This entire "Why am I not driving" thing has come down to this: I'm not trusted behind the wheel if my wife is home. Some days I'd agree with her on that. Depending on how long it's been between pain meds makes a difference as well. Having said all that, let me say this; Yes, the pain meds make it near impossible to drive. The new stronger dose does at least. The older dosage wasn't so hot to trot about making me go clean out. I've tested all four of the levels I can get to on this prescription. Only two of them seem to give me much relief at all, 3/4 of a ml, and a full ml of the 40 mg/1ml strength Morphine. Both of them make me way dopey and sleepy, and only a full dose makes me crash out right away, and stay crashed out for quite sometime. I'm generally sore when it I get up from taking either of the doses. Although one carries somewhat higher chance for making a serious mistake while driving, like passing out behind the wheel. On the pain reduction side it's simply wonderful. If I felt like, for even a second, that I was going to pass out at the wheel, I'd cough up the keys so fast it would make your head spin. I'll say that and give you an example, this last October 26th and 27th we were in Fort Worth to be with friends and attend a highland game competition. Both were great times, but we had to scoot outta Fort Worth around ten or eleven the morning of the 27th. Liz had to work the next morning and we needed to scoot out anyway. I was driving, and somewhere just west of Eastland, I thought I was feeling a little drowsy. I blew it off (something I'll never do again) dozed off passing a guy. Three seconds tops. Three. If it hadn't been for the buzz strip on the shoulder, I could have killed both of us. Fucking foolish, and that's why I don't mess with that while driving. That's something we never did in the past, and you can bet your sweet ass it'll never happen to me again.
Side note. Grandson Wyatt, at his day care, puts his index finger over his throat and says "This is how you have to talk to Wyatt. Pretty funny. I'm glad my oldest son has brought Wyatt and his mom into our family.
Other shit that goes with this fucking "Death with Dignity" thing. I lost time this week. It's not like it just ran fast, that's every day. This I really lost. I can't even piece together what I was doing. I see flashes of things, but not enough to tell me what I was doing. For me, that's damned scary. What I realize now, I was going to change dressings on my trach tube. I would have gone to the bathroom, cleaned up all the wounds, (nothing like gun shot wounds) and put a cleaned and ready to go tube and collar. Then I'd come back to the recliner and continued my sleep. But NOOOOO, I had to do this all by myself. Only I couldn't. This is really a simple task for me, since I've been doing it for almost 7 months now. It wasn't, it turns out, so simple after all.
I'd left spotty evidence as to what I was doing. Including two smaller tegaderm strips over the pain patch on my stomach. Apparently I'd get one thing partially finished, start another, almost finish that particular job, start another, get the picture now? So anyway, when I did get around way early that next morning, it wasn't to get ready for work, it was to continue to rub on my neck. In the end, this is what I decided, since I slept almost 19 hours out of the 24. The pain relief pills doesn't ask to see the kids at the park all day, to use it like the pulse counter as a ruse to bring the kidnapper into the light of day. I couldn't even get that part correct. Damn. Then after all the diddling around and not getting done, or even remembering what I was doing, I slept nearly all day and into the early evening yesterday. I slept right at 19 hours, counting the time I went to therapy. That's a lot of sleep. Not all of that is cancers fault, either.
So, I promised you a theory as to why my behavior and cognitive skill went down the shitter. I believe my blood oxygen was pretty low. How low, I couldn't tell you. It was mid 80's to low 90's at therapy. Not good at all. By the way I felt all day, sleeping, showering, seeing people, I couldn't tell you what I was actually doing because I simply can remember. That's FUCKING scary to me. I've never been like that, at least not when I was on some heavy duty pain killers. Percodan comes to mind at the Five State Fair in Liberal. My sister and her husband took me to the fair. Secretly, I think they wanted to follow me around and laugh. Within 15 minutes of sitting under the O2's machine, I was feeling more awake and more aware. To test my theory, I got off the O2 myself, and paid attention to my actions. None of them were very good. So I went back on the O2 and feel more like myself again. Spooky, and that's not bullshit.
