by john | Feb 8, 2010 | Real Life
Not of strangers, it hasn’t been that kind of a Blanche DuBois weekend, but of my friends and relatives for sure. I’ve always wondered a little at the Southern tradition of bringing food over at the home of the sick and the deceased, and that’s largely because I’ve never really dealt with being the one in the house dealing with all the shit that goes on with a sick partner. So the fact that our friends have supplied meals all weekend has been a huge help, more than I could ever explain to anyone that hasn’t been there. And I will never scoff at the casserole again. The ability to make a meal, meat, veggies and sides, into one dish and carry it someplace now seems nigh-miraculous to me.
Bonnie (my sister, who half-raised me) came up and stayed with us from Friday until this afternoon, and she helped with a lot of the little bits of cleaning that Suzy wasn’t able to get to before her surgery. Because God forbid anyone come into the house without it being cleaned from top to bottom first! And I am not exactly the domestic deity that my wife is. Honestly, I think I may have run the dishwasher more this weekend than in the first 14 years of our marriage combined.
But I gotta say, the people who have come by and brought food are saints among men and women. I couldn’t have made it through this weekend without a hellacious takeout bill otherwise, and I can’t thank them enough. I thought the road was going to smooth out when we got home, but I forgot about that whole split-level house thing. So the first night I must have made 20 trips from the den (bottom floor) to the bedroom (top floor) and back. But yesterday Suzy made it down to the den a couple of times, and she’s comfortable ensconced on the couch in front of the big TV right now as we wait for out last planned dinner to arrive. I’m still exhausted every night when I go to bed, because this whole nursemaid shit is not exactly my scene, so much so that I’m looking forward to going back to work tomorrow!
But her recovery is coming along incredibly well, especially for someone who had a defective organ the size of a football removed from her abdomen. She’s experienced very little pain, and is navigating steps like a champ. I still think our road trip in 3 weeks is probably off the table, but that’s a trip we can make at any later time – great thing about a road trip, the road will still be there. Ah crap – time to eat – I’ll finish this drivel later. Essentially – THANKS to everybody!
by john | Feb 6, 2010 | Poetry
My poem Santa Fix, about a dysfunctional Christmas, was recently published in Deuce Coupe. I like this blog/journal because it tends to run edgier stuff, so I’m hoping it will be an outlet for some darker work for me. Not all poetry is pretty, and it’s a great thing to have outlets for the raw material.
by john | Feb 4, 2010 | Poems, Real Life
Today is better than yesterday – her mobility is improved a lot and her pain is more manageable. She’s off IV painkillers and onto oral drugs, so she’s in a little more pain, but nothing that she can’t handle. She’s moving almost normally, and I don’t think there will be any problem with getting her home tomorrow. Her staples can come out tomorrow, and that’s basically the only thing keeping her here.
Then the challenges with living at home will begin. Obviously most folks don’t think about recovering from surgery when they’re picking out a home, but just for the record, a split-level is not the way to go. No matter what you wanna do, there are stairs involved. Now if we were a little smarter, we would have set the guest bedroom up downstairs, so that Suzy could move between the guest room and the den, but no, that’s my office. So we’re trying to figure out if she’ll be more comfortable spending most of her time downstairs or up in the bedroom. I’m guessing it’s going to be downstairs, just because that’s way more convenient for visitors to sit. It’s not like we’ve got a lot chairs in our bedroom. So I think most of her waking time will be downstairs, which is okay, because she can sit or recline either in the recliner or on the sofa, and there’s a little dorm fridge down there for snacks and stuff. My sister is coming up tomorrow to stay a couple of days and help out, and friends have volunteered to bring over dinner Saturday and Sunday (tomorrow night’s dinner is still available if any of you have an overwhelming desire to feed people).
The outpouring of well-wishes through Twitter and Facebook has been simply amazing, and we appreciate the flowers (and yes, Otis, I will provide photos of me drinking beer out of the smiley-face mug). This has been a rough week, but all of you guys have made it a lot easier. So thanks. A lot.
This poem started life as a piece of a song that came to me in a dream, and I suppose I should be thankful it was as short as it turned out to be, since the last thing I wrote off a dream ended up around 65,000 words. I’m not sure where it’s going, but I think there’s something in there. Let me know what you think.
Homecoming
I drove back to hell today,
walked in through the front door.
