My girlfriend is in the hospital, unless something dramatic and horrible happens she’ll be in there at least two weeks, maybe longer.
Her water broke early this (Tuesday) morning, she’s only twenty-two weeks into the pregnancy. The doctors say there’s still enough fluids inside the womb that they have hope everybody involved will stay healthy until the twenty-four to twenty-six weeks point. But not much longer than that.
The baby is still moving, still gulping in the amniotic fluids, still kicking.
I can’t get up to see her until Thursday, but my step-father stopped in to see her tonight after work, and brought her magazines, puzzles and fruit.
Her oldest son will be staying with his grandparents (may God have mercy on his soul), and our son will be with me for the foreseeable future.
Just last week the doctors told us the baby was in perfect health, the cerclage was holding up great and there was nothing to worry about. Then Monday night my girlfriend noticed some leakage, so she tore up to Ottawa to have it checked out. They told her everything was fine and sent her home. A few hours later it was apparent nothing was fine, and here we are.
So. This isn’t hopeless, it happens in a surprising number of pregnancies, they just have to make sure there are no contractions. They have her on medications that will, hopefully, speed up the development of the baby’s lungs.
So, this is where we are [link] and this is where we have to get to [link].
This continues to be the most stupid year in history.
This has been one of the dumbest years of my life, and it’s only three months old.
First: it’s too hot. It has basically been fifteen degrees hotter than it’s supposed to be, every day, for the past week. That’s just stupid. It has been spring for two days, tops, but I’m wearing shorts when I’m not even supposed to be thinking about where I stored my sandals for at least another week.
Second: the Chinese food place in the next town has decided to put a minimum charge of $15 for deliveries to my village. I usually use their kitchen once a month, sometimes twice if I’m feeling particularly self-destructive. For the past eight years my order has been: General Tao’s chicken, with sticky rice and two egg rolls = $12.35 (tonight’s fortune: “Sing and rejoice, fortune is smiling on you.” In bed.). Suddenly, now I’m the weirdo who orders one dish and six egg rolls.
Third: earlier this week I got into a three day argument with my girlfriend over what our kids should call my mother. Just before my son was born I asked my mom what she wanted to be called. “Granny” was out, for a lot reasons but mostly because that’s what I call my psychotic grandmother.
My mom chose “Bubbie”, which made no sense to us because we’re not Jewish. Actually my girlfriend didn’t know “Bubbie” is Yiddish slang for “grandmother”, but that’s another issue. She just thought it sounded weird. So, for the past 2.5 years, my girlfriend and her oldest son have been referring to my mother as “Nanny [her name]”.
Which, I could tell, drove my mom a little nuts. And why wouldn’t being called “nanny” cause a grandmother to be a little put off? Right? So my mom, while my two-year old son and I were visiting for dinner, told my son to call her “Nano”… I don’t know why, probably because it wasn’t “nanny”. So, by the end of dinner, my son was calling her “Nano”. He really seemed to like the way it sounded.
Which, when I told her, really pissed my girlfriend off. Which got me defensive… “seriously,” I asked, “why shouldn’t my mother be able to pick her own Grandmother Name!?” I was told that apparently there’s a two-year cutoff for naming rights, and my girlfriend used to call her favourite grandmother “Nanny”. So there.
But, until I was five I used to call my grandfather “Grand-papère”. But then he sat me down and said, “kid, I’m too young to be a grandfather. You can call me Bud, or you can call me Spud, but no more Grand-papère”. My step-siblings, who only spoke French when our families came together in 1989, still call him “Patate” (potato). My much younger cousins called him “Omie”, I have no idea why.
And now my girlfriend and her oldest son call him “Big Victor”, because our son is “Little Victor”. At least I didn’t tell my girlfriend she was probably overreacting because of the baby hormones, so we’re still together.
Fourth: I still can’t hear most of the world. Way back in January I lost most of my hearing to an ear infection — in both ears. I finally started to get it back on the last weekend of February, but then an insane cough brought on by heart medication — to treat the hypertension brought on mostly by the hearing loss — closed my ears up tighter than before.
So… ears close from infection, I get hypertension from hearing loss, hearing comes back, take pills to treat hypertension, start coughing from pills and close ears again. I think that qualifies as dark irony.
My hearing has improved a little over the past couple of days, but I’m still mostly deaf. I’ve been off the heart medications for two weeks, but the cough has come back as of a few days ago, and every time it does there’s a sharp pain in my left ear, and I can feel it close a little. So I don’t know what the fuck is going on.
