Blah blah blah

I haven't updated this in nearly two months. Bad Jill! Bad blogger! Shame!

It's not that I haven't been writing (the frequent updates on my adoption blog are proof of that). Or that nothing has happened for me to write about.

I've mostly gotten very lazy lately, and also depressed. And my fibromyalgia is doing bad, bad things to me. I wake up most mornings feeling like someone beat me soundly with a potato sack full of unripe fruit. Which is not, as you can imagine, a very pleasant thing.

I used to take meds for my fibro, and they worked well enough. But I stopped taking them when I got pregnant, and never started them again. They were expensive, for one. Also, I think one of them might have been doing some sort of damage to my kidneys. And Barbers have kidney problems to begin with.

So no more fibro meds for me. I'm not taking the antidepressant I was on before my pregnancy, either. I'm back on Zoloft. The SSRI I was taking before has a high incidence of liver damage. And I'm very attached to my liver. I've had it as long as I can remember. Also, for some reason, I have always been skeeved out at the thought of anything liver-related. I like to pretend I don't even have a liver.

So apparently I can either have good brain chemistry and lots of energy, or I can have a liver and kidneys. I've rather unsportingly chosen the latter.

I think that's it for now.

It’s that time again, boys and girls!

It’s been well over a month since the last list, so here we are: things that are bothering me right now!

-What is the point of a heat advisory in the Phoenix area? It’s Phoenix. It’s hot. Don’t we all know that? But Jill, you might say (which would be stupid because I can’t hear you), sometimes it gets a bit hotter than normal, and people need to know to stay indoors. To which I say (or I would, if I’d heard you object), is 114* really that much more dangerous than 110? Do the risks of heat rise exponentially with every degree of heat over 109? And do people really need to be told to stay inside when it’s really, really hot? I think that if you don’t know that, that if you’re the sort of person who would cheerfully go for a run when it’s hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk, this is what’s known as natural selection. Survival of the smart-enough-to-avoid-heat-stroke.
-When someone admits to being an unapologetic (fill-in-the-blank), it tends to be the sort of thing for which they should probably consider apologizing.
-I’m never sure whether, when writing, I should use the passive voice or end a sentence with a preposition.
-Ninety-five percent of the American population wouldn’t know a preposition if it bit them in the collective arse.
-The difference between a perfectly browned grilled cheese sandwich and a blackened mess seems to be about ten seconds. Maybe it’s my stove. Maybe I’m too bloody stupid to make a grilled cheese sandwich. Either way, I’m irked.
-I want to smack the next person to speak or write the phrase “natural childbirth.” Ten times out of ten these people think that childbirth is only natural if it’s drug-free, and that the only admirable, good, acceptable birth is a natural one - otherwise, you have failed as a woman. I had an IV painkiller and an epidural and finally a C-section because my body didn’t want to birth a baby. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that and I’m sick of certain people judging me for not wanting to be in excruciating pain. They’ll say that drugs aren’t good for the baby. Well how the hell is my suffering and being exhausted any good for the baby? I got drugged and I got sliced and my baby was pink and healthy and aced her APGAR. I’ll probably blog about all this later because it really bothers me.
-I watched a few episodes of “Toddlers & Tiaras” last Saturday. The fact that this show exists at all just kills me. (In my defense, there wasn’t anything else on TV.)
-The media seem incapable of using the right words when discussing Twitter. The verb is “tweet,” not “twitter.”
-The fact that the preceding bothers me, bothers me.
-My neighbors’ dogs are at it again, which mystifies me. Doesn’t the barking at 3am bother them, too? Because it sure as heck bothers me. I need to replace the battery in my Dog Silencer Pro, and all will be right with the world again.
-A few days ago “Access Hollywood” named Madonna as one of the sexiest women over 40 in show business. They said she had the body of a woman half her age, or something like that. This makes me wonder if they have seen Madonna lately, because as near as I can tell she has the body of a med school skeleton.
-I had a funnier comparison than “med school skeleton” yesterday but I’ve forgotten what it was.
-I have the Stanley Steemer jingle stuck in my head.
-I’m not very funny anymore.

