It has been quite a week here, beginning with an ultrasound of my swollen underarm that revealed unsuspicious lymph nodes. As I primly and eloquently told my wife leading up to the appointment, “My doctors are so far up my ass that if anything was horribly wrong, they would know by now.” This returns us to square one, with my rheumatologist uncertain if it’s a reaction to Humira or something else that’s responsible for my arm pain and discomfort. Until she figures out our next move, there’s not much to do but suck it up and see if a steroid taper reduces the swelling.

In other intrigue, Crankenstein has been under the weather. When asked for a self-diagnosis, she pronounced her illness “F*ck if I know.” She had a sore throat, fever and fatigue. She is often exposed to COVID at work, including in the week leading up to her illness. Her initial concern was that we stay away from each other, so I played nurse from a distance until her fever broke. After three negative COVID tests on successive evenings, she escaped her bedroom exile and daringly sat on the couch—and then got sick again later that night. Now she’s back on the mend and probably relieved I watched Flood! without her.

There were times in her training, particularly when she worked with very young children, that she could call colds and flus like Babe Ruth calling a homer. Walking into the house on a Tuesday evening, she’d caution “Don’t kiss me! A febrile three-year-old hacked directly into my mouth earlier, so I’ll be sick any day now.” And, sure enough, by Thursday she sounded like someone from a NyQuil commercial. Mandatory mask policies at her workplace have curbed much of that, so this was an unusual occurrence.

Finally, to cap our week of sad-trombone antics, I fell down a few stairs this afternoon while carrying an armload of blankets stripped from Crankenstein’s sickbed. All that padded cargo came to my rescue, breaking much of my fall. And, now that I’m stuck on the couch with a bruised knee and swollen foot, I’ll have time to work on reviews that were delayed last week. That includes a Mary Tyler Moore seasonal offering and a lesbian cowgirl spin on Hallmark-knockoff holiday fare (hence the Blanche Devereaux image accompanying this post).

Estelle Parsons (standing) with Ruta Lee, who played her girlfriend on Roseanne.

My original plan had been to celebrate Estelle Parsons’ 95th birthday today by breaking down the history of homosexuality on Roseanne. That’s a more complicated undertaking than I anticipated, largely due to the number of quotes I need to check and screen caps I need to grab that span so many seasons. As fans of the show will remember, Parsons’ character, Bev, came out of the closet late in the original series, only for her lesbianism to be ‘taken back’ and given to another character in the series finale.

Years later, when the show was rebooted, the second character’s lesbianism was also reversed, alongside many other latter-season developments that never made much sense. It’s a whole big mess, but Parsons, a wonderful actress who deserves an Emmy for her most recent appearance on The Conners, had tread similar ground decades earlier, when she kissed Joanne Woodward in Paul Newman’s Rachel, Rachel. Happy 95th birthday to Estelle, and here’s to many more.