This is just another one of those "fuck me, I didn't know that about myself" moments. There are, I'm sure, going to be more as this shit scoots along with me. Yuck, I say, yuck. I'm off to get coffee with the boys. I shall finish this upon returning. Don't hold your breath waiting.
I, like MacArthur, have returned. At least for the time being, I take The Son to school around 0715. To continue on for now, and in doing so, use the O2 generator to boost my blood/ox mix. Sucks to be breathing like I had good sense, and not being able to hold my O2 level high enough to function like a real live person. I figure that if I don't keep my O2 level high enough, they'll put me somewhere I'd really rather not be, just to sit there hooked up to oxygen and vegetate until my body dies. In order to be on top of my cancer and pain, I'm taking a rather hard position to put the morphine under my own tongue. Sublingual is a fairly fast fast way to get the medication into your blood stream. I also would fancy a guest and would want the kid to bag his limit well ahead of myself. That doesn't mean the entire portrait is at a loss, just that I am, for lack of a better word, impatient.
Okay, that paragraph above this one is a bag of "WTF did that come from?" and I can tell you I'm as radical as ever. Let's get this show moving, shall we?
One year ago today, January 14, 2013, I was on my way to see the radiology Dr. . Something that had already been spoken with me in depth. But we started off with the usual small talk while the Dr goes over my case file. I had a pretty good idea as to what she was going to tell me, because my Radiation oncologist had already told me. She tells me that since I've had so much radiation around all points of my neck that any more would more than likely kill me. Yep, I was right, that's what my Oncologist here told me. Because I had so much radiation, particularly on the left side of my neck that, both my carotid arteries where very thin. Good place for a blow out, that's for certain. No shock there. I thanked her and off about my merry way I went. Now to see my plastic surgeon (no, he's not made of plastic, silly's) about reconstruction after my surgery is finished. I had no other appointments on this day, so the rest of the day was mine to do as I pretty well pleased. I went to a place called The Spicy Pickle for lunch. I got a Rueben Sammich, which was passable, but not blow your mind delicious, the Campbell's Soup was pretty good for canned soup. But the pickle. Wow. Seriously, just Wow. It's not a bad place to eat and I've gotten far worse food in Houston than that. I'm not certain why I didn't travel around Houston more, but I was more of a hotel body. It's not that anything is so hard to find, even if you travel on the freeways, but that in general it's a big place, no two ways about it. I went across the street to CVX to pick up some breakfast cereal and some milk. A box of Grape Nuts, a box of Krux? Anyway, I liked it's taste. I'm bored stiff. When I get bored I tend to snack. Not just a little snack either. A big snack. I picked up a quart mixing bowl and went back to the room to have a snack and watch some of the hearings on the house and senate floor. The hearings got to be a sham, so I fixed a snack, hoping for enough of a debate that I could enjoy my snack. FYI: So I didn't explode as the grape nuts expanded. And I'd left very damn few in the debate bowl. Mine included a less than healthy dab of sugar as well. I was wound up tighter than Dick's hatband, I had more than enough colon blow, I've had enough of vitamins and minerals to run me, and a pile of both bottled water and bottled Diet Coke and Diet Dew as well. In two settings, one about 3 hrs apart from the second trip to the Bodine Bowl for a snack. Two times to have a snack, and one box of Grape Nuts. Shoot, an entire box of Grape Nuts, a quart of milk, and a Bodine Bowl to wash, and it's not even 0900. This is going to be a loooong week. This is how my month in Houston begins. Wednesday nothing was scheduled, so rather than write a ton of "Didn't do shit" I'll call it good right here, and move on to Thursday in tomorrow's blog. It should be said here, I was still very optimistic that my surgery will fly along quickly and we can move on to healing me up and my going back to work just bit ahead of my Short Term Disability runs out. We all know that's not the case, but I'm working on telling about the week prior, with maybe some hospital time included.
