The Desert Mermaid

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice

• It was totally the gallbladder, y'all.


• Doctors are totally just making up estimated recovery times for surgeries.


• The worst part about recovering from surgery is how it fucks up your brain.


• When your iPod breaks down and forces you to back up its entire library, it may be foreshadowing.


• Edgar Rice Burroughs didn't just write about Mars; he also wrote about all the other planets. Guy was MANIC.


• The ghost in Mama, who gets a bad rap for its unconvincing CG, is in fact for the most part played by Javier Botet, an actual guy with a terrible debilitating congenital disease called Marfan Syndrome. I have to hand it to Botet for making a miserable situation work for him. "Disease," he says, "It is not you who owns me; it is I who own you."


• Paul Verhoeven's entire commentary track for Starship Troopers consists of him and Edward Neumeier exasperatedly pointing out that the message of the film is "Nazis are bad"--something Verhoeven, growing up in the Netherlands during WWII, was personally aware of. But apparently the only part of that thesis critics heard was "NAZIS!" * At least it made for an entertaining commentary.


• Boötes is supposed to represent a herdsman. It always looked like a kite to me.


• My name, "Amelia," was the #1 name for baby girls in the UK in 2011. I strongly suspect that this fresh crop of little Amelias is a direct result of Doctor Who.


• You can collect tokens at national parks and historic sites and things! HOLY SHIT Y'ALL ROAD TRIP VIDEO GAME.


• Ebay purchases can be supremely entertaining.


• Too much enthusiasm for CrossFit can make your muscles melt and your kidneys explode and then you die. The irony is palpable.


• Before Super Mario Bros. 2 was famously not a Super Mario title, it was actually being developed as ... a Super Mario Bros. title. I guess it didn't pan out. And then it did.


• That baffling -ject morpheme that shows up in so many words and that I've always meant to look up is from the Latin word iaciō, meaning "throw" or "cast."


• "Augie's Great Municipal Band," that fun song during the parade at the end of The Phantom Menace, is a bouncy, upbeat version of the Emperor's terrifying theme song. Which is actually kind of awesome.


• Anesthesia, man. It's WHACK.


• French cliticizes its pronouns, which is both far less dirty and far more interesting to me than it might sound.


• For weird legal reasons, Idaho owns the top 39 feet of Jackson Lake, which is apparently a thing you can do.


• Fishing vests are the way to go, man.


• Book lice are not actually lice, nor do they feed exclusively on books, which I found out when a few of them showed up to chew on a secretly moldy basket in my bathroom. Little creeps.


• The main character in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy is a bit more Sam Elliott than his reboot counterpart, and that is also pretty awesome.


• There is an actual linguistic term for Talking Like Donald Duck.  It is called buccal speech, on account of the air is in your cheeks, not your larynx, when you do it.**


• I now know how to identify a barn swallow!


• Bookstores categorically hate self-published writers.


• Colorful umbrellas are apparently an intolerable challenge to the masculinity of male pheasants. Female pheasants, of course, could not care less about the umbrellas.


• Those individual servings of cake-inna-mug you can make with standard cake mix and a microwave are DELICIOUS.


• Breaded fish is better than battered when you are making fish and chips.

*Which is ridiculous. Well, the whole movie is ridiculous, but I can't believe anyone would miss the sarcasm dripping off its propaganda reels.

**Assuming you can do it.  I sure as hell can't get any phonemes out except for some kind of lateral fricative.  Clarence Nash was a goddamn genius.

The Insurance Part

ME: Hi, billing lady! I've been working out every single possible angle of this whole "paying for surgery" business. I think I've worked out how to pay for it all, but I just need reassurance. Does this payment plan work?
BILLING LADY: Oh, totally! All set! We've got your deductible all worked out!
ME: Great! And this won't turn out to be all fucked up later, right?
BILLING LADY: Of course not!
ME: ... Against my better judgment, I am going to believe you.

Pre-Op

NURSE: Okay, just a few more things to go through. First, please put all your stuff into this bag
ME: Right!
NURSE: Then put on this paper bag and matching booties!
ME: You got it!
NURSE: Then pee into this container.
ME: Sure th--wait, what the hell is this?
NURSE: We need a sample of your urine.
ME: In a toothpaste cap?
NURSE: Now, now. It's at least thimble-sized.
ME: What, you need, like, half a cubic centimeter, tops?
NURSE: Well, you haven't drunk anything since last night, have you? How much are you expecting to have to pee now?

So I went into the bathroom to change into my paper bag and Pee In The Cup. And, in order to make this as inconvenient as possible, the tiny bathroom contained exactly two things: a toilet and a roll of toilet paper. Which means that once you've whizzed all over yourself and into the cup, you 1) have no where to set the cup, and 2) have to exit the bathroom to wash your hands. Which is also awkward when trying to adjust your paper bag.

ME: This is a hazing, isn't it.
NURSE: You have to prove your devotion to the surgery!
ME: The thousands of dollars didn't do that already?

