I am the patron saint of lost causes
A fraction of who I once believed (change)
It's only a matter of time
Opinions I would try and rewrite
If life had background music playing your song
I have got to be honest, I tried to escape you
But the orchestra plays on, and they sang
Oh, things are going to change now for the better
And oh, things are going to change
Hands, like secrets, are the hardest thing to keep from you
Lines and phrases, like knives, your words can cut me through
Dismantle me down (repair)
You dismantle me
You dismantle me
... Ill be damned if I haven't heard a better song in years. Justin and Kristin, seriously... thank you for introducing me to Anberlin. I'm obsessed.
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts
6.20.2009
4.26.2009
Guessing Games
Well. I haven't written on here very much - at all? - about what has been going on in my life lately. Not that I have many readers - 2, 3? - and not that they don't already know...
Over the last two months, I've been having some severe stomach/abdominal pains. About a month and a half ago, it got so bad after three intense days that I had my parents take me to the emergency room. Some morphine and a CT scan later... they decided I did not have Appendicitis. Or a bad gall bladder (so they said). The word that they mentioned was Colitis, and possible Crohn's Disease. I was recommended to a gastro-intestinal specialist, given some Vicodin for the pain and some antibiotics to kill the inflammation they saw in my large and small intestines.
Well, I saw that doctor, and he recommended I have a test done where they stick a tube down my throat, blow dye into my stomach and bowels, and do a CT scan to see the results. He also said if I was feeling better, I could play the "wait and see" game. I didn't want to have to blow my system out with drugs to get ready for the test - I was already having lower bowel pain and issues from all the sickness, as it were - so I decided to play wait and see.
(INTERJECTION: for clarity's sake - I was not supposed to eat spicy or greasy foods, which I did my best to stay away from, for the most part. Also, the pain - my stomach hurts in general, but there is also a severe cramping and bloating that comes with it. Sometimes the bloating gets so bad that I feel like my insides surely will burst, and sometimes, I wish that would happen, as some kind of release from the pain. Read more below. End Interjection.)
Long story short: I was back in the emergency room within a week, almost two weeks exactly since the first time. I called my family doctor to get more meds, to no avail. The gastro-intestinal doctor denied me meds, too, and said to go to the emergency room (or so his nurse said). So, back to the ER I went, where I had another CT scan (this time with contrast dye) after a failed half-hour of trying to get my IV in. I ended up getting sick and vomitting in the hospital, after which I felt much better.
The second emergency visit prompted my stomach doctor to rush me in for... a colonoscopy. Now, I really had to blow my system out. This was about two weeks ago. It was miserable, I was and still am so sore from all the havoc wrecked on my system. Long story short: they found two polyps, sent away for biopsy, came back negative. No cancer, no evidence of Crohn's disease or Inflammatory Bowel Disease. I was given a clean bill of health - this past Tuesday.
So why did my pain return on Thursday? Part of it is surely my fault - I ate pizza on Tuesday night, I was so hungry (couldn't eat for 36+ hours) and I was craving something tasty. But, they said all the inflammation was gone, no trace of it. So, I thought, in essence, I was cured.
Turns out they may have been looking in the wrong place.
Since the ER does me little good - it's basically a chance to get high powered pain meds like Morphine, which works incredibly well but wears off and doesn't prevent the pain from returning - I decided to tough it out this weekend when the ailment returned.
Now I've got an appointment, as a consultation, to deal with my destroyed lower bowels on Monday, and the original Stomach Dye test that I turned down on Tuesday. Hopefully, we'll start figuring out what this IS, and not what it is NOT.
In the meantime... I am trying to keep my spirits up. This has been the first really bad medical thing I have had to go through. It's starting to get to me, to get into my head a little bit. I can't describe that... it's just odd to not be able to escape your pain. Pain medicines, the ones you buy over the counter, even the Vicodin they gave me, they all don't really work. They just tear my system up even more, which starts this whole thing over again.
For now, I am hanging in there. My life has been pretty disrupted, but I am game for the next steps... hopefully they can find out what is wrong, we can treat it, and I can move on. Keep your fingers crossed.
