My worst headache today wasn’t the one from Covid — ibuprofen helped with that. It arrived via text, when my mom sent a new photo of my dad’s spider bite, which had gone from steadily improving in appearance to looking worse than ever. Crankenstein, who says she feels “70% better” as of today, saw patients remotely from her home office this afternoon, and of course her opinion was sought.
If there’s a tactful way to tell your family “Stop treating my wife like Seth freakin’ Hazlitt if you aren’t going to actually follow her advice,” I’d love to hear it. (This presumes, incorrectly, that they’re familiar with Murder, She Wrote.) But I want them to stop pestering her unless there’s a new emergency or some other special circumstance, because whether it’s my dad or hers, they don’t listen too well.
In this case, my dad heeded her advice to seek immediate medical attention on Thursday. He was given antibiotics at urgent care, and advice for what to do at home, and he was supposed to quickly follow up with his PCP. Crankenstein emphasized the importance of following those instructions and he claimed he’d do as told.
Cut to today’s sequel, in which he reports it looks worse, feels worse, and his doctor can’t see him until the end of the day tomorrow. Crankenstein said not to waste any time, so he went to the ER down the street from his office. There he was given a different antibiotic, as well as a medicated ointment, and instructed to keep tomorrow’s PCP appointment.
Once he was out of earshot, my mom spilled the beans: he’d never followed up with his doctor to begin with, and he’d stopped taking the first round of antibiotics when it upset his stomach. So much for the melanoma scare teaching him anything.
With that, I’m grouchily off to bed, hoping to feel better enough tomorrow to write something more substantial — and equally hopeful I kept sleepy errors to a minimum.* Oh, and let’s not forget about tennis: I was pleased with all of today’s Wimbledon singles winners, but tomorrow might not be as lucky. Though I like their opponents as well, particularly Rybakina, I’m rooting for Ostapenko and Svitolina. On the men’s side, I’ll go with Fritz and de Minaur, though I expect the latter will lose to Djokovic, who has looked rather spry for an old man recovering from knee surgery.
* A couple nights ago I rearranged a sentence to put “dal soup” before “mushroom bisque” but forgot to delete a word and ended up with “mushroom bisque soup.” Last night’s error was one I still need to correct: I wrote that Dick Van Patten’s Eight is Enough character was a sportswriter. From where did I pull ‘sportswriter’? I’m vaguely aware of the many achievements of Tom Braden, whose book about his family formed the basis of the show, and sportswriting wasn’t one of them.
I think the sportswriter/Eight is Enough wires were crossed not only because of a football subplot in the pilot, but because earlier in the day I’d read about Irv Kupcinet, the legendary Chicago Sun-Times columnist, getting his start as a sportswriter. If you have no interest in journalism — or knowledge of Chicago — but his name sounds familiar, he was also the father of Karyn, the troubled young actress whose unsolved murder was dragged into nutty conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination.