FINALLY! Something interesting to write about, part 2

This is part 2 of a multi-part (?) story. You really should read part 1 before proceeding--unless you are into non-linear Joyceian stuff.

So, when we left off . . . I was in severe abdominal pain for about two-plus days. Tegan and I went to the ER to see what was what. There, after a CAT scan, it was discovered that I had some mysterious abdominal blockage in my small intestine. Surgery was the best course of action to remedy the situation.

After determining not to consider the worst possibilities, we got ready. Naturally, during all of this we were without a cell phone. Our one phone that we share started dropping calls and not sending calls during T's recent trip to Texas, so we had called Cingular and asked for a replacement to our 6-month-old phone. It had not yet arrived in the mail.

Luckily, a member of our church heard the news and came to visit. You see, we are hosting a Lenten bible study at the house and were calling the members to tell them that that night's (Tuesday) meeting would not occur. Fred arrived and was kind enough to lend us his wife's cell phone for as long as we needed it. Tegan started making phone calls to others, informing them of the situation. I started getting ready for the early afternoon procedure.

I wasn't worried, really. I think T was much more concerned that me. I have had several surgeries over the years and have many, many scars to show for it. (Maybe that is why I like Road House so much, hmm? I mean, aside from the awesomely bad mullet and the philosophical judo larynx maneuver.) But, I was confident and ready for whatever came. I hope Tegan wasn't too worried.

After waiting for the OR to free up and for the doctors to scrub up, review the situation, and do whatever they had to do, I was getting ready to be wheeled from the ER trauma room I had been in for the last four hours and head upstairs.

But first, disrobing. Good bye shirt, pants, socks, shoes, and underwear. I won't see you again for about three days!

Now a bit chilly, I am ready to head upstairs. Fred said a quick prayer, did a brief anointing with oil (he is a trained deacon), and T and I headed up to the pre-op room for more waiting. There, they graciously gave me some warm blankets and started hooking me up to IVs, giving me fluids, starting the numbing medicine. I briefly talked to the anesthetist, said goodbye to T and feel asleep somewhere down the hallway to the OR.

When I woke up, I was in post-op, feeling groggy. I have no idea how long it took or how long before I woke up. The doctor who did the surgery told T that everything went fine and provided her with this handy visual guide to explain what went on:

What you see here is a highly technical drawing of my abdomen. The snaky coily thing is my small intestine. The shell-like item lying atop the intestine is a layer of fat called the "omenum." Apparently, some of this fatty omenum got coiled around and behind the small intestine, applying pressure on the tube and pinching it off. How? I don't have any idea? But the surgeons relieved the pinch and the intestine sprung back into place like it should. Now my bowels were free to operate as intended.

The other weird thing they noticed was that, probably due to the complications of the bowel obstruction, my appendix (that very small little oval that is circled by the dotted line, was also beginning to be inflamed. So they removed it as well before it caused trouble.

So, that was the surgery story. Next up . . . RECOVERY!! (Full of strain, pain, some much-needed laughs, and other changes. Stay tuned for more!)

FINALLY! Something exciting to write about.

I have been in the hospital for the past week.
(I bet that was something you don't normally expect to read on this site.)

It all started last Sunday. In the mysterious dark of the early morning hours I awoke with a sharp, painful feeling in my abdomen. I tried to ignore it and went back to sleep. When I fully awoke a few hours later, the pain remanded. It felt sort of like food poisoning pain that Tegan and I had experienced a few months ago after some ill-fated Bob Evans salads. So, I thought back and remembered some breakfast sausage that I reheated on Saturday morning and surmised that it was bad. I told T. that I was feeling some pain and she told me to stay in bed. We ended up staying home from church that day and Tegan kept the kids away from me, thinking (whatever it was) that it might be contagious and we didn't want the kids to get it.

