My boys are sickly :(

Those who follow my tweeting may have seen that the two most important males in my life, DH and Pancake, are both in need of surgery.

For DH, he is getting a bullectomy. I’d love to link you to a site explaining it, but much googling (and binging) has led me to few if any results. I mean, there’s one site that talks about it in reference to emphysema (which is apparently the most common way to end up with a giant bullae in your lung) or to COPD (other common way), but neither of those apply to DH. DH has a congenital bullae. It is possible that he’s had it for 2 years or 20 years. It’s caused by a weakness in one area of the lung that causes a pocket to form where there shouldn’t be one, hence being common in patients with emphysema (b/c that weakens the lung tissue). It isn’t causing him any immediate breathing problems or stress, but it could burst or become infected (the latter being more likely) at any point and cause him lots of pain and potential lung collapse. The thoracic specialist/surgeon said that if DH were in his 70s, they might not bother with it, but with him being in his 30s, the chances of it becoming bad are higher. So, to remove the large bullae, what they do is go in kind of like they did for my gall bladder (although they won’t blow him up the same way…they’ll collapse his lung and get room to work that way, from what I’ve read…I watched a video of it being done), with camera and instruments. First, before they cut in, they’ll send a camera down his throat and into his lung to verify that it’s where and what they think it is from the cat scan. Then, assuming it is, they’ll do the bullectomy using 3 small incisions for camera and instruments, triangulated to allow them to work without tripping over each other. They’ll basically remove the air from the bullae, and there’s some other bits, too, but the point being, they’ll make it so his lung can inflate fully again. He’ll be in the hospital for 2-3 days following the surgery, and during that time, he’ll have a chest tube. The surgeon said he’d be able to work again in about a week but that it’ll take 3-4 weeks for him to be at 100%. DH and I still need to talk more about the plan for this. He came home for awhile, but he was restless and wanted to go to work. So, he’s at the casino now, and he and I will figure out the details later…but surgery is scheduled for 7/6. It’s very likely that I will work remotely from the hospital during that week, though I need to check in with work on that…I may also just take the week off so I don’t have to worry with it, but problem is we have a project milestone that I need to be there for during that week, so…well, point being, it’s a TBD situation.

While DH was finding this out, I was at the vet with Pancake. I’d been neglectful and not taken him in for a checkup for ~18 months. (I’d taken him in because he had a bump on his head during the summer last year, but I hadn’t scheduled a check-up b/c Banfield ticked me off during that visit…and then my work project (now cancelled) kicked in and I lost track of time until now. Point being, I was a bad cat parent. ) So, I was taking him a new vet that is a cat-only practice. And around the same time I made the appointment, coincidentally, his breath got really nasty smelling. I’d changed his cat food, so I changed it back, but the really nasty breath persisted, so I asked them to take a good look at his teeth, figuring he probably needed a cleaning and he’s at the age where I might need to start brushing his teeth. But, it was worse than that. He has advanced periodontal disease. His gums are all pus-filled and nasty. He’s already lost two of his small grooming teeth in the front. And I feel terrible because if we’d caught this earlier, it’d be better. Plus, he’s probably been in pain, although, as cats do, he’s hiding it. He’s been eating dry food and such, and his appetite is strong and healthy. But, anyways, this is why yearly check-ups are important, because this sort of thing can sneak up on you. He probably had some plaque build-up that just got worse without care and I didn’t realize it. Anyways, so he’s getting a full cleaning on Monday and they may have to take his teeth out if any of them have more than 50% decay. The vet said his gums are receding badly, that there’s a bump on his canine teeth that is visible that shouldn’t be visible, so she suspects that he will have some teeth that have to be removed. The good news is that this doesn’t really affect his lifestyle. Even with no teeth, he can still eat both soft and hard food. It may change his face structure a little, but generally, the most important thing is that he won’t be in pain. And I feel like a total jerk, because I let it get to this point, unknowingly, but still. I should have known better, and he should have been seen 6-8 months ago, and maybe we wouldn’t have gotten to this point. Granted, Maggie never needed a cleaning in her life…she had all her teeth when she died, and she never had more than a tiny bit of build-up that the vet cleaned with a little scraper and a regular cat toothbrush…but all cats are different. The vet pointed out that some cats are more susceptible than others. These are excuses, though. I was a bad owner, and Pancake is suffering for it. Pancake goes in for dental cleaning and potential (likely) surgery on Monday. He’ll be on antibiotics until then, and he’ll be on painkillers and antibiotics for a week or so afterward. And tonight, he’s having Alaskan salmon.