In other ear news, I’ve been taking Extra Strength Aspirin for the pain caused by the coughing, and to reduce the swelling in my ears. Turns out, heh, there’s a 33% chance that prolonged use of Aspirin can cause hearing loss.
Fifth: turns out that for the past month one of the most popular Internet spam filters, Akismet, thought my blog was spam. I was spam for a month. Which, when I figured it out, felt weird, and worrisome and stupid, but it was kind of nice to finally have an answer, because for the past month I’ve been leaving comments on other blogs, and in the WordPress support forum, and the comment would just disappear.
Which sucks for everyone else as well because my comments are always brilliant and well worth the read.
I figured everyone just had their moderation features on. Or that I had pissed a few people off, or something. I made a support request, but WordPress has been deluged with more than 8,000 requests and have only ten people fixing things. So I was a low priority ticket.
It took a week, and some testing on my part (thanks Zoom), but I finally narrowed the problem down to my URL. Then support finally told me to check with Akismet directly — WordPress and Akismet are both owned by AutoMATTic. Two hours later and everything was fixed.
Thankfully, I am no longer spam. At this point I really don’t even care how I got put on the Akismet spam list… actually I am kind of curious. And vengeful, actually.
Three fucking months. That’s how old this year is. Just to recap, last year I broke my foot; gave myself a second-degree burn after being in a two month Lithium overdose thanks to being put on insulin; I slipped and had a partial separation of my shoulder; I had a two month long fight with my mother; had a long and painful eye infection; my computer caught an expensive virus, and; I found out my kidney functions have dropped to 37%.
See… I knew, I knew, that when I hit forty that I would begin to disintegrate. I’ve lived a life where disintegration, at some point, was a given. But I had no idea it would be so fucking fast. I’m barely two years into the forties and I feel lucky my arms are still attached.
Thronged were the streets with people; and noisy groups at the house-doors
Sat in the cheerful sun, and rejoiced and gossiped together,
Every house was an inn, where all were welcomed and feasted;
For with this simple people, who lived like brothers together,
All things were held in common, and what one had was another’s.
Yet under Benedict’s roof hospitality seemed more abundant: For Evangeline stood among the guests of her father;
Bright was her face with smiles, and words of welcome and gladness
Fell from her beautiful lips, and blessed the cup as she gave it. ‘Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie’ (1847) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
We’re having a girl, and her name will be Evangeline. She will be born during the fist week of August, which makes sense because August is an awesome month.
I didn’t want to know, but my girlfriend wanted to tell me so badly she looked like she was about to burst. Just based on how she was bouncing around after getting back from the ultrasound I kind of had a pretty good idea it was a girl.
We started discussing having a second child almost immediately after our son was born, in 2009. And my girlfriend always had a semi-secret smile when she talked about the possibility of having a girl.
She wasn’t the only one, her oldest son has been talking about having a little sister for a year now. And my mother has wanted a protege for a long, long time.
I’ve been telling my girlfriend I was totally cool either way for our first, and for this one. But, honestly, the idea of raising a girl is freaking me out.
It’s probably not rational, but raising a girl just seems insanely complicated. And scary as hell. Not the clinical stuff, not the health stuff, but teaching her how to be safe. Or how to be a princess.
To be honest I find most “girl” things are, mostly, ridiculous. Ponies? Gymnastics? I have to go to gymnastics meets now? Unicorns, I’ll have to learn about unicorns. And sparkles.
Teaching my son how to defend himself will be easy. People who meet him are all certain he’s going to be a large person, so teaching him to defend himself is basically going to be me showing him how to throw a punch from the shoulder. He’s already beating up his older brother.
But I’m already starting to have nightmares about my daughter asking me how to defend herself against the insane self-esteem attack games girls make on other girls. Jesus, what if she’s the first one in her class to “develop”? What if she’s last?
What if she asks me for advice on dealing with the ‘mean girls’ in her class and I screw it up?
Obviously I’ll try my best to get her interested in sports, like real sports. There are soccer and rugby leagues in this region for girls, and also a mixed hockey league.
But what do I say when she asks me for advice on boys? How do I keep her safe from the ‘pornification’ of high school dating?
How long do I wait before explaining to her that people like Rush Limbaugh exist?
Thankfully there are a lot of women, alive and not so much, on my side of the family who will serve as excellent role models for my daughter. My paternal grandmother, for example, was a mathematician who worked with Alan Turing. My three sisters are all brilliant, strong women, who have lived interesting lives.
