The Death Of A Flute

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Last night was a humdinger. The remnants of hurricane Ida arrived about dark, and it's supposed to rain all day steady, and at least part of tomorrow. The road maintenance crews have prepared for flooding. The weather forecasters expected heavy rains that dropped out of the sky faster than the ground can absorb it. It doesn't appear to have rained that hard, but steady on. It's set in. Thankfully, the winds calmed down a lot before the center of the tropical storm got to here.

Tuesday is the day I take the methotrexate. I can't predict how my body will react to it from week to week. Sometime it causes a considerable amount of nausea to the point of projective vomiting, and other times it's just an uneasy feeling that I cope with fairly well.

The rheumatologist has prescribed a medicine with the brand-name Humira. It's distributed in self-injecting units that I'm expected to shoot myself up with them once every two weeks. The side-effects of this drug can lead to death because it lowers my immune system. It particularly warns not to start it when there are existing infections and/or fevers.

I received the medicine via FedEx yesterday. I've been thinking about it pretty much since it arrived and I put it in the refrigerator. A friend with a lotta medical training offered to observe when I give myself the first injection for the purpose of support, but his plate is full with his own concerns just now. I'll probably do it in the next couple of hours.

I woke up with a dull headache that I associated with a hint of constipation, but that never transpired because I was able to perform my toilette without problems. Twice. Now the headaches going away, and I can assess my general health to figure if I have any reasons not to start the injections today. My body seems to know what's coming, and it don't seem to like it one bit.

It's been preparing itself for death, but me and the VA doctors keep interfering. Our efforts obviously won't keep me alive forever, but the drugs I've been taking ere now have made life more painless. I'm reminded of what it was like previous to starting the methotrexate on occasion when the edema and swelling return occasionally.

I don't really have much choice about using the adalimumab (Humira), because the doctor didn't renew my prescriptions for methotrexate or hydroxychloroquine. He did prescribe 5 mg tablets of prednisone a day for a couple of weeks to help me over the hump of changing strategies.

On the other hand he could have just forgotten to renew them. I won't see him again for four months, so I won't know until then. He hasn't answered my e-mail to clarify. It's difficult for me to think that when he was ordering the Humira and the prednisone that he would have overlooked refilling the other medicines.

I've had strong feelings about trying to find a way to keep writing and to keep playing the scales on my digital piano each day as long as I can. How long I can literally depends on the effectiveness of these drugs. I had to stop doing one or the other for what seems like a long time. Finally, with the drugs I was able to do it fairly pain-free again.

The pain became an obstacle that I wanted to overcome for the sake of keeping these habits up. I'm trying to be straight with myself about where I'm at with writing. At times I feel like I've gotten as much out of it as I can. Being honest with myself about why I'm playing the scales on the piano seems more difficult.

For some reason I convinced myself when I was hitch-hiking around the country and playing for donations with my old beat-up guitar, that if I could just learn and practice the scales on any instrument at all that it would allow me to offer a little more variety in the songs I wrote. If I don't continue to play the scales after I finally taught myself to play them from the instructions I studied on the internet, then I'll never know whether I was right about my theory or not.

I reckon it's been maybe a year or so since I understood the sequence of piano keys I had to depress in order to play all the major and minor keys, but even less time since I've figured out which fingers to use to play each key correctly. It's getting a little easier since I do it for an hour or more each day, but I still make a lotta mistakes.

Playing the scales at this late date doesn't really lead anywhere, but it does inform me about how much good it is doing to follow through with my promise to myself to do it persistently. I seem content to be able to play simple songs like nursery rhymes that I've always played in C Major on the white keys, now that I can extemporaneously play the same simple songs from memory in any key that crosses my mind.

If I keep at it, however, I think I may start reaching for a little complexity, you know, sort of like what people brag about in the various wines they get good at recognizing. I might be able to start playing with a little flair like I could do with a classical flute, and that's the deal about learning and practicing the scales regularly. I really need to find a way to afford a new flute.

If I could teach myself to play the scales on a classical flute I might be willing to play it with other people at a level of understanding that might cause them to welcome me to sit in with them. I'd be able to play in any key they wanted to, and they wouldn't have to limit themselves to my ignorance.

With a flute, a single-note instrument seemingly designed for people with Mercury in Aries, I can scat all over the place and make interesting things happen that other people can jam to. That might be a nice thing to be able to do to amuse myself in the place I'm carted off to die at.

It took forever for me to get up the nerve to buy a classical flute and teach myself how to form my lips to get it to toot. I've played around with wooden recorders that could stay in tune, and others that didn't. The Yamaha student flute I bought at the pawn shop was the cheapest band instrument type of flute that company made.

This silver-plated student's flute was old already, and the pads were worn, but the notes it sounded were pretty close to perfect pitch. They sounded the same each time I covered the right combination of holes, and it was something I got to where I could depend on being there for me. When I reached for them in my mind, my fingers and lips could make the precise sound I expected to hear, and not cause me no hesitation.

Much of the silver plating was already worn off the flute where it got held by whoever owned it before me. In the nooks and crannies behind the intricate mechanisms that operated the hole pad there was still some of the silver plating, but it was tarnished and cruddy in such a way that I figured it could stand a cleaning with some tarnish remover.

It was my clumsy efforts to make it look, and perhaps sound a little better, that brought the Yamaha student flute to it's final end. I got some silver polish on the pads that caused them to swell up and not fit over the holes right, and then, when I took the flute apart to see if I could fix that, and lost one really tiny and important screw, I was never able to get it to work again. Parts of it are all over my house in some box or the other. What a drag, man.
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