There have been some improvements to life since exhaustion/fretfulness.

• The wick has been removed from Edward’s abscess, so now it can heal up, and he says it feels like it is indeed healing. He has had a shower and washed his hair, after a week of not being able to do so. (I would have washed his hair in the sink if there’d been one more delay, but he was very reluctant to have me do that, so I’m glad it didn’t come to that.)

• I called the pediatrician again, deciding I would stay on hold for no more than 15 minutes, and then I would write them a letter saying I could not get through their system and could they please call me at their convenience. But mere seconds after I worked my way through the automated options, someone picked up. It was so fast, I hadn’t even rehearsed what I was going to say, and had to go with “Oh!! Uh!! Hi!!” And now Edward has an appointment for later this week, and it’s nice to know we’ll have a doctor checking the progress of the healing, even though I am twitchy about going into yet another medical building.

• I looked up his antibiotic, the one the doctor gave him three more days’ worth of but at a different dosage, and the CHANGED dosage is the normal full dosage. What he was on before was double the standard dosing. So I felt okay about just letting this one go and giving him the reduced-but-normal dosage for three days, whether or not that’s what the doctor intended. If it had been for a longer period of time, I would have forced myself to call, and I had found a phone number that looked promising as a place to start, which made me feel less flaily and more as if there was something I could do if I needed to.

• Edward’s MRI appointment is over, and it feels good just to have that no longer looming up on the calendar. It felt especially good because it looked like it was going to be THE WORST: he has to drink a bunch of special fluid before the MRI, and he drank a bunch and then barfed it up, and they said they’d take a sample image to see if they could do the MRI anyway, but if not we’d have to reschedule: they weren’t going to let him try again with more fluid. This place is about an hour and a half away and stressful to get to, and thinking of having done all the anticipation and all the worry that we should cancel and all the driving and all the coaxing Edward to drink the nasty fluid, and then have to do it all again another day—well. But then: they COULD get the images anyway! so they did the whole MRI! All the way home, Edward and I were jubilant, way more jubilant than if it had just gone normally without first the pit of potential despair. (We’re also increasingly cranky about the insistence that he drink a FULL LITER of the fluid, when it is OBVIOUS that’s not necessary. This time he drank not even half a liter, then threw most of it up, and they could still get the images.)

• We got an email from the vet, following up on her voice mail from Friday. I didn’t get a voice mail on Friday, but it’s an issue with my phone, not with the vet; Paul is working on it, having discovered because of this that he is having the same issue with his phone. Anyway, it looks like one of the cat’s kidneys has shut down for reasons unknown, and the other is larger because it’s doing the work of two and not because there’s a tumor; the active kidney is infected, but it’s important to get the right antibiotic so we’re waiting on the results of the urine culture. In the meantime she has prescribed a comically expensive cat food, and a general dewormer just in case of parasites. We’re going to try the antibiotics and the prescription food, then she’ll see him again in two weeks; if he hasn’t gained weight, we’ll decide what the next step might be. Things are still uncertain (neither the vet nor the ultrasound technician think that what they’ve found so far is enough to explain his weight loss), but I’d been thinking there was a strong chance that after Friday’s appointment we’d be making the hard choice to put the cat down, so this reprieve is welcome. And it also felt good to know the vet didn’t forget us: it was our own fault we were left hanging, not hers.

• Paul has found ways he can track both the electric meter and the water meter online, so he can SEE us, for example, pre-heating the oven or taking a shower or whatever. He has already tracked down two fixable issues.

• In doing the blog project where I update the links and photos that broke during the move from Blogspot to WordPress, I accidentally discovered another blog that was posting my posts, as-is, as if the posts were their own, with my photos and everything. I went through the reporting process, but it did not fill me with confidence (for example, it asked me to provide the URL of every single stolen post, but there were hundreds, so I just gave a sample of four or five posts plus an explanation, but then the form wouldn’t submit because the explanation was not in URL format), and also I was worried because all the stolen posts were from when my blog was on Blogspot, so I thought that might muddy the waters if the “proof” I was giving showed the posts on WordPress instead—but I learned today that that other blog HAS been deleted.

• I saw a story online about a family who has lost several members to Covid-19, and, along with having some things on my list resolve and others improve and others removed altogether, it helped reset my perspective. That isn’t something someone else can point out to me (is there anything more annoying and less effective than being reminded that you are not literally the worst-off person in the entire world?), but it’s something that can help if I tell it to myself. My whole extended family is still well; no one is sick, no one has died. (As long as I don’t start thinking “Yeah, but this streak can’t last.”)

