It's become my December habit to turn out the lights, bloggily speaking, and start the new year at a fresh venue. But as you may have noticed, I'm Jess not sayin' much these days. (Hey, I'm not the only one!) In fact, if I were to set up a new blog for 2008, that's probably what I'd call it: Jess Not Sayin' Much. But then what? No posts?
Truth to tell, I most enjoy Jess D'Zerts Cafe, where I can be more fingerpainter--uh, I mean chef--than writer. Turning off the Comments feature there freed me to cook up tasty little morsels for my own amusement, and I think it also frees others to graze or ignore or even think "Boy, is that stupid!" or "I don't get it" but maybe sometimes be amused too, without feeling like they have to say something about it. Whatever. In any case, that's where you can find me.
Update to the following paragraphs:
After repeated problems with the chat room,
I've removed it until a better solution comes along!
Jess D'zerts Cafe is located in the fictional town of Ardis, a friendly place, and in the Cafe spirit, I invite you to slide into the Corner Booth, where I've installed a Meebo chat room. Say hello, tell me what you've been up to, and feel free to engage in crosstalk with other diners. Keep it friendly though, or Dinky Dog (the bouncer) will bite your sensitive area and drag you to the curb.
Yes, I imagine the conversation will be, shall we say, pretty slow! Nobody's going to sit around in the Corner Booth all day! No matter! Whatever you say will linger in the air until someone happens by to hear it. Conversation remains in the window and conversations are archived so you can always catch up. It's even possible for you to eavesdrop on the Corner Booth from your own place and "phone it in" from there, so to speak, when a conversation begins (read the Meebo Wiki if you want more information).
Please remember to edit the nickname box below your message, using the name we all know you by. And be advised, anything you say can and will be overheard by other diners. It's a Cafe, after all, not a confessional. Even if you seem to be talking to yourself, you're not. And even if you are, well... heh... at the Cafe, [Jessie nods] we understand that kind of thing.
There are a few new A La Carte items at the cafe: Jukebox, On the Menu, and Rest Room all feature You-Tube videos. On The Menu items have not been previously posted on this blog before. Most of the Jukebox items were posted here though and are backdated at the Cafe, since I didn't want to feature them as new posts. However, new ones may be added occasionally.
Medical Exploits of 2007 Part Deux: "There is no dark side..."
Bored readers are invited to skip the text and scroll directly to the audiovisual metaphor at the end of the post (which I found on You-Tube, by the way--I have no video skills).
Ten thousand apologies for my delay in getting this posted. I started writing it September 9 but my mojo is missing, so it was an uphill battle. Messages of concern were greatly appreciated (even if not responded to) and motivated me not to give up.
I spent the first week of August schlepping my stuff from the standing-room-only apartment I've been living in for the past year to a place twice the size (for the same cost) and two miles east, actually closer to the condo and neighbors I didn't want to leave last year. My plan was to not pack, but simply load stuff into my vehicle at the one end, then unload it and put it away at the other, and this plan worked well for small furniture, the contents of closets and cupboards, and boxes that never got unpacked from the last move. It lost some glory, of course, when I got down to the seven bookcases and shelving units, which were too large for my vehicle and had to wait until Ex-Boyfriend could help on the weekend. Mounds of shelf contents accumulated at the new place in anticipation of the bookcases to come, and in the end it took days just to get things sorted to the right rooms.
The lunatic is in my head...
A few years ago, while I was letterboxing in a place I should never have gone alone, I found a coyote skull. I put it under the seat of my car, where it's been ever since. In the course of "decorating" the new apartment, and you are about to discover how loosely I use that term, I decided to bleach the coyote skull and clean it up. My thought was to put it on an end table with a couple other of nature's artifacts that I have--two bird nests, a squirrel's hand, and a turtle shell. I set the head to soak in a bucket of bleach water in my bathroom.
After a few days I'd had enough of the chlorine aroma so I dumped the water and rinsed the skull. The teeth were still black. A toothbrush didn't help, but I happen to have some dental picks (garage sale), so I decided to try cleaning the beast's choppers with those. I found I was able to scale the black stuff off and, truth to tell, it was the kind of mindless time-passing activity to which I can easily lose an hour or three, and I did.
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too...
About 10 p.m. that night, while I was lying on the sofa watching some excruciatingly lame rerun on TV, the cloudburst thundered in my ear, so to speak. Something happened in my head and suddenly I had a stiff neck. I thought I had pulled a muscle, but within minutes I had a migraine-like headache. Soon, and many times throughout the night, I had to throw up.
