylitol on the Internet. I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that xylitol can cause digestive distress among some subset of the population. It's like winning the reverse lottery. 

No more gum for me. 

My sister suggested maybe I needed a dose of negative ions. I remembered that my therapeutic light box emits negative ions (according to the manufacturer), so I plugged in the box and pressed the button. The green light came on and a slightly acidic smell wafted toward my nose. Is that how a negative ion smells?  How would you know if you were receiving a dose of negative ions? I'm asking out of curiosity. I can't imagine I'd be able to differentiate a negative ion from a coronavirus, could you?

I also heard that spices can open up sinus congestion. Ears, sinuses, Eustachian tubes . . . now I really get why those Ear Nose Throat doctors cover the territory they do. It's like a miniature version of the universe, all connected. I put some hot red pepper in my tea. That produced a coughing fit, which made tea shoot out my nose. You don't see that everyday. I hope the next time I get an ear infection, I remember to reread this blog post. I'm sure I will forget.

Well, I give up. This afternoon I sit in the dark cave surrounded by votive candles lit to honor St. Eustachian, the patron saint of crackling ears. The blinds are drawn against the heat of the day. Summer is here, more or less. It's 90°F today. We'll have a few days of heat, and I hope that will help my head stop swimming. Maybe the heat will burn out the ear infection as well. If the heat doesn't work, my last resort is telemedicine. You know what that is, right? Some kind of newfangled way to talk to a healthcare professional. Stay tuned. 

Almost time to roll credits

Near the end of most romantic comedies, a moment arrives that lets you know a change has occurred. The hero has been driving all night. The montage of headlights, dotted lines, and highway signs flows into a calm sunrise to represent the hero emerging from the dark night of the soul into a new day, transformed somehow, usually by grief or remorse or chagrin. The hero realizes the answer was love all along, or moving home, or apologizing, or singing outside someone's window holding a boombox. The music swells—usually violins—as the hero crests the hill or lands at the airport or whatever and sees the ocean, or the city, or the house, or the love object. When that moment comes, you know credits will soon be rolling up your screen and you can head for the bathroom.

Lately I'm hearing that music when I drive home from my mother's nursing home. I used to call it her retirement home—an unsettling euphemism for a warehouse where old people are sent to die. Now I call it the nursing home, because as she slides deeper into dementia, she's clearly way past the retirement phase of her stay there and there's no use pretending she's going to suddenly start knitting again or playing bingo with the other old ladies.

The music isn't anything specific, usually. Usually Marketplace is on when I get into my car and turn on the radio. It's not like my drive has changed. The restaurants with their optimistic welcome back, we missed you signs look pretty much the same every day, rain or shine. A smattering of cars in their parking lots, a few aggressive drivers on the road, and the sun setting in my eyes over the mountain I live on. Same destination, nothing fancy, nothing new, just my kitchen and my computer and the bad news about the corona virus. It's more of a feeling that a change is coming. 

I visit my mother's window every evening like a hopeful peeping Tom, peering through the screen with the sun reflecting in my eyes. What I hope to see is my mother just arriving from dinner, still alert enough to visit for sixty seconds at the window before she sinks limply on the couch. Earlier this week the nurse called to say they were going to let her take her meals in the dining room. Mom wasn't into eating her meals all alone from a tray in her room. Losing weight, headed south, yada yada. The past couple days she's been more alert. If I time my visit right, I can catch her before she fades.

Yesterday I was too late and she'd already settled into the black hole. I thumbed the button on the parental baby monitor unit and said softly, "Hello Sleeping Beauty, are you awake?" 

She opened her eyes and looked at me. I moved from the screen to look through the glass and pulled my mask down so she could see my face. She gave me a childlike grin and waved. 

"Hey, Ma," I said, waving. "It's me at your window again."

She gazed at me, smiling. After a long moment, her voice came through the monitor in my hand: "There's my Carol." 

"How ya doin', Ma?" I asked, hands cupped around my eyes, trying to see through the reflection. 

"Not too bad," she said as her eyes were closing.

"Okay, I'll let you sleep," I said. "I'll see you tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow . . ." 

"Tomorrow, tomorrow," she sang back, and opened her eyes to give me our version of the high-five—the peace sign. I returned it and leaned over the waist-high bush to put my nose on the glass. I can't quite lean far enough to kiss it, and you know, cooties. I try not to think about all the bitty spiders that are jumping from the bush to the front of my jacket.

"Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll love ya, tomorrow," I sang, off key of course, because I can't sing very well. Who cares, not me, I never see any other family members out there peering in their loved ones' windows doing their best to keep them alive by sheer force of willpower. I'm alone except for the occasional dive-bombing crested blue jay guarding a nest I suspect is in the gutter overhead. I wave goodbye, pull up my mask, and head back to my car.

