Well, nothing like finding out the desk (or a certain person on it) is talking smack about me.

I’d explain the context if I didn’t think it would bust out the person who told me anything was said, but I will say this: I may eat, breathe and shit the paper as my full-time gig, but technically I don’t work for it anymore. Therefore, I don’t have any sort of power to decide to scratch any story at my capricious whims. As such, if I’ve covered something that I don’t think merits space, I call the person in charge and run it by them; if they agree, I don’t file, and if they don’t, I pull something out of my ass.

Jerk-off.

Anyway.

I had hoped a mid-afternoon shower and once-over with the loofah would be enough to restore my will to live, but alas, it wasn’t. My last two days have been spent hauling Mother around to her first two tests, the endoscopy and, because the doctor discovered her duodenum is narrow, an Upper GI series this morning. The running-around alone would be enough to make someone crazy, but add to it the following things:

-- Mother calling me at ass o’clock Tuesday morning, yelling that we have to leave RIGHT NOW because they can get her in earlier (and not really believing her because of past histrionics);

-- having to run her errandssit with her because she’d been sedated and might be woozy all day (she wasn’t); and

-- smushing myself into two chairs trying to sleep while waiting THREE FUCKING HOURS for this test today as a crazy Asian old guy yelled at his son and a bunch of snotty little kids ran around screaming and being snotty;

and you would be as useless as I was today when I got home. Seriously, I conducted an interview and then just sat in front of my computer in a fog all afternoon because I’m so worn out. About the only thing good in all this is that switching Mother’s meds last week has kept her relatively calm. If she’d have been on Defcon Mother, someone would’ve been dead by now.

I threw “narrow duodenum” into the Google monster, and everything that came up first had to do with duodenal ulcers (of which I had one, like, 13 years ago, and it sucked). Seeing that Upper GIs are used to find ulcers, we may have a diagnostic winner. We’ll find out tomorrow morning.