Shhh...

Want to see a picture of M?

Click here.

eeeew tendons are so gross!

There is this tendon in there that keeps getting caught on something, snapping, feeling so eeew....

eeeew....

Okay. Since I can't take a lot of pictures right now I am editing some older ones. I made this tonight.
My personal favorite is the praying mantis. He reminds me of Zorak. Or maybe it's a she. Who knows the gender of the wild praying mantis...

It snowed today. It's spring, dangit! What the tar?

Some archival lol

I just found this old picture of Steve and got a laff from it. I think it's posted on my old blog, but here it is again, because not a whole lot is making me smile just now, but this did:
I think I might be headed for the upswing.

Aw for Pete's sake

You know those days you'd like to recall? The ones where stuff goes wrong all damn day? Yeah that was today.

I borrowed my Grandma's car because I can't drive my own since it's a stick shift. Yesterday I left the headlights on in the parking lot while I was working. Needless to say, the car was dead when I came back to the parking lot. A coworker and I tried to jump it to no avail; it was dead as a doornail. I had to take the bus home (a painful experience with the busted arm). This morning it snowed. I had to take the bus back to work. The bus was late because of the snow. Then there was traffic because of the wrecks because of the snow. Then at work I had to do a project that involves a large amount of tedious cutting and pasting, over and over, for hours. My boss asked how it was going and I sort of told him. I said things I regret. I was in pain because I can't take my painkillers at work because my brain won't work, I was in a terrible mood worrying about the car. I really shouldn't have said those things. M met me after work to try to jump the car again, since he knows about these things. Nothing. We had to leave it again, covered in snow, in the lot downtown where some girl got her windows busted out yesterday. He drove me home, then drove me to therapy where I couldn't get much therapy done because my arm can hardly be moved now because of the bus riding and the uncomfortable way I have to sit in my desk chair. Then he drove me to my mom's to borrow her car, since I broke the one I already borrowed. Now he is back downtown with my uncle trying to fix the car. In the dark. In the cold. In the snow. I feel horrible about it. I can't believe I left the damn lights on.

The thing inside my bottom lip has swollen beyond all reason. I'm going to the doctor next Wednesday to get it cut out. Every word I speak is uncomfortable because my teeth hit it.

Soon I am going to have something positive to say. Dammit. Dammit! I am!

The reflexes of a shrew

So I tried to go to work yesterday and only made it an hour and a half before I had to crawl out of there and come home and have M wrap me up in my elaborate plug-into-the-wall cooling system.

My physical therapist says I can't pick my camera up with my right hand for 9 weeks. Well, one week down, so 8 to go. I took this picture yesterday with a tripod and the remote I bought (which I am a little iffy on, as sometimes when I use it the cam focuses and sometimes it doesn't). These are hyacinths that a coworker brought me a couple days after my surgery. They're making the house smell really good.
I wrote a post last night but Blogger ate it. But that's probably good because it was really negative. Yesterday sucked. Except for when M and I watched "Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter." That was amusing.

Good moments and bad...still in a lot more pain than I expected. It feels a bit better today so that's nice, but I've been fooled before into thinking the pain was gone only to have it come back and whomp my arse down hardcore. Typing kinda stinks. Takes a long time.

My goal today: To last 3 hours at work. Wish me luck.

Coming back, a little

Warning: There is a really gross picture at the bottom of this post, so if you cannot stomach really gross pictures, you might not want to scroll down.

Some things they don't tell you before surgery but should:

• This is one of the most painful surgeries one can have. It also take a very long time to recover from it.
• You will be under the knife for 2 1/2 hours. During this time your eyes will be taped shut and you will have a breathing tube down your throat. This means that when you wake up, your eyelids will have sticky gunk all over them and stick open and shut, your face will be covered in other sticky gunk that you can't remove, and your throat will be so sore that you cannot swallow, in addition to that horrible pukey waking-up-from-anaesthesia feel that you will have. Also you will have lots of foul-tasting burps from the oxygen tube. You will almost puke with the burps.
  
• You'll have to pee like a futhermucker since they will have drained an entire large bag of fluids into you during the surgery. But you will not be able to get up to walk because you are too loopy. When the nurse attempts to assist you to pee while you are lying in the bed, you'll be unable to relax those particular muscles enough to go.
  
• When the nerve block wears off ten hours before they say it will wear off, you'll be cursing the God that caused you to exist.
  
• Perococet does not do much for pain that ranks a 9 on the 1-10 pain scale. It can handle pain up to about a 7. After that, you're on your own.
• If you take the maximum dosage of Percocet in a day every day, you will not be able to poop. Your stomach will swell up and become hard. You will stop eating because though there are things going in, there is nothing coming out. You will have to send your man out to the pharmacy to buy you stool softener which you will take and pray. When you finally do poo, it will suck a lot.
  
• Showering is agonizing. So is taking a deep breath. Holding still and moving both hurt. A lot.
  
• The day after surgery, when they start your PT, you will cry. You will cry like a little girl. Your man, who has been an absolute angel through all of this and who has accompanied you into the PT room, will turn white and sit down fast when you start crying like a little girl. You will feel guilty about this.
• Anything you drape over yourself to keep warm will get stuck in the stitches that are sticking out of your arm.
  
• You really won't be able to move your arm. At all. It will feel weird, painful, and gross.
• Your ability to sympathize with anyone else's pain will dry up like a salted slug, because their pain cannot possibly outweigh your pain. You wish for the luxury of having only emotional pain instead of this physical agony.
  

