The Thinkulum

Well, I didn’t think it would happen, but I finally found something to post on YouTube. I’ve had an account for a while, but only to comment on other people’s videos. As I was leaving work today (it’s still Thursday in my mind, since I haven’t gone to bed yet), I drove past a family of geese crossing the street. 🙂 So I pulled over and got out my camera to document their journey. I wish I knew where they were trying to go, because they sure weren’t getting there very fast. One of the babies was hobbling along way behind the others, poor little guy (girl?). Maybe he was like me and was just lost in thought. 😉

My C-Pen arrived today! I ordered it last week. It’s a handheld scanner. You drag it across individual lines in a book, and it scans the text and OCRs it into a document. I tried it just now, and it works great! I’m really impressed. This will make taking notes much easier, and I’m hoping it will make my reading more productive and help me churn out projects a bit quicker. Plus it looks kind of like something from Star Trek, so I can pretend I’m in the 24th century when I use it. 😉

Hi folks! Now that it’s the end of April and Easter is several weeks behind us, how was everyone’s? Mine was okay. I didn’t have any special plans, so it was a pretty normal day. I know we were supposed to be celebrating the Resurrection, but I guess I hadn’t been in that victorious of a mood, so I couldn’t get into the spirit very well. :-\\

On to today’s topic! I warn you it will not be appetizing.

My Good Friday was spent in the hospital. 🙂 Part of it was anyway. Since about the middle of December I’ve been having these weird bowel problems, mostly a strange and stubborn case of diarrhea. When it didn’t go away after a month, I decided to go to the doctor. Not a bad idea, since I hadn’t had a checkup in ten years. Well, he said it was probably chronic constipation from not eating enough fruits and vegetables, and he put me on some laxatives. Those didn’t really help, so he sent me to a gastroenterologist.

I went to the gastro last Thursday, and he said yeah, my symptoms sounded weird, so he recommended a colonoscopy. How about tomorrow or Monday? o.o I’d been putting up with this for four months already, he reasoned, so why wait? I concurred and decided on Friday, since I didn’t have work that day. My friend Joel agreed to be my ride, since I wouldn’t be allowed to drive afterward.

So that night I got to prepare for it. Joy. I didn’t mind having to go to the bathroom every few minutes. I did mind having to drink a gallon of that disgusting medicine. And I mean literally a gallon, 8 ounces every 10 minutes for three hours. The pharmacist provided these flavor packets, but that didn’t help. They gave it a weak fruity odor, but the dull, salty taste was still there. The consistency was almost like regular water but slightly thicker, so it was like drinking oil. It wasn’t too bad at first, but after about eight glasses of it, it got a little nauseating. Plus I felt like my stomach didn’t have time to catch up with its digestion before I was pouring more content into it. So I dragged it out to every 20 minutes or so. Finally when there was one liter left I took my doctor’s advice and added some Crystal Light lemonade mix, and that made it much more tolerable, so I recommend that.

The next day we drove to the hospital, I signed in, the receptionist told Joel to come back about an hour too early, he left, I waited, my name was called, and I went back with the nurse’s aid to get ready. The patient’s waiting area was this big room with a desk of some sort in the middle and small rooms along the walls with curtains instead of doors. We went into one of these, he took my blood pressure and asked some questions, I signed some forms, and he gave me my gown to change into and left.

After I had changed into my gown, a nurse came in and gave me the remote to the TV that was mounted on the wall in the corner of the room, since there was someone ahead of me and I’d be waiting for a while. A few minutes later she came back in to put in my IV, and I turned off the TV because I knew I’d be trying to pay attention to both the TV and the IV at once, and it was too much stimulation for my little brain. She said I could keep the TV on, but I said I’d rather watch what she was doing, and she smiled and said that most people wouldn’t. But I didn’t think it would be a problem, and it gives me more of a sense of control when I can observe stressful events happening. I said at least it wasn’t a PICC line! She put it in the crook of my elbow, which was good, because I get a little weirded out by the thought of inserting needles into the back of my hand.