• But new fret: it looks like we might have to make decisions soon about things such as “Do we let our college kids go back to in-person college, or….or what? Drop out? Take a year off? Would they be allowed back at the college if they did take a year off? What are the options here? Who gets to make the decision, us or them or a combination? If they DO go…can they come back home, and if so, how?” I’m trying to wait until the choice is actually upon us, since plans keep changing and a lot can happen between now and then, so we don’t even know what our choices ARE yet—but on the other hand, this is now something that will have to happen NEXT MONTH, which sounds pretty soon.

We normally go through Archer Farms Monster trail mix at a pretty steady rate, and I’ve been continuing to order it from Target during the pandemic—but in the last few weeks it hasn’t been available for shipping. We tried a few other trail mixes, but no one liked them as much. It occurred to me that I could easily make my own Monster trail mix (I even have an empty Monster trail mix bin I could mix it in), since all the ingredients are easy to buy separately; but I felt like I wanted the guidance of knowing what the original proportions were, rather than winging it. I WAS able to buy it in a smaller, more-expensive-per-ounce bag of it, and I put it aside as a little project for another day. TODAY WAS THE DAY.

I assembled my equipment: a kitchen scale, pen and paper, the bag of trail mix, a paper towel, five little bowls. Did it bother me that two of the bowls were the same color, especially when I own two additional colors of that bowl (pink and yellow)? Yes, but I was not going to lose momentum by waiting for the dishwasher to finish. Plus, then I would have had trouble choosing which five colors of the six I should use. In some ways this was easier: the type of discontent was predestined. A person could PRETEND there were only four colors, and that this was merely a matter of the pattern repeating.

I separated out the ingredients. Left to right: peanuts, mini M&Ms, raisins, chocolate chips, peanut butter chips. (If this task appeals to you, may I recommend a job as a library page?) I had to dump the contents of one bowl back out onto the paper towel so I could tare the scale to the weight of an empty bowl (I could have used a sixth bowl for that, and could have had it in the photo and everything, now I’m bothered again about the bowl colors) (also it bothers me that I put the two darkest things in the darkest bowls, though I don’t regret using the orange bowls for the peanut-related things; but I could have at least put the raisins in green and the M&Ms in purple, well BYGONES). I weighed the five bowls and wrote down the results. I resisted the temptation to ROUND the results, even in cases where HEAVEN ITSELF cried out for rounding (e.g., 101 grams of peanuts, 99 grams of raisins, ARE THEY DELIBERATELY TAUNTING SCIENCE??). I thought back to my biology teacher, who had to tell me to stop tweaking my labs to Look Right and to instead put down THE NUMBERS I ACTUALLY GOT.

My plan was to take little pieces of paper I’d written the weights on, and tuck them into their respective bowls to make a pretty and effective visual aid. As I was stacking the empty bowls, having dumped their contents into the bin and mixed them thoroughly back together, I remembered that that was the plan.

See, I left more room on the bottom half, for tucking into the bowls. Anyway! Here are the numbers, according to this one sample bag! (I am going to order at least one more bag for a double-check; I have to order the unsalted peanuts anyway.)

• unsalted peanuts: 3.6 ounces / 101 grams
• mini M&M’s: 2.7 ounces / 77 grams
• raisins: 3.5 ounces / 99 grams
• chocolate chips (I’m pretty sure milk chocolate): 2.5 ounces / 69 grams
• peanut butter chips: 2.0 ounces / 56 grams

I am going to order the things I don’t have, or get them on my next grocery-shopping trip, and then scale the whole thing up to fit the 36-ounce bin. Also I am going to make the peanuts and raisins the EXACT SAME WEIGHT, and I’m going to make the M&M’s and chocolate chips match each other, too, and I’m going to ROUND TO MY HEART’S CONTENT. If I’m doing this math right, with my adjustments it would be something like:

• unsalted peanuts: 9.25 ounces / 260 grams
• mini M&M’s: 6.5 ounces / 175 grams
• raisins: 9.25 ounces / 260 grams
• chocolate chips: 6.5 ounces / 175 grams
• peanut butter chips: 5 ounces / 140 grams

That comes to 36.5 ounces. But actually, I might want to scale the whole thing down even smaller, like to 30 ounces, because I need room in the bin to shake it all together to mix it, anyway. And also I want to remember to compare the price of making my own versus buying it already made. Well, those will be problems for another day.

[Figuring Out the Proportion of Ingredients in Archer Farms Monster Trail Mix: DO-OVER!]

This post has a fair amount of medical stuff in it, if you’d rather not.

