Perspective

Ah, idiocy. It comes in so many forms these days. It's hard to believe that there are those who invented the wheel and those who are too stupid to get out of the way when they hear the wheel hurling towards them. A fellow in my building is a definite member of the lesser caveman group. He's a nice enough guy but he lacks more than a few common sense brain cells. Let's start from the beginning. A few nights ago, the power in my building went out. It was down for about ten minutes before there was a thirty second spark of light and then it went down again. Thirty minutes later there was power again, but only for thirty minutes (I guess that night's number was 30 and it was brought to us by the moron downstairs). Then - OUT. For I don't even know how many hours. It was only our building so people were flipping their fuse boxes and trying to figure out the issue. But there was nothing we could do so I sat in the dark with one flashlight and one candle and a toddler who was nervous and wide awake because of all the ruckus outside our door. Then the power kicks back on again but it only lasted about five minutes. Finally, it comes back on to stay and things start to calm down and the kid falls back asleep.

Yesterday we found out what the cause of this mini blackout was and it was...idiocy. I don't even know how else to describe it. Last week this dude decided to paint his apartment (in freakin' October) and brought in a big fan for the fumes because he didn't want to open the windows. This was genius move number one. The fan was too much electricity and the power went out in the middle of the day for about two hours (I wasn't home at the time). Genius move number two, although to his credit he did learn something from his mistake, was renting a generator to plug his new toys into. He also got some bright ass lights so he could "see the paint color better" but didn't plug those into the generator. Cuz those won't be too much for a normal electrical circuit, right? Genius move number three. So he's running all this crap at the same time and, surprise surprise, the power goes out. Does it occur to him that he's the reason it went out? No. Does he close up shop and stop plugging stuff into every outlet in his place? No. In fact, after the power came back on the first time he fired everything up and kept painting. I don't think dude is playing with a full deck, if even a half deck. So, the second time he plugged everything in was too much and thus the power was down for the count.

In the end, it was a minor annoyance but you know how we are these days. Even minor annoyances become major in a hurry. Until you're brought right back down to earth by your own health issues. I had an appointment the other day with my doctor to see how my steroids are working. The news was about what I expected; they may be working a bit but we don't know if they're working as well as we'd hoped. Ideally, my levels start to stabilize (though not get back to normal since they'll likely never be even close to normal again) and I can scale back on the steroids until I get to a dosage that just manages everything. (There's a tiny chance I could even go into remission at some point, but that's only if I'm REALLY lucky.) But all of that could be a ways off now. My levels are borderline and now I have two choices for treatment. I can stay the steroid course for a few more weeks and hope my levels get just over borderline, although it's unlikely to see anymore improvement from the steroids. Or I could start treatment with some cancer drug and hope it works it's magic. Oh, and it's more likely to work it's magic if they remove my spleen first. Fantastic. Given that I have grown quite attached to my spleen in the past 30 (there's that number again) years, I've opted to go the steroids route. I know it likely won't change anything but my levels are better than they were before I started them so maybe a few more weeks does help. It's a leap of faith but I really don't want to consider surgery and even harder core drugs yet. I don't know. It could be the wrong decision altogether. The hardest thing about this is that nobody I know has dealt with it before so nobody knows how to give me advice about what to do. So I'll go with the steroids. And hope that it works out.