Happy? Birthday.

Today is my dad's 53rd birthday.

I remember his 51st birthday. It is, in fact, seared into my memory more clearly than almost any other day of my life. That was the day we found out he had a brain tumor.

I remember his 52nd birthday as well, although not quite so clearly because it was a good day. My mom had made a banana-flavored cake and my dad had finally found a good pair of non-bulky cargo pants at Mervyn's. We talked about the year before and how this birthday - and every birthday after it - were, by default, better than the year before, because what's worse than a cancer diagnosis?

We found out the next day: a terminal cancer diagnosis. They gave him three months. He got three weeks. And suddenly my dad's 51st birthday seemed like a great day, because he had been alive. Now every birthday after his 52nd is, by default, worse, because it means that nearly a year has gone by without him, and there are days when that thought alone is almost too much to bear.

I hate that all these thoughts come up on his birthday. I hate that I can't just take this day to be happy that he was born, happy that I had him as long as I did. I know there are people worse off than I am, people whose fathers died younger and more tragically than did mine.

But he was my daddy, and he is gone, and I miss him, and today is his birthday. It's hard to think of anyone, and anything, else.

The operative word here is "emergency"

I went to the ER on Saturday night.

Strictly speaking, it was Sunday morning. It was a little after midnight when my mother pulled the car into the ER parking lot at Banner Desert.

I had my choice of ERs. There's a hospital every few miles around here, I swear. But I couldn't go to Gilbert Mercy, because that's where the ambulance took my dad after his stroke, and I don't know much about Banner Gateway, and Baywood was too far. When I had gallstones three or four years ago, I went to the Banner Desert ER. They treated me pretty well. So I thought I'd go there this time.

I had a fever of 100.5, chills, and a sharp pain in my back. I told this to the woman at the front desk. She seemed uninterested and shoved a paper at me to fill out - their computer system had gone down or something like that. I filled in the blanks and gave it back. I was sent a few feet away to have a nurse (I think) put a little clip on my finger and ask me the same questions the first lady asked me. Then I had to sit in the waiting room. My mother had found two chairs apart from the rest, which was a good thing because the waiting room had sort of a leper colony feel. My skin was crawling just being in there, and if I hadn't been in so much pain I'd have just walked back out the door. The place was packed.

I sat and waited. And waited. I observed an interesting cultural phenomenon during this time, and if I have any Hispanic readers, perhaps they could enlighten me. But it seems like every Hispanic person that came into the ER had the entire family with them - no less than five people.

I waited. Finally, a nurse named Alvin called me back to a little curtained-in area. He asked me the same questions I'd already answered twice and took my vitals. I waited a few minutes more and an actual doctor came back. He asked me the same set of questions. I started to think that maybe someone should write my answers down, save a little time for the next person. The doctor said something about my appendix and my kidneys and wandered off. Alvin led me back to the waiting area.

About 45 minutes passed. The waiting room was filling up. Several people seemed possibly to have highly communicable diseases. It was getting harder to avoid sharing their air. Finally another nurse called me back into a corridor marked "Procedures." She said she was going to start an IV. She asked me the same questions I'd already answered.

I should mention that, in addition to being exceptionally pale, my skin is on the thick side. No one has ever been able to find a vein on the first try, and most of the time it takes a good 5 to 10 minutes. It took two nurses and an ultrasound machine to locate a vein for my IV. They got it going, put me on a saline drip and gave me drugs for pain, stomach acidity, and something else I'm not clear on. And then ... they sent me back out into the waiting room with my IV pole.

About a half-dozen or so people in the waiting room also had IVs in. My mother and I found a place to sit that seemed slightly less disgusting and were settling in when two orderlies wheeled two women into the area in hospital wheelchairs. One of them had a plastic bag she was vomiting into. And vomiting, and vomiting. I'm not sure what the volume of the average adult stomach is, but this woman had to be pushing it. I thought surely she'd run out of contents to vomit, but no such luck. And these were gut-wracking, 50-decibel heaves. I nearly threw up myself. I found myself wondering, shouldn't someone do something for this woman? Pump some fluids into her? Find a bed for her? And what about the rest of us with our IV poles? Why the wait? If I felt well enough to wait, I wouldn't have gone to the ER. But I did. I went to the emergency room because it was an emergency.

