Yesterday was Eileen’s 61st birthday. I’m hoping she had a good one. I had a flower waiting for her when she got up. Years and years of birthdays and living habits make these kinds of days tricky. You want it to be nice for your partner. This means if you make too much fuss, they will feel uncomfortable. Eileen often compares how I  celebrate her birthday with how she celebrates mine immediately. At any rate, having a date night last night seemed to be what she wanted most. So that’s what we did. The waitress included some carrot cake to go for Eileen after learning it was her birthday.

I had the morning free yesterday and used the time to attempt to balance checkbooks and do bills. After  a few attempts at balancing  Eileen’s and my checkbook and failing, I decided to ask her if she would check my work. Mom’s balanced easily.

Eileen ended up taking Mom to the doctor. I made the appointment misremembering that Eileen had the day off. She alternates Fridays and Saturdays off. I got confused. I left a voice mail for her on Thursday after I made the appointment. She immediately got time off from work to take Mom in. Mom began suffering from a symptom of excessive saliva immediately after we left on vacation.

This is a symptom she had for many years (in the 90s?). It was eventually diagnosed as myasthenia gravis and her doctor put her on a med for it which she still takes.

Her internist (also Eileen’s and my doctor) dismissed the nurses’ concern that Mom had a hiatal hernia, upped her MG meds and sent her to a neurologist. We’ll see what the outcome will be. Mom has lots of confusion around this sort of thing, oscillating between insisting she has had symptoms for weeks (this is probably not the case, because I would have noticed) and asking Eileen when it began.

The doctor kept Eileen and Mom waiting for over an hour past the appointment time. Eileen ended up having to take two and half hours off from work. She was of course good natured about it, but still it is annoying. I try to tell myself that doctors have a tough time juggling patients. At the same time the “professional” class doesn’t realize how deeply entitled it sees itself.

Oh well.

I have been enjoying using Home Fweet Home to understand Joyce’s Finnegans Wake more completely. It has slowed down my reading of it. Though the entire text is online , Raphael Slepon, the web site creator, recommends not using the online site to actually read the book. So far I have read a paragraph in the book and then reread it online with the annotations interleaved (you can set up the search results however you want— you don’t have have the text of the book present and can just access notes).

Eileen has just surprised me and gotten up. I’m sure this is so we can have some moments together before I go off to play three ballet classes. So I’m outta here!