Over the last two months, I've been having some severe stomach/abdominal pains. About a month and a half ago, it got so bad after three intense days that I had my parents take me to the emergency room. Some morphine and a CT scan later... they decided I did not have Appendicitis. Or a bad gall bladder (so they said). The word that they mentioned was Colitis, and possible Crohn's Disease. I was recommended to a gastro-intestinal specialist, given some Vicodin for the pain and some antibiotics to kill the inflammation they saw in my large and small intestines.
Well, I saw that doctor, and he recommended I have a test done where they stick a tube down my throat, blow dye into my stomach and bowels, and do a CT scan to see the results. He also said if I was feeling better, I could play the "wait and see" game. I didn't want to have to blow my system out with drugs to get ready for the test - I was already having lower bowel pain and issues from all the sickness, as it were - so I decided to play wait and see.
(INTERJECTION: for clarity's sake - I was not supposed to eat spicy or greasy foods, which I did my best to stay away from, for the most part. Also, the pain - my stomach hurts in general, but there is also a severe cramping and bloating that comes with it. Sometimes the bloating gets so bad that I feel like my insides surely will burst, and sometimes, I wish that would happen, as some kind of release from the pain. Read more below. End Interjection.)
Long story short: I was back in the emergency room within a week, almost two weeks exactly since the first time. I called my family doctor to get more meds, to no avail. The gastro-intestinal doctor denied me meds, too, and said to go to the emergency room (or so his nurse said). So, back to the ER I went, where I had another CT scan (this time with contrast dye) after a failed half-hour of trying to get my IV in. I ended up getting sick and vomitting in the hospital, after which I felt much better.
The second emergency visit prompted my stomach doctor to rush me in for... a colonoscopy. Now, I really had to blow my system out. This was about two weeks ago. It was miserable, I was and still am so sore from all the havoc wrecked on my system. Long story short: they found two polyps, sent away for biopsy, came back negative. No cancer, no evidence of Crohn's disease or Inflammatory Bowel Disease. I was given a clean bill of health - this past Tuesday.
So why did my pain return on Thursday? Part of it is surely my fault - I ate pizza on Tuesday night, I was so hungry (couldn't eat for 36+ hours) and I was craving something tasty. But, they said all the inflammation was gone, no trace of it. So, I thought, in essence, I was cured.
Turns out they may have been looking in the wrong place.
Since the ER does me little good - it's basically a chance to get high powered pain meds like Morphine, which works incredibly well but wears off and doesn't prevent the pain from returning - I decided to tough it out this weekend when the ailment returned.
Now I've got an appointment, as a consultation, to deal with my destroyed lower bowels on Monday, and the original Stomach Dye test that I turned down on Tuesday. Hopefully, we'll start figuring out what this IS, and not what it is NOT.
In the meantime... I am trying to keep my spirits up. This has been the first really bad medical thing I have had to go through. It's starting to get to me, to get into my head a little bit. I can't describe that... it's just odd to not be able to escape your pain. Pain medicines, the ones you buy over the counter, even the Vicodin they gave me, they all don't really work. They just tear my system up even more, which starts this whole thing over again.
For now, I am hanging in there. My life has been pretty disrupted, but I am game for the next steps... hopefully they can find out what is wrong, we can treat it, and I can move on. Keep your fingers crossed.
4.19.2009
We Built The Pyramids
So... is geek really chic? It's a fun question. Is it now cool to be into video games, dungeons and dragons, striped shirts, big rims (glasses, not wheels), science fiction, and corduroys? Why not - what there is not to love?
After spending a good amount of time - in a short while, mind you - blitzing through the wonderful television series Freaks and Geeks, I was rewarded with The Big Bang Theory Season One, a gift from a friend that, well, kept on giving. Regretfully, I have not had time to watch the "Guided to Geek Chic" bonus feature - busy as I am downloading WoW patches and re-watching the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica in order to prepare for watching said show's fourth and final season - but seeing that the BBT season collection had such a thing as a featurette on Geek dress made me... start to think.
Now, I am a geek. Maybe not in the painfully obvious, and overblown, ways that the characters in BBT are, and a little less High School, and more a mixture of both the geeks and the freaks, as in Freaks and Geeks (my slavish devotion and rabid obsession with music gets me awfully close to freak territory - then again, the useless, nearly depthless amount of useless knowledge I possess about music probably swings me back towards geek - it's not physics, but I promise you, it's big and impressive...). But a geek, nonetheless. I own my fair share of esoteric geek material, such as a pretty fine collectioon of Dragonlance novels (and game materials), way too many BattleMechs, a bunch of the original Final Fantasy games for PlayStation (FF1 and FF2/4 being my faves), and Firefly and BSG and CSI seasons on DVD. We won't get into the bad movies I love.