She's pulling away, she's receding from me. It tears me up but I'm doing my best to be there for her. I read that our hearing is the last of our senses to leave us when we are dying. I hope that I'll be with my mother when she leaves. If I am, no matter who is listening, even if I'm bundled head to toe in PPE, I'll be singing the Happy Wanderer into her hearing aid as she goes over the crest of the hill. Roll credits, but not yet, not quite yet.

The Chronic Malcontent waits for summer

Two weeks after spending an afternoon in the ER, the maternal parental unit came out of quarantine and joined her fellow inmates in the dining room for the first time in three months. Earlier in the day, the nurse called me to tell me they were changing Mom's care plan to allow her to take her meals with other people. Mom hasn't been eating well in her room. She'd just as soon sleep as eat. Consequently she has been losing weight. 

I wasn't there to see her triumphant entrance to the dining room. I could have peered in the window but I didn't want to scare anyone. I assume all social distancing protocols were followed. When I visited Mom at her window after dinner, parental baby monitor to my ear, she said it was nice to go to the dining room but she still couldn't talk to anyone. I can only imagine what any conversation might have sounded like. Even on a good day, she doesn't always make sense. Well, who does, really. Nobody is having good days, these days.

Speaking of sense, when it comes to vertigo and ear infection, nothing makes any. I can't figure it out. I thought if I treated the vertigo, the ear rustling would cease. I studied some videos of the ear canals to see where my renegade ocotonia were vacationing. Wow, I know we studied the ear in elementary school but I'd forgotten how complex a structure it is. Amazing. And so tiny. It feels as big as the ocean when waves of vertigo sweep through my head. Who knew such a tiny contraption could reduce me to head-banging.

Three semicircular canals. Remember those? Horizontal, posterior, and anterior. Somewhere in there, maybe in more than one canal, are some wayward ear crystals dancing on nerve endings they were never supposed to see. I'm trying to think of them fondly as little dudes gone astray, enjoying a walking tour without proper permits. I'm not feeling much benevolence. It's very hard not to want to rip them out of my head like the lousy gravel that they are.

YouTube is great. People, especially chiropractors, naturopaths, and physical therapists, are so helpful, if you can endure the interminable ads. I found conflicting remedies but in desperation, I tried them all. The Deephead, the Epley, of course, my traitorous maneuver that never works, and a new one, the Barbecue Roll. I now know where my mastoid bones are, and I know what happens if you use a vibrator on them (temporary clanging bells). 

This is nuts. 

I'm trying to treat the vertigo on the theory that the ear hissing will subside, because the hissing seems to be linked to the vertigo. The hissing is rhythmic but not regular. It's as if someone is tapping you on the shoulder every five to thirty seconds, saying "Hey." More like, "He-e-e-e-e-e-e-y-y-y." For three to five seconds, a really long h-e-e-e-y. Like, hey, don't forget me, here I am, hey.

I'm a doctor's worst nightmare: the self-diagnosing patient. What did we do before WebMD? I think my Eustachian Tube needs a major overhaul. I'm ready to try the Modified Muncie, so you know how far gone I am. That's where you poke your tonsils with a finger to massage the malfunctioning Eustachian Tube opening. I'm also treating the ear infection with Valsalvas, antihistamines, nasal sprays, hot packs, ginger tea (by mouth), nasal rinses (with distilled water so I don't get amoebas in my brain), and ear lavages with alcohol and white vinegar. 

The only time I get relief is when my head is immersed in a hot tub of bathwater. These conditions are difficult to replicate sitting in front of my computer doing Zoom calls. I'm operating under the assumption that heat opens the Eustachian Tube and stops the ear rattling. Therefore, I have a new remedy in the works. It's only in the design stage so don't get too excited. It's called the Fire Turban. I don't have much hair anyway, so if something gets singed, probably my usual black hat will cover it.

I'm holding out for summer, my solution to all my problems. I've always believed summer will cure what ails me, which is why I moved to Los Angeles when I was twenty. You can imagine the rest. Usually summer starts on July 5 in Portland, but this year, summer is late, and according to the forecaster, it doesn't seem to be wafting over the horizon any time soon. Man, I need some high pressure. It's my last resort. If I don't get some relief when summer finally arrives, then I'll give up. I crawl to my doctor (virtually of course, via a telehealth appointment I'm sure will cost me $100) and I'll admit defeat. 

Next weekend is the first class of my five-week series on business tips for artists. Luckily it's on Zoom so I can keep my feet warm with my heated rice-filled foot warmers. I'm a little anxious that I will be distracted by waves of dizziness and relentless hissing in my ear. It will be hard to explain to the class if I suddenly break down weeping. Well, we either survive or we don't. Meanwhile, we are intrepid: We carry on.