If you’ve had kids—or have been around kids—you will know exactly what I’m talking about here. You know how a house with at least one little kid in it is a cornucopia of noises. There’s always some kid thing going on, and it is accompanied by its own soundtrack of chatter, crashes, and glee. Even one kid will jabber away while they play. As a parent, you know that the time to get worried about what the kids are doing is when it gets quiet. Quiet means a kid is up to no good and that they are savvy enough to put on the cloak of silence in order to not get caught doing a bad, but super interesting, deed. Quiet means the ball of 1000 rubber bands in the desk drawer very well might now be in the toilet.
Our house is kind of like that still, even though I’m alone in it most days. I talk to myself. I talk to Skitter. I sing. I think out loud. I narrate whatever task occupies my time. I am often loud, just to be loud. But I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet in the house this week. It’s making me a touch nervous. I’m suspicious my own brain is plotting something bigly I don’t want to know about. 🤡
My “banned books” Face Mask o’ the Day reminds me that so many of these books address themes of various and sundry injustices. In 1853, The American Unitarian preacher, Theodore Parker, published a sermon called “Justice and the Conscience.” From its pages, I offer up this quote to chew on: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” I’d like to think my personal little moral arc bends toward justice. I know I want it to. I guess I better check myself on that a bit more often than I do—just to be sure. I recommend we all check ourselves about that.
In this selfie from August 2020, seahorses Bow Tie o’ the Day is pleased to present the impenetrable unibrow I would be sporting if I went a week without tweezing my eyebrows. All hail the tweezers!
Bow Tie o’ the Day, with its curved lines, is one of my recent painted wood acquisitions. This selfie says I seem to be feeling all kinds of stripey, for some reason. If I feel a certain way, I usually try to dress like it. I have no earthly idea why I do that, except to say it’s simply how I roll. As far as what it means to feel “stripey,” I don’t know that exact answer either. I can tell you it is true that I have had a hankering all day for some Fruit Stripe gum from my kidhood, and I did listen to the Kate Bush song, “Big Stripey Lie” thrice this morning. Also, when I checked the family text thread over breakfast earlier, I saw a picture of Suzanne’s niece who is in the National Guard—which made me think of the Bill Murray movie, “STRIPES.” It must be World Stripe Day or something. Wearing lines/stripes just hits the spot today. I have no doubt I will move on to other feelings and designs tomorrow.
BTW I haven’t yet heard anything at all from the lithotripsy docs, so nothing has been scheduled. I hate waiting.
Despite my wearing a ferocious animal print Bow Tie o’ the Day to my ERCP at the hospital, the scope the doc stuck down my throat and into various innards was unable to dislodge and retrieve the boulder growing in my pancreas. It’s official: Plan A was a failure, so we’re on to Plan B and the shockwaves of lithotripsy. I don’t yet have an appointment for it, but I’m hoping it will be scheduled by the end of the day. The minute it’s on my calendar, you can bet I’ll be rummaging through the Tie Room neckwear inventory for the exact right piece to wear to Plan B, for good luck. In all my years of unofficial—but thorough—fashion studies, I have never once come across any suggestions for what to wear to a lithotripsy appointment. I guess it’s up to me to be the brave fashionista explorer who makes that discovery. 😎
Yup, I’m on a clear liquid diet today. I can’t eat a solid thing until tomorrow after my ERCP. Since I can’t eat, I’m channeling my hunger into my neckwear. Salad Tie o’ the Day and Hot-Dog-Hamburger-Pizza-Fries Bow Tie o’ the Day will have to satisfy my urge to eat.
Umbrellas-and-raindrops Tie o’ the Day and I spent much of our time gazing out the tall windows at the buckets and barrels and teaspoons of rain, which fell unceasingly for hours. The day-est part of the day is almost over now, so the rain has finally stopped. Due to the inclement weather, there was no bike ride for Skitter and me yesterday or today. I’ve embarked on a mission of teaching Skitter to sit on the bike seat and pedal the bike, while I ride behind it in her connected doggie trailer as she pumps me around the neighborhood. Skitter’s skinny mutt legs can’t afford to miss another day of pedal practice. 🚴♀️🐕
Look at what I found while scouring through my files. I do not remember being Santa at this Delta High School newspaper staff party. I do remember Barbara though. She made me laugh and she had a bigly vocabulary, so we said bigly words to each other when we talked. It’s always a pleasure to run into her when our paths cross. I wish they crossed more often.
I had to take a blood test for my crazy-head doctor, and a COVID-19 test before I’m allowed to go inside the hospital to have my ERCP procedure Friday. We have a U of U clinic about four blocks away, so I figured I’d head over there as soon as the clinic lab opened, and I’d be back home to do a morning TIE O’ THE DAY post before the day really got going. I left the house at 8AM. And then, suddenly, it was almost noon. That’s right. An annoying, but necessary, errand which should have taken 30 minutes to conquer, magically took 4 hours. Hey, we’ve all been there. Some days are like that, and you might as well smile through every minute of those days. There’s nothing more ridiculous to see/be than the poor fool who’s having an clumsy, luckless day and tries to fight it, but is unsuccessful. Sometimes it is best to accept your circumstances and press on as best you can. I was an illustration for the ages of this principle this morning.
So I went to the Centerville clinic just a few blocks away to get my two tests done. They could handle the blood test, but they had very recently quit doing COVID-19 tests at their location. I knew then that I would be driving somewhere else to get my COVID test, but I was already at this clinic, so I let them poke me for the blood test my crazy-head doc had ordered. With the blood test done, I drove out to the Farmington Health Center where I was sure they were still doing COVID testing. And they were. Now, I’d had the stick-poking-way-up-in-the-nose COVID test a few months ago. It made me sneeze, and it felt more obnoxious than painful. Today’s test was different. I was in charge of the swab sticks. I got to poke one swab stick in both my nostrils—swab, swab, swab. I then got to poke a second swab stick in my throat—swab, swab, swab. If my test comes back negative, I will be set for my ERCP Friday.