I went back to see my brother,
mother and my sister
but my father said “I have no son”
and they turned me away.
I drove back to hell today,
stood on the front porch
crying to come in
while my mother stared right through me
my tears standing in her eyes.
I drove back to hell today,
but my sister would not leave with me.
She just stood there holding Daddy’s arm
grinning like she’d won a prize
’til I finally turned away.
by john | Feb 3, 2010 | Real Life
And I’m not. Except in an SEO-building post title, because I’m a traffic whore.
So things yesterday could have gone better, but I don’t fault Suzy’s doctor for the things that went wrong. The plan was to perform a laproscopic hysterectomy, which would reduce her recovery time and leave her with only two small incisions on her abdomen, one in her bellybutton and one on her side. The ovaries would be left in place unless there appeared to be something wrong with them once the docs were able to make the judgement on site, as it were.
Well, the best laid plans and all that. Once the surgery began, the docs realized that due to the healing from a myomectomy Suzy had six years ago when she had several uterine fibroids removed (the largest was a benign tumor the size of a baseball) there were adhesions going on inside her abdominal cavity. Basically what happened (or at least as it was explained to me) was that as scar tissue formed from the myomectomy, the bowel, bladder and other things kinda stuck to the uterus with the tendrils of scar tissue. That made is very crowded in there, and in the process of trying to remove these adhesions, the surgeon cut Suzy’s bladder.
On the one hand, that’s a bad thing. On the other hand, if you are given a choice between having your bladder cut during surgery and your bowel, you’re going to take the bladder 100 times out of 100. So when that happened, the docs went ahead and opened her up to fix the bladder and finish the surgery. The decision was made at that time to remove her ovaries as well as her uterus to prevent the potential for ovarian cancer, because if they had to go back in later the risks would be pretty dramatic. So they removed her uterus, ovaries and cervix, fixed her bladder and sewed her back up. This added an hour to her recovery, and will lead to a recovery time of more than a month, with Suzy having to tote around a catheter bag for the next couple of weeks.
Now in our litigious society, one of the first questions that comes to mind is “can I sue anyone over this?” I don’t feel like there’s a real “yes” anywhere. Of course I could sue, but I don’t think there’s much point. Medical malpractice isn’t the same thing as an accident. If I’d smelled whiskey on the doc when he came out to tell me about the bladder problem, I’d have a lawyer already. But I didn’t. I honestly believe that this guy became a doctor to make people feel better, and to help improve and lengthen their lives. I honestly believe that he made a mistake in his procedure, just like people screw up at work every day, and the mistake was in not immediately reverting to an open incision when he saw the adhesions he had to deal with. But he made that mistake with my wife’s best interests at heart, and in the interests of shortening her recovery time and causing her less pain. And I can tell by the look on his face today when he saw her up and moving around and already on solid foods, that he feels like he dodged a bullet with this one, and that she is really healing much faster than he expected.
So while I’m probably not going to go out of the way to recommend him as Surgeon of the Year, I’m also not going to pillory the man, either. He’s got a motherfucker of a job, and I don’t begrudge him that one. But at the end of the day, Suzy’s going to be fine. She’ll be here in Presbyterian Hospital, room 767 until Friday, and then we’ll take her home where she’ll be on bed rest for another week before she’s back to doing much, but after that it will be life pretty much as usual. So that’s where we are, and where I am, and why I’m there. So thanks for all the Facebook messages, and tweets and emails and texts, I really appreciate it.
by john | Feb 2, 2010 | Writing
So I know there are a lot of writers that read this, and I hope a few more will as well. The Red Dirt Review, Charlotte’s latest and greatest literary magazine, or at least the one that’s mine, is now open for submissions. I’m looking for the best of the South, and the best of the friends of the South. If you’ve ever lived in the South, been drunk in a ditch in the South, driven 14 hours each way to hang out in a bar in Greenville, SC, or owned an album by Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash, you qualify.
Send me your best poetry, short fiction (1,000 words or less) or short nonfiction (same deal) and as long as it doesn’t suck out loud, I’ll print it in our first issue come March 1. And since you’re obviously someone of discerning taste or you wouldn’t be reading here, I have the utmost faith that it won’t suck out loud. Send submissions to editor@reddirtreview.com. I need stuff by February 14th to make the March issue.