Here we are, polishing up, the time until I finally was allowed to come home. Hang tough, we'll get there.
When I was a little kid in Gorham Kansas, I was in the minority of residents of Gorham. Probably not the entire county, but also the probability of being a minority in the county as well. I didn't pay that much attention, and still don't. The Parochial school had closed it's doors for the last time after the school year in 1967 came to a close that May. The public school was in a three class room building, that as a first grader, I thought was absolutely HUGE. Anyway, there was an influx of kids I didn't know, which wasn't unusual, since I'd get my ass in a bind if I left the yard against the parents wishes.
Like any kid, school was a little scary at first. But I liked it just the same, it was from. I was also pegged to be the first month of school "milk man". I collected the nickels that were used by us kids, some kids didn't want any milk so they didn't pay. I've wondered, off and on since then, whether or not their parents needed that nickel to pay bills with a quarter a week saved on milk money, or figuring out how at the end of every week those kids could go to one of the two service stations in town, and hang out drinking soda pop all Saturday morning. Nothing was open on Sunday, that was truly the Sabbath in that small town, so no one worked or you'd miss one of the Masses held by Father (i can't remember his name, dang it). I broke my left arm that fall as well. This is the one the Dr set in his office without anesthesia. No crying or yelling about that, just vomit on the Dr. That'll teach that rat bastard!!!
In school we had grades one through three in one room, fourth and fifth in another room, grade six hand their own room. (those guys, i thought, were spy's of some kind. I never saw them come to school, have recess, or eat lunch. They were there, though). We changed teachers in the grade 1-3 room like we all changed underwear. I don't know why that's true, but it was. I would imagine that their husbands were either rail road men, or worked for one of the bigger oil companies in the area. I honestly don't know why we never saw them.
The food at that school was so much better than the damn garbage we got when we moved and I had to go to school in Russell, at Bickerdyke. This to me was a big city, it had TWO grade schools and there was at least one room for every class in the school. I was terrible at math, and I thought the teacher hated me. It turns out, he pushed me so I could learn it better, and retain more. I wish he could have followed me to all the schools after that. For looking like a mean old S.O.B., he was a nice man, with the intention of teaching every kid so that kid would learn something to carry him home on his shield. I did learn a lot from him. The mark of a real educator. Back to the food at Gorham Elementary. It was prepared by two older German ladies. Like a lot of the older folks in town, they could speak and read German before we Protestants could learn one language, they were well on their way to the second. My God was that food good!! In the late fall we got chili at least once a month. Chili came with a Cinnamon roll that looked like it would cover your head and have enough left over for some gloves. Writing about it now, I can still taste the roll. Seconds were allowed, as long as your serving tray was empty, they'd give you a small serving. Generally, and here's the weird thing, they'd give you just enough the first time through that you would be stuffed and couldn't hold another bite. I remember seeing kids that had a little more on their plate than others, seldom more than I had, and some kids that had very small servings on their plates, but when we were all finished, they'd be stuffed, or couldn't eat everything. Spinach, at the time, would make me barf if I even smelled it up close. Somehow, the cooks got wind of that, and I had something different than spinach on my tray every time they fixed Spinach. That little school is also where they first picked up that I had a speech impediment.
I had (and still would have if I could talk, and didn't watch myself) trouble with "CH" become "SH", so I'd say Shicken, instead of Chicken, and consequentially "Flowers" became "PLowers". I learned to fold my tongue in two to make a tunnel. I think that became a beer funnel. As soon as I find out myself, I'll bring along medical turn for what I had from grade school right up until the time I lost my voice"
Alright, I've dicked around with this long enough today. Be Good, hear? You in the back, do you hear? Okay. Damn well better fly right, Mister.
I sound more ghetto if I use some of that shit when I'm trash talking with the buddies
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