TV shows like BBT make geeks fun, make 'em look cool. But me and you? We're not cool. Well, I am, but that's a different story. Then, it struck me... maybe I'm not geeky enough! I mean, this whole new geek world is supposed to be full of opportunities for us, like sex with scientific girls who play violin, and making out with cheerleaders, and all that jazz. I mean, am I missing something? Am I just too plan ordinary?
I have always been a fence sitter, one foot on one side of the yard, one foot in the other. I was never a full jock, never a full geek, never a full freak, never a full church kid. I was always somewhere in the middle, able to surf the social channels of high school with (relative) ease. Now, I got picked on a lot when I was younger, but as I aged, that changed, and by my junior year of high school I was pretty damned comfortable being the almost-jock/nerd/geek/churchkid/freak that I was. Does that mean I was everything and nothing, faceless, too homogenized to be exciting?
Nowadays? It's all rock music mixed with folk and metal. It's (not often) lifting weights afterwork and running on the treadmill mixed with (more often) weeks of being lazy, or (less often) walking the dog at that park or shooting hoops by myself. (and summer means hiking!!) It's Battlestar Galactica and World of Warcraft mixed with lots and lots of college and NBA basketball, cheesey and crude Judd Apatow movies, less crude but still corny Cameron Crowe movies, and The Who biography on DVD. It's t-shirts and jeans and work boots mixed with... sometimes a button down, but usually not much else. Maybe a sweater. It's geeky, boxy glasses mixed with a fading hairline and a goatee with the chin-strap, teeth all brushed and body all showered. It's fit everywhere else mixed in with a little beer tummy. It's cranky, silly humor mixed in with tempermental driving mixed with rapid fire wit and backporch, beer-and-cigarette philosphy, and long, late night conversations with good friends.
So, what I am trying to say, is that I am cool while being geek. Who know's if it's chic. Who cares? I can't quote physics equations, and I can't quote baseball statistics. I ain't tall, don't have good hair, and don't dress GQ. But I've got skillz on guitarz, Gheis and Choppy will make mince meat out of your Hordemoh little druid thing, and I can tell you that one of the original Beatles managers slept with the Beatles original drummer's mom, despite being 20+ years her junion, and whilst her son was still drumming in the band. Godspeed, Pete Best's mom. Godspeed.
After spending a good amount of time - in a short while, mind you - blitzing through the wonderful television series Freaks and Geeks, I was rewarded with The Big Bang Theory Season One, a gift from a friend that, well, kept on giving. Regretfully, I have not had time to watch the "Guided to Geek Chic" bonus feature - busy as I am downloading WoW patches and re-watching the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica in order to prepare for watching said show's fourth and final season - but seeing that the BBT season collection had such a thing as a featurette on Geek dress made me... start to think.
Now, I am a geek. Maybe not in the painfully obvious, and overblown, ways that the characters in BBT are, and a little less High School, and more a mixture of both the geeks and the freaks, as in Freaks and Geeks (my slavish devotion and rabid obsession with music gets me awfully close to freak territory - then again, the useless, nearly depthless amount of useless knowledge I possess about music probably swings me back towards geek - it's not physics, but I promise you, it's big and impressive...). But a geek, nonetheless. I own my fair share of esoteric geek material, such as a pretty fine collectioon of Dragonlance novels (and game materials), way too many BattleMechs, a bunch of the original Final Fantasy games for PlayStation (FF1 and FF2/4 being my faves), and Firefly and BSG and CSI seasons on DVD. We won't get into the bad movies I love.
TV shows like BBT make geeks fun, make 'em look cool. But me and you? We're not cool. Well, I am, but that's a different story. Then, it struck me... maybe I'm not geeky enough! I mean, this whole new geek world is supposed to be full of opportunities for us, like sex with scientific girls who play violin, and making out with cheerleaders, and all that jazz. I mean, am I missing something? Am I just too plan ordinary?