A nurse called me back into a little room. He checked my IV and asked me the same questions I'd answered already. He said something about a CT scan and a room but implied it might be a few hours. I was sent back into the vomitorium. This part of the waiting room was emptying, and my mother and I, too, went to the other side. Right next to an elderly gentleman who was hacking up a lung.

We'd been there three and a half hours, and I was in a great deal of pain. I whined to my mother for a moment, then went back to the nurse in the little room and asked him to remove my IV.

My mother drove me to Gilbert Hospital on Power Road, where they say it's door to doc in 31 minutes. Only six or so people sat in the waiting room and none of them were losing bodily fluids. A kind, well-dressed young woman asked me a few questions and printed out a bracelet for me. No sooner was it on my wrist than I was taken back. One nurse took my vitals while another asked me a series of questions - and put my answers into the computer. Then I was taken back to a room. An actual room with a heavy wooden door. I changed into the gown they gave me and a nurse started an IV and took some blood. A doctor came in. Both he and the nurses knew my answers to their questions from looking at the computer. Fifteen minutes later I was getting a CT scan and an hour after I'd arrived, I had a diagnosis (a kidney stone and infection) and I'd been given an antibiotic shot. Then they sent me on my merry way with a prescription.

I don't have any funny points to make and there is no moral to this story (although it's obvious which hospital I'd recommend) but, seriously, vomiting in the waiting room? That was pretty bad. I'm just saying.

Nine months

Yesterday (the ninth) marked the nine-month anniversary of my father's death.

I can't believe it's been nine months. Some days it feels like it's been years since he's been gone. Other days it feels like hours. I can still remember everything very clearly - the day he died, and the eleven days before it. The day he lost consciousness (August 29th) is especially clear in my mind. In some ways it feels like he died that day. His brain did, I suppose. He had the stroke on Friday. When my mom and I saw the MRI on Monday, we knew he was gone. The doctor said the white areas were dead spots. The image was blanketed in white spots.

I knew earlier, though. On the 29th, when we couldn't wake him up. We called 911 and the ambulance came, sirens blaring. I met the EMTs in the driveway. They came in. They took his blood pressure. It was 60/40. When I heard those numbers, I knew then and there he wasn't going to wake up.

The EMTs had my dad strapped to a stretcher. They asked if we had a hospital preference. They took him away. That was a Friday. One week later, in the hospital, the nurses took out his breathing tube. Again, an ambulance came. They took him to the hospice we'd visited earlier that week.

On Tuesday, September 9th, another ambulance took him away. They didn't use sirens that time.

How has it been nine months already? Where did the time go? I've done so little with it. I've had so little energy.

I bought my dad a Homer Simpson card for Father's Day last year. I feel the strange compulsion to buy a card this year. Why? What on earth would I do with it? I don't know, but the urge is there just the same. Habit, I suppose. I've bought one every year that I can remember. It seems strange I don't need to buy one this year. That I'll never need to buy one again. I think my dad's birthday will be hard, too, especially since it'll mark two years since the initial diagnosis.

Brain cancer, I'd thought. Who the hell gets brain cancer? It seemed unfair. Why did it have to be my daddy? He thought differently.

"Why not me?" he'd say. "Am I so special that I can't get a brain tumor? I'm no better than anyone else."

But he was, in so many ways and for so many reasons.

I miss him so much.

Headed nowhere

So. Apparently I haven't ranted in a week now. Blogger says I last updated on the 22nd and today is March 1st.

This is a shame, really, because I'm too dang tired to be clever. I'm too dang tired for much of anything, really, and I have been for about a week. I haven't even finished my Valentine's candy yet and I'm usually a holiday ahead as far as candy goes.

I blame my migraine. Here you might think that I've made an error and that I should have pluralized the word migraine. You would be wrong. If I calculated it properly, I reckon I'd find I've actually had relatively few migraines in my life considering I've been getting them since I was ten. The problem is that each headache lasts at least a week.

