Day #31 of my Search for a Soulmate

The Wild Honeysuckle

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,

Hid in this silent dull retreat,

Untouch’d thy honey’d blossoms blow,

Unseen thy little branches greet:

No roving foot shall crush thee here,

No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature’s self in white array’d,

She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,

And planted here the guardian shade,

And sent soft waters murmuring by;

Thus quietly thy summer goes,

Thy days declining to repose.

Smit with those charms, that must decay;

I grieve to see your future doom;

They died – nor were those flowers more gay;

The flowers that did in Eden bloom;

Unpitying frosts and Autumn’s power

Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

From morning suns and evening dews

At first thy little being came:

If nothing once, you nothing lose

For when you die you are the same;

The space between is but an hour,

The frail duration of a flower.

Philip Freneau 1752-1832

And here you thought you were going to read a lovely, romanticism-era poem about the beautiful and fragrant honeysuckle!  Don’t you love the way one of America’s earliest poets gets you all bummed out and depressed?  So … American of him.

Saturday the 17^th of December.  I arrive at the Sutton Car repair shop in North Andover  for a DEC 2011 inspection sticker at 9 a.m. in the morning.  This is the place people recommended I switch to after GM screwed up their entire company and sold off the Saturn line, dumping all of the Saturn owners in a pile of offal.  The Sutton Car guys can’t get my horn to work, which means I can’t get an inspection sticker.  I suggest bringing my car back in the week I’m off work (Dec 26th), but noooo, after next week (Dec 19^th) , they’re closed until 2012, and I’m not off work next week!  I freak out. 

Now I have to figure out a way to get my car to the Sutton bozos on Wednesday, get myself to the train station to get to work, and get myself BACK to Sutton at the end of the day.  The Sutton people have already taken so long accomplishing nothing that it’s now noon.  I now can’t get to the bank to get my singles needed for the highway robbery at the MBTA commuter rail parking lot.  I go to CVS only to discover that the endocrinologist has NOT called in a prescription for test strips as she promised, so I now have the meter but very few test strips.  I freak out again.

I finally drive to the grocery store, cursing out the universe.  More Andover Demons have left their shopping carts all over the parking lot.  I’ve lived in quite a few places (New York, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois), and I can honestly say that North Andover, Massachusetts is the absolute worst, as far as being crammed full of narcissistic, fat, lazy women goes.  They weren’t even this bad in Worcester, and Worcester is practically a ghetto.  I have never lived ANYWHERE as bad as North Andover.  People were more polite and considerate in Manhattan and Yonkers, that’s how bad this place is.

Sunday the 18^th of December.  I have now developed a knot on my head, left side, up near my hairline.  There was a small lump there anyway, ever since the accident.  Now it has gotten a lot bigger when I wasn't paying attention to it.  I examine it.  Not an injury – it’s not tender or bruised; not a zit, it’s again not red or tender.  What the [bleep!] is it?  I decide to see if it changes (sinks or swims, as far as head bumps go), and do a post-breakfast blood sugar test.  And completely freak out again.  The number is so high it isn’t even normal for ME.  The number is so high we’re talking imminent death territory.  And this is a Sunday morning - naturally.  My doctor isn’t even alive on Sundays.

I have a choice:  the first option is to take myself to that charming site of infinite waiting and suffering:  Lawrence General Hospital.  I’d be sitting in their emergency waiting room, packed in there with the sneezing, coughing, hacking, stomach-flu vomiting residents of Lawrence and then have to pay them a week’s salary (assuming I was still alive) because Blue Cross/Blue Shield is too cheap to cover the visit.

The second option is to diagnose myself.  I figure I would be marginally better off taking a second shot of insulin than dying in the Lawrence General Hospital waiting room, waiting for 8 hours to be seen.  It’s a 50/50 proposition:  do I want possible death by overmedicating, or certain death in the Lawrence General Hospital waiting room due to being ignored all day?  Their commercials about how great Lawrence General Hospital is are laughable jokes to anyone who has ever been to the place.  A moment’s hesitation, and then I elect Door #2 and shoot myself up again.  I’m only supposed to be getting one shot a day, not two, but I still figure I’m safer injecting myself with an unprescribed second dosage.  I wait a half hour to test my blood again, and unbelievably, the number is still climbing, but very slowly.  Then, fortunately, it starts dropping.

What does a head lump have to do with blood sugar?  I know that my blood sugar levels go up when I’m sick, but I don’t FEEL sick; I just have a lump on my head.  On the other hand, I don’t know why I have a lump on my head.  Correct that.  I know WHY, I just don't know why it has gotten larger.

