The (Other) End of the Internet

I know there have been a lot of similar lists of strange things said in hospitals and emergency rooms, most of which have been longer and funnier than this one, but this list has one unique feature: these are all things that I actually heard during my most recent hospital stay.

1. Your blood count is really funky. This bit of wisdom was uttered by an emergency room doctor (or nurse, I’m not sure because of the morphine I was on at the time). I wanted to tell the guy not to get all technical on me, but note my reference about the morphine. Later, a doctor who had a few more years of experience under his belt explained that I was extremely dehydrated and when you remove a lot of liquid, the concentration of what’s left goes way up.
2. I’ve never seen such a bad case of arthritis in someone as young as you are. Do I really need to go into how uplifting and encouraging that is? That’s a nurse who needs to work on her bedside manner, in my not-so-humble opinion.
3. My husband wasn’t as interested in computers as I was, so I tended to not spend time with him. He died of leukemia two years ago. OH HOW CHEERFULThat’s just the kind of uplifting and heartwarming story that a guy stuck in a hospital bed wants to hear . . . especially right after being told that his blood count is “funky” and his blood pressure is practically nonexistent. Could you loan me a really sharp knife, please?
4. That scar from your heart surgery sure does make it easy to line up the x-ray machine to take chest x-rays. I’m so glad to know that. Really. The only reason I had the surgeon knock me out, slice my chest open, break my sternum, and stop my heart for two hours was just to make your job easier. I’m thinking of having similar scars installed on my back, both arms, and both legs. That should make your job a breeze.

The really wild part is that these comments came from folks at the hospital that I prefer to use. The hospital I used to end up in was actually much worse. I remember a nurse at the old hospital who told me, in not-so-many-words, “If you make me mad I’ll make you regret it” and then she turned the flow regulator on my IV up so high that after about 20 minutes (by which time she’d gone home) my arm felt like someone was running thumbtacks through the IV. That incident was one of the main reasons I switched to the hospital I just finished ranting about in my list. At least the new hospital won’t make an insurance company cancel your term life insurance policy when they find out your under their care!

Technorati Tags: hospital, stupid+comments, gripes, heart+surgery, rheumatoid+arthritis, sarcasm

As I watch the price of gasoline go higher and higher, I keep wondering what sort of strange side effects will result from this situation. I can just see the day coming when some poor Joe doesn’t have the credit rating to buy a house but when the mortgage lenders see that he’s got a full five gallon gas can in the back of his truck they start falling all over themselves trying to loan him money.

Daughter Number Two doesn’t know it, but she gave me an idea the other day. She was talking about how she’d like to get an external hard drive for her laptop. This got me to thinking about how I’d like an extra drive for my laptop as well as my desktop machine. The idea she gave me is to somehow come up with a ginormous hard drive then connect it to our local network as a shared drive. I envision partitioning the drive into equal portions for all the different computers around here.

Now all I’ve got to do is come up with the actual drive. Hey … Father’s day is just around the corner

Paraskevidekatriaphobia is the fear of Friday the 13th. Given today’s date, I simply had to post that little factiod.

So, why is Friday the 13th considered to be so unlucky? As the 6th day of the week, Friday is considered by many to be a Bad Thing®. While I don’t understand how anyone could possibly prove this, one source I checked claimed that Friday was the day of the week on which Eve gave the apple to Adam.

The number thirteen is said to be unlucky because that was the number of people attending The Last Supper. According to tradition, if 13 people gather for a meal, the first one to stand up after the meal is finished will die before the end of the year.

When you combine the bad luck associated with Friday and the bad luck associated with the number thirteen, that’s a double shot of Bad Luck® - if you believe in that sort of thing.

What I will never understand is the same people who swear that Friday The Thirteenth is unlucky will amend their statement to say “unless you were born on Friday the Thirteenth, in which case, that’s your lucky day”.

Technorati Tags: superstition, friday+the+thirteenth, origin

Remember last February when I was talking about the tornado that came through town and totaled the van I was driving? Well, the van that got destroyed belongs to my mother-in-law. She contacted FEMA right away about getting help replacing it. They, being the government, just gave her a check for the van a few days ago.

Four months to process a claim isn’t bad enough, I guess, because the check came with a letter saying not to cash the check until she’d received another letter detailing what she was and was not allowed to buy with the money. Presumably, things like a vehicle, tags and auto insurance are fine, but they’re tring to discurage people from spending FEMA checks on stuff like PowerBall tickets.

I’m just glad they finally did something and now she is free to sell off the Dodge Caravan-shaped hunk of scrap metal in her yard. Honestly, even though there was no way I could have kept that from happening, there’s still something inside me that feels guilr every time I look at that van.

Technorati Tags: FEMA, government, tornado, reimbursement, check

This is cool. I was thinking about getting some of those marketing pens with the name and URL of my blog printed on the side. I figured if I got myself about 50 of those and “accidentally” left them lying around different places I go, it might help my web traffic.

What I thought was cool was when I logged in to my WordPress dashboard just now and, in the section noting new incoming links was a link from Schvenn’s Space that was created just because of the name of my blog.

How cool is that?

