I Don't Care If Monday's Blue

You could probably say I’ve had a spell of bad luck. Naturally I’m talking about middle-class employed white girl bad luck, not poverty-stricken Somalian bad luck. That kind of bad luck would involve my last goat being eaten by neighboring dogs and contracting a flesh-eating virus while trying to squeeze the last drop of milk out of my shriveled breast for my crying baby, who’s covered in flies and clinging to the legs of Sally Struthers. So forgive me my self-centered drivel today, because I’d like to start at the beginning and just work my way forward. Maybe I’ll find a pattern. And then I can kill the pattern, preferably by breaking the pattern’s knees.

It started with a combination of bronchitis, sinusitis and laryngitis. Not so bad, really. I mean, I was just choking runny snot down my throat and coughing it back up again for shits and giggles. Breathing is very highly overrated. But then the running snot made a trail of inflamed tissue down my throat, which made a lovely home for my acid reflux. I ended up with actual bleeding lesions on my esophagus that didn’t go away for a week and a half.

The first morning I woke up without a crusty nose and an aching throat, I felt like throwing myself a party. I was healed! I met Kasi for dinner at a small Italian place downtown and ordered the special, the pan-seared salmon. Food was finally tasting like food and I couldn’t have been happier, as sinus infections convert normal food into peanut butter. Cheerios? Tastes like peanut butter. Chicken? Tastes like peanut butter. I might have mentioned on here that I can’t stand peanut butter. Hence, an eleven day stretch of peanut butter flavored everything was about as amusing as rubbing battery acid on my arm. But oh, the delicious salmon! Flaky and seasoned, it was! I especially enjoyed that seasoning when I contracted the stomach flu at 3am and vomited up fish, spinach, bread and diet coke until 5am, when I switched to straight stomach bile for another ten hours. I would have tried to drown myself in the bathtub but I didn’t have a stopper.

Four days later I took The Demonspawn to the vet for some routine shots and a little declawing action, because my sofa is new and I happen to quite like the arms covered in intact, rather than shredded, fabric. But the vet killed Llama (undeniably my favorite) with an overdose of Valium. I was sad.

The next day I went in for a procedure involving a radio transmitter being implanted in my esophagus (by the aliens) and a catheter through my nose. Unfortunately I was one of the .2% of people who react badly to the implantation. When I say badly I mean that stabbing myself in the chest with a fork was a viable option for over five days. Christmas was a blast. Also, I have an insanely high tolerance for Valium.

The day after Christmas my mother drug me to the animal shelter because she needed to adopt a friend for her current cat, Dr. Watson. Dr. Watson used to have a friend named Sherlock but Sherlock got runned over by a reindeer. There was another cat in the house named Cleo who maintained his superior cat-distance for over eight years, refusing to give in to Dr. Watson’s friendly gestures. Then Cleo died of some strange ear-slash-eye-slash-mouth infection but he was eighteen so it’s not like we were surprised. Very long lead in to the fact that my mother was looking for a new kitty friend for Watson and the animal shelter seemed like a good place to start. Save the animals from Certain Death!

She narrowed it down to two sweet ones, one orange and fat and another one small and gray. With Certain Death looming over their heads I decided to take the small gray one, naming her Josephine. She went immediately to the vet for declawing and spaying because I thought if someone was going to kill another one of my cats, they might as well do it before I got all attached. But two days later she started sneezing. Then strange liquid coughs that made her tiny chest heave with effort. I took her to the emergency vet and was told to squirt antibiotics down her throat twice a day. No need to worry, they say. Cats get this all the time.

The Sunday of New Year’s Eve was a no-go. I misread a new bottle of pills, assuming when it said Take With Food it meant that any food was acceptable. What it meant to say was Take With Five Course Meal Or Severe Nausea And Vomiting Will Occur. Also, Attempting To Operate Machinery While Vomiting Can Lead To Messiness. I rang in the new year with re-runs of CSI and a bottle of Pepto.

By Thursday I was kissing Josephine on the nose and tearing up in front of my Kervorkian vet as she sent her off to kitty cat heaven. No need to worry, indeed.

That afternoon I took myself out for a late lunch and early beer. My boss works with a lot of women and recognizes mental instability when it’s crying in front of him. During lunch my right arm started to feel weird, kind of like it was asleep but without the tingle. As the day progressed I became more and more jittery and everything from my eyeballs to my toenails felt like they were stuck in limbo. I wanted my finger to press Channel Up on the remote, but my finger was cranky and slow to respond.

By lunchtime the next day I was miserable. I hadn’t slept a single minute and I was feeling like Michael J. Fox but without Rush Limbaugh to make fun of me. I called my specialist doctor and talked to his nurse, who told me to turn the car around and head to the nearest pharmacy for some Benadryl. Apparently if you don’t act fast these side effects can last for a very long time, as in weeks or months. Fearing the worst I took three times the normal dose and waited for relief. Three hours later I was still wide-eyed and crazy. It took many more Benadryls and many more hours before I felt human again. It was a wicked fun experience, one I’d pay people to never experience again.

I think it would be kind of dryly amusing to end this with a “And I stubbed my fucking toe this morning” but I’m not about to encourage anything else, plus I’d be lying. I want no more dead pets, no more strange pains, no more exhausting stomach viruses and no more alien transmitters in my esophagus. Which is why I spent all day Saturday inside apartment, refusing to even unlock the front door. My big accomplishment for the day was taking a shower and watching John Grisham movies on TNT.

**After rereading this I see no pattern. Obviously I have just pissed somebody off.

I’m not a resolution maker because January 1st is exactly the same as any other day of the year. It just happens to be when some yo-yo way back in the day decided to restart the 12-month calendar. It could be the month of Gilgamesh for all I care; I just like to put on a pretty dress now and then. Make kiss a boy at midnight. Toss back some overly-sweet champagne.

But this year I’ve decided that I’m done. Bad luck is supposed to come in threes, and this shit is getting old. I’d better be getting something really nice for my birthday. Like a hot, gainfully employed man with the ability to form grammatically correct sentences. Or I could win the lottery. I’d be fine with that, too.