My mother had a book of her poetry published when she was barely twenty. She went on to work as a book and magazine editor, and won several awards for her reporting. Her aunt became a Catholic nun when she was a teenager, and taught high school for forty years. She was also a brilliant painter and could kill a person with a stare at thirty paces.
So maybe, with living examples and stories about her ancestors, Evangeline might have a chance to survive despite my neophyte parenting skills…
The first two videos are from the standup of Louis CK, the funniest person on the planet five years in a row. He talks about his daughters a lot, and I think I’ll be using his act as a tutorial for at least the first seven years of my daughters life. The third video is the trailer for a movie called ‘Thirteen’, one of the most powerful movies ever made about girls ‘coming of age’, and a movie that scares the shit out of me.
[Three] YouTube Alert(s). If you can’t see them, click here.
For the first time in more than three weeks I can hear the bathroom fan. Since January 25th I’ve been mostly deaf. The kind of deaf where, just to hear the TV, I had to turn the volume past 60. I’ve been trapped with only the sounds of my heart pounding in my ears, and an electrical current running through my head.
But no more. My left ear is still a little blocked, and I still hear a bit of a buzz, but most of my hearing is back. At the moment it’s like my left ear is popping open and closed depending on whether I’m yawning or swallowing. Most importantly, however, I’ve managed to sleep soundly during the past two nights without having a panic attack from feeling claustrophobic.
Which means, because I feel comfortable that I’ll be able to hear him if anything goes wrong, I can start having my son stay over night again. He’s been here a few nights, but only when his mom has been here as well. I didn’t feel comfortable having her here either, because I was worried I might flail out and hit her if I was to have a panic attack in my sleep.
Also, because I’ve only been sleeping in twenty minute increments, I’ve been too exhausted during the day to be chasing him around.
The past month hasn’t been easy on my girlfriend. She’s almost four months pregnant, and had a surgical procedure done almost two weeks ago, which left her with a surgical stitch in her cervix. It’s called a “cerclage”, and it’s highly recommended for women with an “incompetent cervix”.
So she’s been in pain, and had to deal with her six-year old and our two-year old mostly on her own. Which isn’t fair.
So… other things have happened since either the virus or bacteria decided I had done something to their kind worth taking revenge for. Like, I started taking medication for hypertension.
This had been planned since just after the New Year, but I didn’t see my family doctor until last week. My blood pressure has been rising steadily since the summer, mostly because of a Lithium overdose caused by the introduction of insulin into my life.
During my time living with the ear infections my blood pressure actually got up to 174/110, which is considered normal for meth addicts. So now I take a 4mg tablet of Coversyl every morning.
Also, thanks to the six week overdose that started last August, my kidney functions are down to 37%, so I’ve been taken off the Glyburide and Metformin and put on a second insulin, something called Humalog, which I take with my meals. I also take Lantus, a time release insulin, every night.
Before the ear infections the two insulin types got my blood sugar numbers into the normal range for a prolonged period for longer than ever before. But the infections, plus the stress and lack of sleep, screwed all that up.
Because of the overdose, which was bizarrely caused by an interaction between the Lithium and the insulin, my Lithium intake has been almost halved. My psychiatrist wants to change to another mood stabilizer, something like Lamotrigine, but my family doctor doesn’t believe the Lithium is causing any damage, as long as it stays within the therapeutic levels.
I’d prefer not changing… if I stopped the Lithium I’d have to change the name of this blog, and I like it the way it is.
Something else that happened while my ears were under attack was I turned forty-two. Growing up I didn’t realize the human body actually disintegrated so literally upon reaching the forties, but in the past two years I’ve had more things diagnosed wrong with me than in the previous ten.
Then again, most of the problems I’m having today could have been diagnosed and treated ten years ago.
Anyway, because my birthday happened during the first, and worst, week of the infections, there was no party.
Some friends had planed a dinner, so we’re going to try again for this weekend. If I don’t completely disintegrate before then.
Other things I couldn’t hear while my ears were blocked: I couldn’t hear my cat, at all. Normally, when I’m getting into bed and she’s under the blankets, she makes a little “brrrr?” sound to let me know she’s there. I nearly crushed her a few times.
I couldn’t hear the car that almost crushed me over the weekend. I walked right out into the street. I heard it when he leaned on the horn though.
I couldn’t hear my stereo unless it was loud enough for people outside to also hear it… my girlfriend came over one night and told me she could hear my ‘Guitar Rock’ playlist from two blocks away.
