jumpingfish › version 3.0

Are You Tired?

Wed, 11 May 2016, 08:35 PM (-06:00)

Are you tired? I am. My legs are aching with it. And my feet. And the palms of my hands. And my eyelids.

My eyelids are tired, but they will not close. I lie in bed with chapter 12 of Natalie Goldberg open above my head and a tower of books beside me on the table. But I can neither read, because I am too tired, nor fall asleep, because… well just because I can’t seem to fall asleep.

The dogs don’t have this problem, especially Mr. Guinness. Nor does Trudy. The house is quiet.

“Are you ok?” she asked me this afternoon. “We need to go and do something.”

I guess planting those salvias amid the fog of mosquitos didn’t count as something. I guess we need to do something else. Of course, she’s right. We were going to go camping, but it rained. And I was going to go kayaking in the bright red kayak, but it rained. And because it rained, the mosquitos came. And…

Are you tired? I am.

HOV Lanes

Mon, 9 May 2016, 08:57 PM (-06:00)

“Do you want to try the HOV lane this time?” Trudy asked.

She was behind the wheel. I was navigating. We were high-tailing it as fast as we could out of Houston, trying to beat rush hour.

We’ve been thru this before. To HOV or not to HOV? Even though we’ve been two or three people in the car — a veritable high-occupancy — it’s never been absolutely clear to us that the HOV lanes are indeed free, anymore, combined in places as they are with toll lanes and TxDOT-quality signage.

I grumbled something about not knowing. But then a sign appeared. High above the roadway. With clear rows and unambiguous words: HOV 2+ FREE.

We decided to merge into the fast lane.

And so there we were, sailing along between the concrete barricades passing the slowing afternoon traffic. As rush hour was beginning to condense, it was all Trudy could do to keep our speed to 65 miles per hour, even as the cars in front of her began to pull away.

We win! We were thinking. And then, a funny thing happened.

The HOV lane rose up and began to curve to the north. The concrete walls squeezed in, and the traffic slowed. We were coming to a park-and-ride, not a surprise, I suppose, but the puzzling thing was that the signs only gave us two choices: exit into the park-and-ride or continue around the tightly turning roadway on the HOV lane to FM 1960.

But… but… we didn’t want to go north. We wanted to go west. You know: west, like the HOV lane had just been doing five minutes ago. But no. We were beginning to realize that this was not the Katy Freeway HOV. And now having passed the park-and-ride, there was no exit until the far northwest side of Houston.

Incredulous at our failure, at my failure as a navigator, I murmured something like, “Oh well, I guess we’re going home on highway 290.”

Let’s just say, that in all my years of coming and going between Austin and Houston, I’ve never taken the highway 290 route. From the side of Austin where we live, you’d never do such a thing. You’d end up on the wrong side of town when you got home.

The wrong side of town. That’s where we were headed.

There was however, one upside. You see, there’s this gas station just outside of Brenham on highway 290 that serves hand-dipped Blue Bell ice cream. And OMG how long has it been since we’ve sunk our teeth into a cold scoop of Blue Bell.

Oh well, we’d just have to make a stop.

Mother’s Day #2

Sun, 8 May 2016, 05:56 PM (-06:00)

This year the dogs didn’t get cards for the mommy. They had a different suggestion, leaving the execution to the man, of course.

Mother’s Day 2016

Sun, 8 May 2016, 11:00 AM (-06:00)

Happy Mother’s Day, mom and moms!

Barium Swallow Test #3

Sat, 7 May 2016, 09:22 PM (-06:00)

Last time I was here, I had a little trouble with the final swallow. The first one was ok — watery barium liquid. The second one was ok — something more like milk. The third one was, too — barium pudding with a spoon — although it did take a little work. But I couldn’t get down the last mouthful of pudding mixed with crushed saltines. The x-ray video of me-the-skeleton showed the problem. There I was, my skeleton jaw moving up and down and my skeleton tongue (?) and skeleton throat trying and trying to swallow. But there it was, that lump of pudding-and-cracker stuck at the base of my tongue in the back of my throat going nowhere.

That’s what happens when the shoot radiation at your throat day after day, week after week, after cutting out a chunk of your tongue.

But this time, three months after their gun fired its last shot at me, things were different. The first liquidy swallow went fine. So did the second milky swallow. And the spoonful of pudding. And finally the pudding-y crackers. As I chewed and swallowed, I could see the x-ray video in a reflection in the window, and I could see the dark lumps slip cleanly down my throat each time.

The technician was almost giddy.

“You did great!” she said. And she called me over to her monitor to show me the video close up.

“A lot of people still can’t do that,” she said. “Look at you. Right there. It goes right down. Let’s watch it again. You’re doing great!”

As an additional bonus: I actually tasted the saltines!

Manhood

Sat, 7 May 2016, 08:51 PM (-06:00)

Gary is a spectacular nurse. His jocular, slap-the-back manner is comforting for patients who have a lot of things to worry about.

“My memory isn’t as good as it should be, Mr. Hasan,” Gary said as he was getting the room prepared, “but as I recall, you did well.”

He put a clean scope on the tray, and he mixed the mixture that they would spray down my nostrils to deaden my nerves and open things up to make is easier to push the scope up my nose and down my throat.

“In fact, you did really well,” he said, “although… you know, you didn’t look that tough…”

“…Sorry Mr. Hasan, I didn’t mean to insult your manhood.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ve had testicular cancer twice. There’s not that much manhood left to insult.”

