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Goofiness

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I have had an intermittent  buildup of fluid behind my left ear drum for a couple of months, and tried using decongestants get rid of it, as well as having one of my colleagues box my ears in a special way that somehow is supposed to realign the eustachian tubes so they drain. It didn’t work. I couldn’t hear much out of my left ear, and couldn’t even listen to the phone with the receiver to my left ear.  I finally went to the doctor this week when both ears were water logged, since I couldn’t hear much out of either ear.  Why did I wait to get medical attention for this? I knew how it would be treated, and the treatment would render me goofy.

Prednisone it the treatment of choice for this condition, and I get giddy when I take it. I start telling jokes. I get expansive. It is embarrassing. I warned my coworkers about it. They were less than supportive and just laughed and  said they probably wouldn’t notice much since they found me goofy most of the time anyway.  Rat finks!

On Thursday night at the Maundy Thursday service, we have a tradition of people washing one another’s hands. The two women serving as assisting ministers went back and forth with large white china pitchers of clean water for the hand washing ewers. They wore their typical white assisting minister robes. That they reminded me of Grecian nymphs bearing water pitchers was probably not such a strange thought, but did I really have to mention it to one of them (my attorney, in fact ) when she came over to me in the choir to share the Peace? Probably not.  She told me, after she said “Peace be with you ” that I must be psychotic.

I only have a seven days worth of pills. I hope I don’t get goofier. I also hope the water drains.

 

Tell about times you were goofy.

48 thoughts on “Goofiness”

  1. Relax, Renee. There’s nothing to fear. I take Prednisone daily, and have for years. I take two pills daily, in fact. I cleverly call them The Big Pill and The Little Pill. (Because one is bigger than the other.) I’ve done that for years, and they haven’t messed me up or made me vote for Trump or anything. Ish biddely oh boaten, bo bo skidootendaddle! You’ve got nothing to worry about. Ish biddely oh boaten, wa da chah!

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  2. Rise and Goof Off Baboons!

    Well. Renee, prednisone makes me crazy: mood swings, tears, giddiness all in a minute. Now and then I get a sinus infection so incurable that prednisone is required. I also warn people! And I agree that it is embarrassing! My poor husband during those times.

    A drink makes me goofy–I am not one who can tolerate much alcohol. I start to giggle and can’t stop.

    There is also a Thanksgiving memory that makes me goofy and giggly. When those of us present that day talk of it, we all start laughing helplessly. I think I will write that up for the blog!

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    1. In one of my several hospitalizations six years ago, I developed “hospital skin itch”, so the nurse gave me a little Benadryl. It made me psychotic almost immediately. I had auditory hallucinations all night. At the time, there were four motors for IV functions on the IV pole. I heard chimpanzees, elephants, lions, horses. I kept calling the nurses in and couldn’t understand why they didn’t hear the loud animal sounds. They were at a loss as to how to help until one creative nurse brought a bunch of towels in and wrapped them around each motor to muffle its sound.

      Every since that experience, I’ve thought about the fact than anyone can buy this stuff over-the-counter and go on an LSD trip.

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  3. Sleep deprivation makes me kinda goofy. I definitely need my sleep. And one thing I hate about steroid medications is that I can’t sleep when I have to take them. Horrible things, steroids.

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    1. In spite of their unpleasant side effects, steroids are the only way I can function (to the limited degree that I do function). With steroids I can do a mediocre imitation of walking. I can drive a car. Without steroids I’d be a wheelchair-bound cripple.

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  4. I am not much of a drinker – don’t like the taste of most hard liquor and wine mostly makes me sleepy. But a glass of champagne makes me giggly and kind of loud – not to mention dizzy – almost immediately.

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  5. My father wasn’t much of a drinker, but on the rare occasion he had one too many, he would deny it, and mom would say, accusingly “you’re giggling!”

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  6. I made some Dresden Stollen and brought it to a psychology staff meeting at my work one December. It gets doused with brandy when it comes out of the oven. The six of us at the meeting ate stollen and felt nicely placid!

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  8. During a short flight to Kenya’s South Shore, one ear completely plugged for 10 hours or more. The worst part was that when I talked, the sound of my own voice felt amplified and like it was reverberating in my skull.

    A fews years ago, my ears felt partially blocked, so a went to my doctor and he promptly ordered an ear wash. It worked immediately, but the gunk the nurse pulled out with a special tweezer reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode when maggot-looking worms crawled into a guy’s brain and made a home.

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    1. a water pic allows you to do it easily at home
      it’s an inherited trait the ear wax thing
      my dad passed it on
      he used to have a big stainless steel syringe he would shot warm water intovhis ears with repeatedly until the wax came out
      it was just part of life for him
      i recognize the symptoms and do it as needed

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  9. By the same token, if you were, by any normal reckoning, unremittingly goofy but you also happened to be the President and your goofiness was menacing and destructive, could you still call it goofy?

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  10. i am goofy as a standard state and then there’s always argumentation recreational or otherwise
    recreational much less these days… geeze i enjoy recreational goofiness
    amsterdam and denver make me itch

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  11. I remember once two friends and I performed at a Christmas party. We dressed in robes with turbans and various accoutrements…our slapdash version of orientalism. In that garb we performed, using the melody of “We Three Kings” but the words from “Three Little Maids From School Are We”. A goofy person might think that was witty. A witty person might think otherwise.