I couldn’t hear people knocking at the door so, when my girlfriend came over with our son, the first I’d realize they were here was when my son would grab my leg. Which, if I was sleeping, would freak me out and start a panic attack.
I couldn’t hear the water falling from the roof as the snow melted.
But now I can. It can definitely get better, and clearer, but I can hear the important stuff now… like ‘Spirit In The Sky’ by Norman Greenbaum.
And like my son talking, which I couldn’t do unless he was yelling, so I recorded him talking last week so I could play it back louder on my computer… enjoy:
“For the past ten days I’ve been suffering through an ear infection. Both ears. Until just a few days ago they were both completely closed. For the most part, I’ve been deaf.
“The only things I’ve heard for the past ten days have been the sound of my pounding heart, and the kind of high-pitched brain feedback you might get after spending an evening standing beside the speakers at a particularly loud punk concert.
“At night, I’ve been waking up every thirty minutes in a panic, I’d have to run outside and take deep breaths of the cold air to calm down. My blood pressure has been extremely high, 154/100 last Thursday and 152/98 this past Monday. During the day I’d lose my balance when I was walking, when I sat at the computer or watched TV I’d get nauseous.” ‘Spending two weeks listening to my heart beating left me nearly insane’, Me, Feb. 08, 2012.
I’ve had an ear infection for almost three weeks now. I’ve been mostly deaf in both ears, except for a loud, high pitched feedback-like sound, and the pounding beat of my heart. Last Wednesday I thought I was getting better. It’s possible I was. But on Saturday night everything went to shit.
I was at a seminar hosted by a local art gallery on the experiences of an elderly woman’s life with depression, and eventual diagnosis of ‘Bipolar Two’. Her talk was interesting mostly because the crowd of fifty-five people were women all over the age of 65, and most had lived their lives with untreated and undiagnosed depression.
When the speaker started her presentation I could hear her fairly clearly with my left ear. Two hours later, when her talk was over, I was sitting on the edge of my chair, and leaning so far forward I was almost kissing the neck of the woman in front of me. Any healing that had occurred in my ears over the previous days was gone.
That night, with my girlfriend and our two-year old son staying with me in my apartment, I woke up just after 2am feeling like I was hyperventilating and claustrophobic. I rushed outside onto the deck of my second storey apartment, and stood there for five minutes, in my boxers, breathing in the cold air and trying to calm down.
Roughly an hour later I woke up convinced I was having a heart attack. There was a heavy pressure on my chest, I could barely breathe, my left arm was numb and there was a sharp tingling in my shoulder area.
I frantically woke my girlfriend who, panicking, followed me into the living room asking what was wrong. She held me for a few minutes as I tried to catch my breath. Just holding me, rubbing my neck and face, seemed to make things better.
I managed, over the rest of the night, to catch sleep in twenty-minute intervals.
My mother agreed to take me to the ER on Sunday morning. The first thing the triage nurse does is take your blood pressure. Mine was 176/110, which is up from 156/100 last week, both of which are miles above the mostly normal I was at just before Christmas.
The ER doctor, my fourth in 2.5 weeks, told me the infection was now as bad in my left ear as it had been, and still was, in my right.
On January 28th, I was prescribed 500mgs of Teva-Amoxicillin, three times a day. But apparently, as an antibiotic, that shit’s about as effective as milk.
On February 1st, and again on the 9th, I was prescribed Ratio-Amoxicillin & Clavulanic Acid at 500mgs and 125mgs, three times a day, and Rhinocort Aqua spray at 64mcg once a day in each nostril. This is the stuff I got a little better on, then a lot worse on.
This past Sunday, February 12th, the ER doctor told me to increase the spray to twice a day, and put me on 500mg of Ratio-Cefuroxime, twice a day — the pharmacy was out of his first choice, which I can’t remember the name of.
The pharmacist told me things should start to clear up in two days. She was really cute, and overly optimistic. I’ve taken four doses of the new antibiotic and, as far as I can tell, nothing has changed from Sunday morning.
I did manage to get two hours of continuous sleep last night (Sunday), but I think that was entirely based on the pharmacists optimism. Or that she really seemed to be flirting with me. I spent most of today (Monday) in bed or sitting on the couch watching TV with the sound turned up to 100.
My girlfriend came over during “Young & The Restless”. She pounded on my door for a good five minutes before walking in, I heard nothing… but that could have been the TV’s fault.
I can hear people when they’re practically yelling at me. It’s like being in a crowded bar. Which I thought was the perfect analogy.