A week.

Sometimes - frequently, in fact - longer. So my problem (one of about fifty) is that I've had this headache for a week now and it's made me crabby and unproductive. All I've had the energy for is looking at the same thirty or so websites over and over again and wondering why they don't update every twenty minutes, because I'm bored. Most of them update once daily or so, so I've had to play a lot of video games as well (hey, you try mowing the bloody lawn when your brain's trying to push its way out of your skull).

One of my daily obsessions is a blog called Your Next Gift dot com. Each day there is a new, fairly cool item that would make a good gift. The other day they featured this. It’s a voice-activated alarm clock.

I was excited by the idea at first but upon reading the description I was disappointed. It recognizes 10 commands and none of them are what I need in an alarm clock. I need something that will stop blaring when I shout “Shut up!”

Who designs these things, anyway? What's the point in having something voice-activated if I can only say certain things? Although I reckon this keeps the clock's feelings from getting hurt if I turn verbally abusive after a poor night's sleep.

But anyway. Back to my headache.

I've seen commercials for a prescription migraine drug (that doesn't work for me, if you were wondering) where migraine sufferers have been photoshopped so they're holding their own heads, Sir Patrick Delaney-Podmore-style. The caption is something to the effect that sometimes their migraines are so bad, they wish they could take their heads off.

I could see that, I suppose. There would certainly be some advantages to being headless. I know I'd like to see exactly how my arse looks in a pair of jeans before I leave the house. And if you were to meet up with other headless people, you could engage in all sorts of headless hijinks, as do the members of the Headless Hunt in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." But honestly, I've never had a headache so bad I wanted to remove my head. Probably just my central nervous system. You don't need one of those, right? I mean, the peripheral nervous system is such a slacker. Why not make it take some of the workload for a change?

Although I would miss conscious thought, I think. I've had electrical impulses firing in my brain for so long that I think I'd miss that as well. Which is why instead of removing anything vital I usually just take a Frova or two.

Frova is a wonderful little pill that my neurologist prescribed a year or two ago. It is the only thing that knocks my headaches down a few notches. And last October my doctor told me not to take it any more. So I've been forced to tough it out when a migraine hits.

I should mention that my version of toughing it out involves a lot of whining and sobbing and a fair amount of Twizzlers. And hours at a stretch on the computer. Which could prove useful. For all I know, tomorrow's Your Next Gift might be some sort of anti-migraine device.

Or at least something I can shout at if it makes a loud noise.

I'm a Pepper, You're a Pepper ...

I think my mother's the only one who wanted to read about this, but too bad. I needed an excuse to use this title. So here goes.


A few weeks ago I was listening to Michael Medved’s radio program.

In my defense, my mother had turned the radio on and chosen the station. Had it been up to me, I would have been listening to KSLX – or better yet, nothing at all on account of I’d just woken up and was sort of crabby.

Anyway.

Not being a regular listener, I can’t say for sure whether Michael Medved is an obsessive lunatic . However, based on the hour or so of programming I heard, the man needs psychotropic meds, and quickly. Because he thinks that one of the worst problems in America today is soda consumption. To listen to Medved tell the story, one would think that sugared beverages killed Kennedy, knocked over the World Trade Center, ruined the economy, and ended more lives than cancer, heart disease and AIDS combined. I’ve never heard anyone discuss soda with such vitriol.

Soda, apparently, is the single biggest reason that Americans, and more specifically children, are obese. He thinks that it’s worse than drugs and that it should be outlawed.

I wish I was making this up, I really do.

Seriously, Michael Medved? With all the problems society is facing, you’re going to zero in on soda? Forget violent crime, unemployment, abject poverty, a lack of health insurance, drunk driving, and about fifty other things. Oh, no. It’s soda that’s the real evil. The road to hell is paved with Coke bottles.

I’ll admit, soda isn’t the healthiest thing in the world. If you drink a lot of it, you’re not going to be in great shape. But a few cans a week never killed anyone. A Dr Pepper with lunch isn’t going to inflate your arse. Mountain Dew doesn’t cause diabetes. And if children are overweight, soda is likely merely a factor, not the sole cause. If you’re eating rubbish, it doesn’t make a difference what you’re washing it all down with.

