Already here it is Wednesday with the world slipping by, and I haven't posted anything since Saturday. Forgive me for wanting validation, but I have a need for readers, or simply a reader, to keep me writing. With that said, I just found out that I'm going to be stuck past Christmas in this hellhole. I call it names and moan and groan, but it's really not that bad. I've had worse.
One thing I do like about this hospital is that when I call the nurse -- which in my case is accomplished by blowing on a tube that is attached via clamp to my bed -- instead of it going to whoever might be sitting at the nurse's station -- as it would in every other hospital I've been in -- it rings a telephone carried by the tech (a nursing assistant) on duty who answers and asks me through my bedside speaker what I need. This is innovation (yeah) and hopefully in the future other hospital-type institutions will adopt it. With all that said, let me return again to my hallucinations of several weeks ago.
It was morning time best I remember, and I was sleepy having been up all night. I closed my eyes hoping to drift off to slumber and it wasn't long before I felt a dream coming on, an unusually familiar dream that promised a blissful state. A couple of minutes later though for some reason I opened my eyes, and I was surprised by a bunch of little brown ghostlike creatures rushing in the air towards me.
The wall before me had an HDTV and a wall clock on it, and as soon as I opened my eyes those little things rushed quickly back behind said devices as if to hide from my sight. I closed my eyes again and got the distinct feeling that the little ghosties were at it again and it was they who imparted the feel-good dream. It was a really nice dream but a little scary because the way I remember it I had the choice of staying there forever with the caveat of never returning back. It was very real, and I can't discount the feeling that there is something like an alternate universe out there that we share in a dream state, not necessarily better or worse than this one just different, though in this case I had the use of my limbs, a very heady feeling to someone who is paralyzed. On the face of it, it would seem an easy choice, but sure as I chose to stay, something would go terribly wrong, and it would be just my luck that it would turn out to be a portal to hell.
I opened my eyes again this time genuinely scared of the dream, and again the little ghosts scrambled for a hiding place. I was mildly amused and I took advantage of the situation by closing my eyes for brief amounts of time and then opening them just to see the little critters flee. What was really wild was once when they turned to run I trapped two of them inside of my eyeball.
Eventually I did slip off into sleep, and I can't say exactly what I dreamed of, but I do remember that there was a recurring theme of being in another world just as real as this one. I've tried to describe it there, but I've come up short. But I do remember a world of fairies living in the ceiling of my room. More on that later.
In closing, I'd like to thank my sister for stopping by today. She brought me Christmas presents in the forms of food and clothing: a huge meatball sub (of which I've devoured half) and a sweatshirt of the softest fabric. I've found that there's nothing so important as family, blood or otherwise, and I send warm holiday greetings to my adopted family in the small town of Kensington. All of you are the best, and I can't wait to get back!
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
So easy a caveman...
For all you anthropological types out there, you might be interested in the movie "Quest for Fire." It's set 80,000 years in the past and follows three prehistoric tribe members in their journey to find fire. Once you get used to the "Geico" caveman makeup what unfolds is a uniquely intriguing movie that has no dialogue, only grunts and other rudimentary human sounds. The acting is so well done that it carries the story sans words. There were some genuinely comical moments in this movie to counterpart the vicious world it depicts.
Speaking of movies, if you haven't seen "Payback-the Director's cut" starring Mel Gibson, don't bother. It sucks. Hopefully, the theater version was better. If not, I can imagine a lot of pissed off moviegoers. But in the Director's cut it's as if he went back and put in every single scene he shot. It makes for an interminably long movie. I kept expecting it to end, but it kept going and going to the point that it became ridiculous. Mel Gibson's bad acting didn't help. Any wannabe directors out there? Use this movie as an example of what not to do.
Today has been terribly boring, and I've found myself slipping into self-pity. I will certainly be happy once I get out of this place. I feel like I'm serving a jail sentence. Ten more days... thank god... it's only ten more days and I'll be released. I've got to start thinking about who's going to work for me when I get home. The weekdays are covered, but I don't have anyone for the weekend that can get me in and out of bed. It was fine when I was confined, but when I get home I've got to start getting up every day.
