An Allergic Reaction, a Near Death Experience, and a Dream

First, the dream:

High timber country, dirt road--more of a trail, really. My big rig is parked, unloaded, the dry van semi trailer is empty. Time to turn this rig around, head back down the mountain.

But wait. Why do the backing up, jackknife thing I've always done here before? The road clearly loops upgrade a bit, over, and back down, reconnecting with itself at the Y a few hundred yards behind me. I'll bet I've been doing this the dumb way all along!

Grab a gear, head on up the loop...over...down. Wait a minute. This is not good. The road has tapered out to nothing. We--the truck and I--are suddenly in deep doo-doo. This is a crumbly, steep side-slope, plunging down to infinity below, wall of clay. I'm holding the rig level and driving it forward not through its own capabilities now but only through my personal energy and determination: Soul power.

It's not enough. We're going down. NO! I REFUSE! MORE Soul power to the wheels, temporarily forcing even the trailer wheels to drive, grab for traction, scramble.

(Told you I was good.)

STILL not enough. We begin to slide down, back--NO! MORE Soul power. Single-mindedly, I, me, myself, and I, from my position behind the wheel, DRAG the entire tractor-trailer combination forward, up, forward, up....

Made it.

At the Y, beautiful women--a number of them--are waiting for me. First to greet me, and in no friendly fashion, is ex-wife #4, still and always one of the most beautiful girls on the planet. She's ticked at me, scowling, not an unusual mode for her. Tries to chew me out for (I know) taking the route that should have led to disaster.

I just grin at her. "I'm here, every bit of the equipment is here, and not a scratch on it!"

It's hard not to grin. She's stark naked, and that was always her way of signaling me she was ready to be romanced. Subtle, that's my girl.

Then another, also beautiful female...though sadly, when I wake, I find myself unable to remember who she was or exactly what she looked like or what she said. Bummer.

Then another, also extremely beautiful woman. Not saying who; the wrong person might read this Hub! But, beautiful, brunette, tall, slim...and expressing her love for me in a remarkable way. I'm now resting, kind of lying back on something. Repeatedly, her index finger lightly brushes mine, almost tip to tip. Doesn't sound like much, but with the electricity passing between us, eye to eye, it's a lot.

I woke up. Understood the meaning of the dream immediately.

For me, dreams of driving tractor-trailer combinations often indicate my marital relationship. Not always; after all, I was a commercial truck driver for a number of years, and sometimes a truck is just a truck. But when it does relate to the marriage (and this goes back through all seven of my marriages), the trailer represents the woman. It's my job to take the lead and tow her safely to where she needs to be.

Or not. In the above dream, one bad decision came within a cat's whisker of dropping her into the red clay abyss. Not a good thought.

Accurate, though.

A few weeks ago, my wife found a drink she really liked: Life Water by Sobe, especially the cherry pomegranate flavor. It was light, smooth, yum! Not that she went overboard; in fact, she limited herself to no more than two bottles per day because, quite frankly, the stuff is not cheap.

Being broke saved her life.

The Life Water nearly killed her. Had we been flush, had she consumed (for instance) half a dozen bottles a day instead of just two, the result could well have been an early funeral.

Life Water contains one of the fake sugars, a product called erythritol. She's better off sticking with real sugar, no sucralose, no saccharine, no aspartame. Not even any acesulfame, malitol, or whatever other I can't believe it's not sugar lab goodie they come up with. However, (a) we'd never heard of erythritol, and (b) we missed its inclusion in the Life Water.

With Pam being as sensitve as she is, reading nutritional product labels is for us a way of life. How we missed this one, we've no clue. But we did.

A few days after she began drinking the stuff, she developed a thrush-like yeast infection looking thing in her mouth. This has nothing to do with oral funmaking; you don't even want to know what happens if she goes there. No big; she called her doctor, who called in some Nystatin, good to go.

Except...she got gradually worse instead of better.

Now, my Pammie is deeply body-aware. With all of the things that could kill her, she'd have been dead decades ago without that ongoing knowledge of what's happening within her physical form. She finally figured out it had to be the Life Water, specifically the erythritol. No more of that stuff for her!

