A formal apology from The Dr's Office

Dr. Festivus would like to apologize. Apparently, his/her medical humorosity has not been dispensed at adequate pace or dosage to satisfy the lonely three of you who actually follow this blogblogblog.

Do the Dr. a favor, please let me know exactly how many patients there are in the waiting room so he can figure how many appointments to schedule. Also, please remove your clothes. Except you, Drew.

Let me tell you a tale, my children. A tale of rosy chickens, hefty handlers, and assassinatory cats. Yes. Assassinatory.

Sunday, I left me house to do something useless. Turning into the alleyway in the Superu (complete with new dents, which I suspect came from the fat hacky-sack playing teenager across the street), I noticed the neighbor's inappropriately named young black cat Boy in the ready position ahead of my car, facing away from me. I honked, but he didn't even glance back at me. Using my knowledge obtained from the Jeff Corwin Experience and the musical Cats!, I realized that he was in stalking position. Ipso facto, he was stalking something. Was it a mouse? A stray human baby? I had to find out.

Rounding the corner on foot, I was confronted with a beautiful plumed hen-- a chicken--clucking and walking in slow circles, gradually, gradually away from danger. The cat, Boy (named by the neighbor's kids, who I suspect aren't racist, but they may well be), was either fascinated at the stupidity of the fowl or readying himself for the kill. Though the epic motions of nature's struggles are always good viewing--and especially so in person--I was less interested in seeing a bloody fowl corpse than getting on my way to pastures greener. Plus, there were now two cars waiting on my own to move forward in the alleyway.

Speedy quick, I chased the cat off a short distance to avoid returning to a bloody, feathery mess, and knocked on my next-door-neighbor's door. Belated detail: she has a chicken coop in her backyard. Seeing as we are probably 30 miles from the nearest actual farm, I assumed the hen belonged to her. As is usual when my (very nice) neighbor and I have our infrequent interactions, she answered the door a bit flustered, with two slightly anxious-looking Japanese exchange students eyeing me suspiciously. My theories on that relationship are for another post. At any rate, she told the Japanese kids to "focus on making their sandwiches" and asked me what was up.

Me: Hi. Yeah, I think one of your chickens is in the alleyway and Boy is trying to kill it.

Her: Ah! Which one?

Me: Um.

(inner monologue for me) what the fuck kind of question is that which chicken. I don't know your stupid chickens from Adam, should I just make up a name? Mr. Boondoggles. That chicken. God!

It's kind of orange.

Her: ROSIE! Dammit!

Turns out, when the garbage truck bumps the fence to her yard, it can uncover a hold in the posts that these idiot birds sneak through to wander in circles, clucking and attempting to eat gravel. We hustlebustled back to the alleyway, during which time Boy accompanied us. Then, for the next minute or so (that's a full 60s, imagine it), I, along with Boy the Cat and three other car denizens, were treated to the following scene: My neighbor involved in a low-speed circular chase with Rosie the chicken, with lots of clucking going on from both parties ("rosie, are we going to do this again?! You embarass me!" "gobble gobble cluck cluck"). Each time the neighbor girl got near (it's obvious by now I can't remember her name), she would most unathletically swoop her arms down towards the bird, and at the last second Rosie would take a couple of lousy chicken-prance steps forward, leaving her owner with nothing but air and hands that continued in an uncoordinated fashion into a self-hug. Swearing, repeat.

Finally, after I almost pissed myself but kept my mouth shut (I was closer to actually getting a lawn chair and a tall can of Vitamin R), she chased Rosie McShitforbrains into the foliage and pinned her against the wall. Cue feathers and leaves a'flyin! Marching back to the yard, I was able to see the other drivers/passenger's faces as they comprehended the cause of the delay. Shock, confusion, and glorious smiles were all I could gather, but it was enough to convince me that the tale was worth relaying. Moral? I pay $662.50 per month to live in El Salvador.

ala-kazaam! st. patrick got the snakes out, but I have no idea about the newts.

A word or two of prose about stitches in my nose.

Since the recovery technically continues....(I learned haiku structure again for this)

Itch! scab in nostril!

attached to stitches. damn!

tug stitch, feel brain move.

What else is pissing me off today?

(another haiku, entitled "Korean barber lady and linguistic relativism")

"you like hair shorter?"

"yes; but careful not too short. "

Now: "PFC John"

the things that come out of that kid's nose, I swear...