If Michael Medved wants to vent his spleen on the beverage industry, why not turn his rage to the makers of these so-called energy drinks? Teenagers and young adults are using them as meal substitutes and downing them in alarming quantities. Or what about the perpetuators of lattes and frappucinos and iced coffees? The calories in those suckers is nothing short of alarming. And again, young peple are sucking them down instead of eating.

And, Michael Medved, what about the alcohol manufacturers? Why not get angry at them for their sly marketing to teenagers? Why not rage about DUIs and alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis of the liver and how more and more starlets are going to rehab because they’re alcoholics before they can even legally buy alcohol? Where’s your vitriol there, Michael Medved?

I’m not advocating soda instead of milk instead of school cafeterias. I don’t think people should have Coke with every meal, or spend more on Diet Pepsi than they do on groceries. And I’m certainly not going to say that soda is good for you. But plenty of things aren’t good for you, but are fine in moderation. It’s not the Coca-Cola company’s responsibility to teach moderation. That’s the job of parents, and if they’re not doing it properly, they’re to blame. Not the hardworking people who make and bottle and ship and deliver soda across the country. Should they lose their jobs just because people are stupid? No, Michael Medved, they should not. And you should shut your bloody piehole about soda and focus on the real problems we’ve got going on.

Like loudmouthed, obnoxious radio show hosts.

Just a thought.

Year in review

Warning: this is a long one.

It’s the end of the year, and we all know what that means: the media – or “the media” if you prefer to be snarky about it – will be counting down lists of the best, dumbest, and most amazing people, animals, natural disasters, and celebrity meltdowns of the past year.

Animal planet, for instance, has a special airing soon about the ten most amazing animal moments of 2008. E!’s “The Soup” will do some sort of soupy countdown as well – a clipdown, I believe they call it, since it’s all TV show clips commentated on by the delightfully snarky Joel McHale. In a recent Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King listed his favorite movies from this year. The list goes on and on.

I actually considered counting down my ten favorite countdowns, and I still may do so. But with all the emphasis on the best of things, I always get confused. I think, hey, wasn’t this in fact a spectacularly crappy year?

So without further ado, I give you my personal top ten suckiest moments/events/whatever of 2008.

10. My car. Period. This was not a good year for my car. Of course, it’s a Chevy, so no year is a good one and every mile I drive causes more and more cash to fly out of the tailpipe like it does in those commercials. I think the bloody thing’s worth maybe a grand now. But even for my bottom-of-the-line, stripped down Cavalier, this was a bad year. The EGR valve croaked. Two of my three A/C control knobs broke. It really started to get that Old Car Smell. The little ashtray-drawer-thingy snapped off. The latch on the boot broke. A tire went flat in the 3rd Avenue parking garage. The paint started peeling off aggressively. My gas mileage tanked. The belt driver (whatever the H that is) had to be replaced. The foam in the steering column hardened, causing my horn to blare randomly, frequently, and without warning – often at 2 or 3 in the morning, for five minutes at a stretch. And more recently, the battery died. A fairly new battery, I might add.

All this is just in the past year. Since I’ve owned it, I’ve also had to have the brakes fixed, a new A/C installed, the starter repaired, and the antenna reattached. And the windshield wipers replaced five times. And like four new batteries. And the stereo replaced.

My next car will be German or Japanese, I promise you that.

9. 2008 was the year that an old friend from my past made a reappearance.

Acne.

I had horrible acne as a teenager, and I was terribly relieved to find that as I entered my twenties, my skin cleared up. I had, oh, three or four good years. My skin looked great. A trifle pale, certainly. But that’s my normal hue. I could use WiteOut as a concealer, I swear it. But every so often I’d get a nice rosy glow in my cheeks, and darned if my face didn’t look fantastic.

But then it happened. Long about … oh, March or maybe April I think, I started noticing blemishes where there once were none. It started out small – a red bump here, a red bump there - one, maybe two at a time. But then a new one would pop up while the others were still out. Three zits, and then four marred my face.