So, I stayed on the bed all day, trying to ignore the pain that kind of came and went. Tegan kept up with the kids downstairs while I watched conference tournament basketball games and an endless supply of bad sci-fi movies on cable (2010, Mission to Mars). The best part of the day was when Ruth wanted to come upstairs and eat her snack on the bed with me (apparently she missed me). She ate cheese and crackers; I sipped bullion broth and nibbled on some crackers; we watched Florida demolish Kentucky in the SEC tournament final for about ten minutes.

That night I wasn't feeling any better and had only briefly thrown up one time, so I should have guessed that it wasn't food poisoning, but I didn't. I woke up on Monday and didn't feel any better. I told Tegan that I had better stay home from work and see if I could get over this. She got the kids ready for school and I stayed up in bed, dozing, trying to find comfortable positions, ignoring the fairly constant abdominal pains, watching ESPN, Angel and Buffy reruns, sleeping some more, trying to read, eating absolutely nothing. (It never dawned on me that I was not using the bathroom very much. . . .)

Tegan decided that what I had wasn't some kind of 24-48 hour stomach virus, since I wasn't throwing up and wasn't showing any improvements either. So that afternoon we went to the local urgent care and after an hour of waiting I told the doctor (Dr. Vaughn--even though he looked more like Weiss than Sydney's lovah) my story. He took some x-rays and . . .
(I should stop and say that here comes all the graphic, embarrassing, biological stuff that you only talk about when sick and putting yourself in the care of others--if you are offended by these things then stop reading now, but I warn you . . . you'll miss a good story.)
the doctor said that I looked to be pretty constipated. I then realized that, yeah, I hadn't had any bowel movements in several days but I chalked that up to eating nothing since Saturday. I wondered if the large portion of spaghetti that I had eaten on Saturday night was the culprit behind all of my problems. So, the doctor prescribed a laxative pill to take before I went to bed and suggested I try an enema as well. Which . . . I did.

By Tuesday morning, no improvements. The pain was still there and maybe getting a bit worse. I called in sick to work again and this time Tegan stayed home with me. The Weiss-like Dr. Vaughn warned me that their facilities didn't have all the medical equipment and if things didn't get better to go the a family doctor or to the hospital for more advanced checks. Tegan took me to the hospital that morning and after a brief wait in the ER lobby, we were assigned a trauma room and they got all my vitals, started asking questions, and began thinking.

They decided to take a CAT scan of my abs. That, unfortunately meant I had to drink 2 Big Gulp-sized cups of something that they called "contrast." It tasted a bit like fruit punch with a mediciny aftertaste. I threw up 1/2 of the first Big Gulp and struggled through the next cup after about another 45 minutes of small sips. Then we waited for the CAT scan machine to free up. I was scanned, and the verdict was NOT constipation (I was very happy that I wouldn't have to have THAT be my big sickness.) Instead, it appeared that I had some obstruction in my small intestine that was preventing everything from operating and causing the pain. They didn't know WHAT the obstruction was, but the best chance to fix everything was to operate . . .

(more to come later . . .)

visuals

It is nice to be seeing my project come to an end.

I have been thinking about it for many months now and while I can't honestly say that it has consumed most of my time, it has been a constant presence in a great deal of recent months. As deadlines approached, I did more work at home than I wish to do.

But I think it has paid off and that the end result is worthy of a feeling of satisfaction. It's not perfect, but not much in my business is and I am not willing to obsess enough to try and make it more perfect.

So, that leaves me here at the end of a day with some free time on my hands. So, I want to fiddle with some pictures that I recently took and post them.

I have always liked photography. I don't claim to be particularly skilled at it, but it is something that I aspire to improve upon. My dad is, in my opinion, a good amateur photographer. He has certainly taken many pictures over the years. I have many memories of our annual slide shows, where we sat down as a family and reviewed the trays of slides from when my parents were newlyweds in Kentucky, my dad with his Army Reserve haircut and my mom in her college-aged years. Then my brother MSquared as a young boy and other photos from those early married years.

