toujours, ce sacré miroir (et moi, là-dedans...)

I don't know what I am doing with this blog anymore.

Honestly, I'm not fit for human company. Unwashed, in the same clothes I wore yesterday -- I hurt so badly last night that washing and changing were unimportant. Sleep mattered, that was it. Even so, sleep came in spurts of 45 minutes. She's down! She's up!

La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore gave me a look of pure disdain this morning. "Que t'es bête, prof... complètement bête."

To her, it is a matter of will, getting better, an area in which I am found sorely lacking. The fact that there are ungrowable pathogens destroying my bones, and apparently getting into some soft tissue (one side of my face is swollen, to the point where I have a permanent headache and my glasses are digging into the side of my head)? Not pertinent to The Castafiore.

Will it all away.

She is something of a changed woman these days -- being an out-of-work Diva has been both a curse and a strange blessing. Fred and I admit to appreciating the decline in the ear-splitting frequency of L'Air des Bijoux, and that blessed mirror, that laugh approaching hysteria.

You see, Bianca only sings L'Air des Bijoux from Gounod's Faust.

Not that this is at all out of the ordinary, an operatic star fixated on one role, one lyric, one composer. We all can get stuck on our favorite things, certainly on a cherished ditty. But..."Ah, je ris de me voir si belle, dans ce miroir..." -- ad infinitem? ad nauseum? I want to reach through the time and space of fiction to shake that stupid Marguerite, to point out the obvious devil traits before her in the unctuous Faust, all in the hope of getting La Bonne et Belle Bianca, the Milanese Nightingale, to shut up!

So she thinks I am an idiot. I can take it. She has called me worse things, in the middle of some madcap caper or other, usually seeking the approval of Captain Haddock -- what better way than to throw the extraneous French professor under the bus?

Feels like I've nowhere but *here* to emote; My thoughts are hardly worth noting anymore -- repetitive tripe.

I am spending the day making and fielding phone calls from doctors' offices. Now that there is a workable plan to put in place, there's nothing much for me to do except fret. And I am almost too tired and in too much pain to do that.

The current task is the assemblage of medical records that I am to hand carry to this guru of a medicine man, a mere half-day's drive from Marlinspike Hall, deep deep in the Tête de Hergé.

Ah... a wrinkle. Yes just in the space between the last paragraph and this. My MDVIP Go-To-Guy called to say I will likely see the Wizard next Tuesday. He paused and then regaled me with the heartwarming story of how, seeing that the Wizard-Guru Man has just relocated here from Ohio, he's not had time to establish his insurance connections. "That might be a problem for you," opines my Go-To-Guy. Bull Crap Bull Skeet of Tête de Hergé is an imposing monolith of a health insurer, indeed.

YOU THINK? GAWD...

Am I so sick that I am supposed to be able to magically bankroll this consultation? I have spent over $20,000 thus far this year on health care -- and that money came straight out of my investment account, the account that was not to be touched because it will hopefully, one day, have enough in it to comfort, shelter, and feed The Fredster and The Castafiore, as well as the Four Felines. It was never meant to be money spent on BCBS, hospitals, doctors, repeatedly unhelpful tests, and month after month of intravenous vancomycin...

That money was supposed to survive me, god damn it.

ah... je ris... je ris... de me voir... si bête, si bête... toujours dans ce sacré miroir...

The expert we are consulting doesn't even have an established surgical team, barely an office -- he is a new prof at the medical college there. Yonder. One of the administrators is going to attempt to get his provider numbers with Bull Crap Bull Skeet of Tête de Hergé tomorrow.

But everyone knows my situation vis-à-vis the paddle and the creek -- so I may have to write a magic check.