• The state of divorce

    The St Pete Times reports on a New York Times article, which describes a survey by researchers Queen’s College, which finds that Pinellas County’s own Clearwater (Florida) has the highest percentage of divorced residents in the U.S.

    I’ll bet you thought I was never going to get to that period.

  • Any comment?

    After a few days of neglect, I checked out the site this morning and noticed I got my first irate comment. My heart is a flutter with excitement. It’s got it all… colorful language, insinuated questions about my integrity, righteous indignation… hoo wee!

    Not only am I not going to delete this comment, I’ve made it easier for you – the reader – to find it and read it for yourself. I’ve set up a new section on the sidebar which links to the most recent comments on the site. To see the comment in question, click on the Jorge Cantu link. As you will see, this comment is in reply to an entry I wrote back at the start of baseball season.

    Just be sure not to inundate me with further comments… the WordPress sidebar widget will only show the most recent comments… and I don’t want this moment to pass too quickly.

    It’s hard enough for me to fathom someone else reading my stuff, let alone having it provoke a response. Other than family, I didn’t think I had it in me to piss people off. Now I’m going to have to re-evaluate my whole self image.

  • First cold

    I was in no mood for posting yesterday, even though life has been boiled down to surfing, blogging and TV watching over the last month or so. Today I’m home alone again, but with nary a thing to do… and no desire to nap. So here goes!

    Yesterday was the day I came down with my first at home, immunosuppressed cold. I woke up early that morning to my early warning system telling me a head cold was on its way. My sinuses were just beginning to protest. My throat was getting irritable from the my nose’s drainage. I was slow getting out of bed.

    “What’s wrong?” my wife asked.

    “I’m getting sick. I think I’m going to work from home today.”

    Later, my mother in law comes by to pick up the kids. After ascertaining the situation, she pops her rhetorical question: “You’re going to call the doctor, right?”

    After one or two non-commital, hedging grunts, my wife started to get in on the action. “It’s probably just a virus, but you better call the doctor and ask if you need prophylaxis.” (I have ER to thank for this.) Now I have my script for azithromycin, which says on the packaging, “less that 1% of patients have to stop therapy due to side effects.” Why do I care (besides the obvious, phobia value)? It just so happens that four years ago I had to stop taking azithromycin due to side effects (nausea and vomiting).

    Boy do I feel lucky. First, I got a rare form of leukemia (one of 600 cases per year). Then, I was one of the rare patients who have to be hospitalized for the chemo (which is “generally well tolerated”). When I went in for my follow-up visit with my oncologist, the nurse exclaimed, “we were all surprised you had to be hospitalized so fast.” Then I get sick right after I go back to work, and the treatment of choice is an antibiotic which 99% of patients can tolerate – and I’m an exception. (I’m only on it because I’m allergic to two other classes of antibiotics.)

    So here I am. I’m back at home, drugs in hand, ready to fight the good fight against illness. Thank God for compazine.