whiskey in a teacup . com

Last night I had dinner with The Girls & Co. from the old office to celebrate the departure of one such Girl. Turnover has gotten pretty high at that infamous and oft-maligned place, so there were some new faces at the table. One was a guy from Rome who I ended up sitting next to for most of the night. People started getting silly as dinner progressed, and someone suggested walking down to the local tattoo parlour and getting inked. (Now, I caught all kinds of hell when I got home and told Jared this, but allow me to point out that between the four of us girls, we have seventeen tattoos. We are legitimate, not cute drunken morons off to get cartoon characters on our hipbones). My Roman tablemate, being older and less Wild and Crazy than us broads, was unsure that a new tattoo was in order. To this I said “I think you should, because…when in Rome!” I expected laughter and instead was met with a blank stare. Turns out they don’t actually use that expression in Rome.

Anyway, the inkery was closed and despite our best efforts to get it re-opened (involving one member of our party flagging down a former Boston rock celebrity who happened to be walking by, figuring he might have the clout to open tattoo parlours with the sheer force of his existence), we gave up and went to our respective homes. It was a great night and the first non-Jared social outing I’ve had in a while. (In one four-day span recently, I missed Concert with the Girls, Friend’s Birthday Dinner, and Ex-Boyfriend’s Wedding, almost all due to nothing but fatigue).

And now it’s time for brunch!

Google seems to be offline at this time…I tried to search for a status report, but upon reckoning that I could not google “google”, nor gmail my friends to ask if they knew what was up, I had to do a (gasp) yahoo search, which yielded nothing.  O cruel master!  Please come back.  I want to read my mail, please.

I had a hell of a time falling asleep last night. I knew trouble was on the horizon when I slept ridiculously late all through the weekend, and then had some tearful bouts of anxiety beginning Sunday evening and lasting into the late hours. Sometime before midnight I got into bed, and promptly clutched at the blankets with white-knuckled tension and stared wide-eyed at the patterns cast on the walls by the window blinds. Time passed, and deep-breathing failed to relax me. I thought about how babies are comforted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeats. Realizing I had a stethoscope lying near the bed (because really, who doesn’t?), I listened to my own heartbeat, which was actually quite soothing despite my abnormal rhythm. It got so calming that I had to put the scope away, lest Jared come in and find me asleep, naked, and using medical equipment on myself (and you can quote me on that). Sleep still wasn’t coming, and somehow a Jethro Tull song got stuck in my head. Suddenly I had a mental image of Ian Anderson gallivanting around on a pirate ship singing his medieval sea shanty. That went on for a while. I tossed, turned, and rocked back and forth while he was too oh, oh, old to rock and ro, oh, oll repeated in my weary mind again and again. Eventually Jared came to bed and I drifted off, waking a few hours later to greet the morning that would segue into another day of stress and uncertainty.

I have high hopes that I will fare better tonight!

Some more fascinating dialogue between the chimp and myself, which took place today in our controversially interracial household!

Jared: Hey, this year we can get a Christmas tree! We finally have room for one!

Me: What? I’m not having no goy-ass Christmas tree in my house. Why do you people think it’s a good idea to put a tree in the living room?

Jared: It smells good, and it’s warm and inviting.

Me: Holidays aren’t about being “warm and inviting”. They’re about remembering suffering, and how lucky we are not to be suffering.

Jared: Jews suck. It’s clear why everyone hates you.

On that note, Happy Rosh Hashanah to all!

Scene: Jared and I are driving home from dinner. Directly behind us, a cop puts his lights on. We pull over, expecting him to drive past us to the scene of some unknown crime. The cop pulls over behind us.

Me: Are we being pulled over? Wtf.

Johnny Law: Hello. Do you have any idea why you’re being pulled over?

Jared: Nope!

Johnny Law: This vehicle is unregistered.

Jared and Me: [realizing we forget to renew registration] Ho. Whoops. Yeah.

Jared: Well, what’s the usual course of action here?

Johnny Law: I fine you a hundred dollars and tow the car.

Me: Hm. What are our other options?

Johnny Law: Hold on. [ambles over to cruiser, returns] Are either of you’s computer literate?

Jared and Me: Yeah.

Johnny Law: You have a computer?

Jared: Many!

Johnny Law: Go to this website and renew the registration online, then print out a copy and keep it in the car until you receive an official copy in the mail.

Jared and Me: Thanks!

[we drive away]

Me: Are either of you’s computer literate?

Jared: I am a MASTER of computer science! During the past forty-hour work week, I spent seventy-five hours working on a computer!

Jared and Me: Heh.

And, scene.

When the large heart-esque tattoo on my left arm is exposed, I receive a lot of compliments on it (and the occasional “that’s a stupid fucking tattoo” yelled at me from across the street, which I also welcome). That piece of ink probably accounts for 97% of the praise I get from strangers, so when it’s covered up by the sleeves of a hoodie, I don’t expect to get any remarks on my appearance. Sometimes a random girl will notice my lovingly applied eyeliner and pass some propers my way, but that’s a rare and enjoyable surprise. (Eyeliner is kind of my “thing”. Even when I look like the absolute shit described in my last post, you’d better believe my Fluidline is in full effect.) So you can imagine my bemusement yesterday when the kid serving me my coffee at the Hip Neighborhood Cafe gazed intently at me before professing, “I like your, um, eyelids.”

