• Maybe it’s better I didn’t know

    Who knows what kind of anxiety I could have built up if I’d known.

    Until Friday I had an umbilical hernia. I preferred this name to the more common “belly-button hernia.” Until Friday night I thought the surgery to repair it would be nothing – no more harmful than its silly sounding common name.

    I have a couple days under my belt now, and holy shit on a popsicle stick, it wasn’t nothing! It felt like my poor navel coughed up a large fruit. There was a constant, off the charts sharp pain in my gut, and it wasn’t in the same galaxy as the feeling that followed any movement. It took my breath away. In fact, the rise and fall of my stomach during the act of breathing was enough. (It’s better now but I’ll get to that.)

    Cheryl and I developed a close relationship with the doctor-on-call over the last few days. There’s been a few cases of miscommunication, a few conversations with health insurance reps, a couple run-ins with a pharmacist who thinks I’m a doctor shopping drug addict, and a fall back to meds I had left over from neck surgery. In fact, I’d like to go to the pharmacy and throw my half-full bottle of oxycodone at the judgmental prick. I won’t because I’d like to keep my criminal record clean. I can’t because it’s the only thing I have that’ll touch the pain. It would be funny if I didn’t feel angry, frustrated, ashamed, stigmatized and depressed. The script the pharmacy wouldn’t fill was less potent than the oxycodone I had left over from neck surgery. In fact, I only had the stuff because I’d long ago asked my first surgeon (from the neck surgery in February) for a less potent script so I could try to start weening off the pain meds altogether.

    Before you say anything, I recognize there are lots of folks who shop for doctors to get scripts for medication they don’t really need. I get it. We live in a world where people do bad things. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to treated like a criminal until I can prove otherwise. Hell, Cheryl criticizes me because I don’t sell my discomfort, usually resulting in under-treatment of symptoms. The only reason I had this lovely chat with the folks at CVS is because I turned down a script after the surgery, and Cheryl called my (hernia) surgeon after I spent a night and half the next day curled in a whimpering ball. (I was thinking the discomfort would be nothing compared to my last surgery, and the weened down meds I’d been taking for my neck would be plenty. Yes, I’m THAT stupid.)

    Now it’s late, I’m tired, and even in my current medicated state/fog, sitting here really hurts. I’ve got one thing left I want to say.

    If you’re offended by foul language stop reading now and turn away.

    Fuck you, CVS.

  • There’s something about nineteen

    It’s not just today, but it is today in particular.

    This is the point in this post where I start making a little sense.

    I was nineteen years old when I started dating my wife. To be clear, we weren’t married at the time. Unless a third party arranges a marriage, folks don’t typically date their spouse. The husband and wife part came later for me and mine. Folks often hear this and say, “Awh! You guys were high school sweethearts! That is SOOOOO sweet!” Then I say to myself, not out loud “I don’t know how old you were in school, but I didn’t turn eighteen until after I graduated. I was month into my sophomore year at UF when I turned nineteen.”

    Out loud, I reply, “well… not so much. We met in high school and I was sweet on her, but she was dating another guy behind my back, and turned me down when I got up the nerve to ask her out to prom. She didn’t see the light until after graduation.”

    I believe I said I’d start making a little more sense. You’ll note I didn’t say anything about being interesting let alone entertaining.

    You might ask yourself, “why do I bring this up now?” I might reply, “because I think it’s significant so hold your horses!”

    I’m not too old, relative to just about every significant person in my life not named Adam, Beth, Conner, or Eric. We had a good thing going, alphabetically, until Eric came along. However, nineteen seems like something I read about a long time ago. And that’s how long Cheryl has been my person. I knew before we started dating that I wanted to spend a long time with her, and we’ve lived our lives that way since then – not long after I turned 19 years old.

    Today is special to me for another reason, but they’re closely related. It’s our nineteenth wedding anniversary. I’m not sure many other folks think of 19 as a milestone, but I’m not most other folks. Every day is significant, but I’m a nostalgic fella. My memories are an interconnected web of thoughts, experiences, and emotions. My mind rarely stops at just one.

    So there you have it: nineteen.

    Happy anniversary Cheryl!

  • When questions get harder

    Beth wanted advice on a homework assignment for a writing class she’s taking at college this semester. Her professor wants the class to come up with two topics for a possible upcoming assignment: write a persuasive essay taking a side of an issue relevant today.

    I thought to myself, “yeah sure, possible. Like it’s possible I might take another breath before the end of the semester.”

    So far, so good?

    Here’s where the fun began. He gave a couple examples, one of which was: “climate change is a liberal myth perpetuated by a liberal media.” Beth explained she wanted to turn her professor’s example around and argue the opposite for one of her topics.

    Ho-boy! Where do I begin?

    First of all, I tried to stay calm – a feat made easier by a muscle relaxer taken an hour earlier to calm down some neck pain. I didn’t want to say something like, “Man, it sounds like your professor is a f…ing idiot.” She’s smart enough to come to this conclusion herself. Plus, I didn’t want to encourage an adversarial relationship with someone responsible for giving her a grade. I went that route my freshman year at UF and it didn’t turn out well.

    I’m trying to cut down on my swearing. So lets just say, I had English teacher whose head was stuck pretty far up someplace that’s usually inaccessible to one’s own head.

    It was one of the few times I got less than an A in a class at UF, and I started the semester a seventeen year old, know-it-all teenager. She’s a fifteen year old, know-it-all teenager, who hasn’t graduated from high school yet, and an average of four years younger than the rest of the class. I feared she might not fare as well.

    My next thought was, should I give the guy some slack? Maybe he was playing the role of provocateur to get some neurons firing, rather than being an ideologue trying to push an ill-informed worldview ON MY DAUGHTER!

    Finally, I tried to find a middle path. She knows how I feel on the subject, as we’ve discussed it many times. I told her I was proud of her desire to take up the cause, but this wasn’t the right place. Plus, I didn’t think it served a possible purpose of the exercise: to write a reasoned essay defending a position on an issue that might not be familiar (now), or one she might not even hold. Giving the guy the benefit of doubt, I thought it could turn out to be a good exercise in critical thought.

    Plus, I thought merely taking his example and turning it around lacked creativity. There are LOTS of problems in the world worthy of a little persuasion.

    I’ll tell you one thing. It makes me yearn for her early years when the questions were easy, like explaining redshift.

    The astronomical phenomenon, in case you were wondering.