Everything’s Cherry

That’s an interesting thing about cherries: They apparently don’t fall from the tree until they are ready to break open upon impact with the ground. Another interesting thing about cherries: using a broom to sweep squished cherries away only makes them disintegrate further, leaving broad purplish-red streaks across the paving bricks. A third interesting thing about cherries: They make birds poop pink.

I believe I am “off” cherry pie for a while.

So I was driving to work this morning in my pink-poop covered car when I realized ten minutes into my drive that I’d forgotten my pills. Again. This has become an alarming trend, and one I haven’t figured out how to break.

For the first ten months or so after the operation, I remembered my pills religiously (well, as close as I get to religion, anyhow). I always had them with me, and I always took them within half an hour of when they were due.

Immunosuppressant pills are funny that way. You know how the instructions might be “take one pill daily in the a.m.”? And you know how ambiguous “a.m.” can be? Well, if you are anything like me, you might end up taking the pill at 6:00 a.m. weekdays (because that’s when you get up) and 9:00 or even 10:00 on weekends (because that’s when you get around to it). Morning is morning, right?

Technically, a pill must be taken at the same time every day to maximize its effect. For most pills, a little slop in the timetable doesn’t mean much. But for immunosuppressants, it can be a big deal. You do NOT want the drug to fall below a certain critical level in your bloodstream, or your white blood cells will start waking up. If they start to wake up enough that they notice you’ve been carrying around somebody else’s liver, it can be difficult to tell them to forget about it and go back to sleep again. White blood cells can be notoriously difficult to reason with.

For some reason, the life-and-death aspect of pill-taking seems to have lost its edge with me. I don’t understand how I can forget. I’m totally panicky when I finally do realize that I’ve gone off and left my lifeline behind. It isn’t as if I don’t realize and understand the dangers of getting sloppy with the meds. And yet, for the second time in two weeks I left home without my drugs.

Now it isn’t as if I’ve missed taking my drugs and have done a major screw up. I leave before 7:00 a.m. every day. I take my meds at 9:00 every day. I still have a two-hour buffer to get my hands on the Prograf. But it does mean that I’ve been late for work once last week and again today. Somebody is eventually going to notice if I keep making a regular habit of this.

I’ve tried all the usual tricks to keep from forgetting the meds. I’ve left my car keys on top of the dose box. (I have been known to pick up the keys from there and still forget my meds.) I’ve gotten everything together in the evening and put it on my dresser so I don’t forget it in the morning. (I leave the pills on my dresser.) I’ve made a checklist (“don’t forget company ID, wallet, meds”) and left it in my car. (But then I don’t actually read the checklist until I’m five miles away from the apartment.) I’ve brought an extra supply of pills into work and left them with Occupational Health so I have to embarrass myself in front of others in order to get the meds. (The embarrassment quotient has apparently worn off, and when I screw up I not only have to remember my regular pills for the next day but I have to remember to bring in an extra supply for back up.)

There are days I see this as the first sign of encroaching senility. There are other days when I begin to suspect I have a hidden death wish. Most days my working hypothesis is that I was born without a brain, though.

Actually, the being born without a brain explains another event my recent life. I have, for the first time in thirty years of having a checking account, bounced a check (two checks, to be exact). All due to a really, really, really stupid math error. That’s the reason that The Socialist is finding out about this little fubar through the diary rather than from my lips. I can’t face a mathematician and admit that I entered a $500 dollar transfer as a $5,000 transfer in my computer ledger and didn’t notice.

I contacted both parties I bounced checks for (Doctors without Borders and an eBay seller) as soon as I got the message from my bank, and fortunately I got to them before their banks did, so I didn’t look like a total dufus. OK, so maybe I did look like a total dufus anyhow, but at least I was an honorable total dufus. The situation has been resolved, but I’m sure as hell glad it wasn’t a utility check or the rent check that I bounced. I still can’t believe I was that dumb.

Brainlessness isn’t always a bad thing though. Not that long ago, when the cherries first started bombing my lovely patio, I was convinced I could keep up with the onslaught. The key, I was sure, was simply to sweep every day. If I kept after the cherries, then they wouldn’t accumulate and make my patio look like a “clean up in aisle four” disaster resulting from a dropped jar of pie filling.

So I swept with what I call a “deck brush” (Dad was in the navy) and what the Socialist calls a “push broom”. That is how I first discovered that brooms do not push cherries, but only smear them. Persistence did not lead to a clean patio; it only led to fruit smears and frustration.

I was getting desperate enough to start wondering if a leaf blower would be of any help when one night about a week ago we were absolutely deluged with rain. I’m not talking cats-and-dogs variety. I’m not even talking horses-and-cows variety. This was rhinos-and-elephants stuff, the kind that sweeps away Cooper Minis and newspaper vending machines. I watched the rain coming down, despondent that it was knocking yet more cherries out of the cherry tree, when it occurred to me that this might be the ideal time to sweep the patio. I mean, sweeping and flushing simultaneously? How could I miss? The cherries didn’t stand a chance. So I put on my slightly oversized silver raincoat ($8 at Ross Shop for Less), laced up my duck boots, got the deck brush, and opened the door to the back patio.

Have any one of you ever swept in the rain under a cherry tree? If you haven’t, take my word for it: it’s wet work. The rain was coming down too heavily for the freshly cleaned roof gutters to cope, and so roof run-off made my job a bit like sweeping under Niagara Falls (only without the stupid colored lighting effects). Any part of me not covered by the raincoat (legs from the knees down, face, hands) was absolutely soaked. But I swept. And damned if it didn’t work like a charm. There was so much water coming down that I was able to create broom tidal waves that washed the cherries off the patio without further squishing them. I swept one area until it was entirely devoid of cherries, and then moved on to the adjacent area. I looked back, and the first area was covered in cherries again. So I swept that again, then went back to the second area which itself was now covered with fresh cherries. I did this three or four times until the rain let up, and cherries had stopped descending like bloody hail stones. The next day there were, of course, yet more cherries on the patio, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I did have to find a way to dry out the deck brush, and my jeans were so soaked I had to wring them out in the sink. It was worth it though. For one night, I had taken charge and was winning the fight against the suicide cherries.

Brainless cleaning obsession, rain and a deck broom: Perfect together. Now if I could only have swept away my bounced check problem the same way….