At the very end of last week, Edward developed an infection that, after Urgent Care evaluated it and sent us on to the Emergency Room for a CAT scan, turned out to be an abscess that needed draining. It was a brutal process. He was shouting and crying while pitifully apologizing for doing so. There was a scalpel, there was rinsing out, and then there was putting gauze into the wound, leaving a little tail of it out to keep the incision from healing in case there was more draining. He was given IV antibiotics, and a prescription for a week of oral antibiotics.

So already that would have been a tiring day, emotionally and physically. But doing it during a pandemic, going to two separate medical facilities, breathing and talking through masks, being close to health care workers, breathing that air for hours, worrying that handling this medical situation would result in a more dire medical situation—even more stressful.

And then he had to go BACK to Urgent Care a few days later, to have the wound checked. The hope was that at that point the gauze could be removed and a bandage could be put on and it could be over—but it was not quite done, so the gauze was taken out of the open wound, and fresh gauze was put in, and there was more crying.

And we have to go back to Urgent Care AGAIN, today or tomorrow, and they might finally take out the gauze and let the wound heal, or we might do another cycle of gauze/check, or the doctor might find the abscess was not fully removed and there will have to be another incision and more rinsing and more gauze. Back to the medical center again and again and again; contact with health care workers again and again and again. During a pandemic.

He hasn’t been able to shower since Saturday; he’s always in a certain amount of pain from having the wound still open; he’s grossed out by having it still open; he can’t comfortably move around; he feels grim and grubby, and he’s dreading each next step, and it makes it worse not to know how many more steps there are. He’s lost several pounds, and he can’t afford to lose any. I’m fretful and exhausted, and worrying about the next steps too, and worrying that one or both of us will be exposed to Covid-19 during all of this. I’m also worried because he was due to get his Remicade infusion this week, but it’s had to be postponed to next week.

Meanwhile, one of our cats, the one with big paws, has gone from his usual weight of 11-12 pounds (he’s a large-framed cat) to 7 pounds 12 ounces at his appointment this week; we called for the appointment two weeks earlier when he was down to 9 pounds, but they have limited staffing because of the pandemic, and this week was the earliest they could see him.

They did blood work, urine tests, and x-rays. They found a bunch of things, but nothing yet that explains the weight loss. He’ll have an ultrasound tomorrow to see what the deal is with his mismatched kidneys. It would be pretty good news to find that they’re differently-sized because one of them has shut down. (The bad news would be to find out one of them is bigger because of a tumor.) But his bloodwork isn’t showing the serious news the vet said she’d expect to see. (I’m worried this means it’s more likely to be cancer.)

The three times I’ve had a cat with a major medical issue, each time the cat was 16 years old when we heard the diagnosis, and 16 years is a pretty nice full life for a cat, and so each time I’ve had them put down rather than pursuing expensive treatment. But this cat is only 9 years old, and the dear favorite of Elizabeth, who calls him her son. And you know how when you get a larger tax refund than you were expecting, you try to guess whether your car will need an expensive repair or whether a major appliance will go? This time our cat broke.

Again: so much more exhausting to handle during a pandemic. There are the different procedures at the vet’s office (calling from the parking lot, speaking to a vet tech over the phone, then leaving the cat carrier in the breezeway), and it means talking to the vet over the phone rather than in her reassuring presence. (I’m GLAD they’re doing this, but it still makes it more stressful.) And they may want to show me how to give the cat subcutaneous fluids, which I am very willing to learn how to do, but it’s stressful to need to go inside and have someone show me (though easier knowing they’ve been keeping people out of the building as much as possible).

Today I went to the grocery store, and I made two trips into the store because I wanted to get in there before the Fourth of July weekend and then not have to go for awhile. Considering all the posts I saw about Memorial Day get-togethers and Father’s Day get-togethers, I think it’s likely there will be a ton of Fourth of July get-togethers, and I don’t want to have to shop at all in the days between the time people are exposed and the time they start to show symptoms.

But we still have to go to Edward’s Remicade appointment and MRI appointment next week. My hope is that we will be done with those appointments before all the people start arriving at those medical centers from Fourth of July exposures—and that none of the doctors and nurses and technicians we see are people who went to a Fourth of July get-together.

I come from a Mike Pence-y kind of Christian background, the kind where it is understood that the apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Thessalonians about “avoiding the appearance of evil” in order to explain why teenage girls can’t have platonic male friends in their rooms and adult men shouldn’t be alone with their female co-workers. So I was a little worried when I wrote the Emails with an Ex post that some of the lingering effects of such an upbringing might be seeping through, and that I might come across as wayyyyyyy overthinking a situation that most people would be way less unnecessarily hand-wringy about. But I needn’t have worried!

