Bumfusticated - Wrinkled Brows

All right, I will just admit it.  I am bumfusticated. 

It is Monday morning, and I have already made the trek to K's house, and we have done breakfast, read the newspaper, briefly discussed the daily news, and started the first load of wash.  The home nurse was already here when I arrived, which always leaves me feeling slightly guilty, even though K. has told me repeatedly that he is doing well enough that I don't need to be here 24/7. 

In a little while he will leave for his hyperbaric chamber treatment, as today begins the third week of a four week (five days a week) course of these treatments.  His slight irritability tells me that he is more than ready to be done with these miserable experiences.  They are not painful, just uncomfortable and boring. 

We scramble around to make sure he has a 100% cotton shirt clean and ready to wear, since that is all that is allowed inside the chamber.  Apparently at 400% pure oxygen there is some danger of clothing bursting into flames if you go in wearing the wrong thing.  (I could certainly have used that incentive to encourage staff to dress appropriately back when I ran an office, given the state of dishabille in which some arrived.)  

I personally would have a tough time being sealed in a chamber the size of a closet with two other strangers for two hours, five days a week, wearing a breathing device and trying to watch a stupid movie to pass the time.  Talk about claustrophobia!

While he is gone I will clean house, do his grocery shopping, and stop by the medical supply store because we are out of two-inch paper tape.  If it is anything like the last trip for pink zinc-oxide tape, they will have one-inch and three-inch in stock, but will be out of two inch and will have to order it.  And so it goes....

Still, these are all normal, everyday happenings (at least "normal" in my current world) and combined they do not tell me why I am so bumfusticated.

Odd word, isn't it?  You won't find it in any dictionary that I know about.  I am fairly certain it is an amalgam of several words which attempt to describe confusion, frustration and a sense of being stymied and out of sorts.  I learned it from an old gentleman I knew in my youth, who had an amazing lexicon of hybrid words that colored his vocabulary like a three year-old with a brand new box of
Crayons. 

Although he sometimes used words and phrases that I had never heard before, I almost always understood exactly what he meant.  He had that kind of clarity about who and what he was.

Some days he was "frizzled", other days he was "as pleased as a pup with two tails", occasionally he was as "happy as a dead pig in the sunshine."  (I never did quite "get" that one.)

Thus, today I am bumfusticated.  Although I may not know precisely what it means, I know exactly what it feels like. 

Hope your day is full of clarity and sunshine.  Until next time ...Marsha