I have always been a fence sitter, one foot on one side of the yard, one foot in the other. I was never a full jock, never a full geek, never a full freak, never a full church kid. I was always somewhere in the middle, able to surf the social channels of high school with (relative) ease. Now, I got picked on a lot when I was younger, but as I aged, that changed, and by my junior year of high school I was pretty damned comfortable being the almost-jock/nerd/geek/churchkid/freak that I was. Does that mean I was everything and nothing, faceless, too homogenized to be exciting?
Nowadays? It's all rock music mixed with folk and metal. It's (not often) lifting weights afterwork and running on the treadmill mixed with (more often) weeks of being lazy, or (less often) walking the dog at that park or shooting hoops by myself. (and summer means hiking!!) It's Battlestar Galactica and World of Warcraft mixed with lots and lots of college and NBA basketball, cheesey and crude Judd Apatow movies, less crude but still corny Cameron Crowe movies, and The Who biography on DVD. It's t-shirts and jeans and work boots mixed with... sometimes a button down, but usually not much else. Maybe a sweater. It's geeky, boxy glasses mixed with a fading hairline and a goatee with the chin-strap, teeth all brushed and body all showered. It's fit everywhere else mixed in with a little beer tummy. It's cranky, silly humor mixed in with tempermental driving mixed with rapid fire wit and backporch, beer-and-cigarette philosphy, and long, late night conversations with good friends.
So, what I am trying to say, is that I am cool while being geek. Who know's if it's chic. Who cares? I can't quote physics equations, and I can't quote baseball statistics. I ain't tall, don't have good hair, and don't dress GQ. But I've got skillz on guitarz, Gheis and Choppy will make mince meat out of your Hordemoh little druid thing, and I can tell you that one of the original Beatles managers slept with the Beatles original drummer's mom, despite being 20+ years her junion, and whilst her son was still drumming in the band. Godspeed, Pete Best's mom. Godspeed.
12.04.2008
I Am An Exit
I don't blog enough. Sometimes this poor site becomes a release for the bad, and never enough of the good, and lately things are going good... maybe even great.
Winter can be such a tough time, for so many people. It can be for me, that's for sure, but other than in early November, things have been excellent this winter. I am overworked but not totally overstressed. I have way too much to do with the music stuff, but it is so much fun I don't mind.
Winter is one of those great seasons where life is preparing to be reborn. Some view it as the end - the death of the year - but it's cyclical, so it's not really the death, but merely the completion of the circle of another years. And circles are continuous (thank you geometry), so we know that spring is coming, and life is preparing to be reborn.
In much that same way, some people use winter to labor over what is ending, while others use it to prepare for what is coming. This year has been so much of the latter for me - preparing for another good, possibly great year.
Let me share one small thing with you, one of the many reasons I am excited about the rebirth. I am working on getting my music online - ONLINE! - and the process has been fun, information, and most of all, carries with it a sense of accomplishment. Soon I'll be able to sell music online, linked from my own website, and even on iTunes and other electronic music sites. How cool is that?
I'll have to make it a point to come back often, and share my stories, good ones, for your enjoyment. This blog is my exit. But so many times the road you veer off of on the highway of life makes for one helluva great detour.
Winter can be such a tough time, for so many people. It can be for me, that's for sure, but other than in early November, things have been excellent this winter. I am overworked but not totally overstressed. I have way too much to do with the music stuff, but it is so much fun I don't mind.
Winter is one of those great seasons where life is preparing to be reborn. Some view it as the end - the death of the year - but it's cyclical, so it's not really the death, but merely the completion of the circle of another years. And circles are continuous (thank you geometry), so we know that spring is coming, and life is preparing to be reborn.
In much that same way, some people use winter to labor over what is ending, while others use it to prepare for what is coming. This year has been so much of the latter for me - preparing for another good, possibly great year.
Let me share one small thing with you, one of the many reasons I am excited about the rebirth. I am working on getting my music online - ONLINE! - and the process has been fun, information, and most of all, carries with it a sense of accomplishment. Soon I'll be able to sell music online, linked from my own website, and even on iTunes and other electronic music sites. How cool is that?
I'll have to make it a point to come back often, and share my stories, good ones, for your enjoyment. This blog is my exit. But so many times the road you veer off of on the highway of life makes for one helluva great detour.
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