On a completely different note, it was only a little over a week ago that I started hallucinating. My doctor had taken me off of all of my medications except for my antidepressant and my blood pressure pills. That left me with nothing for pain and nothing for muscle spasms, and I think I was going through Valium withdrawal.
It was on a Wednesday evening that the hallucinations started. I began to feel as if I had dropped some acid. The clock on the wall and some of the ceiling fixtures started folding up on themselves as if they were flimsy rubber. I even mentioned to the nurse that I was hallucinating.
I hadn't slept all of the night before, and I was going to try to get some sleep. It was about midnight and only minutes after I closed my eyes that there was this big flash of light. My eyes opened suddenly to see flames shoot out from behind the wall mounted TV. Wow, whatever was going on it certainly had my attention. I stayed awake watching CNN, and there was all this weird behind the scenes stuff going on. The real kicker was when the room started getting smaller. It didn't just appear to be getting smaller. I could actually see the room squeezing in slowly from the windows side. It was strange. What was even stranger was when the nurse came in and didn't even notice. There was a moment when I thought I might be going crazy, but then I dismissed that idea. This didn't seem like a hallucination. It seemed as if the room had actually been designed so that it could through some outside mechanism grow smaller.
All that night CNN had been televising all kinds of tricks that it could play on the audience, and having a room fold in on itself seemed to be a common theme. So when my room appeared to be folding in on itself, I expected it was the work of some outside party.
Then the TV came alive. It wasn't the TV itself but the people inside the TV. They started poking their head out and talking to me directly. Somewhere along the line I got it in my head that my brother had put this all together, and I was going to be ejected out of my bed through the entrance to the hallway to some outside room where my friends and family were gathered to greet me. I even heard my brother's voice. It was exactly the type of thing that he would do. The room, the TV, everything had been a setup. It was like a surprise party for me, but my legs hurt and I felt lousy. I didn't really feel like seeing everybody just then. I began to hope that whatever the trick was that it wouldn't work.
Everything seemed to build up to a climax -- the moment had arrived for my expulsion from the bedroom into the room beyond. There was unseen movement all around me -- people pulling strings, putting the machinery in high gear, and I actually saw an arm or a leg in my peripheral vision. A nurse came in to do something, but she hurried to get out of the way of these people behind the scenes. It all seemed so real.
Someone from the television set encouraged me to hit this button by the side of my head. I assumed it was some sort of trigger to release me from the bed so that I could shoot out into the next room. I tried repeatedly to hit with my head to no avail.
Suddenly, the moment was over. Critical Mass had passed and I had remained in my hospital bed. It was some time before I could look back and realize that it had all been a hallucination.
Next Post: fairies and beyond
Speaking of movies, if you haven't seen "Payback-the Director's cut" starring Mel Gibson, don't bother. It sucks. Hopefully, the theater version was better. If not, I can imagine a lot of pissed off moviegoers. But in the Director's cut it's as if he went back and put in every single scene he shot. It makes for an interminably long movie. I kept expecting it to end, but it kept going and going to the point that it became ridiculous. Mel Gibson's bad acting didn't help. Any wannabe directors out there? Use this movie as an example of what not to do.
Today has been terribly boring, and I've found myself slipping into self-pity. I will certainly be happy once I get out of this place. I feel like I'm serving a jail sentence. Ten more days... thank god... it's only ten more days and I'll be released. I've got to start thinking about who's going to work for me when I get home. The weekdays are covered, but I don't have anyone for the weekend that can get me in and out of bed. It was fine when I was confined, but when I get home I've got to start getting up every day.
On a completely different note, it was only a little over a week ago that I started hallucinating. My doctor had taken me off of all of my medications except for my antidepressant and my blood pressure pills. That left me with nothing for pain and nothing for muscle spasms, and I think I was going through Valium withdrawal.
