The saga of the squeezie pants continues. The company who makes them sent the lovely Kaylin (yes, Gen Z, 5 feet 10 inches in heels, thin, blonde, a little ditzy, and wearing a fabulously chic black pantsuit) out on Monday to perform the Medicare requirements, which are to take measurements of the leg(s), put the lymphatic press on the person (me) for a 15-minute session, then re-measure the leg(s) and submit this data to Medicare. She competently took the initial measurements, had me sit to put on the “garment” to do my test, and, guess what? It didn’t fit. No big surprise to me, considering the lipedema underlying the lymphedema, but…damn.

And of course there was no back-up garment in a larger size awaiting Kaylin in her car. Apparently when this comes up they add “extenders” to the thing, but she didn’t have those with her either. The parent company is in Riverside, 90 minutes away, and the office out of which Kaylin works (Agoura) is the farthest out and apparently least well supplied. (She says she has lodged repeated requests about that to no avail.) So she called her boss and he told her to come back to base and they would decide what to do.

Apparently, previous to January, they were able to just take measurements and then order the garment, but since then Medicare has required this test. They could go ahead and put in for it, but the likelihood was that Medicare would make them reschedule. So, I mustered up a smile and a joke (“Hey, I’m here all week!”) and agreed to await word from Kaylin.

To give her credit, she was extremely apologetic, expressed solidarity over Medicare’s ridiculous hoops, and reassured me that they would figure it out, and I would get my garment, as soon as possible.

On Tuesday, Kaylin called to tell me she had ordered the extenders sent out from the parent company and when they arrived she would reschedule.

Yesterday, Kaylin called to say she had the extenders plus an opening at 4:00—was I available? Yes, please. So, she brought the original garment plus the extenders, unpackaged and laid them all out on my dining room table, and tried, for 15 minutes, to figure out how they went together. She did discover how to hook the two extenders to one another, but then the extenders wouldn’t hook to the main garment. There were no connectors, no tabs, no velcro, nada. There was no online video for assembly, and no instructions came with the packaging. I got her to show them to me, two heads being better than one, and we both kept trying, hoping for that “Ah hah!” moment, but no joy.

Finally, in turning them inside out to see what was inside, she discovered tags and read them. The extenders were marked “compatible with these two models” both of them numbered 470-something, and the base unit was marked model 370-something. So basically, FFS, her office doesn’t have the proper standard garment to be connected to extenders.

She was so frustrated and so apologetic for wasting my time again, but all I could think about was her time, making phone calls, driving around in this heat, trying to do the right thing while not being supported by her company. I was curious, so I asked her how much change she saw in people’s measurements after the 15-minute trial session. She said oh, about two centimeters, not that much. Then she said, You’re thinking what I’m thinking, we just make it up and tell Medicare and move on (who, me? I’m shocked! hee hee). She said that at this point she was really tempted to do that, since it’s more than obvious that I’m a prime candidate for this treatment, but…the other reason for the trial is to show me how to use the pump, to learn the controls, pressures, and timings, etc., and I wouldn’t be able to do that unless we had the trial.

So, she left again after offering assurances, and today I got a phone call that the proper base model would be here from Riverside on Monday, and we would try for the third time.

Meanwhile, in other news…one would think that being at home alone with little to no agenda beyond feeding myself at intervals would be mostly uneventful, but no. First of all, I’m teaching an art workshop on Saturday for which I need to print handouts for 20 people, but my Brother ran out of black ink. I looked for the cartridge in all the places it would logically be, and it wasn’t there. So, I placed an emergency order through Amazon to have a cartridge delivered between 4 and 8 a.m. this morning, and put that off for another day.

I went to bed “last night” around 1:15 a.m., read for 45 minutes, and finally felt like I could sleep, after the Tylenol, the magnesium, and the Biofreeze had a chance to work on my knees. I slept from 2-5:30, made a trip to the facilities, and went back to bed. But when I put my hand on the bureau next to the bed to brace myself to roll in, I heard a clatter that meant I had knocked something to the floor. I was too tired to turn on a light to ascertain what, so I went back to sleep until 9:30, when a thrice-damned (by me) telemarketer rang my cell phone and woke me up out of the first sound, dream-filled sleep I have had in a week. At that point I discovered that what I had heard was my glasses, falling off the bureau onto the floor.

I expected them to be right there below the spot from which they fell, but they weren’t. They must have bounced, either under the bed or under the bureau, but despite using my hand and then my cane to drag out all sorts of detritus (socks, a tube of Neosporin, some eye drops, a box of bandaids, a pen, a stray earring, etc.), NO GLASSES.

I then retrieved the broom from the kitchen and poked around with that, finding more stuff I didn’t want to know had accumulated under the furniture in the many moons since I have moved it. (My bedroom is small and my bed is wedged in place, with minimal possibility for shifting it.) Long story short, it took me almost two hours to find the damn glasses. They were under the bed. I didn’t hear a bounce when they fell, just a clink, so I’m thinking I must have pushed them farther back while trying to pull stuff out. One instant’s inattentiveness, followed by one wrong move, and half the day gone.

I ate my morning oatmeal at 12:45, and now I’m printing my handouts (Amazon, at least, having come through with the ink!). Lessons learned: Tell people up front that I’m huge so they come prepared. Find a better place to put my glasses at night. Order new glasses and include a spare pair, at rest in a safe place that you won’t forget the moment you put them there. And clean out under your furniture more often (eeuw).