After I left the Farmington Health Center and headed in the direction of home, I spied HARMON’S at Station Park. I didn’t have a Goliath shopping list, but I needed a couple of things. I parked as close as I could to the front doors because the wind was getting serious about blowing, and things were turning cold. I was only in the grocery store for 5 minutes, but the wind was significantly windier when I carried my one bag of groceries out the door and into the parking lot. Out of nowhere, I was attacked by a stray shopping cart—piloted by no one but the gusts. It rolled over my toes and kept right on going. (A roll-and-run?)
I must pause here to tell you a true thing about me: I’m always the odd person who says things like, “Jesus would return his shopping cart.” I mean, if you’re gonna say you’re a Christian, then you better take every opportunity—bigly or small—to act like him. So right away I knew I had to wrangle that aimless shopping cart and put it where it belongs, where it can’t injure someone or someone’s property. Off, I ran across the parking lot. My goal was to snag the cart before it hit a group of cars it seemed to be aimed at. All the while, my bag of groceries is flying whichever way the wind haphazardly whipped it as I ran. Despite my “old broad” style of running, I gained on the shopping cart. Finally, before it ran into anyone or anything, I grabbed it. I stopped it. I pushed the cart against the gusts of wind and into a stall at the cart return. Next stop, my car.
Yup, I was panting up a storm because of the cart chase, and I was now far away from my car. My car was waaaaaaaaay across the parking lot from where I had ended up. I walked through the chilling wind, warmed by the feeling that I had done my tiny part to make the world a better place. I had put a fleeing shopping cart back on the right path.
But the wind was not done with me yet. I turned my head from side to side to keep an eye out for any approaching vehicles—or other stray shopping carts—as I trudged bravely across the parking lot to my Vonnegut Grace Vibe. Suddenly, a gust of wind—probably a tornado, I’m sure—caught one of my hearing aids in exactly the right/wrong spot. It blew my left hearing aid completely out of my ear! (For a moment, I thought I must be back in windy Delta.) Once again today, I was on the trail to catch something running away to who-knows-where. My runaway hearing aid had flown out of my ear, then dropped, then flown and dropped again and again, as I zig-zagged dramatically and desperately to tackle it. I would say that I probably looked to gawkers like I was performing some kind of expressionist dance routine, but I’m sure it didn’t look anything like that at all. And it’s not likely any passersby would have been able to see my minuscule hearing aid scurrying about. Nope, they would have seen only me, chasing the wild air. At least with the cart, an onlooker could see I was chasing after a delinquent shopping cart in the wind. The Hearing Aid Dance was a whole other enchilada.
After I got my still-functioning hearing aid back in my ear and was safely in my car, I realized I had just had some unplanned fine fun. I hadn’t wasted time and energy shaking my fist at the travails of my day. Bow Tie o’ the Day and I had simply danced through the bluster. All is well.
NEWS FLASH! The way we handle things is always a choice of our own making.
I put on my Flintstone-y wood Bow Tie o’ the Day and had my bigly appointment with my Hanky Panky doctor at Huntsman Cancer Hospital last Friday morning. (Isn’t the Huntsman lobby ceiling fantabulous above me?!)
As you know by now, I have no problem violating HIPAA laws about myself. My doc and I went over the results of my CT scan from March. Here’s the skinny on my Panky: What little bit is left of my pancreas is healthy and working relatively well since my Whipple surgery almost three years ago. However, my Hanky Panky has taken it upon itself to grow a pancreatic stone which is blocking the pancreatic duct. It causes pain and it hinders the pancreas from correctly aiding me in terms of digestion and nourishment. Excuse my French, but DAMNIT! Stoopid pancreas!
My Hanky Panky doctor has a plan. Actually, he has three plans. The first thing we’re going to try is called an ERCP, during which a specialist will stick a long camera-with-a-claw down my throat and attempt to extract the panky boulder. If this works, my problem is solved. But the chances this will work are about none. When I had pancreatic stones before my Whipple surgery, we tried the ERCP to get them out, but my pancreatic duct was so twisty that the doc couldn’t pull any stones out. And now, there’s also scar tissue from the surgery which the specialist will have to contend with. We’ll try the ERCP solution again anyway, because it’s better than jumping right to surgery. It might work. But none of us are counting on it. (My ERCP is already scheduled for this coming Friday morning.)
If the ERCP doesn’t work, the second thing I will be doing is a thing called lithotripsy. Lithotripsy is a medical procedure that uses shock waves or a laser to break down kidney stones, so the resulting particles can move through the body to be peed out. Unfortunately, lithotripsy doesn’t usually blow pancreatic stones to smithereens as well as it does kidney stones. This probably won’t be successful either, according to my doctor.
The third option—if it gets to this point—is good, old-fashioned cut-me-in-half surgery again. Excuse my French again, but DAMNIT! This is the option that is the most likely to relieve my agony, but I am not going to think about even the possibility of surgery beyond this post. I have stuck my fingers in my mind’s ears when it comes to hearing anything about surgery.
Nope. I’m putting all my good vibes into the ERCP solving my problem with its tiny claw this Friday morning at 6AM.
FYI Millard Care and Rehab says in-person visits are back on immediately at their facility. Skitter and I see a visit with Mom in our near future! Yay!
