Red Nose

Better

Today is the first day that I have felt significantly better.

And a good thing too, because the doctor's note I got in the ER says I should be okay to go back to work tomorrow. I am planning on it. I tell ya, being home from work loses its charm when it is accompanied by fever, chills, coughing, aches, and fainting.

The cough is much improved and doesn't hurt. My nose is not stuffy. The fever is gone. The wheezing has lessened. The bruises are still quite sore, but do not get in the way of being awake and functional. I slept pretty well last night. I still get tired very easily and my back is still a mess, but I should be able to be productive at work the rest of the week.

I even made some peppermint bark for a potluck at work tomorrow. (It is ridiculously easy and takes no skill. Honest.)

I probably could have toughed it out at work today, but I thought that one more day would seal the deal. I do not want to go back to work only to get sick all over again. Also, I want to show off my bruises before they fade away.

I also have to be well to take care of Joe. He now has a bad cold, thanks to me.

Pull Up Your Goddamn Pants: Pants On Pants Edition

I am getting better. I even fixed dinner, although putting chicken in the oven and toasting some English muffins is not exactly difficult.

But I am still not there yet. Even that tiny bit of work has tuckered me right out, and I am still wheezing a lot. So rather than bore you with still more flu talk, let's have a look at this fellow, who seems to be going for the best of both worlds: jeans of a normal height, covered up by sagging track pants.

Dude. Do you really need two pairs of pants?

Location: Greenbelt Metro
Sag Factor: 6.5

Things I Am Tempted To Order

I have seen a lot of daytime TV commercials from my sickbed. I'm tempted to order everything just to see if they work. A consumer reporter on our local news does this very thing, but I think it would be lots more fun to do it myself.

For example, Tag Away! This product will solve your annoying skin tag problems in a few short weeks. Just dab it on those nasty things -- no matter where they are -- and eventually they fall right off. How is this possible? I hear you cry. Well, it's a combination of all-natural herbs and oils. See?

Then there's the Sobakowa Cloud Pillow, which is apparently the best pillow in the whole entire world. This pillow's innards actually passed the egg test, where an egg was placed at the bottom of a tube of innards and a 10-pound weight was dropped on them. Amazing! The eggs do not break!

My favorite, though, is the Wax Vac, a dandy little machine that vacuums ear wax and dirt out of your ears. It comes with eight soft rubber color-coded tips! It has safety guard that prevents you from sticking it too far into your head! It's quiet! It has a powerful headlight!

The commercial reiterates, over and over, the dangers of using a cotton swab to clean your ears. It shows a stupid man digging in his ear with a swab and then hollering OW! when he stabs his brain. It has a colorful animation that shows how swabs push wax and goo farther into your earhole and then bump up against your eardrum and play a rapid tattoo. We even get an actual doctor telling us how using a swab is bad bad bad bad bad. By the way, kids love it.

And guess what? If you call within five minutes they double the offer! Yes,  you get two Wax Vacs, one for each ear. All for only ten bucks! (Plus processing and handling, of course.)

Who can resist that? On second thought, maybe I can.

The Flu Continues

Well, my bruises are blooming nicely. I have five at last count: one knee, two shoulder, one forearm, and one cheek (upper). The knee is the most impressive, but the shoulder hurts worse. The forearm is from the first try at the IV port. The cheek bruise looks like badly applied dark blusher.

My back evidently got torqued up too, because man oh man, it hurts to stand up or sit down or bend down or basically move.

Now I have a problem. Normally I sleep on my left side, but my left lung is the weaker, noisier lung and keeps me from sleeping with its wheezing ways. Okay then, I'll switch it up and sleep on my right side, except sleeping on bruises is not exactly conducive to restful snoozing. Not only that, but moving from left side to right side is full of OW! with the torqued-up back. Oh, and whenever I cough? Double OW.

However, Joe got my scrips filled today, so I am trusting that modern medicine will help -- the albuterol inhaler will lessen the wheezing, the benzonatate will calm the coughing, and the 600 mg ibuprophen will relieve the pain. It would be very nice to get a good, full night's sleep.

There is some improvement, though. My biggest accomplishment of the day has been to take a real, honest-to-God shower. The only thing that could have made that shower better would be if hundred dollar bills came out of the showerhead along with the hot water. A couple days without a good shower makes you appreciate running water and working plumbing, I tell you what. (I also managed to microwave a Stouffer frozen meal for lunch, but that does not involve much actual effort.)