Well, the strictly medical part of my adventures has come to an end. Mostly. The highlights of the days after my laxatives overload (tentative working title: Mad Lax: Beyond Thunderbowl) are as follows:



Increasing alertness, desire to open my window blinds and see what time of day it must be

Ability to recognize simple shapes and colors improving

Appetite demanding more than soup and that weakass yoplait with the blue lid

moderate increase in a desire to communicate with the outside world

not sleeping for 2 days, sleeping loads for the subsequent 2

Facial mobility increasing-- can wrinkle nose, communicate some human emotion



Okay, that brings us to yesterday...drove meself to the polyclinic to get me stents and splints out. I had dared to youtube the procedure, because according to my Dad, who got this procedure done back in the late 1400s, it felt like "getting kicked in the nuts and punched in the nose at the same time, but the punch hits a nerve in the center of your brain also". A wonderful description if there ever was. The youtube vids looked relatively painless, thanks to new technologies and plastics making removal easier (quick aside-- the stents are essentially these 2-inch plastic greenbean-shaped things that they jam halfway up your nose and into the sinus cavity to reinforce the structure of your nose whilst it heals), but the youtube people were also both fat and with little pug noses that seemed more accomodating than my neo-viking schnoz.

I'd expected the nurse to be there to aid and offer some kind of moral support, but the doctor went straight at it, pulling the nose cast off (sort of painful but not that bad, then snipping the stitches holding the stents in place. He then sprayed my nostrils down with an aenesthetic liquid. This was a pretty good idea in principle, but the excessive amount of the spray he used caused a healthy dose of it to trickle down to my lips, completely numbing them within seconds. Thus, all of his "help me help you" questions like "does this hurt?" or "can you feel this moving inside your frontal lobe?" were useless, because I could only slurp out "mblbrbl gdblbmffle". Once he figured that one out, we switched to international thumbs up-thumbs down.

It wasn't as painful as Dad advertised, but getting something that size pulled out of your sinuses is a very weird experience. Probably a cross between getting experimented on by aliens and what I'd imagine a prostate exam feels like. But for your nose. Definitely for your nose. Anyway, these big ol' dang ol' things came out and all was well. My nose is still swollen on the outside (yesterday I looked rather like my profile picture) and I'll have to ease back into phy





sical exertion, but the good news is that I can, for the first time I can remember, I can draw a straight, full breath through my nose. It's actually pretty awesome and I hate all you out there for being born with this supernatural ability. For my first real meal with my new sense of smell (and taste), I had Paseo's Roast Cubano with extra grilled onions. For those of you outside of Seattle, Paseo's sort of evens out Cuba's karma. On one hand, you do have to think about tortured political prisoners and assassinations, but on the other, you get a grilled baguette with a pork loin seasoned by Lucifer himself with spinach, some sauce I'll go to hell for eating, and grilled onions that you would freely trade your own human baby away to taste. Life is looking good.

Alrighty well there ends the account for my adventures in modern medicine/daytime TV. If the world sees fit to crap on me in an inspiring way--and it always, inevitably, does-- I'll write that down poste-haste.

Bananarama!

Call it like you see it-- douche alert!

http://iambrandx.ning.com/profiles/blogs/its-monday-or-hi-im-a-douche

who else should be on this list?

I submit:

seacrest
all celebrity news interviewers
seacrest
a random 95% sampling of hollywood
seacrest.

what do YOU think?

Misanthropic Monday, a day late

here is some very important information. I have made a significant error in judgment and you should avoid making the same error. I suspect, however, that unless you are illiterate or a medically certified dumbass, this warning is unnecessary. As I mentioned previously, oxycodone turned my digestive tract into Fort Knox. A la Auric Goldfinger of James Bond fame, I knew it would take a scheme and a half to solve this quandary. Through various means, I obtained the following: Miralax, Dulcolax, and Ex-Lax chocolate squares. Let the record show that I lack familiarity with modern laxatives-- though ancient remedies such as batwing and wormsroot are old hat to me. I took the requisite capful of miralax and waited for...two hours. Never mind that the bottle said wait 6-12 hours. No, fuck that. My innards demand relief NOW. Down goes a Dulcolax. Wait an hour. Down goes one of those surprisingly good Ex-Lax chocolates. Damn that was good. I want another one. Mmm that's good. Chocolatey. Wait. Oh no. Fuck.

-8 hours pass-

I spent the next day in the bathoom. I couldn't even get that mad at myself, just sort of laughing at my idiocy and impatience. A single one of those laxatives would have been FINE. Shit happens, I guess. In this case, it happens because I made it happen. In spades. One thing I've learned about myself in this experience...I can tolerate a considerable amount of discomfort, more than the average person, I guess. It's not because I'm especially tough or mentally strong, I think I'm just too lazy to care that much and I become resigned to situations very quickly. No fight in me whatsoever!