Her symptoms still got gradually worse...and worse...and worse.

By this time, perhaps ten days into the problem, she knew it was going to take some hard hitting to kill this thing, flush the thrush and all the other symptoms that were steadily adding up. One such: Her toes were going into spasm and crossing each other so that I had to gently massage them back to their normal positions.

She needed to see her doctor. Get prescriptions for hardcore antibiotics, antifungal, and steroids. Nothing else would kick this. She knew this, I knew she was right, and that's where I messed up. Took the wrong road instead of backing my rig around right there. Should have said, "Go for it, set the appointment, let's go!"

Instead, I said, "Don't know how we're going to pay for that and then pay for your regular refills the very next day when those are due. We're busted, baby! Only got X dollars, and...."

And she snorted, "No way I'm going without my regular meds. I'll just have to kick this myself!"

See my evil influence here?

She did set an appointment, but then cancelled it the night before we were due to go to the clinic.

Detour! There's a muddy road ahead!

The morning of the cancelled appointment, my thinking had shifted. I checked the white sores inside Pam's mouth. The swelling of her cheek lining had increased, and so had the white.

This was not good.

I thought...and went to work. She napped a bit. When she got back up, I told her,

"I'm going to hock the title to the car."

"No!" She responded instantly.

"Not up for discussion," I replied, "But it's not like we haven't done it before. I had to put both vehicles up as collateral for enough to get us through before I hired on trucking in Colorado in 2006, remember?"

She didn't remember. Too painful.

But she went into action nonetheless. Called the clinic. "Is that appointment slot still open? It is? We'll be there!"

I'd crunched the numbers seven ways from Sunday. Crunched 'em again. Told Pam we might not have to hock the car title, at least not this month. It would take a miracle plus all the change in the coffee can, but maybe.

We went to town. Her doctor was nearly in shock. The white sores in Pam's mouth were oozing goop.

"It's gotten into your bloodstream. If you'd come in even a day or two later, it would have meant the hospital if you even made it there."

Oops. Good call, instigating that delay, cowboy. Uh-huh! Uh-huh!

The doctor cut her fee (which is already low for us, helping us out because we're self pay and for now on fixed income--though we do have prospects) by another $10. She wrote five prescriptions, one a refill of a med Pam uses every month, the other four a head-on attack against everything wrong with my sweetie because of the erythritol (and the delay). Yep. Three of the four were the steroids, antibiotics, and antifungal Pam had already named.

Well, she is an ex-pharmacist.

But...five? Oh, man, we were doomed. Or at least the car title was going to have to go to car title jail for a while; no doubt about it.

And then the bonus miracles, the miracles on top of the fact that the appointment slot had stayed open when that never happens and that the doctor had cut her already modest fee even farther. Bonus miracles at the pharmacy:

1. The antibiotic used to cost $103 per course. For the first time ever, according to the pharmacy tech, we were able to get two courses (which Pam always needs; one never does it) for a total of $29.

2. The antifungal, a fierce thing that really works, but you don't want to use it unless you're in dire straits, was at least in the $50 to $60 range a few years back. This time it hit the magic $3.99 mark.

3. By the time all was said and done, an expected medical outlay for the day of $300 or more had shrunk to $98...total.

Then, of course, the real fun began. The meds flushed her so fast that--let's just say the details would definitely be TMI, Too Much Information. But by this morning, a mere 18 hours after hitting this emergency regimen full bore, her mouth looked great by comparison. The cheek swelling was down by a good 50 percent, and the white sores were...gone!

So: An allergic reaction to erythritol. A near death experience due to that and a money-nervous husband who instigated a delay in seeking medical assistance. And a dream in which my mistake was made clear but I found myself able to rectify the situation (as my late father was fond of saying) and I got to hang out with a bunch of beautiful chicks.

Including, once I woke up, my beloved redhead. I'm here, every bit of the equipment (and believe me, Pammie's got some equipment) is here, and not a scratch on it.

How do people actually get bored? I just don't get it.