Was it food poisoning, I wondered, from that can of apple pie filling with the 2002 sell-by date? Or chlorine gas poisoning from the afternoon's dental hygiene efforts? Or, oh no!, a deadly virus killed my coyote and now, viable virions dislodged from his tooth plaque are killing me! Well, it's Saturday night. Take two aspirins and call someone in the morning.
Sunday morning, having no discernible result from the aspirin therapy, I phoned Ex-Boyfriend. "Will you be home today?" I asked, "I may need to go to the hospital." I told him the details.
"If you decide you want to go," he said, "call me back and I'll take you." When he said that, I realized I didn't want to call him back. I wanted to go. So he took me.
Did I take along a toothbrush? A comb? Deodorant? Of course not. I expected the longest part of my visit to take place in the waiting room, just like when I broke my wrist last Christmas.
Much to my surprise, though, I never made it to the waiting room. As soon as the folks at the ER desk were assured of eventual payment, I was taken straight to an examining room. "You're lucky," I was told, "we have an excellent neurologist on call today." And within seconds of hearing my symptoms, he explained that I was not dying of chlorine inhalation or coyote virus. I'd had a brain hemorrhage.
You raise the blade, you make the change...
Okay, okay, there was no blade, no change, nothing rearranged to make me sane. But over the course of the next nine days, half of which I spent in the ICU, there were two CT scans, two angiograms, and an ultrasound.
And people, there were drugs.
There's someone in my head but it's not me.
Dilaudid Dreams
It's the middle of the night. Someone comes into my room and stands over me in the darkness, trying to hand me something. I reach up to take it, reach higher and higher, but my hand passes right through it. I wake up to find myself alone, with my arm in the air. Again.
Several days into my hospital stay, my neck was still stiff, my backside was injured, my headache was relentless, and I was desperate for sleep. In the past, my regular doctor had prescribed Valium for stiff neck, and I've also used it very successfully for migraine headaches, so I asked a nurse if I could get some. She promised to ask the doctor. She did, and once authorized, she brought me a 5 mg dose.
Evening plodded into night. I was still awake when the night nurse, just beginning her shift, brought me my next dose of Nimodipine, my most important treatment drug which must be taken every four hours. I asked if it was time for another Valium as well.
"Are you having anxiety?" she asked.
"My neck is so stiff, and I just want to get a good night's sleep," I answered.
"The doctor prescribed them for anxiety," she said, missing my point.
"It's a muscle relaxer," I said, missing her point. (Forgive my density. I was drugged and in pain!)
"The doctor prescribed them for anxiety," she insisted, enunciating clearly. "Are you having anxiety?" she asked again.
She might also have been nodding her head, I don't remember, but hey, you don't have to hit me over the brain-damaged head with more than two bricks. I got her drift and crafted the necessary response. "Yes, I'm having a lot of anxiety about getting a good night's sleep!"
Thus was another helping of Valium served up, and four hours later, when my next dose of Nimodipine was brought, I woke up laughing out loud at the hilarious dream that was interrupted. I promised myself I would remember the details for retelling, but hey, I was drugged. You'll just have to trust me, it was hilarious. Go ahead, laugh.
But wait, what's this about an injured backside? Well, I'll get to that, but first let's backtrack a bit. There are a couple of things you need to know.
Not long after I was taken prisoner by the ER staff, holes were poked in both of my arms for IV ports. This, I was told, would save me having to be poked again later if one went bad. When I was settled into my room in the ICU, tubes were therein hooked up to trickle liquid refreshments directly into my circulatory system, and an IV alarm (much like a car-theft alarm and equally loud) was set to create, you know, alarm, in the event my IV was (like the car with the car-theft alarm) disturbed.
And, because I would not be allowed out of bed for a week, another tube was installed, um, down south, for the sake of convenience, since I would be expected (and by that I mean strongly, relentlessly nagged) to imbibe twelve gallons of Gatorade daily. Well, okay, two gallons but... Gatorade! (A few days into my stay, two nurses happened to be present when I hurled a half-gallon of red Gatorade across the room, and I was not using either of my rigged-up arms to perform this feat, if you know what I mean. After that, the nagging diminished and so did the Gatorade-imbibing. Although there's no medical explanation for it, I lived anyway to tell this long-winded story. But we haven't gotten to the bad-TV portion of our little docu-drama yet, so let's not belabor that little miracle.)