After the IV was in, she left again and I flipped through the channels, but the only thing on that was at all interesting to me was Spongebob, and I didn’t feel like advertising that fact to the medical staff, so I turned off the TV and lay there on the gurney, contemplating. I thought about how the spot with the IV needle was a little achy, but other than that I was fine and not even nervous.

I also thought about something my friend Don told me when I told him I was having this colonoscopy. He said he would be praying that I would know that God was with me. I paralleled this with Natalie Grant’s song “Held” and its statement that “[God’s] promise was
when everything fell we’d be held.” And when it comes down to it, this makes sense because his promise was certainly not that all our problems would be solved in the present life or that we’d be protected from all danger. Many Christians have been martyred, after all. No, the promise is something like moral support. God will be present with us, and the more we are aware of this the better. Since then I have added to this thought that God’s presence with us means that he is able to bring about good in our bad situations if he decides to. So he’s ready both to comfort us spiritually and to physically help us.

Then Joel came in. They had brought him to my little room for some reason, and he thought my procedure was already done, but I told him no, they had given him the wrong time to return to the hospital. So we talked for a while, and then they sent him back to the waiting room and wheeled me in to the operating room.

The operating room was large and kind of dark, and there was a long counter along the wall with cabinets underneath and probably overhead, but I don’t remember. They stopped me off to one side of the room next to where they had the monitor and other equipment set up. Then another nurse stuck heart monitoring electrodes to me, put the oxygen tube in my nose, and told me to turn over on my left side. I tried to get in a comfortable position.

The drugs were my favorite part. 🙂 They gave me a painkiller and some non-anesthetic drug to put me to sleep. They had told me that I wouldn’t remember anything that happened in the next couple of hours, but they were wrong. My herculean mind defeated their puny drugs! I do have some blanks in my memory, but I think they said I was awake the whole time, and I can even remember watching part of the procedure on the monitor. I was hoping for an out-of-body experience like the ones I’ve read about, but oh well, not this time.

It was fun to feel the drugs take effect though. First I felt light headed, then my eyes started doing that thing they do when you spin around and suddenly stop, and then the people’s voices started sounding echoey. But I don’t remember dropping off. I just sort of lay there waiting. And then I remember watching the screen and seeing them pluck out bits of my colon for testing. The doctor did this sort of three count thing, and whoever was operating the device got it into position, stuck it to my colon wall, and pulled it off. The painkillers were working quite well, and I could tell they were moving around in there, but that’s it. I vaguely recall the doctor whipping the scope back out, but the next thing I remember was being back in the curtained waiting room with Joel and one of the nurses.

The nurse gave me my clothes back and told me to change my shirt and when she came back she’d help me get my pants on so I wouldn’t take a nosedive. I felt stable enough to do it on my own, so I did, and I stayed upright. Another nurse brought me apple juice and some tasty Lorna Doone cookies, and later the doctor came in to give me my diagnosis.

He said I had a mild case of ulcerative colitis on the left side of my colon near the end, and he gave me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory. Ulcerative colitis is a rare bowel disease that may or may not be autoimmune, and it can be treated but apparently not cured without removing the affected parts of the colon. It can go into remission for decent periods of time.

The nurse walked me to the bathroom, and the next thing I knew I was on the road with Joel. He asked me if I wanted to go to Taco Bell first or to the grocery store to pick up my medicine. I was surprised and asked how he knew I wanted to go to Taco Bell. He told me I had told him on the way to the hospital. I thought that was funny. So I hobbled into Jewel with Joel (actually I was walking okay by this point), bought my rather expensive medicine, went through the drive-through at Taco Bell, and was dropped off at home.

Joel told me he would call me that night to make sure everything was okay, and I learned something that I didn’t fully appreciate until reflecting on it later that weekend. There are different kinds, perhaps levels, of goodness. I am a nice person, in that I try not to offend people or get in their way if I don’t have to, and I am even a good person to talk to because I try to listen carefully without judging. And I am cooperative and generally willing to help people when asked. But my form of goodness is fairly passive. I usually don’t go out of my way to find good things to do for people. So I would be happy to drive people to the hospital and the pharmacy, but I doubt I would even think to check up on them later, or if I did I would be lazy and dismiss the idea. It was a small gesture, but Joel’s ownership of the situation impressed me. That’s the kind of goodness I want to strive for.

