Sometimes it's way more fun to have a mystery than to have its eventual solution. Mr X got the strangest phone call this afternoon, and then it repeated in the evening. It was from an elder-care institution of some variety in New Mexico, where his name was listed as an emergency contact. At first he told the caller, "I got a call from you earlier today, and someone has a wrong number." The woman said she would take him off of the patient's file, and not bother him again. But then he called back to ask exactly how his name appeared on the chart in the first place. His name and phone number were there, marked down first as "spouse," and then that was crossed out and "son" was noted. He answered the first time, because the area code was the same as the one where we lived two cross-country moves ago (four actual moves). He asked for as much information as he was allowed, and found out that it was an 87 year old woman who claimed he was her son. He got a first name (which I will withhold) and he Googled her. He found an obituary for her sister, with someone with his name listed as a family member, but spelled with two Ns rather than one. That still didn't answer the question of how his phone number ended up attached to this woman's life. She lived not far from where we did, but our lives never intersected. At first we thought perhaps she had been a neighbor or related to one of his airmen when he was a commander there. Finally it occurred to him that if we had all used the same hospital (which we did repeatedly), the error probably happened when someone went through patient records to find her son with the extra N, and they picked the wrong guy. It makes sense, but it was a let-down to have the answer so easily spelled out. I liked it better when it was creepy in a Big Brother sort of way.
Today was another trip to physical therapy, and it took everything I had to show up today. As I walked down the hallway after exchanging hellos with the new PT, I told him that this is what I would consider a "moderately bad lupus day," and I felt I should own it and let him see it. It was all my own doing, after flipping out yesterday and tearing apart my living room, to the point I spent more than an hour on the floor, scrubbing baseboards and vacuuming the underside of the rug. I paid for such obsessiveness today, which is pretty much how this works. So he spent most of our session trying to loosen up joints that haven't moved in decades. Not kidding, he wrapped a giant strap around the very top of my leg, and shackled the same strap around his body with a seat belt buckle, and he pulled the cap of my femur laterally until I had motion and flexibility that I haven't seen since my 20s. It might not seem like a big deal to you that I could comfortably rest my left ankle on my right knee, but that's a trick I haven't had in my repertoire since Kurt Cobain was alive. Problem is, now I can't move at all. I've had a muscle relaxant, a glass of wine, and a long soak in the hot tub. Nope. Nothing doing at all. I have done myself wrong, and I see the error of my ways.
I guess there's nothing left to do but cuddle with the Pride and wait out the muscle stiffness. Eventually it will loosen up. Just not tonight. From my vantage point I can see all four of them. They're ready for bed. I am too. Really I have been since I crawled out of the hot tub at 6:30, and felt OLD. I couldn't believe it wasn't bedtime then.
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