Once I was totally rigged, the nurse told me, "You don't have to lay still, you can move freely all you want," and then departed, leaving me alone with my hook-ups. Between the brain pain, the stiff neck, and the intricate web of tubes and wires I was tangled in, I wasn't sure I could move at all, never mind freely.
Despite my drugged condition, though, it didn't take long for me to notice The Evil Pit-Hole Of Satan in the middle of my bed, a crevasse through which I was being sucked ass-end-first down into the fifth circle of hell. Attempting to save myself (and my back, which is accustomed to--and indeed, dependent upon--more health-promoting accomodations), I tried to roll myself and my tubular web toward one side of the bed, hoping to rise from the pit and find some level ground to cling to. Immediately, right beside my brain-damaged head, the IV alarm began to sound. BLEEP... BLEEP... BLEEP... BLEEP...
Needless to say, this was not the best possible medical treatment for my aching brain, but as the moments bleeped by, it became clear to me that no actual medical personnel were alarmed at all. Thus I undertook to roll myself and my tubular web toward the other side of the bed, where the call button lay on the mattress beside me.
Alas, this motion resulted in the call button dropping off the side of the bed and landing on the floor, well out of my reach.
This series of events was to become the pattern of my days and nights, interrupted only at 12-hour intervals when the nursing shift changed and the fresh personnel decided that my IV portholes were inadequate in some way and needed to be redrilled. By the time I was set free, both of my arms would be black and blue from elbow to wrist.
You shout and no one seems to hear...
After I'd been moved from ICU to a private room with a view, I was taken by gurney for my second CT scan. This involved shifting myself and my dual IV hook-ups and other tubular paraphernalia from bed to gurney to scanner-bed and back again. Upon returning to my room, I was in the process of shifting from gurney back to bed, hovering my vulnerable behind over The Evil Pit-Hole trying to figure out how to lower my delicate self with the least impact, when my caregiver for the day, Nurse Ratched, who was standing behind me (fans of my underpants, she was standing in the glow of the moon, you might say, since my underpants had nine days off) next to the gurney I had just vacated, chose that moment to pass me the call button and ordered me to put it down on the other side of my bed.
As I was balanced precariously on my heels and my recently broken wrist at that moment, and as I was having some trouble trying to position myself, and as I'd had repeated problems with the call button falling out of bed and quite out of reach, at this particular moment in time I felt both irritated and overwhelmed. "It always falls out of the bed," I snapped with uncharacteristic churlishness, a lapse in courtesy that embarrassed me even as it fell from my lips. Fortunately Ex-Boyfriend was standing in front of me at my bedside and took the call button from my hand.
I was still trying to figure out how to descend from my three-point balancing act when Nurse Ratched proceeded to raise both the head and the foot of my bed, somehow pinching my backside or perhaps causing me to lose control of my balancing act and drop in such a way as to cause an excruciating pain in my hips that would ultimately take longer to recover from than the brain damage that brought me to the hospital in the first place, not to mention a resulting bruise the size of my hand which subsequently appeared on the back of my left thigh. For weeks I would be unable to sit, stand, lay, or lift my arms to shoulder height without causing the muscles of my backside to seize up. Yes, people, I certainly did cry out when that happened. A loud and inarticulate cross between "Ooow!" and "Aaarghhh!" was all I could manage.
To my great dismay, I was assigned the same nurse the next day. Although she had been friendly and chatty before the bed incident, now she was tight-lipped and I saw very little of her through the day, which was fine by me. With my physical misery compounded and made ever worse by The Evil Pit-Hole, I didn't have the energy to fake civility. I wanted to be left alone. To avoid dealing with her as much as possible, I figured out how to reset the bleeping IV alarm myself.
As a result no one, not even I, was properly alarmed on the one occasion when my IV actually did become displaced. Toward the end of her 12-hour shift, Nurse Ratched came in to find my left arm inflated like a water balloon. After removing the offending IV, she hunkered down on the right side of my bed to find yet another new and untried location for a fresh IV port, the fouled port in that arm having been removed a day or so earlier.
Did she search in the crease of my elbow? No. The back of my hand, where there are visible veins the size of overfed earthworms? No, not there either. People, she chose to probe the hard side of my wrist right below the base of my thumb. If you've kept up with my medical exploits of 2007, you are probably thinking, "Wait--isn't that portion of Jessie's anatomy composed entirely of metal and scar tissue?" And yes, of course, it is. If there are veins in there, believe me, they're the size of Paramecium cilia.