Happy Hospital!

So, I spent most of today in the ER.

Don't panic; I have the flu. And no, I didn't get my flu shot yet this year, because everytime they offered them work I had a conflict, and I just never around to going to Kaiser for it.

That will never happen again, for flu is a holy goddamn bitch.

I spent most of yesterday alternately freezing and sweating, coughed enough that my sides ache, and slept the rest of the time.

Joe woke me with the promise of pancakes and coffee, so I got up. I thought I felt better. I drank most of a cup of coffee and ate half my pancakes when I started feeling quite woozy. "Woozy" - such a descriptive term! Then I had the overwhelming urge to go lie down. I got up, took two steps toward the sofa, and woke up on the floor.

Joe says I simply dropped, like marionnette whose strings were suddenly cut.

I have fainted before, but this was different because I bopped my head. Well, actually, my knee, shoulder, and face. Evidently I kept asking him the same three questions in rotation: Is it Saturday? Did I hit my knee? Do you have to work today? (Believe it or not, this is not my typical behavior.)

Joe put a pillow under my head. At this point I was quite comfortable and would have been perfectly happy to lie there and nap the day away, but Joe had other plans; specifically, calling 911.

I did manage -- with Joe's help -- to get to the sofa before the ambulance arrived. The EMTs were great. I walked -- again with help -- to the ambulance and once again had to lie down for the ride to the ER.

The great thing about going to the ER in an ambulance is you go right on in, yay. No sitting around a waiting room with a bunch of sick people.

Anyone who has ever been to an ER knows that most of the time you spend there -- if you are not in imminent danger of death -- is spent waiting. The nurse got me hooked up to all of the monitors pretty quickly, took a shitpile of blood out of me, and handed me the most important piece of equipment, the TV remote.

But man oh man, that ER room was hot. I was sweatin' up a storm and about as parched as I have ever been. Luckily, my sister came (Joe had called her on the way to the ER) and she had a bottle of water with her. So I sneaked several refreshing gulps of the lifegiving beverage. And I borrowed her chapstick too.

The doc appeared and I fell in love. He listened to my wheezes, he asked great questions, he examined all my bruises (did I mention? -- knee, shoulder, face!), he ordered a CAT scan and a chest x-ray and a nebulizer treatment and an IV.

The CAT scan room, unlike the ER room, was freezing. It felt great. I would have been perfectly happy lying on the CAT scan bed for the rest of the day and night because I was finally cool, delightfully, deliciously cool.

Alas, back to the ER I went, where I had the speedy-uppy nebulizer treatment while a bag of saline solution dripped into my arm.

Dr. Cutestuff came back to tell that my chest x-ray was fine, my CAT scan was fine, my bloodwork was fine, and I had the flu. He gave me scrips for painkiller (knee, shoulder, face), cough medicine, and an inhaler; and wrote out work notes for both Joe (caregiver) and me (sick person).  Score! (Not really.)

So now I'm home and hydrated. And I'm also exhausted, so I am finally going to go lie down.

Tights Are Not Pants: Premiere Edition

Yes, they are a fetching leopard print, but they are NOT PANTS.

Location: Tenleytown Metro

Someday Perhaps I Shall Get A Tattoo Maybe

One of my current guilty pleasures (yes, I have more than one; shut up) is this "reality" TV show called Ink Master, wherein a bunch of tattoo artists compete for $100,000 and -- even better! -- the title of Ink Master.

It is exactly the same as Shear Genius, which was a hairstyling competition and another one of my (many) guilty pleasures, except with needles instead of scissors.

There are three judges: Dave Navarro (a rock musician with many tattoos of his own), Chris Nunez, (a tattoo artist with many tattoos of his own who used to be on Miami Ink), and Oliver Peck (a tattoo artist with many tattoos of his own who constantly chews on a toothpick). Sometimes there is a guest judge; usually another tattoo artist who specializes in whatever style the contestants must demonstrate, but sometimes another person who is sort of famous, but in either case the guest judge has many tattoos of his own.

Each week, one contestant is kicked off and must pack their equipment and get the hell out; eventually one person will remain -- THE INK MASTER!

The show has two parts: a flash challenge, which does not necessarily involve actual tattooing, and an elimination tattoo. The "human canvases" are assigned by the winner of that episode's flash challenge, so there is all kinds of strategy and skullduggery going on.