Speaking of Alaska, some of y’all may know that we were tentatively planning to take a cruise to Alaska in July. We held off on booking to see what happened with DH’s lung thingie. Given things as they are, we’re going to skip the cruise this year. DH will probably be recovered in time, but we don’t want to tempt Finagle’s Law by booking a non-refundable cruise.

In other news, I’m doing fine! Also, it’s too damn hot outside. You may have seen my tweet that my credit cards melted into one congealed mass in my wallet, that I’d left in my car all day while at work. My Dad quipped, “That’s one way to consolidate your credit cards.” He’s too funny for his own good.

Husband Health

(Just a quick update for folks who might not have gotten word though other channels.)

Issue #1: Black toe. As expected, DH has runner’s toe. Our podiatrist trimmed it down, got rid of the scabby parts, and basically told him to be nice to it for awhile.

Issue #2: Hernia. DH has a mild umbilical hernia behind his bellybutton. (In a strange coincidence, my father had this same problem a month or two ago!) Our surgeon took a look at it and told him that it will gradually get more pronounced, but that it isn’t causing any issues and as such, DH can get it fixed surgically whenever he’s ready.

Issue #3: Strange thingie seen on ER X-Ray. DH had a cat scan done. He had to drink barium milkshakes. He says they were not as bad as he expected, but that the cat scan was not fun. He had to lay really still, and they had put another IV in his arm so they could put dye in his veins, too. DH’s doctor said it looks like he has an air pocket on/in his lung, and he doesn’t know much more beyond that. After that, we spread the word and found out that DH’s brother has sarcoidosis. So, we started thinking it was probably that, since DH does tend to have a niggling cough that lingers every time he gets a cold. However, our surgeon took a look (during the hernia appointment) and thinks it’s not sarcoidosis because it’s filled with air, not pus or fluid. DH is seeing a thoracic surgeon/specialist next Thursday to try to suss out what it actually is. (My googling has led me to suspect a spontaneous pneumothorax, but that’s only because it’s the only similar thing I can find.)

Nurse Jackie = Dr. Cox

Warning: This post contains minor spoilers for the plot of Showtime’s Nurse Jackie pilot and for Scrubs.

Nurse Jackie = Dr. Cox:

• Both are cranky but caring medical practitioners working in an ostensibly Catholic teaching hospital.
• Both work too much, to the chagrin of the hospital’s chief of medicine.
• Both are accompanied by an overly cheery and perky sidekick underling.
• Both are addicted to depressants (pain meds vs. alcohol).
• Both feel too much responsibility/guilt for their jobs.
• Both are vigilantes when it comes to providing the best care.

So, do you think the pitch for Nurse Jackie was something like, “Think of Scrubs told from Dr. Cox’s perspective…but make Dr. Cox EDGIER…and FEMALE…and MORE REAL…”

Bloody hell!

For once, I am SO happy that I procrastinate.

I have a final tomorrow (in session 9/10 of Strategic Thinking). I made flash cards (at incredibly helpful site CoboCards) for all of the key areas that I needed to be able to rattle off. For example, how should you advance your position as a runner-up in your industry? (Buy up smaller competitors, move into new regions or segments, be first-to-market with a new innovation, find new/unique ways to cut costs) Or, what are the methods advised by Farkas to compete? (do new things in the same ways, do the same things in new ways, or revolutionize your industry) I did a single passthrough of the flash cards but planned to really buckle down today. I mean, the test is going to be applying all of these methods, but I felt I needed to be able to rattle them off in order to make sure my answers were complete.

This morning, I check my e-mail, and the instructor has sent out a cheat sheet that we’ll be allowed to use during the final…a cheat sheet that covers 90% of what’s in my flash cards. If I had studied this stuff yesterday instead of planning to study it today, I’d be SO pissed.

As is, I’m now taking today as a fun day. B* is coming over. We’re going to play games. So there!

Everybody gets a hospital visit!

Originally, DH and I were going to be doing the LP zoo run this morning. He was going to do the 5K, and I was going to do the 10K. I sprained my ankle earlier this week, so I planned to downgrade to the 5K “fun run/walk” instead of the actual run (which, considering I’ve been sick 3 of the past 4 weeks, made sense all the way around). We went to bed early (for us) last night, at around 11pm.

At midnight, DH woke me up because he was having really bad abdominal pain that was keeping him from being able to sleep. I had him take some Gas-X because he’d had half a low-carb pizza that day, plus sugar-free candy, plus sugar-free cough drops.* But, 30 minutes later, he was still in ridiculous pain and couldn’t lay down without it hurting worse, so we got dressed and got in my car. After one false start at what I thought was a hospital and was actually just an acute care center (and DH wanted a hospital in case he needed surgery), we ended up at the Condell emergency room in Libertyville. It was a really stressful drive. DH was moaning, and I was doing my best to go quickly but not so fast through the speed traps that I’d get pulled over and further slow us down. It was scary. I mean, I wasn’t so scared that I was like, fuck the speed limit…but I was scared that I was making a mistake by not going faster. DH was doing lamaze-ish breathing and stuff. I was worried.