Then came my other brother Muleskinner. By this time Mom and Dad had moved to Georgia. It was all basic family photos: in the back yard, beside the car, in the house doing stuff. All very normal and ordinary, but those photos took on a deeper and richer history over time and with each viewing. My family has a tendency to (in my opinion) invest a feeling of tradition in many of the things we do. There is a sense of ritual, but not meaningless ritual. Instead it is something that helps connect us together as a unit--even though we are all growing older and in some ways become less and less alike.

My sister MA came next. Interspersed with pictures of her as a baby were pictures of MSquared as a young boy and toddler Muleskinner. There were also pictures of other relatives and cousins visiting the house and holiday visits back to Kentucky. Pictures of the family dog and pictures of Georgia in the spring, azaleas and dogwoods blooming, late Sixties Easter clothing (pastels and striped pants).

Then came pictures of little me--never as many in proportion to the rest as I would often complain. But, oh well. There were the posed school pictures, all t-shirts and buck teeth. There were more pictures of everyone else, all a bit older and looking more and more like "themselves" as time goes on. The personalities became more real. Also Mom and Dad getting older, more adult and parental, more as I have always seen them in my minds eye. Pictures of them in Hawaiian leis during a business trip. Pictures of the childhood home that I remember, not the one that was lived in before MA and I came along, but the REAL house.

It seems like we watched these same slides every year. I don't' think I ever thought of it in the stereotypical way that sitcoms portray slide shows. I found it fun to put up the projector, turn off the lights, and hear the tray clack along its circular track. The projector always emitted that sound of the small fan blowing to cool off the bulb, blowing out hot air if you were sitting beside it or trying to coax the slide tray to move properly to the next picture. Inevitably there were slides sideways or upside down. Those were always fun.

Most of the slides were taken before I was born, so I always got a glimpse of family life before me or pictures of places Mom and Dad went without us--exotic business trips and other things like that. I don't take as many pictures as I think my dad did or others do. Sometimes I think about how these years will be remembered by my children. In this digital photo world, will there be a reliable record of their childhood? I hope so. I hope they can look back on some things and feel a sense of connectedness, a sense of family.

Slate x 2

Two items from Slate.com this morning:

1. An additional viewpoint on the myth of perfect motherhood. Lulu did such a good job of responding to my last post on this topic that no one else felt the need to share. Maybe you have something to venture now?

2. This article tricked me with its title Your i-Pod is worth $1 billion. Now, I don't have an i-Pod, but I was intrigued. Was it Steve Job's personal machine with platinum gears? How? But it turns out to be much less intriguing. Undaunted, I link to it anyway . . . because I made a decision to do so, and I shall not go back on that decision!!

PiMPin' ain't easy

Those of you who work with me at the Hill (which constitutes 98% of my readership I am afraid) know all about the new computerized evaluation system that has been implemented in recent weeks.

In the past I kept track of my work activities in a Word document that I saved on my work station hard drive. Every new project that I began, every make-work job that they threw at me, I kept track of with a snazzy bulleted list.

When the snow began to melt and the birds started chirping, we knew that winter was on its way out and that our annual evaluations were soon to come.

So, my manager would email each of us and remind us to dust off our lists, write up our self evaluations of the previous year, and send it to him. Then the two of us would sit down, discuss, and we would move on with our lives.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Well, now that system is too easy. Each employee must log onto the Performance Management Process system (affectionately know by me as the PiMP) and use various screens to create and track my Key Job Responsibilities, assign measurable metrics to evaluate my success at achieving these goals, and do other stuff that only students working on a Master of Business Administration degree would bother caring about.

So, why do I tell you this?

Well, for the past week I have been successfully putting off that most important of initial steps--creating my PiMP plan. So, I turn to you, my loyal readers for assistance.

Can you help me decide what my PiMP goals and competencies should be? How can I implement these goals with a PiMP development plan?

(And, NO, step 1 will not be: Go buy Huggy Bear outfit.)