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    1. I’m making the assumption, Bill, that at the time of that performance you were much younger, and what’s considered goofy or witty changes with age. I my ripe old age, very little passes muster as witty. Most of what goes on out there seems goofy to me.

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      2. We were our own best audience. And isn’t that pretty much the definition of goofy?
        And I agree with you. At this stage of my life, very little passes for witty.
        What does merits high praise.

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  12. We’re still trying to get my aunt out of the nursing home she moved to about three weeks ago, back to her previous place. She imagines all sorts of horrible things are taking taking place in the nursing home where she now is. Could be a reaction to a medication, or to stress. It would be sorta funny if it wasn’t so genuinely frightening to her. She told me they have a giant tub where they can drown five people at a time, and she hears water running in it constantly at night. She can’t be reasoned with at all. To her it’s very real.

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    1. That’s awful, Linda. Have they changed her medications recently, or do you think it solely related to the move? I spoke with Philip, and he’d like to visit her when she is back at Cerenity. He really enjoyed commiserating with her, so please keep me posted.

      Happy Easter everyone.

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      1. I was suspicious of the medications, because she doesn’t usually have much mental confusion, much less full blown delusions. So you do wonder if someone mixed up the meds somehow. But she doesn’t take many prescriptions, just one for hypothyroidism and one for neuropathy, and has been taking them for awhile without ill effects. She recently started an anti-pychotic, but that was after the delusions started.

        It’s a mystery.

        Happy Easter to you too!

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  13. 4 months ago red flags went up at BC/BS. Sandy after about 17-18 years on the drug is not allowed the 1mg. Of prednisone she has taken for about a dozen years. Her lupus is raging. Raw butterfly rash. Ankles bloat be end of day. Very high pain. Trouble sleeping at night. No energy. Dr. Will not appeal. Will have to see what it does to her organs. She of course does not complain.
    Babysitting in Evan this week. Next week son and grandson come from Ca. My computer is about dead. iPad acting up. Won’t beon much.

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    2. Some autoimmune patients find low dose naltrexone works well. It is an off-label use of the drug, so insurance generally doesn’t pay for it, but it’s not all that spendy.

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      1. It is not about payment. It s that she is not allowed to have the prescription. You are only allowed to take for so lmuch long.

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  14. When I was much younger but after we were married, I went through a period where I really, really wanted a high-quality gorilla costume, on the theory that a person with his own gorilla costume need never be unemployed. Was that goofy thinking, would you say, or simply limited perspective?

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    1. Goofy thinking? Nah, more likely an entrepreneurial spirit run amok. Maybe that is goofy, come to think of it. If you had a really, really good bunny suit, you could probably make a few extra bucks today.

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        1. Some of those are really, really horrible, and most of the kids didn’t seem to appreciate any of them.

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    2. Bill, this brings up so many questions. Why did you think a gorilla costume would be the key to never being unemployed? And did you get a gorilla costume? If so, have you ever been unemployed?

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        1. Well, you did bring it up in a conversation about goofiness…

          It struck me as amusing, partly because I don’t picture you as someone who ever had a burning desire for a gorilla costume or that you would look to it as a solution to unemployment. Obviously, you have depths that I don’t know about!

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        2. Robin would confirm. I really did harbor a hankering for a gorilla costume in my early days. I had the idea that there would always be someone who thought their enterprise would be more attractive if only they knew someone with a gorilla suit they could employ. I had a similar notion about owning a bulldozer.

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  15. Happy Easter, Baboons. Easter was a blah sort of holiday in my family. They weren’t into religion and they weren’t into the bunny thing. But a friend tells a good Easter story of when she was three or four. Her parents dressed her up with a new dress, new shoes and a cute little hat. She was confused until she figured out that this was a costume. And she knew what costumes were about, so she began toddling from house to house, ringing doorbells and singing out “Trick or treat!” The neighbors were so amused she had a big bag of candy by the time her parents caught her.

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    1. We did the big hunt yesterday. We made it really easy for the kids. I remember one year (I was about 5th grade) and my dad offered all us cousins $5 each (a lot of money back then) if we found all the eggs in 15 minutes. We found all but one of them in about 10 minutes but no matter where we looked, we couldn’t find the last one. Turned out the last one was in my dad’s coffee mug, covered by coffee. My dad wouldn’t give us the $5, but my mother slipped us the bills later in the day making us promise we wouldn’t tell my dad!

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  16. Yesterday Husband and I moved a sofa from the basement to the garage preparatory to daughter taking it to Tacoma. It was a complicated procedure necessitating the removal of three doors and the turning and repositioning of the sofa through an angled hallway. I did it with flair, panache, and impulsivity thanks to the prednisone. It is true I gave myself a fat lip when I wasn’t watching what I was doing, but we succeeded!

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    1. When I purchased the house we live in, I inherited a renter of the upstairs duplex. Six years later when we had to move Gladys into a nursing home, we tried everything we could think of to get her couch downstairs, but there were certain corners that could not be turned with its bulk and height. We ended up having to saw it into two pieces. We have never been able to figure out how they got it upstairs. Perhaps through a window?

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