If you remember, the two options were: (1) maybe not respond to the news about his not-doing-well marriage yet, and just respond to everything else for now, or (2) respond to it, but make it neutral and unencouraging and something his wife could definitely read. But some commenters went for the exciting and not-on-the-table Option Three, which looked something like:

Swistle’s Ex-Boyfriend, writing the way he has once or twice a year for decades: *news about Kid 1, and a request for my input on that kid’s relationship with a kid from a strict Christian family like he remembers mine was; news about Kid 2 and a photo of that kid in a sport uniform; general chatting about how the pandemic has affected their city and their household, and a mention of how he might coincidentally be moving soon to a different, safer city, because his marriage isn’t going well; an update on a health issue he told me about last time, plus news about a new health issue; update on his job; casual, normal sign-off*

Swistle: “NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN.” *blocks him on Facebook, filters his email address to trash, never explains why, lets him wonder forever what terrible misunderstanding occurred*

My goodness, how thrilling! I can think of no better way to take a slightly delicate situation and turn it into a totally unnecessary GIANT DRAMA FIREBALL. So…I mean, obviously I’m not doing that! Clearly there was some miscommunication involved, perhaps combined with misunderstanding (Paul ((not the apostle Paul but my own Paul)) wondered if this is the kind of thing where it’s nearly impossible for empathetic people not to picture THEMSELVES and their OWN exes, instead of the actual people involved), perhaps combined with some of the same type of upbringing I grew up with—but this is not a threatening, weird relationship with someone who is smoldering with feelings for me. If he DOES have any lingering feelings, he has long since stopped expressing them to me, at which point they became Not My Business, which is as it should be. If he WERE to someday cross a line to the point where I needed to end the friendship, I would certainly explain WHY before throwing a smoke bomb and vanishing forever!

Back when neither of us were married, when we were so young our frontal lobes hadn’t even finished developing, he was indeed rather persistent about thinking/saying that we should get back together: our break-up was his fault, and when he went on to date other people, he found he very much regretted his choices—but by then I had gotten over him and felt nothing but relief to be just friends. Even at his most persistent, I didn’t feel threatened or in peril of any sort, emotional or otherwise; it was just kind of exasperating and pitiful, that’s all. After I was brutally direct and clear with him about exactly how zero our chances were of getting back together, he thanked me for it, and said he hadn’t been able to move on while thinking there was still hope, but now he could. And then he did.

He does still say little things from time to time, nothing that would have to be a line-crossing thing between every set of old exes—but he is as I’ve mentioned a little bit dumb, and also he’s the kind of guy who likes truly sappy romantic movies/songs (the movie Somewhere in Time with Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve; any Mariah Carey song), and talk-show episodes about high school sweethearts who reunite in a nursing home after being widowed, and news stores about couples married 70 years who die within a few minutes of each other—so I just like to make sure I don’t give him any fodder for that mill, that’s all. Plus, I like to make sure I justify his wife’s trust, and of course Paul’s trust, so that everyone feels comfortable with this friendship I enjoy having as part of my life.

There seemed to be some concern that any trouble with his marriage meant I was in some sort of new, fresh danger: that he would now suddenly escalate things, or that he would want to lean on me during the divorce, or that he would have feelings/expectations. I am not sure I can adequately express how calm and unstressed I feel about being able to handle any of those things if they did happen. Just for example, let’s say he wanted me to give him tons of attention and support during his divorce. Doing that doesn’t appeal to me at all, and I don’t feel any obligation or pressure to do that, and I don’t feel any stress about the idea of saying so to him. (Note: but he has not asked for that, and he hasn’t escalated contact.) Or let’s say he started suddenly pressuring me to leave my long marriage and be with him, now that he was free: doing that doesn’t appeal to me at all, and hearing it wouldn’t please me, and I feel no stress at the idea of telling him to stop being stupid, and I feel fully capable of figuring out what to do next if he DIDN’T stop being stupid. (Note: but he has not said anything of the sort, and he did not give the news in an even remotely flirty or inappropriate or hopeful way.) Going to DEFCON 2 because of the possibility that he MIGHT do some of these things feels like perhaps this pandemic has us all in a heightened state of emotions right now.

ANYWAY. If you want an update, what I DID do was write back to him saying I was sorry to hear he and his wife were struggling, and that I hoped things would work out for the best. I included that in a whole normal email with updates about my kids, and general chatting about how the pandemic has affected our city and my household, and an update about my job, and an update about a health situation, and a response about his kid’s issue dating a strict Christian.