Op Op

One of the things about getting surgery in the hospital where your dad works is that all the staff know your dad. It's weird to have the anesthesiologist laughing that "she even rolls her eyes just like her dad!"

It also means that I know a little bit of doctor-dynamics backstory.

ANESTHESIOLOGIST: Well, hi there! Lie on this table. We'll get you all straightened out.
ME: Is that the Rolling Stones playing?
ANESTHESIOLOGIST: Nope, it's the Who.
ME: Don't get to play that when you do surgeries with Dad, do you?
ANESTHESIOLOGIST: Well ... he likes classic rock ...
ME: I know. But not for surgery.
ANESTHESIOLOGIST: He prefers ... well ...
ME: Smooth jazz.
ANESTHESIOLOGIST: *wistful sigh* Yes. Yes, he does.
ME: I feel ya, buddy.

Anesthesia Is WHACK

ANESTHESIOLOGIST: Anyway! Let's get started. Here, I'll just put some local anesthetic in your hand here ...
ME: DAMN! That is a big old bump on my hand!
ANESTHESIOLOGIST: And then I'm going to put in the general anesthesia itself ...
ME: Sounds good!
RECOVERY NURSE: I see you're waking up!
ME: ... wharrgarbl?
RECOVERY NURSE: Yup. Surgery's over. We'll have you on your way home in a little while!
ME: ... did I ... miss ... something?
RECOVERY NURSE: Just your gallbladder!

Seriously, y'all. Anesthesia doesn't give you the same sense as when you're asleep. When you sleep, you have at least some sense that you have been asleep. Anesthesia is more like those couple of times I've passed out--it's less like feeling you've been unconscious and more a sense that you just hit one of those time skips the Harlem Globetrotters kept running into in Futurama--you're in one place, and then suddenly BAMF and you're struggling to comprehend how the hell you wound up in the recovery room.*

I also became aware, before I really was paying attention to anything else, that I was hooting with every exhale.

I'm not sure why, but when I am feeling under the weather, I have this tendency to hoot. Or hum, or moan--I'm not sure what you'd call it. I just make these little soft moany noises. For some reason, it makes me feel better. Here, though, I couldn't seem to not hoot. Every time I let out a breath, it was with a little noise. Mom informs me that I was constantly commenting on it ("oh, I just did it again"), but all I remember is trying not to just to see if I could stop. I couldn't.

Home To Sock Jail

The other thing I hadn't thought about was that I was going to be taking compression socks home with me--little leg wraps that puff up to help with circulation, so's to prevent deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. Mom got me set up with them that first day. Pain in the ass, they are. Every time I had to pee I'd either have to take them off or unplug their little motor and carry it with me to the bathroom.

It also presented another issue.

CAT: Oh, you've just had surgery? So what? In case you haven't noticed, I am stuck outside, and am at your window demanding that you make the long trip around to the back door to let my fuzzy ass inside.
ME: You're lucky I'm so goddamn nice, cat. All right, I'm going back to Sock Jail.
CAT: I'll probably want to go out again in a few minutes. First I'll come check out your room and OH SHIT WHAT THE HELL IS THAT
ME: It's my sock motor.
CAT: HOLY FUCKING FUCK IT IS MAKING NOISE
ME: Yeah, it does that.
CAT: IT WILL GET US ALL
ME: Don't worry. It's a rental. It'll be gone soon.
CAT: I AM ON TO YOU, BUZZING THING. YOU'RE IN LEAGUE WITH THE TRAIN, AREN'T YOU
ME: At least you have good survival instincts.

Insurance Strikes Back

INSURANCE COMPANY: Guess what! Your insurance payment plan is all fucked up!
ME: I wish you jerks wouldn't deliver these letters on Friday afternoons. Now I gotta wait all weekend before I can call you and yell about this.

And So

So that was what happened a couple of weeks ago. And then I loafed around for two weeks having mood swings and feeling like stomped shit, and the only thing that made it really bearable was that lineup of audiobooks I got.** But now, it's been enough time that I think I'm starting to feel normal! It's kind of a nice feeling. My sleep schedule is still Even More Fucked than it was before this whole gallbladdery disaster, but hopefully that will get fixed soon.

The other weird thing is feeling the very obvious absence of a gallbladder that has been very much PRESENT for a couple of years. It doesn't feel like an empty space; I'm just not getting the sense of some large, bilious*** alien sitting just under my boob.

And it wasn't just a subjective feeling. I went in for my post-op the other day and my doctor just about burst into the room.

DOCTOR: YOUR GALLBLADDER WAS THE BIGGEST, INFLAMEDEST GALLBLADDER I HAVE EVER SEEN! IT'S A GOOD THING WE GOT IT OUT!
ME: So peeing in the toothpaste cap was justified after all!

It's always a validation to realize that you felt rotten for a reason. Hopefully I will now feel less rotten. Every day seems to be getting better about that!


*Or, that one memorable time when I passed out, why the hell you're lying in a wet bathtub with your Dad throwing a towel over the shower door at you so you'll be decent when he opens it up to see if you're still alive.