Two final nuggets of wisdom: 1. The youtube video playlist "Harmonies in my head" is straight up crack. So much good music by bands I didn't really know before. Check it out.
2. I just channelflipped onto ScyFy and caught the last 3 minutes of a Highlander ep from the early 90s. If you have any idea what I'm talking about, you'll probably smile to know that within 15 seconds of me turning the program on, the Highlander was engaged in an epic sword battle with another Highlander atop the Eiffel Tower in the midst of a lightning storm. Amazing.

Out like the gout.

the predictions of nose-tradammit

well, here's the first entry of what will probably be another short-lived idea slowly killed by my laziness, but until then....excelsior! Hilary suggested this plan, and since I've been couchbound for nearly a week--and the only thing more tedious than healing is boredom--I've started to detail my frequent misadventures with an account of my recent surgery and subsequent events.

A brief contextual backdrop: I'm young, very healthy, and in good shape. I'm lucky to not deal much with hospitals, surgeries, forced inactivity, etc. I got surgery to fix a deviated septum and congenitally dysfunctional nose-- essentially, I get ~50% of the airflow through me nose that most people do. It leads to sinus infections, bad head colds, occasional asthma, and less aerobic ability than I should have. It's not life-threatening, but a big pain in the ass that my dad and sister also dealt with before surgery greatly improved their lot and prospects as marijuana-sniffing dogs in future karmic cycles.

There are two things worth mentioning pre-surgery. The first is that all surgical patients share the same pre-op room, as far as I could tell. This means that when making small talk with another patient ahead of time, I had to contrast his "removal of a cyst on his kidney" to my.......deviated nasal passage. Nothing like a little perspective to make you feel like an ass. The second notable thing was that my anesthesiologist was a distractingly pretty blonde ukrainian woman with a strong enough accent to make me think not of surgery but of eastern-european organ smuggling rings. I still haven't counted my internals, but I'm not expecting much when I do...

After I got out of surgery, I was pretty gone-zo, and I didn't appreciate the idiot nurse (who failed to give me complete home-care instructions) hinting that she wanted me out of recovery when I felt like such trash. I'm sure her comeuppance was realized when I unexpectedly threw up a load of blood Linda-Blairr-style into the nearest trashcan. The blood had drained into my stomach from me poor old nose throughout the 2.5 hr surgery and the stomach is not too keenon that shit. I wonder how Dracula gets along... anyway, her eyes widened and the clumsy compassion of the contrite came to the fore. I looked at her like, well, what do you think of that, dumbass? Think I'm just sitting here pretending I need to vomit? Sorry you can't get off shift early to go home to your boyfriend or husban--- oh, wait. You're an unattractive bitchy nurse who doesn't have anyone at home, probably just a cat named Mr. Right.

Okay anyway, I got home thanks to the Indy-500-style exploits of my roommate who has
otherwise been great . The snake-charmer's hypnotic sequence of high-speed curves
and dips on the Cap Hill arterial route coaxed the remaining contents of my stomach out and invited them into the sink upon my return home. I'm really sorry the details are so lurid, but hey, the details make the story and for reasons that will become clear, I'm working with LOTS of time and very little sleep on my hands. once I got that out, I felt infinitely better and settled into the routine I've been on for the past few days: oxycodone and cephalexin (antibiotic) every 4-6 hrs, sleep when possible, drink water, ice, flush nose with saline, repeat. Here are some of the fun particulars I've discovered: 1) oxycodone constipates me something fierce. I've had to quit taking it because all of my awesome plans to eat dried plums and other fibrous consumables have been rendered useless by the oxy's potency and I'm now working my way through
various.....encouragers...to remedy the shituation. Better than that, I'm allergic to my antibiotic! Never had it before, but wouldn't you know, it manifests itself in the form of.....severe nasal congestion! wow, what are the odds?! so now, every time I take cephalexin to keep myself from getting, oh, a fatal brain infection, my sinuses swell to the point where I feel like I've got a live grenade in my face. Benadryl has helped, but it's an uphill battle. Let's see, what else...oh yeah. the allergic reaction causes some shallow breathing, which is awesome when you're trying to fall
asleep and only breathing through your mouth anyway. god dammit. so, sleep has been a
luxury item; the only saving circumstance is that I'm probably burning less than 200 calories per day here on my blanket-perch and don't need a whole lot of REM. Interesting fact: daytime tv is not as bad as you might think, especially when you're on narcotics. depressing fact: if this is what narcotic drugs are like, then a whole lot of rock stars are just plain stupid (and stoved up).

merry monday,

the constipated nose gnome.