CAT: This door is closed!
ME: Honey, I’m trying to write.
CAT: This door is closed and I am on the other side of the door!
ME: Trying to write! That’s why I closed the door.
CAT: Door! Is! Closed!
ME: The whole reason I got an office was so I could close the door when I need to write!
CAT: Door!
30 Minutes later
CAT: The door continues to be closed despite my many protestations!
ME: …
Oh yeah, that emergency room visit I mentioned…
So it went like this: my abdomen started aching, and then eventually so did my *ahem* balls. Elina was on me to make a doctor’s appointment, but I got a little dude about it and decided to wait it out. After a week (*ahem* or so) of duding, it wasn’t going away. In fact, it was getting worse. So, to get Elina off my back I said I’d make a doctor’s appointment on Monday.
We needed some stuff for the new house, (OMG, did I mention we bought a house??!?) so I drove out to Ikea for a cliche Ikea-New-House pilgrimage.
I was only there for a bit before I realized my abdomen (and balls) really hurt.
Still floating in a haze of dudeliness, I promised myself that I’d go to an Urgent Care, but I had this cart full of house crap, and I couldn’t just abandon it, right? In the checkout line I started looking up the closest Urgent Care.
But, you know, I realized I was hungry, so I thought I’d grab some food while I looked. One lovely veggie-burger later, I realized that I had possibly made a misstep by waiting this long. By the time I finished eating, things REALLY hurt.
I texted Elina and drove to an Urgent Care. While talking to to nurse at the desk, I nearly passed out from the pain and had to go into the bathroom to throw up. They sent me to the real Emergency Room.
Sometime later, with an IV in my arm, a variety of drugs in my system, and with an ultrasound of my belly, they informed me that all the pain was me passing a stone in my right kidney. Fortunately it seemed to be gone now.
Less fortunately, they discovered another stone in my left kidney.
An ultrasound, X-ray, and CT scan later, they confirmed a 1cm by 1cm by 2cm kidney stone (shaped like a bullet!) and two smaller fragments in my left kidney.
The stone is too large to do Shockwave lithotripsy (sitting in a pool and breaking that shit up with ultrasonic sound!), which unfortunately leaves Ureteroscopy and Laser Lithotripsy (going through the urinary tract ( ! D: ! ) with a tube and exploding the stone,) or Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy (making an incision through my back into my kidney and inserting a small tube/vacuum to break up the stones and suck up most of the pieces.) Whew.
After speaking with a surgeon, we’ve decided to go with the through-the-back option, (the stone is so large that the urinary tract option has the added danger of leaving tons stone debris along my tract, which would need a second and possibly third procedure.)
I’ll be having surgery February 9th. They’ll put me under. I’ll have to spend at least one, possibly two nights in the hospital and will have a week of painful bed recovery at home. There’ll be a stent from my bladder to my kidney. Three weeks after the surgery I’ll have to go back in and have it removed (by way of a method so horrifying that I can’t get myself to write it down.)
If everything goes to plan, I should be in pretty good shape about 4 weeks after the surgery. Whew.
I’m kind of freaking out, but generally trying to get on with my life.
Usual disclaimer: It’s been forever, dusting off this thing, lot going on, yadda yadda yadda…
So we moved into the new house. (New House?!??) and right after the move, after I got out of the hospital (hospital?!??) we set up our new internet service with CenturyLink.
For the record, this isn’t going to be a rousing endorsement CenturyLink. They’ve screwed up literally every step of the process of setting up our internet. Billing installation, everything.
They’ve even sent me three letters, three different letters informing me that my credit rating is zero, the letter literally has 000. The letter(s) go on to explain that the reason I’ve had to pay a large (unspecified) deposit is because of my impossibly low credit rating. 000.
So, there’s two problems here, but fortunately they cancel each other out. The first is … I have an amazing credit rating. I don’t know how exactly, but somewhere along the line I accidentally got all adult and ending up with awesome credit. If I were chatting with the folks at CenturyLink, I’d motion around me to the house I just bought. (Zero credit rating tends to make such things a little tricky.)
The other problem is they haven’t actually charged me a deposit. As far as I can tell the whole series of letters is CenturyLink trolling me. I guess as long as they don’t actually bill me for this deposit, I’ll just play along and pretend to write them invisible checks for its unspecified amount.
All of which is to say, I’m much happier with CenturyLink than Comcast. When we moved out of the apartment, I called Comcast and said, “We want to end our service.”
The guy indignantly asked why, and I said, “We’re leaving the country, we don’t know when we’ll be back and we don’t know where we’ll be living next.”
And boom, the guy only tried to talk me out of it two more times, a mere twenty minutes of typical-Comcast-employee-desperation later, and we were free forever. Fuck Comcast.
Now I’m just biding my time till Google Fiber shows up.
Oh yeah, about the house and the hospital and the last year … I realized that I’ve been having trouble getting back into blogging because there’s SO MUCH TO SAY, so I figured I should just jump in and get a post out there. I’ll try to catch you up as I go.
😉
I’ve been messing with the D3.js data visualization library for day-job stuff. I realized early on that the potential for making amazing visualizations was pretty much unlimited.
I’m nearly positive that every time you see a cool chart on a TED talk, it’s probably been made in D3.
Anyway, another thing I’ve been thinking about is my old habit of trying to use the internet to keep myself honest. I sort of like (and fear) the idea of keeping a constant track of my writing progress, how I’m eating, exercise, basically everything that I should be doing to keep myself healthy, happy and keeping meaning in my life.
For a while I wondered if I should make a little box at the bottom of every post that tracked these things, maybe sort of like those old nerd code things people used to do in the 90s, but the more I think about it, I’d love to build a chart that tracked these things. Then I (and the entire internet) will know when I’m meeting my goals or not.
D3 is pretty complicated, but I’ve also been playing with Plotly. I may just try this…
I ran into this reddit post the other day where folks suggested classic and awesome books by women. I pitched in a few friends of mine: Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Brenda Cooper, Monica Byrne, etc.
But the longer I thought about the list the more uncomfortable I felt.
I’m ashamed to note how few of the books I myself had read.
It’s important to me to read diversely, partially to develop my own writing, but frankly also just for my development as a person.
I know it’s not intentional, but it bugs me how much I unthinkingly default to male authors most of the time. So I copied the whole damn thing, cut out everything I’d already read, and made a giant list of my own. I’ve decided to only read women authors for the next year, and I’m tasking myself to read at least twelve books.
I started yesterday with N.K. Jemisin’s “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.” I’m not a huge fan of epic fantasy, but her world-building is astounding.
Next I’ll read Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice” and then maybe Nnedi Okorafor’s “Who Fears Death?”
Anyway, here’s the extended list. It’s by no means exhaustive. Feel free to add books in the comments.
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