It was on a Wednesday evening that the hallucinations started. I began to feel as if I had dropped some acid. The clock on the wall and some of the ceiling fixtures started folding up on themselves as if they were flimsy rubber. I even mentioned to the nurse that I was hallucinating.
I hadn't slept all of the night before, and I was going to try to get some sleep. It was about midnight and only minutes after I closed my eyes that there was this big flash of light. My eyes opened suddenly to see flames shoot out from behind the wall mounted TV. Wow, whatever was going on it certainly had my attention. I stayed awake watching CNN, and there was all this weird behind the scenes stuff going on. The real kicker was when the room started getting smaller. It didn't just appear to be getting smaller. I could actually see the room squeezing in slowly from the windows side. It was strange. What was even stranger was when the nurse came in and didn't even notice. There was a moment when I thought I might be going crazy, but then I dismissed that idea. This didn't seem like a hallucination. It seemed as if the room had actually been designed so that it could through some outside mechanism grow smaller.
All that night CNN had been televising all kinds of tricks that it could play on the audience, and having a room fold in on itself seemed to be a common theme. So when my room appeared to be folding in on itself, I expected it was the work of some outside party.
Then the TV came alive. It wasn't the TV itself but the people inside the TV. They started poking their head out and talking to me directly. Somewhere along the line I got it in my head that my brother had put this all together, and I was going to be ejected out of my bed through the entrance to the hallway to some outside room where my friends and family were gathered to greet me. I even heard my brother's voice. It was exactly the type of thing that he would do. The room, the TV, everything had been a setup. It was like a surprise party for me, but my legs hurt and I felt lousy. I didn't really feel like seeing everybody just then. I began to hope that whatever the trick was that it wouldn't work.
Everything seemed to build up to a climax -- the moment had arrived for my expulsion from the bedroom into the room beyond. There was unseen movement all around me -- people pulling strings, putting the machinery in high gear, and I actually saw an arm or a leg in my peripheral vision. A nurse came in to do something, but she hurried to get out of the way of these people behind the scenes. It all seemed so real.
Someone from the television set encouraged me to hit this button by the side of my head. I assumed it was some sort of trigger to release me from the bed so that I could shoot out into the next room. I tried repeatedly to hit with my head to no avail.
Suddenly, the moment was over. Critical Mass had passed and I had remained in my hospital bed. It was some time before I could look back and realize that it had all been a hallucination.
Next Post: fairies and beyond
Friday, December 12, 2008
To Sip or Not to Sip
Today was my third day up in the wheelchair since my surgery two weeks ago. I sat today for an hour and a half. I increase one half hour each day I'm up. By the time I leave, which is tentatively set for the 22nd, I should be up to eight hours uptime. When I get home I can work on stretching that out to 12 or more hours. That's the good news. The bad news is I can't seem to drive the wheelchair anymore. When I got here I was able to drive, so what happened?
What happened was that my bicep muscle in my driving arm -- my left arm -- tightened up while bedridden. Also, my muscles overall have weakened. I was having a lot of trouble driving the wheelchair this whole year, so this setback is not a complete surprise. Hopefully, through exercise and therapy I'll be able to get back to a point where I can drive the wheelchair somewhat well if not perfectly. The general consensus though is that I need to explore a different method of driving.
When I first started using a power wheelchair only three or four months after my injury, my arm muscles were not strong enough to operate a joystick, so I was delegated to driving through the sip and puff system. The way this works is a tube is placed within reach of my mouth as I sit in the wheelchair. Puffing hard into the tube starts the wheelchair moving forwards at its lowest of three speeds. Each additional hard puff increases the speed until the maximum is met. Once one is moving forwards one can steer by puffing or sipping softly. As long as one continues to sip on the tube, the wheelchair will turn left. As long as one continues to puff on the tube, the wheelchair will continue to turn right. Once one ceases sipping or puffing, the wheelchair resumes going straight in the direction it's pointed. To slow down or stop one only needs to sip hard on the tube. Each hard sip reduces the speed by one power until stopped.