The emergency room admitted him right away. We were in the back within 20 minutes. A doctor came in soon thereafter and poked him much as I had done, and asked him whether he was having a fever or nausea (he wasn’t). Then, she left, and the nurses started checking in. The triage nurse had noted that his blood pressure was high, so they put him on a blood pressure monitor. They put in an IV, which freaked DH out, because he’d never had one before, and he’s not exactly great with the needle stuff in general. (He couldn’t look at my IV when I was in the hospital.) They also took about four vials of blood for testing. Later, we discussed the IV, and we realized he was thinking it was much worse than it is. It’s not like you have a tube the size of the tube you see going into your vein. It’s just a tiny tube, no wider than a needle, in your vein that then has a valve and becomes a bigger tube.

While we were waiting for the tech to come get him for X-rays, he went to the bathroom, and he admitted that he was feeling better after that. Since he was also freaking out about the IV and the associated ouchiness of it, though, he wasn’t sure if that was just negating his tummy trouble. After the X-rays, a nurse came and gave him a bit of morphine. Ten minutes later, he was rambly, not unlike when he’s drunk.

Then came the long wait. All the testing was in progress, and while a nurse came by periodically just to check in, it was basically just an hour of waiting for news. I had my Kindle to read (Temeraire’s friends are in trouble!), and DH had his iPhone. We alternated between entertaining ourselves and chatting while I held his hand. At around 3:30, the doctor came back and told him that the tests had all come up good. His bloodwork was excellent. She was pretty sure it was just gas, and she prescribed him some stuff to help get it out of his system and warned him to come back if he started having any of a list of symptoms (that were written on a piece of paper).

And, that was it. The nurse went over the instructions with us after taking out the IV. DH got dressed again (he’d only been disrobed from the waist up…well, and he took his shoes off). We headed home, and we sent a message to Ms. Jetson, who was doing the walk with me the next day, to see if she would pick up our race gear for us. Even if DH was feeling better at 6am, neither of us would be in any shape to drive an hour plus to Lincoln Park zoo.

Around 5:30am, the phone rang. It was the hospital. They’d seen something on the X-rays, upon further inspection, that might just be gas or might be a mass of some kind. They want him to get a CAT scan but said it could wait until he’s had a chance to meet with his regular doctor since DH was feeling much better by then. They got his regular doctor’s info from him so they could send the X-rays and concerns over.

So, there still may be something, but considering that, as of now, not only does DH feel fine but he’s arguing with me as to whether he should be allowed to eat his leftover pizza for lunch, it seems that it was just bad gas.

* Not to be all “I told you so”, but I poked and prodded him in certain key spots, and I told him it was just gas. But, hell, the first time I had really bad gas like that, I thought I was dying, too. And, I only knew about where to check for sensitivity because of my gall bladder incident…they’d poked me trying to figure out appendicitis vs. gall bladder. Anyways, sometimes peace of mind is worth trouble and expense, and in this case, I think it was.

Self-Aggrandization as an Art Form

I have a bronchial infection. I’m on amoxicillin, loratadine (Claritin) with pseudoephedrine (the stuff you have to show ID to get over the counter), and naproxen (Aleve). Yet, I am the pure awesome. Wanna know why?

I had class tonight, session 8 of 10 for Strategic Thinking. Every week, we have to do a paper (~4 pages) discussing a strategy recommendation for various companies that we’re introduced to via case studies. For tonight’s class, our assignment was on Enclean circa 1992. They were a horribly dysfunctional company with a huge debt problem and no clear way to turn things around. Our task was to tell the Board of Directors, in speech form, how to turn things around. We were to write the paper as if we were the CEO giving a speech to the board, and we were to prepare to give the speech to the class, though only a few students would actually end up presenting.

I did the paper during the weekend. I got done earlier than planned, and for that and a few other things, I rewarded myself by going to see UP! in 3D. (It was a really good movie, btw. I laughed, I cried…and now I want a grape soda pin!) I felt pretty good about it. I’d done a solid financial analysis, and I had a good plan for the company, though if I’d had my choice, I’d be telling them to harvest and get out.

