20 Aug

The Beginning of the End

It starts with the ridiculously early back-to-school sales. I heard reports of some at the beginning of July this year. Three weeks into summer, for God’s sake! Must have been because of the recession. Retail is freaking out, creating sales/hype for whatever reason they can think of. Halloween sales start on Labor Day. Scary ha ha*.

The next phase is the mailing you get from the district. There’s something in there from everyone — the superintendent, the assistant to the superintendent, the principal, the assistant principals, the regional manager, his assistant, and then various committees, like the social committee, who wants you to bring something for the potluck lunch on that first staff-only day.

From there, it’s all downhill. You get more and more emails from staff full of claims that they’re excited about the upcoming year. You run into colleagues at the grocery store, who say, “See you in a couple weeks!” And all the fake cheeriness makes you so self-loathing that you just go ahead and check your class lists online.

And then the dreams come. Oh, the dreams. Your class is huge, completely unmanageable. The room is one you’ve never been in before. You’ve forgotten to bring textbooks or handouts or anything else you should pass out to the students. You’re teaching a subject you haven’t prepped for. You’re late to every class period. You’re not wearing pants. Scary strange*.

*(I’m coining two new phrases. You know how the word funny needs clarification? Funny ha ha or funny strange. Well, I think scary needs a similar distinction. Scary ha ha is the type of scary that deserves derision; scary strange is the kind that sends a chill down your spine.)

08 Aug

My Second Hernia

I became suspicious several months ago when I noticed a very slight bulge in my lower abdomen. Same place as my first hernia, but other side of the body – right, not left. I ignored it for a long time. In fact, if I’m being totally truthful, I’ve got to admit that I ignored it for close to two months.

But sooner or later, I found myself at the doctor’s office for something, and at the end of the appointment, I asked about the bulge. He put on the rubber gloves, and had me turn and cough. “Yep. That’s a hernia,” he declared.

I got my referral to the surgeon, who threw on his gloves and had me turn and cough again. “Oh yeah. Definitely,” he said.

His resident had me turn and cough. “Yeah. I feel it,” she said.

The med student had me turn and cough. “I don’t feel it,” she said.

The resident helped her out. “Right here.”

“Oh. Yeah, I feel it.”

So. Four scrotal gropings is all it took. Actually six if we count the resident and med student twice.

They gave me an informational brochure.

And they explained that my hernia was congenital. “There’s nothing you could do about it. You were just born with a weakness in the muscle wall.” Here’s how it happens:

Mine was an inguinal hernia:

And so they needed to operate on it, which they did this past Wednesday.

I arrived at 6:30 am, right when the doors to Outpatient Surgery opened. The conversations that floated up and down the unit confirmed that most of us were there for the same thing. Apparently, Wednesday is hernia day.

All went pretty smoothly until a med student came to put my I.V. in. He did well with the small talk; he set up the prep station without a problem; he had no trouble finding one of the prominent veins on the back of my hand. But when he got to poking at me, he didn’t inspire confidence. I looked away until he seemed done, but when I finally turned back to appraise the situation, I saw him mopping up blood. I don’t deal well with blood.

It further freaked me out when I noticed a small air bubble pass through the I.V. into my vein. Can that kill me?

And when he fiddled with the drip and announced that it wasn’t flowing well and that he’d have to do it again, I could feel all the blood leave my head. He tore off the tape and started fumbling with the catheter sticking into my hand. It was about all I could handle. I doubled over and got as close to putting my head between my knees as my current flexibility allows. Then the anesthesiologist resident came in and told him it was fine, that the drip just took a while to get flowing.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate medical schools and learning hospitals. But I have some limits. Years ago, I had something called a peritonsillar abscess. It was a horribly painful pocket of pus in the very back of the roof of my mouth. At night, it would drain a little, leaving me with a sore throat many times more painful than Strep.

It didn’t help that the first doctor I saw misdiagnosed me. So this thing had some good momentum behind it before I finally got some painkillers and an appointment to the UW hospital to get the thing lanced. I tried to forget what the word “lance” meant.