Gary stood speechless.

There was another nurse in the room. She had been typing at the computer with her back to us. And in that momentary silence, a huge smile came to her face.

There Were Raisins In It

Fri, 6 May 2016, 09:10 PM (-06:00)

1.

Oh, was this a messed up set of appointments.

We’ll have a follow-up appointment in three months, they had told me. And sure enough there were appointments that popped into my calendar on precisely that date almost the day after I walked out of the radiation center. But those were minor appointments. The actual doctor appointments didn’t show up and didn’t show up, which wasn’t a surprise because in my experience the doctor’s schedules never got finalized until near the appointment dates, anyway.

But as time went on, the actual doctor appointments still didn’t show up.

Finally as the three month date was less than three weeks away, I sent a message and then some more messages on the next day and then left voicemail. It was at this point that appointments started furiously popping up in my calendar with messages of apology and phone calls to disregard some of the other messages they’d left me. It was clear that I had allies there who were working very hard to straighten things out. Adelaide in particular came to my rescue and somehow figured out how to squeeze me into the already over-booked CT schedule. And Mary called. And Gary.

But the thing of it is, by that time too much time had passed, and it was simply too close to the appointment date to get everything lined up nicely.

2.

So the first appointment of the first of two days was at 6:45 in the morning. That was for blood work, and we waited there until time ran out and I was due for my CT scan. So we told them we’d be back, and we walked off to the far reaches of the building to check me in for my scan.

And that check-in process took a long time.

As Trudy went off to get breakfast in the cafeteria downstairs, I sat squinting as a nurse tried several times to get an IV line stuck into my arm — evidence of which I will carry with me as a dark bruise for several days. But I’m kind of used to needles by now, so (squinting aside) it was all good.

Then I went to wait in a big chair with a wonderfully warm blanket over me (because those CT rooms are so dang cold) and the Benadryl coursing thru my veins making me sleepier and sleepier.

Beep. “Hot oatmeal ready,” Trudy texted me. “And cold milk.”

I texted her back and said I was still waiting. And a while later, I texted the same. And a while later, too. And then I fell asleep.

“Mr. Hasan?” a nurse asked, which made me jump.

She took me to the CT room. They scanned me quickly — in far less time it seemed than the time it took to start that IV. And then I was done.

3.

Back in the waiting room, the fair and industrious Trudy was holding my oatmeal and milk. It seemed to me that it had been a very long time since she had texted its arrival.

“And look,” she said, “It’s still hot!”

I was starving. I opened the container and took the spoon and started chowing down. It was indeed still hot. And it tasted great. It had cinnamon. And there were raisins in it.

It was the best breakfast I have ever had.

Mixed Up Identity

Fri, 6 May 2016, 08:34 PM (-06:00)

Karl and his wife were having some kind of trouble. It wasn’t clear at first what the difficulty was, but they were walking in and out of the waiting room talking to the clerical staff and eventually to the Director of Imaging. It was hard not to hear their conversation.

Karl had a white band around his wrist. They put these strips on us every day when we first show up: full name, birth date, medical record number and an electronic bar code — all to make sure they know who we are. The problem was that in spite of this system, something had gone wrong with Karl’s identity.

“Yesterday his wrist band had his correct name,” Karl’s wife was explaining, “but it had the wrong record number and the wrong birth date.”

I inwardly cringed. I write medical software for a living, and I knew they just had a big software upgrade. I didn’t even want to think what kind of system-wide bug was behind Karl’s wife’s observation.

It was pretty clear that the Director of Imaging was also alarmed.

It was difficult to hear the details, but despite my effort not to eavesdrop, it was clear that the director was not 100% sure that the image he was looking at was indeed an image of Karl’s brain.

“You know,” Karl’s wife explained, “the technician must have been looking at the right information on the screen, because when he spoke with us, he got it all right.”

The Director was calm and polite but clearly increasingly concerned, which is a really good thing. Because if they’re going to make decisions based on an image, they’d better know that they’re looking at whom they think they’re looking at.

“I’m sorry,” the Director said. “If you’ll wait for me here, I’ll go get this straightened out.”

I hope they did.

Oh, Helianthus

Tue, 3 May 2016, 10:23 PM (-06:00)

Waiting for Pizza

Tue, 3 May 2016, 09:51 PM (-06:00)

We both ordered ten inch pizzas. Hers had mushrooms and onions, mine mushrooms and sausage. That was it. Just two small pizzas. No drinks. Nothing else.

The fair and industrious Trudy handled the finances and evidently tipped generously, because we got a ring of the cow bell and several whoop!s from the staff behind the glass tossing pizzas into the air.

As we were seating ourselves outside in the setting sunlight, a group of runners was doing the same. They had clearly just returned from a run, decked in running gear as they were, some with sweaty caps on their heads. And they had salads. There were eight of them, men an woman in their sixties — and every one of them came out onto the patio with nothing but a salad.

Now, I ate well at lunch today, so I was feeling proud, but holy cow, these folks had just finished a workout and each one of them was eating nothing but a salad. As we were anticipating our carbs, they were foraging on greens and carrots.

“Look,” I whispered to Trudy and nodded in their direction. I no longer felt quite so proud of my lunchtime achievement.

And then… yes then… a waitress came thru the doors carrying a plate stacked with at least 20 pepperoni rolls. She put them squarely in the middle of the runners’ table so they all could easily reach.

It was a huge relief.