This is a snivelling, whiny little rant, but I just gotta vent. Things are kind of fucked at the moment, and instead of railing against the big things I’m going to throw a hissy fit against the small. Maybe it’ll keep me sane. Maybe it’s too late.
So Mrs. Devil, my love and mother to the six-year-old Devilling has pancreatic cancer. We go in tomorrow for her first major scan since diagnosis to find out if the past few months of chemotherapy hell have been worth it.
She’s been in the hospital almost every day for the past week due to chronic malnutrition and dehydration. Finally got a handle on it. We did get to catch a little Phish (her first), but due to hospitalization missed out on a personally golden show: String Cheese Incident and Twiddle at a little place in New York. Anyone whose seen my festival threads or seasonal tour threads knows that music is what we do; it’s our escape. Right before diagnosis we had flown out to Colorado to catch Cheese for our tenth anniversary; we’d caught Twiddle the weekend of her diagnosis.
We even got comped in to the show. It was one of our few chances to take in music. We missed a couple others due to health or tornado watches (though did make it to Dark Star Jubilee). But instead we spent the day in the ER getting fluids, scans, and scares.
In the middle of that, her parents who were here helping take care of the Devilling got crazy sick and had to be hospitalized (nothing like a little added stress). We had no idea if it was contagious, if it was from somewhere here, or what. Just pain, fevers and nausea. Eventual diagnosis that just came about a week later – listeria. Yeah, stress. Wait, it gets better.
Next up, our freakin’ well has gone dry. Not the emotional one, though that’s getting pretty silted, I mean our literal well. Cause of our mysteriously low pressure for a while now was confirmed over the past two days by our plumber and a well specialist. Pump is fine; it’s just not submerged in water anymore. Holy shit we’re out of water.
So we haven’t been to work for the past week between trips to the ER and figuring out the water issue, and now we’re heading into the biggest appointment of our life so far dirty, dishevelled, under-slept and behind in our work. We do development work, so it’s not like we can tell clients who are working to get a single well dug for an entire village that our personal, private well is causing problems and that woe is us, we have to take bottled water showers.
With all this chemo, she’s barely eating and what she can eat has to have been cooked to death. We’ve tried a few beef ideas I asked about here,but as good as some are, there’s nothing like a steak. I really liked the idea suggestion of an immersion sous vide machine, but even though they’re sub-$200, it’s still a rather indulgent expense.
But today is Amazon Prime day! Maybe it’ll be possible. In the lead-up I even askedabout the gadgets. Still expensive and a conceit, but Amazon had a $30 off coupon for purchases over $150.
It expires tonight, so I waited until around nine or so when the house is asleep, work is paused, and I can get some personal things done.
Amazon is no longer honouring the coupon because “fuck you, we’re Amazon.”
Com’on, what’s one more straw?
It’s not that big a deal, really. But when sanity is being held on to by a weak thread, it doesn’t take much, does it? It would have been, you know, something nice. There are still plenty of other nice things, but this was, I don’t know, gadget-nice. It’s amazing how the tiniest of setbacks–temporary setbacks, even–can feel enormous.
Fuck this, I’m going outside to howl at the moon and throw sticks in the air. Can someone do me a favour and shore up this crappy rant with some ill-mannered words at Amazon?