Well. Maybe let’s talk about something else now, maybe not about exes! Actually, no: let’s still talk about exes. I would like to hear LOTS OF STORIES from other people who have a nice, friendly, non-fraught relationship with an ex! It can be your own story, or a story about someone you know. It seems like we could stand a little more normalizing of that sort of thing.

Edward was throwing up in the night, and first of all I would like to say how lovely it is to be at the stage of life where that is something I generally find out about in the morning, rather than having to clean barf out of carpeting and out from between crib railings and out of a child’s hair at 2:00 in the morning. Barf laundry is some of the worst laundry.

But illness is still concerning. The symptoms don’t make me worry about Covid-19, but I do wonder how he would have caught ANY illness considering he’s been nowhere and seen no one. A quick look at my CONTACT CALENDAR tells me that our most recent contact was the guy who came to give an estimate on a replacement water heater; he was here for several minutes on Friday, but he wore a mask and Paul reported that the worker pointedly didn’t touch anything, waited for Paul to open the basement door and so forth. Paul went into his office the day before that, but saw almost no one, and everyone is wearing masks and trying to keep it at one person per room, and his office has one of those machines that atomizes (is that the science verb I want here?) disinfectant and sprays it nightly, after the cleaners go through and do the newly-intensive pandemic cleaning. And none of the rest of us have been sick, and we can’t think of anything Edward ate that none of the rest of us ate, so I feel like we’re gradually ruling out food poisoning and stomach viruses, or at least putting them lower on the suspicion list at this point.

Since the symptoms are digestive, and since so far only Edward has them, that makes me suspect something to do with his Crohn’s disease. I further suspect that this is because of relative inactivity: he used to walk to and from school each day, plus walk around the school building at points throughout the day, plus have gym class—and now he’s mostly in a nest on the couch with a book or his phone. He is the Indoors Type, and that is a fine and worthy type to be, we don’t all have to be hearty and outdoorsy and covered in ticks/sunburn—but physical activity seems particularly useful for digestive health, and so I think I am going to have to work harder to make sure he is doing more of it. He can do indoorsy versions, such as Dance Dance Revolution or whatever.

In the meantime, I am glad we keep cans of ginger ale and Coke on hand for just this sort of sudden issue (I’ve found the little bottles eventually lose fizz if they sit too long before being needed, but the cans don’t seem to), and that we have saltines and applesauce, and we have bread for toast. He is…well, he is in a nest on the couch, but when he feels a little better we will start wheeling him out into the sunshine, or whatever used to be done with Edwardian invalids. (That was an unintentional play on words with his name. I searched lightly online to see why I associate the Edwardian period with invalids being pale and covered in blankets and reading books on the couch and being wheeled into the sunshine, and I still don’t know. Perhaps it is just a time period when the word “invalid” was being used. Or perhaps there was a pandemic near that time that left many people chronically ill.)

The nature of this pandemic/virus means that many of the things we can do to reduce/slow its spread are things we do for the benefit of other people, and we have to hope that other people will also do those things for us. Mask-wearing is the clearest example of this: we wear masks to reduce the harm we might do to others, and we have to hope others will return the favor by wearing masks to reduce the harm they might do to us. If we are all willing to do something that benefits others, we all end up benefiting our own selves—a beautiful, almost fairy-tale example of the theoretical natural consequence of following the golden rule.

Other choices are less obvious than masks, but similarly expose people other than ourselves to more/less risk. It’s not possible to increase or decrease only our own risk: we are deciding for ourselves and also for everyone else we come into contact with: servers, clerks, stylists, caregivers, other customers/participants, friends, family, co-workers, healthcare workers, fellow patients, people we live with or visit or take care of—and also all the people THOSE people come into contact with. And all of those people are making decisions for themselves that in turn affect us.

This is why, if you’re not already writing down where you go, and when (day and approximate time), and who you have contact with (servers, friends, family, etc.), I strongly recommend starting. It’s another thing we can do that benefits others and also ends up benefiting ourselves. If we ourselves get sick, we have a nice clear record for the contact tracer, so they can see who they need to get in touch with to let them know they’ve been exposed, which can be crucial and time-/life-saving information. If someone we know gets sick, or a place we visited is traced as the center of an outbreak, we have at least the start of the information we need to help us determine if we’re likely to have been exposed. If contract tracers turn out to be part of the sensible plans made by scientists and health professionals, but not by the U.S. government, then we are doing what we can to handle it ourselves. And we save ourselves the stressy and inaccurate scramble of trying to recreate our schedule after the fact, possibly while feeling sick.