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, links, seo, trackbacks

When I got home from the hospital today I was greeted with some really wonderful news. One of our web hosting providers (we use two of them) recently “upgraded” to a newer version of their software and, in the process, they managed to break our MySQL connections. For those who want to know what I just said, WordPress [the blogging software you’re gawking at right now] stores all its information in a database which is served up by a program called MySQL. That database was accessed by telling wordpress to connect to mysql.domain.com (domain being only an example). Well, their new software changed that connection to a different address, but it happened to be one that didn’t work because somebody somewhere made a typo in their settings (which I don’t have access to and can’t even look at, much less change).

While I was in the hospital, my wife was on the phone with this company’s tech support about 5 times. I think she got to speak with someone who actually understood English one time, and he didn’t have a clue what a database server was, much less what the proper address for one would be.

When I got home I tried giving them a call. I got some guy who sounded exactly like the recording of the guy who does the voice for the NOAA Weather Radios. This guy was either brain damaged or just had absolutely no short term memory whatsoever.

He asked for the username on the account.
I told him.
He said he couldn’t find it and asked me for the name the account was under.
I gave him my wife’s name (and spelled it).
He said he couldn’t find it and asked for the User Name again.
I gave it to him (and spelled it).
He said he couldn’t find it and asked for my wife’s name and asked me to spell it phonetically.
I responded “First name: T as in Thomas. A as in Apple. M as in Moron! I as in Ignorant! Last name: L as in Lazy! A as in Asinie! -”

and he hung up on me. Go figure.

Technorati Tags: mysql, database, tech+support, horror+story

You guessed it. I just got back from yet another unexpected and unwanted vacation. This time it was because of an unexpected 5-day stay in the hospital. This time I can probably thank my gall bladder - or, more accuratly, my lack thereof.

Because I had to have it removed four or five years ago, there are certain foods that I just can’t eat any more because they’re just too hard to digest. Anything with a lot of pork fat or pork grease - such as cheapo hams or pork chops - is at the top of the list. The latest addition to the list of things I should avoid is the El Cheapo sloppy joe mix (a generic ‘Manwich wannabe’) that I ate on an empty stomach. That stuff is made with an unbelievable amount of vinegar that just sat in my stomach eating away at an ulcer that had just nicely healed over.

Forgive the imagery, but after I had spent two days throwing up blood and I had gotten to the point where I couldn’t even walk across the house without almost falling over, we decided it was time to call an ambulance.

By the time the ambulance crew got me into the meat wagon, my blood pressure was something close to 74/38. (My personal record was a couple of years ago when I had a staph infection and my blood pressure got down to about 60/29.)

They got me to the hospital and the first thing they did was discontinue all my oral medications I take at home every day and replace some of them with an intravenous equivalent. The one they did not bother to replace was the Lasix I take because of my heart trouble. That one is designed to remove excess fluid from my system and, since they were trying to add fluids to get my blood pressure back up, it would have been rather counter-productive.

Their next step was to pump me full of protonix (a stomach acid reducer) and prilosec (another one) and an antibiotic (because I was also fighting an upper respiratory infection on top of all this :~ ). After two days in ICU and three days in a regular patient room, they finally let me go today. Right now, however, my biggest problem is due to the 5 days without the Lasix pills. See, when I don’t take those, I retain water like you wouldn’t believe (You ladies don’t have a monopoly on that ability - men retain water also) and I look like the Michelin Man right now. In all seriousness, I must have put on 20 pounds in the last week. I feel like I need to go out and buy a few dozen bottles of hoodia but actually all I need to do is start taking the Lasix again. Then I can spend half of each of the next 4 days standing in the bathroom, after which time I’ll be back to looking overweight instead of looking like I just ate an entire Subway - train, tracks, platforms, and all.

Technorati Tags: gall+bladder, ulcer, health, protonix, prilosec, hospital, lasix, hoodia, antibiotic, infection, ambulance

It seems sometimes that all I do is wander around from daughter to daughter telling them to turn down their headphones. My favorite sentence these days is, “If I can hear it, it’s too loud”. The standard reply to that comment is that it has to be that loud to be heard over the rest of the noise in the house. This will invariably get, in response, a lecture about how loud noises can cause permanent hearing loss and woeful stories about how my mother needed an amplifier on her telephone and how my voice fell into the very middle of the range of her hearing loss, so the woman usually couldn’t hear a thing I said.

I was browsing buy.com’s weekly specials to see what sale item I could bug people about for Father’s Day when I saw these Maximo iM-390 iMetal Isolation Earphones. Not only do these things block out most background noise so you don’t have to turn them way up just to be able to hear them, but they appear to be tough enough to stand up to even Daughter Number Three. I’ve never met anyone who can disable a pair of those one-dollar earphones quicker. I think her record is an afternoon.

Now that Daughter Number Two has graduated from the Math and Science school in Hot springs (and she passed calculus! WooHoo) she’s been walking laps in the circular driveway. This is partially because she wants to get the exercise she’s missing by not walking all over the school and partially because she CAN now that she’s had the surgery her knee has been in serious need of for the last few years.

She came in the house just now and informed me that either we need to pave the driveway or she wants a treadmill because gravel is no fun to walk on.

I suggested that she start saving her pennies.