If one wants to back up one would sip hard from a sitting position. Each additional hard sip will increase the backwards speed the same way additional puffs increased forward speed and one steers the same way, through soft sips and puffs.
It sounds more complicated than it is in practice. All in all, it's a very good system considering. The thing I don't like about it is that I have to drive around with a tube in my mouth, and it looks so Christopher Reeve. What I'm trying to say is that it makes me look more disabled than I would like.
While you're pondering all that try this on for size: I just volunteered to join in testing a tongue drive. It sounds absolutely erotic, doesn't it, driving the wheelchair with one's tongue? I can see the headlines now: Quadriplegics Do It Best with Their Tongues. Of course, this is something not new to some of ladies I know. I think being stripped of conventional means to please a sexual partner, I've honed my oral skills to the best of my ability, and I've done a lot of fieldwork.
Have I digressed? If so, please forgive me. I go off on tangent so easily, especially when the subject turns sexual. But anyway, that's enough for now. But I will leave you with this. Next time you are with your lover, spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, or one- night-stand, focus on your oral skills. Kiss as if your entire lovemaking success depends on it, as if that's all there is and you have to make the most of it. That's pretty much the boat I'm in, but I think it's made me a better lover for it.
What happened was that my bicep muscle in my driving arm -- my left arm -- tightened up while bedridden. Also, my muscles overall have weakened. I was having a lot of trouble driving the wheelchair this whole year, so this setback is not a complete surprise. Hopefully, through exercise and therapy I'll be able to get back to a point where I can drive the wheelchair somewhat well if not perfectly. The general consensus though is that I need to explore a different method of driving.
When I first started using a power wheelchair only three or four months after my injury, my arm muscles were not strong enough to operate a joystick, so I was delegated to driving through the sip and puff system. The way this works is a tube is placed within reach of my mouth as I sit in the wheelchair. Puffing hard into the tube starts the wheelchair moving forwards at its lowest of three speeds. Each additional hard puff increases the speed until the maximum is met. Once one is moving forwards one can steer by puffing or sipping softly. As long as one continues to sip on the tube, the wheelchair will turn left. As long as one continues to puff on the tube, the wheelchair will continue to turn right. Once one ceases sipping or puffing, the wheelchair resumes going straight in the direction it's pointed. To slow down or stop one only needs to sip hard on the tube. Each hard sip reduces the speed by one power until stopped.
If one wants to back up one would sip hard from a sitting position. Each additional hard sip will increase the backwards speed the same way additional puffs increased forward speed and one steers the same way, through soft sips and puffs.
It sounds more complicated than it is in practice. All in all, it's a very good system considering. The thing I don't like about it is that I have to drive around with a tube in my mouth, and it looks so Christopher Reeve. What I'm trying to say is that it makes me look more disabled than I would like.
While you're pondering all that try this on for size: I just volunteered to join in testing a tongue drive. It sounds absolutely erotic, doesn't it, driving the wheelchair with one's tongue? I can see the headlines now: Quadriplegics Do It Best with Their Tongues. Of course, this is something not new to some of ladies I know. I think being stripped of conventional means to please a sexual partner, I've honed my oral skills to the best of my ability, and I've done a lot of fieldwork.
Have I digressed? If so, please forgive me. I go off on tangent so easily, especially when the subject turns sexual. But anyway, that's enough for now. But I will leave you with this. Next time you are with your lover, spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, or one- night-stand, focus on your oral skills. Kiss as if your entire lovemaking success depends on it, as if that's all there is and you have to make the most of it. That's pretty much the boat I'm in, but I think it's made me a better lover for it.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Resurrection: Back to the Wheelchair
I should've started this a long time ago, but as they say: "Better late than never."