By November, I was back to using a medicated facial cleanser, toner and moisturizer, the kind that peel off a layer or two of the epidermis as they “clean.” And you know what? I’ve still got acne. Five zits on my face, two on the front of my neck, three on the back of my neck, and one or two little guys behind the ears.

I’ve tried concealers and foundation. The blemishes suddenly match my skin … and I end up looking warty instead of zitty.

Sigh. Goodbye, lovely skin of my twenty-second and twenty-third years. I’ll miss you.

8. My favorite antidepressant stopped working. Oh, Zoloft. What happened? We used to work so well together, you and I. Sure, we had our ups and downs – dosages upped and downed, that is – but once we hit the right number of milligrams, it was magic, wasn’t it? I felt normal. You didn’t have many side effects – mostly headaches, and I was used to those. Together we got through beauty school and fibromyalgia, and you kept me from hauling off and hitting people (although in all fairness, most of them deserved to be hit). We were a team, Zoloft! But I flew too close to the sun on wings of serotonin. I took you for too long. And you couldn’t help me anymore.

And I was a miserable harpy again. Dr. Zenner – you remember him, right Zoloft? He said that if I leave you alone for long enough, when I go back to you, you’ll work again. And we’ll be so happy together.

In the meantime? Bupkis.

7. I met another old friend this year, one more crabby and vindictive than acne. I had my tonsils out in 2007, and I enjoyed a good nine months of good otolaryngological health. Not a rhinovirus or a streptococcal amoeba or a sinus infection in sight – and I’d been a walking strep virus for ages.

In March of 2008, I got strep throat. Well, I told myself, removing the tonsils wasn’t a foolproof solution. I did work closely with children (until #3 happened) and germs were germs. I doubled my use of hand sanitizer and turned away when someone coughed. Strep returned again in March, then May. And June. And again in November.

On the upside, that’s only four cases of strep compared to the ten a year I was used to when I had tonsils. On the downside, that’s four more cases of strep than I had in 2007.

I’m not sure what else can be removed to help remedy the problem. As soon as I find out, I’ll schedule a surgery.

6. I bought myself a shiny new Dell laptop computer back in … oh, February, I think. It came with Windows Vista installed, and I was (pathetic as it is) used to Windows 2K. But, I told myself, new is good. And I got used to the little “quirks” (bugs) that came with Vista, and I came to like it well enough.

Until October, that is. I’d installed Service Pack 1 (which was supposed to fix said quirks but brought with it two bugs for every one bug it fixed) and on the advice of Scott, my computer-genius big brother, I had Windows set to check for updates nightly.

Mid-October Windows strongly recommended some sort of antivirus update. And fool that I was, I clicked “Ok.”
That, my friends, was the beginning of the end.

This all-important, Strongly Recommended update caused my computer to commit hara-kiri. It would not start up. Start Up wizard couldn’t fix it. It would not boot manually. I could not access my files. My computer, an integral part of my life, was a $750 paper-weight. And I completely. Freaked. Out.

Fortunately, I had Scotty, my own personal Geek Squad. He employed every tool in his mental arsenal to fix my problem. He tried removing part of the hard drive. He tried hack after hack. Finally, using a CD that booted Ubuntu, he retrieved my files from Windows. And when I had them all backed up, he cleared my hard drive off, cleaned up my computer, and downgraded me to Windows XP. He also did a little research, and apparently hundreds if not thousands of people had also lost hard drives to this Strongly Recommended update.

Scotty, you saved my tuchis. You rock. Thank you for losing hours of sleep to keep number six on my list from ruining the whole dang year.

5. Did you know that people in their twenties can get gum disease? I didn’t until the über-helpful dental hygienist told me that I had it. So do you know what I did for my summer vacation? I got my gums lasered four times (and my insurance only covered three). My poor gums. They ached. They stung. They bled. They … healed. But unless I brush and floss vigilantly at least twice a day for the rest of my mortal life, it will come back. And you know what? After a treatment I couldn’t eat anything crunchy for a week. No potato chips! No movie theater popcorn! No regular popcorn!

