« January 2005 | Main | April 2005 »

March 18, 2005

March Madness Part 1

I'm 14 for 16 in the first round of the NCAA tournament yesterday. Damn you Creighton!!

Posted by aellis at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2005

Lasers shooting into my eyes

I went for LASIK treatment on my eyes yesterday. And it didn't hurt. Just a little pain when the doctor pressed this suction thing into my left eye. Now dealing with contacts is a thing of the past.

Modern medicine is truly a wonderful thing. The more I think about this technique, the more amazed I am. They peel a little flap off the surface of your eye, they shoot some lasers into your eye to change the contour of your eye, and then flip the flap back onto your eye. Who would even think that was possible?

The process was a little easier for me than most people I think, because I got to watch them do it to Claudine. So as they were doing it to me, I knew what was happening. I think it would have freaked me out to have all these little things jabbing, pressing and cutting into my eyes if I didn't know what they were.

Now my sight is 20-15 in each eye. There are times when everything I see is a little *TOO* sharp. It almost hurts to see this clearly. Because even with contacts, I'm sure my sight wasn't 20-15. It's as if my brain has gotten used to having a little blurriness for so long that it can't process all the data it's receiving now.

Posted by aellis at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2005

Popsicle Face

popsicleface.jpg

Posted by aellis at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2005

Accelerated Recovery

Apparently my wife's body is so happy to be rid of that mutant adrenal gland that it cranked up the healing process. She is cleared to come home today. Claudine sounds very happy on the phone this morning albeit a little tired. The one thing she kept repeating was how *different* she felt. I guess all those chemicals that the mutant gland was pumping for the last couple of years really put her out of whack.

Also on the schedule today: Take the kids to see Robots. Since Claudine wasn't supposed to come home today, I thought going to the movies would be a good distraction for the kids. But now that they've been looking forward to going, I can't not take them now. So movie first, then my mom is coming over to watch the kids while I go pick up Claudine.

Posted by aellis at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

Medical Woes

Sorry about not updating more often. Things are a little wacky around here. Claudine went into the hospital this morning to have her left adrenal gland removed. After it was over, I looked at her and said, "You seem *less* of a woman to me now". Meaning - ha ha - you are missing part of your body, there is less of you now. Which isn't really *that* funny. At all. Fortunately, she was still groggy from the anesthesia so I don't think she really heard it at all.

She had a really rare thing called a pheochromocytoma which I believe is Latin for thing on your adrenal gland that fucks you up. Possibly. Or not.

Anyhoo, Claudine had been having all sort of wacky 'episodes' where she would experience hot flashes, anxiety, rapid heart rate and the urge to kill the children and me (I might be making up the last one - it's possible she just wanted to kill me). Our regular doctor heard all these symptoms and said "I'm sure you don't have a pheochromocytoma - why don't you take this test and rule it out." Which turned out to be the best thing he could have done because if a pheochromocytoma goes untreated, it just keeps pumping chemicals into your body until your heart spazzes out and you die.

So this morning we went into the hospital really early and had them take the sucker out. Now she's in the ICU being monitored around the clock to make sure her blood pressure doesn't ramp up or drop to low. Because an adrenal gland containing a pheochromocytoma has the ultimate defense mechanism. When it senses that something is invading the body to remove it, it sends out all sorts of nasty, unregulated chemicals into the bloodstream. Kinda like a bee that knows if it stings, it will die. That gland pumps stuff out with its drying breath (if, in fact, glands could breath).

Claudine should be in the hospital until Sunday or Monday. And then she'll be out of work for 1 - 2 weeks. After that, she should be better than she's been in a long while.

Posted by aellis at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2005

Irony

Mozilla's Firefox browser got a security update yesterday. It addressed what I thought was an ingenious attempt at fraud by the hackers out there. Firefox didn't distinguish between letters from two different alphabet sets. So if you created a link called www.paypal.com but used the "a" from the Cyrillic alphabet set instead of the Latin alphabet set, (because they look the same in both alphabets) you could send browsers to a totally different website. Who thinks of this stuff?

Frankly, I'm amazed that Firefox even differentiates seperate alphabet sets. Ironically, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is safe from this particular scam because it can't.

Posted by aellis at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

Wow. Just.... Wow.

Here's a lovely news story. I think this quote says it all:

St. James Davis had severe facial injuries and would require extensive surgery in an attempt to reattach his nose, Dr. Maureen Martin of Kern Medical Center told KGET-TV of Bakersfield. His testicles and a foot also were severed...

Posted by aellis at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2005

She can clearly see she's getting older....

Although February was pretty crappy for me, there were two notable things that happened to Claudine. One was that she turned 36 at the beginning of the month. The other thing was that she had Lasik surgery. It's basically the same success story that you've heard from others: She couldn't see anything without contacts/glasses and now her eyesight is 20/15. Now I have an appointment with her doctor to see if the same can be done for me. Although my eyesight is not nearly as bad as hers was.

Posted by aellis at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

It never ends....

U.S. Senator Urges Indecency Rules for Cable-TV Shows

This drives me crazy. Does the government have to stick their noses into every facet of American life? Didn't the Republican party used to stand for less intrusive government? I want my Republican party to go back to being focused on capitalism and not morality. Can't we get a third party in the U.S. eventually? I'm no fan of the Democrats and I'm getting a little sick of the Republicans lately.

Posted by aellis at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

Why New Jersey Is Different - Part 1

There are two things that are odd about New Jersey. "Only two?", I hear you ask. Well, only two that I'm going to bring up now.

Posted by aellis at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)

Good Riddance, February

Sigh. God, February sucked.

The last your heard from me was whether I was going to shovel snow after having a vasectomy. What you might have heard right after that was the loud crack of my back and following closely, a shrill scream. Because, you see, I am an idiot. Claudine was on call that weekend and needed to be in the hospital because some woman (I *think* it was a woman) was going to have a baby. Ok, it probably *was* a woman. Claudine was being proactive and using the snow blower because she wanted to spare me the task of clearing the driveway after having my little procedure. In *my* stupid helpful way, I grabbed a shovel to help her. I started clearing the sections that you couldn't reach with a snow blower.

Have you ever heard the sage advice, "Lift with your knees, not with your back?" Yeah, me too. There is a lesser known codicil to that advice that says should say, "Except after a vasectomy, when you shouldn't lift at all. Because you won't want to bend your knees - it'll hurt your balls if you bend your knees. So just don't do anything involving snow, shovels or lifting." It's a pretty long codicil. But it's still valid. Very valid.

And so I was laid out by sore testicles and an incredibly sore back that made me tilt forward and to the left. And my back stayed sore for about three weeks. As my back was starting to feel better in mid-February, I was cleared by my doctor to try out my snipped bits. And so Claudine and I did with great rejoicing. About four days after the great rejoicing, I started to get a dull ache in my left testicle. It got more painful each day. And then the swelling started. Oh, how the swelling started. Once again, I was tilting to the left but not because of my back.

Just because you have a vasectomy doesn't mean the body doesn't produce sperm - just just stops the sperm from leaving the body. But they have to go *somewhere*. The theory behind this is that once the little sperm tubes are cut, your body will reabsorb the little swimming carriers of DNA. But not every part of the body is always that happy with this new responsibility. Sometimes that part of the body goes on strike. That part of the body just sits around getting fat and causing pain. Much like a striking Teamster. So I had to lay off the "great rejoicing" for another two weeks.

And I had lay off everything else too. Like working out, running, any type of exercise at all. The only thing I didn't lay off of was feeling sorry for myself and eating whatever food got near my mouth.

Stupid February.

Posted by aellis at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)