Anyway you probably get the idea. This has been total suck-city. When I went back to the doc on Friday after the surgery, he said, direct quote, "I shit you not, this is one of the worst shoulders I've ever seen. When I laid you down on the table to operate, your arm fell out of the socket." He had intended to do a few simple ligament/tendon repairs, but wound up stitching the shoulder back into the socket, fixing the torn rotator cuff, and shaving bone that had been damaged in the process of my shoulder being fucked up for years before I fell skiing. He also told me that the left one is just about as bad as the right one was.

So. I have been looped on Percocet since the day of the surgery, but the times when I wake up in the night after it wears off have been clear-headed and angry. I am eager for this time in my life to pass. Very eager.

I am going to go lie down now.

I hope you all are better off than I am just now.

Gross picture, taken during the surgery:

Not to take the Lord's name in vain but

Holy sweet mother of God, ow.

pwned.

Or whatever the kids say these days.

T minus twelve hours and counting 'till The Knife.

Sigh.

There was one nice thing today. I ordered a remote for my camera earlier this week, thinking that I can hold the remote and use it with my right hand while holding the camera and composing with my left hand. I didn't expect the remote to arrive until next week, but lo and behold, it was in a box by the front door when I arrived home from work today. What was amusing (irritatingly) is that though the remote is smaller than those itty-bitty boxes of Dots you get at Halloween, it came in a box about twice the size of my head. No wonder they charged me $6.27 for shipping. That money must have gone to pay for all that oh-so-necessary packaging!

Ah well, at least it's here. I had a lot of doopid fun playing with it for about ten minutes before I decided the prudent thing to do would be to crawl into bed and put the covers over my head for a while. This early-morning insomnia is taking its toll.

I was tagged for a meme by elevendy-two billion people (okay, like, two or three) so I s'poze it's time I got around to doing it. It asks for four answers to each question, but four is one of those numbers I have trouble with, so I'm giving three answers.

1. 3 jobs I've had in my life:

• Veterinary hospital assistant (i.e., chief poop cleaner-upper)
  
• Scanner of books and editor of text for $6 an hour
• Proofreader geek

2. 3 movies I'd watch over and over:

• Ghost in the Shell
• Ghost in the Shell: Innocence
• Baraka

3. 3 places I've lived:

• Ohio
• Ohio
• Ohio (how freakin' lame is that)

4. 3 TV shows I like to watch:

• Simpsons
• Family Guy
• American Dad (those are the *only* TV shows I watch, actually, except for DVD episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, South Park, and SpongeBob SquarePants, all of which are cable shows, and I gots no cable.)

5. 3 favorite places I've been on vacation:

• South Dakota (shuddup, it's gorgeous)
• Norris Lake, TN
• Myrtle Beach (go ahead, Suley, begin the hating. I have my reasons ;) )

6. 3 websites I visit daily:

• Flickr
• Bloggr
• pee g dot com (I proofread it, lucky me)

7. 3 of my favorite foods:

• Saag paneer
• tofu, pretty much any ol' whichy-way
  
• cheese (yum)

8. 3 places I'd rather be right now:

• nothin' beats home when you're stressed about surgery. I'm happy where I am, thanks.

Daz it.

Wish me luck, kids!

Dear me, dear heart, dear world: I need drugs.

Entertaining names attached to spam emails I have gotten recently:

Pursuable I. Crescents
Trappable R. High
Entity E. Present
Constantine C. Fogy
Willamette Q. Incarnation
Witold Rudnicki
Charalampos Hutson
Foregoing U. Retraced
Beavis Charland
Jesus Howard
Spookiest E. Flunky
Inhumanely S. Captive
Histogram M. Remotest
Hannibal Flannery

Who are the people who come up with these things? Do they get paid for this job alone? They're all selling either erectile dysfunction drugs or OEM software. If the names are random words from the dictionary, what's with the unequal proportion of descriptive words? Inhumanely? Remotest? Pursuable? Oh, the perpetual and undying hilarity of it all! (I'd like to get a spam from "Undying L. Hilarity.")

Here is a picture of the sling thing I have to wear after my surgery, which is the day after tomorrow. It's been scheduled, then rescheduled, then rescheduled again. Current status: I'm to arrive at the hospital on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. This is better than what they told me last time, which was that the surgery would be at 2:30 p.m., thus increasing exponentially the likelihood of me turning into a batshit stark raving lunatic in the morning before surgery because I'm not allowed to eat after midnight on Wednesday. (Not feeding a hungry J. Star is like not feeding a hungry wolverine. It's not an indoor sport for the faint-of-heart.) This sling, to me, looks like some undersea creature that was cast onto the shores by unforgiving waves, and lies there, helpless, waiting to either be eaten or to be flung back into the nourishing waters. It hugs me like a Portuguese man-o-war clinging to a fish, wrapping its tentacles around me and straightjacketing my wounded limb out of all movement. I cannot wait until the moment I awake from a morphine-sweetened slumber on Thursday with it holding me like a lover, cradling and comforting me.

(*ahem, *thpht! Hardly!)

Here is a picture I took last night.
I don't like how shiny and almost gooey the middle part of the flower looks, but I like the rest of it. It's quite a dramatic-looking plant, with its dark-red petals with the white tips. I have no idea what it is. I bought it just to take a picture of it.

Ruby has been returned to her other foster-parent, who will be looking after her while I recover. Maybe she'll find a home while I'm under the weather.

Is anyone really over the weather? I mean, you can't really get on top of it. Short of flying in a plane. And even then.

All right, someone stop me.

Perspective.

When I am all glum and down about my shoulder surgery, M sure has a way of putting things in perspective for me.

I had scribbled "Dr. Cha, Feb 21st 2:00" on the whiteboard so I remembered my next appointment. After that was over, I didn't bother to erase the message, so M modified it slightly. And then I laughed. Hysterically.