I took it easy the rest of the day as the doctor ordered, and right after I got home I called Don and my family to tell them the results of the colonoscopy, after which I forgot whether I had called them, so I called again the next day to make sure. hehe

The medicine seems to be doing something. Some of the symptoms are clearing up, while others are pretty much the same, but I’ll see what the doctor says when I go in next week. I’ve decided it’s building my character in any case.

So that was my expedition to the hospital. I don’t go very often, so I thought the experience was worth recording. It was all too much information, I’m sure. 😉

Okay, okay, fine, I’ll write. Yes, I know it’s March and I’m still writing about Christmas. (That was addressed to me, by the way.)

I just wrote a little script that concatenates my Gaim logs in chronological order and divides them into files by month. My IMs are like my journal because I tend to tell my friends what I’ve been doing, so it’s handy to have it all in order for times like this when I’ve totally forgotten what I did.

So, the rest of my vacation. Christmas night I played Apples to Apples with my family, which was fun. That’s one of my favorite games because it has to do with language and takes no skill.

Tuesday night my brother, my sister, and I played some Christmas hymns. I was on my new French horn (yes, I finally bought one!), my sister played her oboe, and my brother played the piano. It was messy but fun. Then we watched Cast Away, which was really good. I had never seen it, as usual. I liked the ending because it was more true to life than the typical happy ending, yet it wasn’t depressing. It was the right way to deal with circumstances you wouldn’t choose.

Wednesday night my sister was in a crazy mood. First she was pretending to be a ninja with a wrapping paper tube. Then she was talking like an Indian (from India). While this was going on I was mediating a group IM conversation between my friend Rob and my family, who was sitting around me. It was funny.

Thursday we went to the mall to watch Charlotte’s Web and shop. The movie was really good, but I was really tired, and the mall didn’t have a bookstore, so after I bought the clothes I needed, the shopping was reeeeally boring. But I survived, barely.

Michael went back to Boston on Friday. On New Year’s Eve (Sunday) we watched War of the Worlds, which I had just bought at Half Price Books. It was a lot less scary on the small screen and when I knew what was going to happen. The scenes went by quicker. In the theater I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, and each scenario seemed to last forever. Still a good movie. Abbie missed the ball drop in New York, so at midnight she dropped her Hello Kitty kickball. 😉 And on Monday I went back to Illinois.

Finally I’m done with that! In my next installment (probably sometime in April), I’ll be telling you about some major developments in my life from the past few months, and sometime around then I’ll have a book review.

*sigh* I know, I never blog. I’m going to have to come up with some strategies to get myself to write more.

Anyway, to comment on my sister’s comment from the last entry: There is no way I would think you are less entertaining than Michael. You’re our substitute for TV, remember? 😉 But you have to admit, we did spend a lot of our time by ourselves doing our own things those first few days.

I came up with a theory over Christmas that systems, such as families, develop patterns of behavior that incorporate all their members, and for the system to behave the way we expect it to, all the members have to be present, at least in a small system such as our family. That’s why when one person in our family is gone, the house seems so much quieter, even if the person who’s missing isn’t especially loud. For our normal feeling of (relative) liveliness, everybody we usually expect to be there has to be there.

So, the rest of my vacation. Dinner with Heather was good. I think I managed to ask the whole range of missionary questions that I usually wonder about. And we gave her some contact info for one of our other missionary friends so they could possibly collaborate in some way. I love connecting people like that.

That night I stayed up till 4:30 doing some audio editing. RumTumTugger, one of my TheologyWeb acquaintances, wanted me to record her singing happy birthday to Johnny, another TWeb acquaintance, because she wouldn’t be in Paltalk that night to sing it in person. But while she was singing it, she paused just before Johnny’s name because she didn’t want to accidentally sing my name or Brandalf’s, who was also in the chat room. This, of course, was too good not to parody, so I recorded some more of the conversation and made an “alternate” happy birthday song. It was so much fun. I laughed a lot while making it. And people on TWeb liked it too, so I was happy.