Nevertheless, Nurse Ratched spent several minutes, her nose just inches from her mission, ostensibly fishing around in there for the imaginary cilia-sized veins with her needle. Fortunately, as I've said before, I was drugged. Thus I was able to ignore the undesirable physical aspect of her venture and consider more important topics, such as the realization that Nurse Ratched had obviously given some thought to the previous day's misadventure.
Her line of thought, I observed, didn't run along the apologeticline, nor the Are you okay? line. Clearly her line of thought was of the This botched patient is a danger to my career and must be eradicated variety.
Readers (you hardy souls!), I am not inclined to irrational paranoia, but you must understand. Confined to my bed by disability and the tubular web for several days already, I was well aware that the only contact I could expect with the world beyond my room (other than Ex-Boyfriend, a true stand-up prince of a guy who visited almost every morning, brought me chocolate and sudoko, and diligently copied phone numbers from my address book so he could keep my family apprised daily of my condition or possible untimely demise) was my assigned nurse.
And now, I realized, my assigned nurse saw me and my injured behind as a serious threat to her livelihood. If word got out, her ineptitude would be exposed! Obviously I had to be silenced!
Motive? Check.
Opportunity? Check.
Means? Hmm, she's sticking some kind of needle into my body where no one with pure intent would dream of putting an IV port.
Hey, I've watched enough TV to know, this is the part where the helpless patient flatlines, having been injected with something deadly that the murderous nurse surreptitiously removed from the pharmaceutical cabinet when no one was looking. The on-call physician is summoned, glances at the chart, and says, "Huh, I guess it was an aneurysm after all. No autopsy necessary." And that's that.
So, in an attempt to divert the plot, I said to Nurse Ratched, "Are you angry with me? Because I didn't mean to snap at you the other day, I was just in pain."
And people, she did not respond to that. No apology for the inept handling of the bed-switching, no forgiveness for my momentary lapse of courtesy. Nothing like that.
"I'll just probe a little longer," she said in a low, stern voice, continuing to masticate my scar tissue with the nefarious needle, "and if I don't find a vein, I'll have the phlebotomist come and do it." And in the end, her villainous plan was thwarted by my cilia-sized veins.
And all that is now and all that is gone...
Well, as you've surely noticed, I lived to tell my tale. Two months after the fact, other than an occasional headache I am no worse physically for the wear and tear. I've resumed most of my usual activities, including settling in at the new apartment.
My daughter flew out to break me out of the hospital and tend to my needs for eleven days while I recuperated at home. As independent as I am under most circumstances, I was shocked to find myself in such great need of assistance. Her presence was a great gift, not only for the essential services she provided but also for the pleasure of her company.
There were prescriptions to be filled when I left the hospital, and we stopped on the way home to get them. One of them, the essential Nimodipine, which is used to prevent tissue damage after a subarachnoid hemorrhage, was not immediately on hand at my pharmacy, so my daughter returned to pick it up later. Luckily she had her credit card with her. Care to guess at the cost of a 12-day supply? Never mind, it was $1500. Fortunately, my insurance covered all but $275.
And all that's to come...
You might be wondering now, since we're on the subject of money, just how much financial impact this whole escapade had on the American economy. Rounded down to the nearest string of zeroes, $80,000 worth of impact, that's how much. What's yet to come is a statement showing what portion of this ghastly sum is my responsibility.
I'm bettin' it'll give me another freaking brain hemorrhage.
------------
Read more information about subarachnoid hemorrhage and other forms of stroke. My doctor says I'm at no more risk for another stroke than anyone else. That means you, so you might as well learn the symptoms. I delayed seeking treatment for twelve hours because I didn't know what was happening. That could have had a disastrous impact on my recovery. Don't make that mistake!
Lyrics of Motus as translated by Google Translate:
hold to them your words well release to them your words well the words bite, the words kill you seek them your words it lose the words in a dead end
I gum them your words I digest them bastard I chew them, your believed words but they aggravate me these words traquacent it to me too is I erase them they ebb
open to see what it leaves
they are connected the words the words break out declad themselves, diffuse themselves in message words I you grapeshot of textos blue words of word crudes
of through too end the wordthe word shocks, small frustrates open to see what it leaves there they bersent me your words upset it to me is beautiful they charm us but they wear buckle it and then sleeps