The Sutton fools finally fix my horn on Wednesday, although to accomplish this I have to pay one of their customers $50 to meet me at Sutton’s at 5 in the morning and then drive me to the train station.  Why not call a cab, you ask?  Sorry, the local “You Call, We Ignore You” Andover cab companies are not known for their reliability, and unlike their cab drivers, I actually have a REAL job.  That night when they pick me up, I’m informed I still don’t have a sticker, because I didn’t renew my registration.  Despite the fact that every other state in the union – or at least the ones I’m familiar with – don’t double-dip drivers, Massachusetts does NOT combine the registration with the inspection, makes you pay twice, AND never notifies you when your registration is due.

I spend a huge amount of energy trying not to scream out loud and am on the verge of doing a Charles Whitman and … well, I would have told you what I was thinking of doing, but I now know that the USA is no longer a free country, but The Police And Homeland Security Dominated States of America, and its repressed citizens can no longer say things out loud, or even think them.  The OWS movement has proven that you also can’t protest, or the police will club you to death, while conservatives cheer them on because our corporate owned media has told them that the entire OWS movement is filled with homeless bums and drug addicts even though everyone with a brain else knows they’re not.  But then any country filled with people so stupid they don’t recognize a constitutional right being ripped to shreds right before their eyes, or who buy our media conglomerates’ version of anything deserves to go down in flames.

Back to my car which still has no sticker, in a state where the psychotic North Andover police think the Egyptian military was within their rights to drag a defenseless woman through the streets kicking her unconscious, because they would think nothing of doing the same thing to a woman who didn’t get her car stickered on time in Massachusetts.  Grinding my teeth in rage, I renew my registration online – from work, by the way, because the Mass DMV is unaware that people have REAL jobs, and their website is only open during business hours, proving once again that Massachusetts is the most stupid and most corrupt state in the Union, after Arkansas.

I drive it to Sutton’s after work on Friday the 23^rd, two days before Christmas.  NOW they can’t sticker it for some completely unintelligible reason – something about:  I had to put more miles on the car to get the ‘black box’ in the car to record the correct information to feed it to the inspection machine.  I’m going “WHAT???”  I’ve had the car pass inspection in New York and Michigan and even once in Massachusetts and NEVER was hit with that story.  They tell me to drive it on a freeway to put more miles on the car.  I’m screaming, “I CAN’T FEEL MY FEET AND YOU WANT ME TO DRIVE ON A FREEWAY???”

Now I’m thinking of going postal on Sutton, while trying not to cry in rage and frustration.

So now they change their story.  They actually ARE going to work the week I’m off (after telling me they weren’t returning to work until 2012 a few days earlier).  I had already decided NOT to take that week off due to the huge volume of doctor’s appointments I had coming up in January.   I have to go make a copy of my car key at Ace and leave it in their dropbox, and then THEY would drive it on the freeway to be able to sticker it.

Keep in mind that the next day, Saturday, was the day before Christmas, which was packed to the gills with things I already had to get done OR ELSE.  Most of them were things I HAD to do the previous Saturday before noon, but had to cancel because Sutton kept me waiting in their shop until noon a week earlier, unable to fix the horn. 

I know what the roads are going to be like, jammed with road-raged assholes who decided to wait until the “day before” to do all their shopping.  To get to the bank and then to Ace and then to the Sutton drop box, I now had to cancel the fasting blood test I was going to take at Lawrence (“Come See the Skeletons in Our Waiting Room!”) General Hospital, which now means I have to cancel the appointment with the primary care physician and the neurologist, who were going to review the results of the blood test.

And the original date for the inspection?  The 17^th of December.  We’re now up to the 24^th.  And they STILL haven’t done SHIT, and they’re still feeding me bullshit as to why they can’t do it.

And on top of that, all of the insulin I’ve injected into myself hasn’t done a damn bit of good.  I’ve only dipped into the 200-range twice, and the endocrinologist raises the dosages in 10 ml increments.  I dunno – at what point do you think she should have said, “Well, DAMN Sam, this ain’t workin!”?

Fine, she’s Asian and wouldn’t employ euphemisms in a redneck accent, but I’m sure she could have come up with an Asian equivalent of , “This ain’t working!”  Hell, I even DOUBLED the dose once and it didn’t do that much good.

Really.  At what point do you say, “Okay, try 50 ml twice a day!” (I’m at 30 ml once a day now).  IT AIN’T WORKING!!  Get me in the office, give me a huge dose and watch to see what happens!  Don’t just raise my dosages in dribs and drabs and keep my blood sugar at dangerously high levels!  Stupid doctor.

But I have to cancel my appointment with her, too, thanks to Sutton screwing up closing my bank account and now demanding a copy of my car key, and tossing my fasting blood test out the window.  I’m almost in tears over the whole mess, one of the Sky Sadist’s “Top 10 Evil Accomplishments” of 2011.  And I still don’t have a &*^&ing sticker!

Note to self:  find another car repair shop.