But I was reminded repeatedly when I got in to the hospital, where a cute, perfectly nice med student injected me with some novocaine and then stuck a needle into the roof of my mouth. The first time she tried, she stuck the needle past the numbed area such that I could feel its tip poke me somewhere in the middle of my head.

Then she did it again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

They told me later that the abscess had probably popped in the middle of the previous night, thus leaving the hapless med student with nothing to actually lance except my brain.

I left the hospital in tears and bleeding from the back of my mouth. The parking lot attendant couldn’t disguise his shock when he collected my validated pass.

Such tragic visions were still dancing through my head when they wheeled me into the O.R. for my hernia operation. I remember moving from the wheely bed to the O.R. bed. And then I woke up to a couple of nurses declaring that everything went well. Two hours had passed.

“Whoa. Time warp!” I said. My face itched pretty bad and I went to scratch it.

“Let me do that for you,” the nurse said. She rubbed my face with a dry wash cloth. “We’re going to take you back to your room pretty soon. Your wife is there waiting for you. Do you have any questions for me?”

“Yeah. Why am I not allowed to scratch my face?”

“Some people scratch their corneas,” she explained. I wasn’t yet with it enough to picture drugged up patients scratching their eyes out, but as I relay this story now, that’s exactly what I’m picturing.

I have a problem.

But at least the surgery went well. And so far, recovery is going well too. As long as I don’t catch my surgery cut on a chain link fence or run into a waist-high toddler (things I actually think about), I’ll be fine.

07 Aug

My First Hernia

Twelve years ago, I knew nothing about hernias. I thought they were the problems of overweight, middle-aged men who finally got off their asses. Then I got a hernia.

I was working a sort of construction job at the time, renovating a coffee house in Cross Plains. On the day of the hernia, I was busting up a chifforobe concrete wall with a sledgehammer. But I had a stomachache, so I wasn’t putting tons of effort into the task.

My stomachache was getting worse and worse, though, so eventually, I went into the bathroom and tried to produce something consistent with what I was feeling at the time. Nothing happened.

But my gut was killing me, and I started to notice a disconcerting bulge in my lower abdomen. I asked for the rest of the day off.

In my car on the way home, the pain was getting pretty unbearable, so I decided to drive straight to the emergency room. I hobbled in bent over at a 90 degree angle. My memory of what follows is a little spotty, but I know I got into an actual room pretty quickly. They situated me on a bed and promised the doctor would be with me shortly. He wasn’t.

I really have no idea how long I waited, but I eventually paged the nurse and told her, “I’m in a lot of fucking pain, here.” That got her attention.

What I learned later was that they assumed I had a kidney stone, and since the remedy for a kidney stone is that you pee it out, they left me in the room until I was ready to pass the stone. But they were wrong. I didn’t have a kidney stone. My problem was that my intestine had broken through the muscle wall in my lower abdomen and was working on a full escape.

The doctor came into the room and noted as much. Then he announced he was going to try to push it back in. I cringed. He pushed. I screamed.

“Okay,” he said, “it looks like we’re going to have to go to surgery.” I had an ‘incarcerated’ hernia, he informed me. And they had to act quick, because if the intestine remains incarcerated for too long, the blood supply can get cut off and then you’ve got yourself a dead section of intestine, which is a much more complicated and dangerous surgery.

So they wheeled me down the hall, shot me up with drugs, and called my mom. My brother answered the phone, and I announced, “Will, I have an incarcerated hernia.”

“Okay. What do you want me to do about that?” Will said.

I set the phone aside and turned to the nurse. “What do we want him to do about that?”

She grabbed the phone from me. And that’s the last thing I remember.

(Stay tuned. Tomorrow: My Second Hernia.)

31 Jul

Appaholism

If you have a mac, and you’re looking for ways to up your procrastination, I’ve become quite the expert. Here’s what you do.

Step One:
Subscribe to RSS feeds of various mac app websites. These sites will introduce you to really cool software that you are just a click away from downloading. Most of them increase productivity.

Actually, as I was writing this, I also subscribed to macapper.com, which gave me a pretty good example of how RSS feeds can make your procrastination efficient. See, what I did was I skimmed through the 30 Macapper articles downloaded to my mail client and I came upon a review of Snowtape, an app which allows you to listen to internet radio, record it, and 1-click export the recording to iTunes. Nevermind that I don’t listen to internet radio, I clicked on the link to Snowtape anyway, and it’s downloading as I type. Now that’s multi-tasking!