It was brutal. Especially considering how many movies I saw this summer.

4. Numbers four and three on my list sort of tie for general suckiness, but after considering my sizeable debt, I ordered them as I did.

At the end of July, my boyfriend of four months dumped me. And he gave me the “it’s not you it’s me” routine, just like they do on television. He encouraged me to get angry with him for it and then got offended when I called him a rude name.

Things only got worse between us but I’d rather not get into that.

3. I was fired from my job of nearly two years. I hated management, but I was starting to build up a clientele and I loved working with little kids. I was good at what I did. I had seniority. I was responsible. I filled in at other salons as they needed me. I kept my trap shut when they transferred me to a salon I didn’t want to work at.

But my manager, Sonia, was (pardon my French) an absolute horse’s ass, and she played favorites like one would play a piano. And I was not one of her favorites. So she made up stories about me stealing and messing with the computers, refused to believe me when I told her the stories weren’t true, and canned me. Five days after my dad had brain surgery. Then, after she fired me – in front of a co-worker she insisted sit in on the firing – she said to me offhandedly, “Oh, sorry about your dad.”

I have no qualms about saying that if God is just, this woman will roast in hell for eternity. She treated me like manure and fired me because she could. I hate her like poison.

2. My father’s brain surgery – his third in a year – was because – I believe it was a year to the day from his initial diagnosis – we discovered that his cancer had come back with a vengeance. One month, his MRI was clear. But after he went to the ER because he was having trouble speaking and writing, they did a scan and discovered a huge tumor had popped up out of nowhere. It was aggressive, and it was going to kill him. We were told he had a few months to live, they weren’t sure exactly. They did surgery to remove what they could, and to insert chemotherapy wafers in his brain.

The surgery was on Friday. He came home on Monday night. Eleven days later he lost consciousness and never woke up.

1. Eleven days after he passed out, he died. My father. My daddy. My friend. The best, smartest, kindest, most insightful man I’ve ever known. I miss him so much that it hurts – it’s a physical ache that won’t go away. His death devastated me and I’m not sure I’ll ever completely recover. I’d give the world for five more minutes with him. One more minute. Anything.

I miss him. I don’t know what to do without him. But I have no choice. It sucks. It hurts. And it’s why 2008 will live in my memory as one of the worst years of my life.

Shut Your Mouth

So. I read in the newspaper on Sunday about a new, less-invasive way of doing surgery; doctors are learning it as we speak and are apparently rather excited about it as it means less mess when removing gallbladders, appendices, and that sort of thing. Well, naturally, the first paragraph caught my attention. I had my gallbladder out a few years back and I’ve got four delightful little scars on my abdomen as a result. I’m lucky, actually, because my surgery was done laproscopically so the incisions were all very small, the largest about 1.25 inches across. If I didn’t know they were there I wouldn’t notice them. I digress. I thought to myself, less invasive? Do tell.

And then I read on.

And it turns out that these nutcases want to pull things out through existing bodily orifices. Gallstones? That gallbladder’s coming out your mouth. And in the case of appendicitis, get ready to give birth to an organ, because isn’t it handy that there’s an orifice nearby there as well.

May I be the first to say, ew? Perhaps I’m overreacting, I do have a delicate stomach. And the patient is unconscious during surgery, so it’s not like you’d choke on a part of your upper GI system. But personally, I’d rather be sliced open like a trout than have any part of my body come out of another part of my body.

The article did go on to mention that there are concerns about infection and the impossibility of properly sanitizing an orifice to minimize risk. But they’re working on it. Working on it, which means that before long they’ll have something figured out, and you gentlemen might be passing more than a bowel movement.

This is, I think a good example of the adage that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Granted, a lot of the … technology, I guess you’d call it, isn’t quite there yet. But it will be, so between you and me, if I have to go to the ER for a ruptured appendix, I’m bringing an X-Acto knife with me and making the first incision myself. It may be the only way to make sure they remove my appendix the way God intended: by slicing me straight open and ripping that sucker out. And if a GI doc asks me to open wide, I’m headed for the exits. There are some things you just shouldn’t throw up.