**For the record, Bruce Coville's Full-Cast Audio Unicorn Chronicles are pretty excellent. A few of the voice actors' choices were Not How I Imagined Them (the attempt to Ed Wynn-ize Medafil was weird, and the first book's voice for Lightfoot was kind of ridiculous), but overall they are audiobooks as they should be.

***"Bilious" is a rather startlingly apt description. Before all this nonsense I hadn't realized it, but there is a very specific feeling associated with it. The closest other description I have is "sour"--as in, it felt like there was a big sour THING just sitting in there--but really, even that doesn't work.

I do feel like I've hit the Crying phase of healing. Not sadness, or feeling all PMSy and weepy, but just a really strong urge to cry. Maybe I need to dump some stress hormones or something.

Still here. I haven't the energy for much, though. Even when I'm awake, all I can do is watch movies or listen to audio books.

Thank goodness I've got Bruce Coville and Tamora Pierce around to read me to sleep this time. And thank even MORE goodness that I bought that sand thing in the Tetons. If you want to give someone something that'll help them heal, consider a sand frame. I think I'll go watch mine now.

Aww, yeah, last meal tonight before I cut myself off for surgery tomorrow!

Oh, did I mention the surgery?

Yeah, I'm goin' in tomorrow to get rid of this darn chestburster. I am all set for recovery, too--all my pajamas freshly washed, audiobooks by supercool authors to tell me stories if I'm too loopy to read, and books and videogames for when I'm not too loopy. So if I'm gone for a few days, y'all will know I'm simpy lying around feeling sorry for myself. Have fun without me!

Oh, good, my chestburster is back. Been thumbing through the physician's directory and haven't found ONE xenobiologist anywhere in the state of Utah, so I think I'll have to fall back on a gastroenterologist and see what they have to say. I am hoping it is not "Nuke the site from orbit."

OKAY, I think we got LJ all working nicely again. What’d we all miss?

Me, I had quite a week. Rich and full experiences, that’s my life: futzed around in the garden, got bossed around by my micromanager, lost another coworker to the deep discontent around the library and the lure of Living Free And Easy, lost a favorite patron to That End Which Awaits Us All, finished a necklace and made an earring, gave up on the X-Files, started Fringe, and wrote a bunch of OGYAFE stuff.

Oh, and also there’s the whole, y’know, SURGERY business. That’s going on.

Seems that while I was away I picked up some kind of gallbladder inflammation. It announced its presence in the middle of a cart of books I was shelving on Saturday. It felt like this:


An apt metaphor for so many of life’s little golden moments, this.

So I mentioned this to my supervisor, who ordered me to get rid of the stupid thing. Sounded like sage advice, but I figured I’d get a second opinion from someone who was not a librarian. So after a few days spent curled in a fetal position cursing the cold unfeeling universe, I went to see Dr. Hyper, a woman I’ve always liked but whose actual name I could never spell.

DR. HYPER: So it hurts more whenever you eat anything?

ME: I’m down to dry Cheerios. Nothing makes you feel more like a three-year-old.

DR. HYPER: That is the right thing to do. Now let’s see if we can get this solved.

ME: Good, because I’m really hungry.


Then she poked at my abdomen.


ME: *squeak!*

DR. HYPER: I haven’t even poked you yet. My hand is still a foot away.

ME: I can’t help it. It was a dark day when my friends found out that even poking in my general direction makes me the Pillsbury Doughboy.

DR. HYPER: Okay, now I’m going to poke your back.

ME: But the pain isn’t in my baaAAAAAAaack—well, what do you know.

DR. HYPER: The pain does refer sometimes.


After that I went to get an ultrasound, which didn’t show anything,* and so I got to have another test: the Making You Lie Perfectly Still In A Tube For Two Goddamn Hours While They Blast Radioactive Dye Into Your Veins Test. Your job is to lie down and try not to think about just how much your nose itches. It itches a lot.


RADIOLOGIST: Okay, you’re all done! How are you feeling?

ME: … I just got out of the TUBE, man!

RADIOLOGIST: You’ll get the report from your doctor in a bit.

ME: Just as long as it’s not a queen.


And yes, I did get the report, just a few minutes ago, and after analyzing it carefully to see the cause of my distress, Dr. Hyper concluded—let me tell you, modern medicine is great—“Fuck if I know.”

So my gallbladder looks fine, but let me tell you internet, it does not feel fine. Doctor Hyper’s got some other options, such as Taking An Antacid For A Couple Weeks or, if that doesn’t work, Carving Out The Damn Thing Anyway, Because Often That Does Seem To Fix Things Even If Nothing Else Shows Up On The Test. So depending on how things go in the next couple of weeks, I either get better, or I get surgery. Either way, I plan to whine about it quite a bit.

Aren’t you glad LJ’s back?


*But it was more pleasant than the last ultrasound I got checking for ovarian cysts, since this time I didn’t have to drink a quart of water half an hour before the scan just to make my bladder visible. Especially obnoxious when you’re in eighth grade and “half an hour before the scan” is “math class.” I damn near exploded before I even got all gelled up.