Step Two:
Just because you’ve subscribed to the feeds doesn’t mean you’ll look at them a lot. So what you need to do is get Growl, a genius app which will display a small pop-up notification every time you get a new email or when a new article shows up in your RSS feed. Let’s imagine, then, that you are typing up a blog entry or something else really productive. Suddenly, Growl displays a quick note (in the lower left of the display for me) that promises a comprehensive review of 8 time management apps. You can click on the Growl notification, which will display the RSS article without even opening your mail.app window. Now that’s efficiency.

Step Three:
This isn’t just about staying informed, though. You’ve got to go beyond just reading the RSS feeds. Occasionally, you need to follow the links and download new software. Some of it’s free, like the FuzzyClock app I downloaded this morning. Others, like Snowtape, aren’t. But don’t worry. Those unfree apps always have demos or free trials, so you can use them for free for a week or two at least.

My Setup:
As you can see from the diagram at the top, the essential feeds are AppStorm, Minimal Mac, and Smoking Apples. AppStorm and Smoking Apples have reviews on a daily basis, and they’ve supplied the vast majority of my procrastination. Minimal Mac is very new, and it’s m.o. is to simplify your computing experience through aesthetically pleasing workspaces that eliminate distraction. Subscribing to Minimal Mac’s feed is the most beautiful paradox.

The above triumvirate is responsible for my current setup, displayed below.
Read More →

26 Jul

Le Tour 2009 RIP; Or, Why I Would Die in The Tour de France

Well, it’s over now. And Monday’s going to be a sad day, indeed. No more Tour to watch. I guess on the bright side, I’ll gain an additional four hours a day, but I’m still sad to see it go. It’s always impressive and always a bit humiliating. I mean, the skills and athleticism of the Tour riders are incredible. I would literally die if I were to try to compete in the Tour. Here’s how:

1. The sag wagon (of death). No doubt, this is the first thing that would kill me. I wouldn’t last one stage on the Tour. Actually, the first stage is a time trial and there’s no sag wagon there. But on this year’s stage two, I’d have been swept up pretty quick. The average speed of the lanterne rouge (the slowest rider in the Tour) was 38.4 km/h, which equals 23.8 mph. That’s in 21 days of riding, which included 2150 miles and 90 hours for the slow guys.

2. The peloton. What do you get when you combine claustrophobia and poor bike handling skills? Me. Causing a huge crash in the middle of the peloton. I’d hit someone’s back wheel 10 minutes into the first ride.

3. Hairpin turns. And road furniture. If I didn’t take out myself and dozens of others by my nervous pack riding, I’d definitely eat it at a) a traffic circle, b) a curb, c) one of those crazy 180-degree turns like the one on the Champs Elyse circuit. Every time the peloton rounds that thing, I think someone’s going to crash for sure.

4. Descending. I’m pretty conservative going downhill. I got up to 48 mph once and it scared me. Add in some switchbacks and a road without shoulders, and I’d be the fastest guy down the hill. Only problem is I’d arrive without my bike and without an intact bone in my body.

5. Fans. I wouldn’t have the bike handling skills to avoid the idiots that run in front of me on the road, so I’d probably run into a half dozen of them on every stage. But even with the necessary skills, I’d get so mad at them, that I’d probably lash out like Contador did on stage 15. Except I wouldn’t just do it once. I’d do it constantly, and eventually, I’d get my glycogen-depleted ass kicked by one of the overjoyed spectators. Like one of these guys:

6. Mont Ventoux. Or whatever ridiculously hard mountain stage they throw at you on the last day of racing. The headwinds up there were 25 mph, which would have reduced my net speed to -15 mph.

7. Jens Voigt’s crash. It didn’t kill him, but that’s because the hardest substance on earth is Jens Voigt. I would have died.

8. Thor Hushovd’s near-crash. Another instance in which I’d lack the necessary skills to not die.

9. This podium girl. Ouch!

10. The Schleck brothers. By my count, Andy’s total number of attacks in the Alps: 13.