Therafy this

2013 was a pretty heavy-duty therapy year. Most recently, I've been doing a kind of therapy called physical therapy, which purports to fix bits of your body. In the past when I've done this, I referred to physical therapy as the kind of therapy where when it's done you actually feel better. I suppose that this is true for those of a certain age, but by the time you reach my semi-advanced state, there is never any assurance that I will ever feel better. Something always hurts- you just deal with it and discuss things like "managing the discomfort."

This is kind of discouraging. I like to be physical and active, and having to think about how you reach or bend or lift or sit, it takes some of the fun out of things. I don't mind the physical therapy itself, though some of it is suspiciously like someone giving you tasks to complete, which is not sufficiently different from being married and having kids to go out of the way for.

This time through I'm dealing with shoulder pain. It's particularly annoying because it's in my right shoulder and it makes writing on a whiteboard tricky and occasionally painful if I'm not careful. I put off doing the PT (as we in the know call it) because you can't just go and get it. You need a prescription, which means you need to see a doctor, which means you need to get x-rays (at a minimum). I put it off for weeks. But I finally got around to it and now twice a week I meet up with this nice woman who stretches and prods at me, then dispatches me to the gym to do exercises.

I haven't asked her yet if she's just making things up at this point- at first there were sheets of paper with diagrams, but now she just tells me to do things. It's kind of amazing how many different shoulder exercises you can make up. Things to push, pull, lift, wobble, stretch, and just plain old hold. Eighteen different things (really) to do with my shoulder, all in the name of managing my discomfort.

When does it end? Who knows? When I asked my internist about why my shoulders hurt, he said "because you didn't die when you were 40," which isn't terribly helpful. In the past, its gone on for months. Hopefully not this time through. I'm kind of overly therafied, or therafried as we in the know call it.

It's been a complicated last few weeks. Having gone though a lot with our poor departed pup, we flew down to Miami on Thursday evening, having removed whatever guilt we might have had about going on vacation immediately after putting our dog to sleep. In face, despite its Monty Pythonesque overtones, it seemed the perfect thing to do. Especially when the song playing on the radio as we left the vet was "I Wanna Be Sedated" (really truly).

We had made this reservation weeks ago, when it felt like we just needed to get away, since any travel around winter break seemed unpromising. We had no idea at the time the Art Basel, one of the largest modern art shows in the world, was going on at the same time. Fortunately, we planned to stay on Key Biscayne, miles from the well-known and feared craziness. This turned out to be a particularly fortuitous choice. The hotel here is very nice and we'd been here before, so were able to slip into a familiar routine with a minimum of fuss.

The weather was fantastic- high of around 80 degrees, no humidity, and a light breeze. Perfect for lying around all day, which is what we did.

After somewhat guiltily thinking to myself, this has been great, but another day would be really nice, I checked in online and got boarding passes and headed out to the beach for a last hour or so. As I swung by the bar, I saw the Eagles game on TV, and saw Megatron get up with a face mask full of snow. I checked in on our flight status to found that, lo and behold, it had been cancelled. Not only that, but the Monday flights, even Miami to Philly via Seattle, were sold out.

So as it turned out, we got 2 extra days in Miami, and thanks to a snow day and a late opening, I only missed two classes. The only downside was spending at total of 6 hours on hold waiting to rebook my flight. Not an exaggeration, though not 6 consecutive. It was 4 calls, 1 hour, an hour and 40 minutes, 2 hours and 20 minutes, and finally another hour. But it worked out fine, great in fact.

That being said, let me just note here that dealing with Miami airport is an absolute horror show. My advice is to never, ever rent a car at that airport, even if it costs twice as much to rent one wherever you are staying. We got to the airport 2 hours prior to the flight, a flight where we were booked first class and therefore had the priority security line, and still just barely made it to the gate in time, after dealing with the various modes of transport and sheer distance in getting from the rental car return to the gate. Ugh.

But home we got, and now it's time to move on to post-dog (for the moment- we are definitely getting another one) life.

Good dog, Greta

Yesterday we put Greta, our sweet 15 year and 4 month-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi to sleep. Permanently, I mean. She had been doing little except sleep for the past few weeks, but recently she had stopped eating and reached levels of nonarousal that I'd not seen since my junior year of college, when my roommate, for reasons unknown to both of us, did not leave his bed for the final 2 1/2 weeks of the school year, assuring himself of a year apart for that particular academic institution.

We'd brought her home from the hospital the previous night, after she'd spent two days there on intravenous antibiotics and fluids. This on the chance that her decline was the result of an infection and not an irreversible reduction in kidney function. We knew it was a slim chance at best, and once it was clear that she wasn't getting better, we decided to bring her home, keep her as comfortable as possible, and bring her into the vet the next morning with the assumption that, unless the vet suggested otherwise, we would not be bringing her home again.

While home, Greta, never the most tech-savvy of us, had her first experience video chatting with her big sisters, who did all the talking. It was nice for them to have the chance to say goodbye to a friend who'd always been part of the family.

Our vet, who knew Greta for her entire life, was sanguine about things when we brought her in. He estimated her kidney function at 5-10% and said that old dogs simply do not recover from this. And this was an almost spectacularly old dog. It seemed like she'd go on forever, but none of us do, I suppose, including those of us who are small and cute and furry.

The vet said something that struck me, though it was just kind of an aside, that a dog's life is compressed. I'd read something recently about how a person's view of what constitutes a complete life lacks any perspective on the beginning and end of their own lives, and so if they are to gain that kind of understanding that they would need to look elsewhere. I didn't see Greta's birth, but I've seen puppies born before, and she was only a few weeks old when she came home with us. Greta had a good life. She survived a weird, if kind, breeder, was healthy and happy for almost her entire existence, and when it was time, which she signaled us by ceasing to eat, we were able to help her end it peacefully and painlessly.

The euphemism "put to sleep" is not completely euphemistic, as it turns out. The end is brought on by what is essentially an overdose of sleeping pills- phenobarbital to be exact. In a marvelous bit of truth in advertising, the medication used is called Euthanal. It's hard to argue with that, and none of us did.

We chose not to stay and watch, so we also bid her goodbye and then left, very sad. I think I'll miss her most in the mornings, when she was usually the only one up aside from me. And it'll probably take some time for me to get used to answering the doorbell by myself. She was a gentle and friendly companion, smart and dumb and cute and soft and silly. And in what I consider to be the ultimate compliment, she was a good dog.