March 17, 2011 Thursday Dinner Time

Spent last night watching American Idol and then a little news on CNN before going to bed around 10 PM.

This morning I was up at 6:15 AM and fed the dogs and gave Vito his shot. Went back to bed for a while before getting back up about 7:15 so I could say good bye to Tony as he left for work. I hate getting up at 6 AM to feed the dogs and give Vito his shot. But he must be fed and given Insulin shots 12 hours apart so 6 and 6 seems to be the best time. Otherwise if I feed him at 7 AM I have to feed them supper at 7 PM. That means we can never do anything at night. So I have little choice but to keep the feeding and shots at 6 AM and 6 PM. Yes, it would be nice if Tony offered to feed the dogs and give Vito his shot in the mornings, but that is never going to happen. At least I can go back to bed for a little while to settle my stomach. I find that when I wake up in the morning and see what time it is I jump out of bed to feed the dogs since it is always 6 AM or later. This getting out of bed so fast after waking up gives me a sick feeling in my stomach and have thrown up a couple times because of it. It has to be because of the med switch a little over a month ago, but I thought these problems would have stopped by now. It is almost like my body gets dizzy from getting up so fast in the morning. I would not have this problem if I had lets say 15 minutes to lay in bed and get my mind started. The joys of HIV meds. Since I was up now I read a little of the newspaper before going outside to start picking up the big pile of crap from the winter. Anyone with dogs, say five dogs, would know that during the summer and such it is easy to daily, or in my case, twice daily, pick up the yard of dog droppings. But when you have snow every day and it is cold they are not so easy to pick up. So all winter long I use a shovel and shovel the snow and crap into a pile. With five dogs the pile gets pretty big by spring. As the pile of snow melts down I have to then clean this all up. It must be like working in the sewers or septic tank business. I am sure you all must really be enjoying this story. I will make a long story short and say I got the pile all shoveled up into garbage bags and out to the back garbage cans. I still needed to hose down the area but that would have to wait since I now had to get showered and off to my board meeting with ARCW. Got to the noon meeting to not only find out the head of the board is leaving, but the representative from the agency will be leaving / moving also. We have made great progress in the last year with a representative at every meeting rather than trying to meet with them after we vote on things. There are only 4 of us left on the board but the agency has to have this board to get funding. I today was voted vice chair person of the board. I didn't want to be the main guy, but I will take the second chair. Things will now be on hold for a while as we get more members and representatives. I have for some time now been pushing for the agency to put in place a buddy system of some sort. Kind of like AAA and a sponsor, at least I think they call it a sponsor. The day you find out you have HIV your life is turned up side down. It is one thing to talk to doctors and therapists that can help. It is quite another thing to have someone to talk to that has walked in this path. I said I would be very happy to volunteer my time to anyone newly diagnosed and needed someone to talk to or lead him in directions to get help and support. I am sure it is like this with cancer or any other disease. You look at the person your talking to and think 'you really don't have a clue what I am really going through'. I think someone like myself would be of great help and more like me. We could be contacted and told of a person who would like a 'buddy' and we would contact them, meeting them at their home or a coffee shop like setting. I was fortunate to have friends that I knew were HIV+ and called them that day I found out. They were kind enough to be at my house that night, listen to me cry, give me a hug, and tell me I am not alone and will help them through this. Jeez, the first three months, if you look back on this blog, I spent each day crying and thinking of ways to kill myself. That was with all the help from friends. Can you imagine someone finding out and not having anyone to talk to? No body who can really say they understand and mean it? I think a program like this would be very helpful and will continue pushing for it. Who knows, there might even someday be a grant for such a program is written correctly. After all, we all know the sooner you get treatment and the more information you have, the greater chance you have to living with this disease. The agency is great at testing for HIV, great at counseling, great at dental and health services and all the other things they do, but there is that gap between the day someone finds out they are HIV+ and the time they get to ARCW for the services. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to ask that person who just found out they are HIV+ if they have someone to talk to or would like someone to talk to that has walked in their shoes. Hell, even someone to sit in the waiting room with them on their first visit would be helpful. It was like going into a gay bar for the first time, the first time I went to ARCW. We all know and remember that feeling and time. Got home and turned on the water in the basement that had been turned off in the fall so the outside pipes wouldn't freeze. Hosed down the side yard real good. We have no grass, I replaced it all with gravel many years ago. It is much easier to clean up daily and no mud in the spring. The dogs figure it out. If you go back to past posts there are pictures that show the side yard and gravel. Changed clothes again since I now felt dirty again from cleaning up dog shit. Took a shower again too. I brought home a couple boxed lunches from the meeting today that didn't no one ate, so I don't have to make dinner tonight. Will watch the results of American Idol and then everything else is reruns. I will DVR Outsourced. It is the only show on the Thursday NBC line up I enjoy. Don't really understand why any of the other shows have hung around this long. If you look in the ratings, the shows should have been canceled last year. I am talking about The Office, Parks, 30 Rock and such. I don't get the humor. But I do love Outsourced. Tomorrow is lunch with the guys which is always fun. It was close to 60 degrees today, but we will be dropping down to the 40s now for the next couple days. We were told to enjoy it because it would not last. It didn't. The clouds are now out and the temperature is dropping.