On Christmas Eve we went to church in the morning and in the evening. As usual my brother and I were greeted with the typical Southern enthusiasm by people we barely knew, but there was less of that this time, thank goodness. It was interesting to look around at people I grew up with and to see how much older they looked. I don’t get to Texas much, so I only see them once a year, if even that often.

Christmas day was good. Abbie’s friend Kimberly, who moved in with our family after graduation last summer, spent the morning with us. She said that’s the most presents she’s gotten in a long time (ever?), and I was happy we could be generous with her like that and treat her as part of the family. I got mostly books, which is always good. They were from my Amazon wishlist.

Abbie had ordered a book for me too, but it didn’t arrive until a couple of weeks after Christmas, -.- so instead she gave me the Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition. 🙂 Then I ordered the other two with an Amazon gift certificate, and back in Illinois I’ve been watching them with my LotR friend Tim. It’s nice to have an excuse to have him over, since he’s usually so busy and I rarely get to see him. We’ve been talking a lot during the movies, so I like to say we’re doing our own commentary track.

This is long enough for now and I want to eat lunch, so I’ll get to the rest of the vacation in another post. And there’s plenty more I have in mind to write about. I really will try to do it soon!

I’m home for the holidays! Actually I’ve been home for a week. And by home I mean my parents’ home in Dallas. I still think of it as home, even though I’ve lived in Illinois for a few years now. I always love coming to Dallas. It feels so much more spacious and alive than the Chicago suburbs. Plus I grew up here. I’m here for two weeks because I never take any other vacation (and I’m still in school mode after having been at Wheaton for so long), and I still manage to have vacation left over at the end of the year.

For most of this first week my parents were off at work during the day, and my brother didn’t arrive until Tuesday night, so it was a little boring at first. But once Michael got home it picked up a little. We got a tree Wednesday night. It took surprisingly little time, given that last year we drove around for probably half an hour bargain hunting. This year we went to our usual place and got there late enough that the trees were all half off. And we chose quite well, if I do say so myself.

Last night we went to see the Nativity. I thought it was a good movie for giving an idea of what life was like back then and the kinds of dynamics that would have existed in that situation. I don’t think those involved would have been as aware of the meaning of Jesus’ birth as the characters in the movie were, such as the wise man declaring that the child was God made flesh, but I guess you have to have those kinds of statements in a movie about the nativity. The cinematography was nice too. The scene at the manger looked like a painting I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere.

It seemed to me that the movie was largely focused on Joseph, which was kind of nice, since he’s usually in the background of the story, except when it’s being told by the kind of people who like to give screen time to background characters or by preachers who are desperate for a new take on the story. But my family thought it was pretty balanced and pointed out that it seemed to be told from Mary’s point of view, which makes sense, since she would certainly be observing her new husband and not herself. Also it was her wrestlings with God that we saw and not Joseph’s. So yeah, though it wasn’t the most exciting movie–my brother noticed that the whole thing was understated, delicate, as he put it–it was good.

After that we went to a new buffet called Palomina’s, which has really good steak, and then we went home, and my brother, mom, and I played Rummikub, which is like Rummy but with tiles rather than cards. I didn’t win. *cries*

This morning we went to an nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients with some people from my parents’ Sunday school class and basically sat in on a Christmas party with singing, Santa, and performing dogs. And I learned that performing dogs are entertaining whether they get their tricks right or wrong. 😉

My mom just made some egg nog. I’ve been complaining that store-bought egg nog tastes like bubble gum, but hers tastes just like it’s supposed to, the way I remember it from my childhood. It’s non-alcoholic, so other people may not agree, but I love it. I haven’t had normal egg nog since way back then.

We’re having a missionary friend of my mom’s over for dinner tonight. Should be interesting.

Merry Christmas Eve Eve, everybody! Maybe I’ll blog again sometime.