But then, late tonight, I saw an image of a man falling into a pool and a POV shot of him looking back up through the water at the people on the platform, and I realized what I’ve been feeling, especially at night, is a lot like drowning.
I see my family doctor, finally, on Wednesday morning. Something good better happen soon because, fuck, I can only drown for so long.
The videos are the first and second episodes of the first season of “The Maxx”, my favourite animated series ever, and based on the comic book “The Maxx”, published by Image Comics from 1993 until 1998. If you live in the United States, you can watch full episodes at MTV.com. If you live elsewhere, MTV hates you and wishes you would just fucking die already.
[Two] YouTube Alert(s). If you can’t see them, click here.
For the past ten days I’ve been suffering through an ear infection. Both ears. Until just a few days ago they were both completely closed. For the most part, I’ve been deaf.
The only things I’ve heard for the past ten days have been the sound of my pounding heart, and the kind of high-pitched brain feedback you might get after spending an evening standing beside the speakers at a particularly loud punk concert.
At night, I’ve been waking up every thirty minutes in a panic, I’d have to run outside and take deep breaths of the cold air to calm down. My blood pressure has been extremely high, 154/100 last Thursday and 152/98 this past Monday. During the day I’d lose my balance when I was walking, when I sat at the computer or watched TV I’d get nauseous.
But now, thanks to three trips to the ER, one clinic visit, non-stop antibiotics and a nasal cortisone spray, I have roughly 75% of my hearing back in my left ear, and 25% in my right ear.
It has easily been the worst week of my life. But I think I made it worse by insisting on being alone.
On January 25, I came down with a cough from an irritated throat. My girlfriend has a six-year old son in grade one, which is basically a Level Four bio-hazard facility, so when he got sick, and then my girlfriend got sick, it wasn’t unexpected that I’d get it next.
But, a few days later, the infection went from my throat and into my ears. On the weekend I felt a little groggy, and my ears were definitely closing, but on Sunday the sound started. At first it was just a little feedback. Annoying, but nothing too obnoxious.
By Sunday afternoon it was like lightning was being shot around in my head. The sound was intense and loud. I thought I was going crazy. This was what brought on the first trip to the ER. The sound mostly turned itself down, or at least went from a live wire through my brain to the sound you hear while walking past a transformer. Only inescapable and constant.
So, for the rest of the week, because I was worried I might be contagious, I tried to stay as far away from people as possible, especially from my 26-month old son.
Which may have been the worst thing I could have done because, from what I’ve learned over the past few days, the only thing worse than being trapped in your own head is being trapped in your own head while trapped in your own apartment with no stimulation or human contact.
I think that’s why my blood pressure got so insanely high, because I was having nearly constant panic attacks and there was no one to touch, or to touch me to bring me back to reality.
When I was alone, which was most of the week, I’d start to think the situation might be permanent, which is when I’d lose my breath and start feeling claustrophobic.
I visited my girlfriend on Thursday, after my second trip to the ER, after our son had gone to bed. I was sitting on her couch, trying to explain what was going on. I started getting a little panicked, but she started rubbing my shoulder and things just seemed to get better.
Over the weekend the antibiotics and cortisone spray kicked in and enough of the hearing in my left ear came back that it gave me some hope. But having a mixed level — some hearing in one ear, not so much in the other — actually seemed to make things a little worse. It’s like sound was reaching one eardrum a split second before the other, and it was making me feel ill.
The ER doctor, on Thursday, told me to get checked again on Monday, so after waiting in the ER for four hours on Monday afternoon, I ended up at a local clinic the family doctors in this region have every evening. I don’t know why, but I always forget about the clinic. If you have a family doctor in the area, you can use the clinic. The wait is generally less than an hour, and it’s first come, first served.
Both the ER and the clinic were filled with babies and kids with deep coughs and runny noses. I hate watching kids cry.
The clinic doctor told me my ears appeared to be getting better, but was worried about how long the infection has been holding on. It turns out, because of the diabetes, the longer this goes on, the better the chances for permanent damage to my ears.
I already have an appointment scheduled with my family doctor for next week, so he can look at my diabetes and kidney functions (down to 37%). I feel like the level of hearing I have now is the bare minimum to prevent any further panic attacks. But if the infection is still in there he’ll have to refer me to a specialist.
Thank Ankotarinja, the worst seems to be over.
I thought the way last year started — with me breaking a bone in my foot, but spending a month hobbling around before having it treated — was the most ridiculous start to any year of my life. Turns out it can always get dumber.
"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style." ~Maya Angelou
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