The only reason I share this inane and narcissistic story is because last night was a terrible experience for me, one that involved me showing up for my ongoing orientation at work and instead being handed the narcotic keys and left mostly alone for eight hours with no break and fourteen patients, many of whom take their meds through G-tubes (which means crushing and mixing, disconnecting the tube feeding, checking tube placement through auscultation and aspiration of stomach contents, water flushes before and after, etc), many of whom are on contact precautions (which means donning full riot gear before entering the room, cleaning and using dedicated stethoscopes and other equipment while in the room, etc). That night also involved me driving home sobbing uncontrollably and wondering why I ever thought nursing school was a good idea. The new nurse’s trial by fire is an age-old tradition which has sent many a dame bawling into her pillow and feeding her cap to rabid wolves, but fucking hell, I would so much rather think about my eye makeup than about that terrifying night and the prospect of repeating it anytime soon.

Today for lunch (which I ate at around 10:30 due to working the 7-3 shift and being generally ravenous) I had one of my most favorite meals:  tuna on a bagel with dijon and capers.  I ate it in the car, checked myself briefly in the rearview (because, you know, I’m a chick), and headed back inside.  At about four o’clock I was home and taking a quick shower, after which I grinned at myself in the mirror and found, to my horror, a large piece of caper lodged in between two of my teeth.

Now, I’ve essentially given up on trying to look even moderately presentable at work (too-large scrubs, frizzy updo, sweaty face, HOT STUFF), but what the fuck?  Why did nobody alert me to this atrocity?  And why didn’t I notice it earlier?  I’m partially convinced that the caper had been stuck somewhere else in my mouth and gradually made its way to the inter-tooth area and wasn’t actually visible all day…but that’s pretty bad too.

So we’re eating dinner at the usual place, and even though it’s just the two of us we’re at a four-seater area made from two tables pushed together. The manager of the restaurant comes over to us, crouches down, and asks in a conspiratorial tone if we’d mind him taking the second of our two tables and moving it over to create a larger seating area for another group of people. But he says it kind of like, “Do you mind if I take the table next to you and push it over to the table next to you,” and then he says, “I just said ‘the table next to you’ like five times” and we giggle and say, sure, it’s yours. Then, employing logic that seems perfectly sound at the time, I contemplate the manager’s word usage and I wonder, “Is he going to move the table through a tesseract?” and my boyfriend, who owns four computers and listens to techno music, stares straight at me and says, “YOU ARE A NERD.”

Last night around eight, Jared suggested we lie in bed for a while.  It was almost time for my genmaicha, and I didn’t see the point in lying in bed when we’d be going to sleep in a few hours anyway, but I went with it.  So into bed we went, and lay around for a while, and at some point I mentioned that if we fell asleep then we’d wake up in the middle of the night and it would mess up our whole scene.  Of course, we then both promptly zonked out.  At midnight we woke up and I took out my contacts.  “Shit,” I said to myself, “now we’ve done it.  I’m going to be up all damned night.”  I was pleased to find that I was mistaken, for I quickly returned to the land of nod, where I stayed until about six-thirty the next morning when I awoke before the alarm.  I didn’t officially get up until seven, at which point our bizarre and random eleven hour odyssey of sleep ended and our day began.

Slate’s Medical Examiner column recently described a new procedure used to treat one of my two bladder conditions. For some reason, the article fails to mention the disease’s name, which is vesicoureteral reflux:

“The problem prevents the muscular wall of the bladder from acting as a one-way valve when the ureters (tubes) carry urine from the kidneys into the bladder. If the valve malfunctions, then infected urine can get into the kidney, potentially leading to kidney damage, loss of kidney function, and chronic high blood pressure.”

As far as congenital conditions go, this isn’t terribly rare. Mine was discovered after a bout of renal infection when I was three years old, and I was started on a nightly antibiotic, which I took for years.

“Long-term antibiotics can suppress bacterial growth, but the underlying condition isn’t cured, just treated, and the risk of repeat infection is high if treatment is briefly neglected. Extended treatment also may encourage bacteria that cause infections to become resistant to antibiotics. The other traditional treatment is open abdominal surgery on the bladder, a very delicate procedure that requires a skilled urologist and often extended postoperative hospital care.”

Yup. When I was six, I had my right ureter disconnected from and subsequently reimplanted into my bladder. While he was in there, the surgeon also found a mysterious third ureter which didn’t actually extend up to the kidney, but was just sort of coiled into my bladder wall. I find that pretty interesting; for whatever reason, the formation of my fetal urinary structures was fuxored enough that it grew not only malformed parts, but extra parts too. Nice job, Ma. In any case, I wouldn’t classify the surgery as one that required ‘extended postoperative care’. I was in the hospital for four days, but this was in 1989; I bet kids who have the operation now are only in for a day or two.

“Now there’s a third option: In a recent paper in the journal Pediatrics, Drs. Richard Yu and David Roth of the Baylor College of Medicine describe successfully treating children by plumping up the tissue surrounding the ureter at the point it enters the bladder. They passed a cystoscope (a tiny instrument that allowed them to look and work inside the bladder) through the urethra of the anesthetized patient, identifying the point where the poorly functioning ureter entered the bladder, and injecting a thick gel just below the surface to plump up the region around the too-open mouth of the ureter to make it into an efficient one-way valve. The procedure, which doesn’t require hospital admission and takes about 15 minutes, was performed on 120 children between 6 months and 15 years of age. It was 90 percent successful after one (or occasionally two) treatments, with no significant complications (two kids briefly had flank pain).”

Hm. I wonder what the longevity of this treatment will prove to be. As for me, by the time I had the operation my right kidney was already pretty well fried, and has remained a small mass of junk ever since. Happily, though, it stopped getting worse, and despite having many bladder infections since then, none of them have traveled up to the kidney.

I wish good fortune to my young cohorts who are undergoing this new procedure, but hope that parents and physicians don’t shy away from the traditional surgery, since the anatomical correction generally lasts forever. Sometimes more invasive is better, in my opinion. When you’re dealing with kidneys it’s best not to leave anything to chance. Plus, the scar it leaves behind is rather fantastic.