Last night, the final six contestants had to do animal tattoos, with an emphasis on showing dimension. All of the tattoos are quite impressive, I must say.

I have been tempted to get a tattoo. My nephew has many tattoos of his own, including the biological taxonomy and a 1940s-style pinup girl. My mother was horrified by this, but also fascinated. My niece has the DC flag on her ankle. Several of my Tribe friends have impressive ink.

But I am a chickenshit. I don't know if I could put up with the pain, and what if I decided I hated it? I have another nephew who got several skull-and-snake type tattoos all over his arms and has spent far more money getting them lasered off than he did getting them inked on.

And what would I get anyway? I thought I might get a clown, but I really don't want a clown; I'm not a clown anymore after all. Maybe I would get a stylized pencil or pen to signify writing, but I'm not really a writer, not really. Juggling theme? Nah. Portrait? Maybe of my mom when she was young, but on second thought, I don't need a tattoo to remember her.

I know! The happy yellow guy, kinda small, where I can see him.

Maybe. What do you think?

Home For The Holidays

 

My Pop served in World War II; he was a Lieutenant Junior Grade in the Navy. As Christmas approached in 1945, he was in Manila, Philippines, waiting to come home. He sent this standard notice to my Mom and to his friends.

My parents' dear friend, Helen Hodge Cox, sent him this reply, signed by her and her family:

I wish I could have been at that party; knowing my folks and their friends, I know it was a blast!

Christmas Carols, Mostly

Joe sent me a text message this afternoon that read "Just in case you were wondering, I love you."

This is a very nice message to receive in the middle of a boring afternoon at work.

And then, on the way home, he started up a tape (yes, we still have a cassette player in the car; it's the only one we have!) of Handel's Water Music, which is my favoritest classical music in the whole entire world. Yes, it is. I love Baroque music in general, but Handel is my favorite Baroque composer (sorry, Bach; see ya later, Vivaldi) and the Water Music is my favorite of Handel's compositions, closely followed by Messiah. Yes, all of it; and yes, Hallelujah Chorus is my favorite part of it.

I used to sing He Shall Feed His Flock to SonnyeBoy as a lullaby. (I can't sing worth a damn, but oh, I love that song, so who cares. SonnyeBoy was a baby and he didn't.)

The local classical radio station has started playing the olde carols and I love that too. It kinda makes me wish I still drove to work so that I'd have a chance to listen to them and sing along like an idiot. I love all those carols: The First Noel, Joy to the World, Adeste Fideles, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Good King Wenceslas, Bring a Torch Jeanette Isabella, and all the others you can name. I sing along and get misty eyed and choked up.

Yes, I do. I am a goofball for Christmas carols.

Years ago when I was living in a big old house in Cleveland Park with a bunch of hippies, I was sitting in the kitchen with two of my housemates. It was Christmastime and we were yakking about carols, and what Larry's choir was going to sing at their recital. Margaret and I started singing O Holy Night, off key and drunkenly (for we had indeed been at the wine), and then Larry opened his mouth and that song spilled out of his skinny body like a flood. His tenor was so beautiful that Margaret and I just sat there, reverent.

I'll never forget that moment -- it was magic.

Hello There

Ah, Holidailies.

Yesterday I made no mention of thus wonderful Holidailies tradition, I just posted a semi-humorous entry. But heck, I guess I'll join in and say a little something about my own self.

Hi. I'm Mary. I'm also Bozoette, because I was a circus clown a long long time ago in a very very different era before the internet was even invented. I started my online diary/internet journal/blog in 2002 and I've been at it ever since.

I am getting old. Did you know that there is a demographic category named "the oldest old"? I am not in that category yet, but I qualify for some of the more lenient senior citizen discounts and I take seminars on how to apply for Medicare and unless I write shit down I forget it. I'm not retired yet, and probably will not retire for another 10 years so that I can collect as much Social Security as possible, assuming Social Security is still around. If it isn't, I may have to develop a taste for cat tuna.

Anyway, today's Holidailies prompt is "What are you most looking forward to this holiday season?"

I am most looking forward to spending time with my family, hugging Sonnyeboy and watching him open his presents, and laughing a lot at the traditional family Christmas Eve dinner at my sister's house.

Oh, and two weeks of vacation.