So here I am at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia. I am a quadriplegic of 23 years and counting, and I came down here to get flap surgery done on my behind where it has broken down into a rather significant sore. I would post a picture, but it's kind of gory. It even freaked me out when I saw it. At its worst, the sore went clear down to my femur bone. My nurse said that she could reach down and touch it. All that emptiness had to be filled in: hence the flap surgery.
A flap surgery is when a surgeon -- in this case a plastic surgeon -- opens up the area and pulls a flap of healthy muscle tissue into the gap. I had mine done a couple of weeks ago I guess it was. It's hard to make sense of time laying here day after day in an empty room void of decoration with only a television for company. During the course of a day I'll see my nurse or my nurses assistant -- which down here they call a tech -- maybe four times a shift. There are two shifts per 24-hour period -- every one works seven to seven -- so I have a face change every 12 hours.
I'm really disappointed in the morning care. The people here seem to have this attitude that there is only a certain amount of work that they are supposed to do and anything more is really putting them out. For instance, I have to ask to have my teeth brushed in the morning. I have to ask to get my hair brushed. Maybe they are adverse to brushes. But it's the same way in every hospital I've ever been in. I was just hoping it would be different here.
Occasionally, I'll get a tech that brushes my teeth without my asking, and that's what I know I have someone that's a grade above the norm. Today was such a case. My tech’s name was Deana. She's an attractive young woman of 23, married two years, and currently going to Georgia State for her nursing degree. It's always easier for me to get up in the morning if there is a pretty face to look at.
And today was my second day back in the wheelchair since my surgery, and Julie, my physical therapist, drove me out to the main nurse's station for the floor. There must've been at least five very good-looking nurses there. I knew a couple of the faces, but there was this one nurse that was exceptionally striking. We even made eye contact for several seconds. My heart goes pitter-patter just thinking about her. And when it was time to get back in bed, Deana and Julie were at the helm, both equally attractive.
I told Deana that if every day were as good as today I would have no complaints. And so I leave you with that thought. Think of what would make your day a good day. Is it something you have control over?
So here I am at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia. I am a quadriplegic of 23 years and counting, and I came down here to get flap surgery done on my behind where it has broken down into a rather significant sore. I would post a picture, but it's kind of gory. It even freaked me out when I saw it. At its worst, the sore went clear down to my femur bone. My nurse said that she could reach down and touch it. All that emptiness had to be filled in: hence the flap surgery.
A flap surgery is when a surgeon -- in this case a plastic surgeon -- opens up the area and pulls a flap of healthy muscle tissue into the gap. I had mine done a couple of weeks ago I guess it was. It's hard to make sense of time laying here day after day in an empty room void of decoration with only a television for company. During the course of a day I'll see my nurse or my nurses assistant -- which down here they call a tech -- maybe four times a shift. There are two shifts per 24-hour period -- every one works seven to seven -- so I have a face change every 12 hours.
I'm really disappointed in the morning care. The people here seem to have this attitude that there is only a certain amount of work that they are supposed to do and anything more is really putting them out. For instance, I have to ask to have my teeth brushed in the morning. I have to ask to get my hair brushed. Maybe they are adverse to brushes. But it's the same way in every hospital I've ever been in. I was just hoping it would be different here.
Occasionally, I'll get a tech that brushes my teeth without my asking, and that's what I know I have someone that's a grade above the norm. Today was such a case. My tech’s name was Deana. She's an attractive young woman of 23, married two years, and currently going to Georgia State for her nursing degree. It's always easier for me to get up in the morning if there is a pretty face to look at.
And today was my second day back in the wheelchair since my surgery, and Julie, my physical therapist, drove me out to the main nurse's station for the floor. There must've been at least five very good-looking nurses there. I knew a couple of the faces, but there was this one nurse that was exceptionally striking. We even made eye contact for several seconds. My heart goes pitter-patter just thinking about her. And when it was time to get back in bed, Deana and Julie were at the helm, both equally attractive.
I told Deana that if every day were as good as today I would have no complaints. And so I leave you with that thought. Think of what would make your day a good day. Is it something you have control over?
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