Then, I got to class tonight. About ten minutes before class, I remember that I might get chosen to present. I had no notes, nothing to talk off of, and I didn’t like the idea of just reading from my paper. For one thing, the instructor wants papers done in 10 point font, single spaced, which means they’re not easy to read or scan for points. This one in particular, because I’d written it in speech form, wasn’t subdivided into topics that would make it easily scannable. So, I quickly, in less than five minutes, did up a powerpoint of my main topics. I pasted in the financial analysis charts I’d done, and the org chart that I’d need to reference as part of my turnaround plan. I know I did it that fast, because I had precisely that much time to do it before class started. It wasn’t fancy. I just used an Office 2007 style that was clean and neat but better than basic.

An hour and a half into class, the instructor asks for volunteers to present. I wanted to volunteer…after all, I’d gone to the trouble to do a PPT! But, I desperately needed to pee. We hadn’t had a break yet, and to keep from coughing, I was drinking constantly…plus the loratadine is a diuretic. So, I hesitated, trying to decided if I could hold it while presenting, particularly if I started having a coughing fit midway through. While I hesitated, another person from class tentatively raised their hand. The instructor welcomed him and explained that he (the instructor) would take notes on the issues, history, and plan on the board, and then invite another 1-2 people to present, continue to take notes on unique points…and then the whole class would discuss if there was anything that hadn’t already been covered.

So, the first person started. And, bless him, the guy had a ton of detail. I’m about to criticise him, but he volunteered, and he had good data and good points, though he got a bit lost in the trees and wasn’t summing up the forest. The instructor diligently wrote some twenty odd points on the board, and you could see that the instructor was thinking the guy had done too much detail, but he didn’t want to embarrass the guy by telling him to sum it up. (He tried to give him this feedback later on, and the guy kind of picked up on it and fixed it.) But, the guy presenting was speaking in a monotone, and he’s got an accent that makes his words blur together. Plus, he clearly hadn’t written his paper in the form of a speech to the board. His paper started with, “The first question is what are the key issues facing the company. The first issue is…”

When it became clear that, five minutes in, the guy still hadn’t tapped into the second or third parts of the assignment, I took my quick pee break. I came back refreshed and ready to present. The class was dying. It was just too much dry content.

So, eventually the guy finished…and like I said, no matter how harsh I’m being, I give him huge credit, because it’s damn hard to get up there first, and I mean, when English is your second or third language, to be able to present in an understandable way at all is fucking huge…to be able to analyse and present a case in it? Hell, I couldn’t do that in French, much less Japanese. And the guy is clearly smart. He’s a data person, though, and like many data people, he goes into details instead of summing it up. (I deal with engineers all the time; I know how this goes.) And once the instructor kind of clued him in that he was going into too much detail, he summed things up and finished up pretty fast…so it’s not like he was just clueless.

When the instructor asked for volunteers, I shot my hand up so fast. I mean, it kind of sucks, because in retrospect, it probably looked like I was letting some sucker go first so I could outstage them (spoiler alert! ), but really, honest to god, I just needed to pee, else I would have been just as eager at the get-go.

I tell the instructor I have a powerpoint that I can show if he likes or I’ll just use it as my notes. He says to go for it, so I set up. And I start off by telling the board that we’re in sad shape. I address the class colloquially, I run through my points. I’m succinct, I’m interesting…I make eye contact, I show pretty figures…I’m fucking awesome. I mean, I’m well-known in my class for being a good presenter, a good speaker. But beyond that, I gave good data. And I did it with no real prep short of writing the paper and throwing together a PPT in five minutes. Lo and behold, I even make several points that hadn’t been made yet, so go me. I finish to a round of rousing applause from the class. The instructor decides that’s the last speech, and we have some class discussion about other options, and lots of people bring up good options that haven’t been mentioned yet.

Then, at long last, we get our first and only ten minute break during the class. I’ve already peed, so I just get up and stretch my legs…and I go to the admin desk to pick up next year’s class calendar, so I can plan trips and such around it. On my way to the admin desk, two different people stop me and tell me my speech was brilliant. One person says I should be [my company]’s CEO. (Damn straight. I could turn the company around if they’d let me. Our current CEO is…lacking, and I’ve met the guy. I’ve presented for him. I’ve heard him on calls. He’s just not…he’s not looking ahead, and he’s not taking proactive steps. I’m convinced he’s harvesting the company…but anyways…) After I get the calendar I needed, I walk over to the snack area to get more ice. Three more raving compliments…one of which talking about my preparation by having a PPT (hee!)…and then I go back in the classroom to more compliments.

My head is the size of Canada right about now. It’s visible from space. How are you people still alive? How have you not been crushed by the massiveness of my ego?

PS – We also have been running a simulation game for this class. I had the highest score in the class, and, in further insult to prepared people everywhere, I did it in one run of the sim. My simulated company made a little over a billion dollars in four years, finishing up with around 66% market share. Our instructor, running the same sim, made around 815 mil.