It was a good morning. Both of us (and the pets) were almost awake, getting ready to go to work and other places. Lunch was packed and I was suddenly face-to-face with my wife and her beautiful new purple shirt. What made it more beautiful than other shirts, purple aside, was that it showed more chest than normal (no naughty bits, in spite of this blog's theme). So I gave her a nice, romantic kiss in that general area. We were impressed but the pets went about their business, non-plussed; one appearing starved and the other waiting for the starving one's food.
Fortunately it was time to go to work. When I say fortunately, I am fortunate to have a job. I am, however, still allowed to bitch about being up in the morning. When in the car, the wife ordered me to scrape the windshield. Of course I had to scrape the windshield.. I was already in the car. This is a metaphor for our relationship. It's also a direct statement about the weather here. As we know, Pennsylvania's state bird is the cloud, and this lovely display of weather did nothing to dispel that fact: it was miserable, gray, and had frozen drops all over the car. We know the sun exists, it's just that we wonder why it doesn't come round to visit now and again. Anyone following the news will know that the Northeast has been threatened with snow for the past month. Lucky for us the weather forecasters are always wrong and we've barely gotten any snow. Instead we've gotten frigid temperatures and bits of precipitation, almost constantly. Last weekend we hit forty degrees and the bikinis were out all around. Brian Williams saw his shadow and won't be on tv for six weeks.
So as I was finishing up the windshield, I detected a really horrible taste developing in my mouth. It got worse and worse until I finally realized where it came from: my wife's chest. Apparently women put perfume there. And I inadvertently ate some of it. Off we went to Dunkin Donuts, for some coffee to get the taste out of my mouth. Other candidates were soda, windshield cleaner and lye.
I know I'm late to the party but I was/am so sick of the Stupidbowl that I almost can't describe it. But I shall anyway. In an unearthly first, I was invited to attend a party. In an even stranger first, I accepted, largely as this was my best friend and there were likely to be football-free zones.
There were, indeed, football-free zones, sorta, but there were still too many televisions (defined as more than zero or one). I'm kinda like Charlie Brown and Lucy (or Homer Simpson) with televisions: I look at the motion, realize it's sports, look away, then see the motion again and look....
I don't care who Brady Bellechek is and don't want to hear his name anymore as long as I live. It's not enough that there is a game.. I have to hear about it until I'm blue in the ears. I hear about it on the news station. I hear about it on the rock station. I even hear about it on the public radio station, which I had hoped would be free of sports, at least after the first day. The only thing worse than this is the item, and I use the term loosely, about deflated balls. I have no real idea what's going on here but I have been bombarded by it every moment of every day, no matter whether it's television, radio or the web. The first time I heard anything of this, it came up on my alarm in the morning. I can be excused from incredulity (and sense) when something starts talking at me before seven in the morning. As I grew further awake, I heard something about deflated balls and just assumed this was some kind of comedy routine. It became a really popular comedy routine when I noticed that the evening news and even Sunday's edition of Shoot the Press mentioned it. If they have so much damn trouble with their balls, why don't they ask the cheerleaders to blow them back up and get on with the event? The politicians must be up to something when this is the lead story for days. You'd think that there was a Kardashian involved, for all the press coverage.
Yesterday in England was the first Visit the Mosque day. This was a hastily conceived bit of press, thrown together after the Charlie Hello attacks, designed to invite outsiders into mosques to prove that Muslims are not all terrorists. One Muslim lady complained about having to apologize all the time for the actions of the terrorists. I suspect she should be having that conference with the terrorists, not the press. The theme of the day was We'll Blow Up that Bridge When We Come to it. Seminars were offered too: Be Nice to Christians Day, Not Murdering Your Neighbors, and Improvised Explosive Devices. All of the usual British suspects, with all of their comical British accents, ventured out from their quaint little towns to inspect the mosques. They were declared fit and now life can continue in England (at least until something blows up there).
NOTE: be careful reading this blog, as it may be booby-trapped. And boobie-trapped. Furthermore, it may explode.
Showing posts with label kardashians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kardashians. Show all posts
Monday, February 9, 2015
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Regis, Kelly, the Geneva Convention and a Colonoscopy
It's not like I meant to get up at six in the morning: usually that's reserved for things I enjoy doing. But I smiled (sort of) and did my husbandly duty, escorting my wife for her diagnostic procedure this morning.
Before you have a diagnostic instrument inserted into your choice of orifices, there's generally some sort of preparation. This can range from simply not eating to taking all sorts of interesting medicines, with what one can only describe as spectacular results.
My wife, being the woman she is, went for spectacular. And why not - she deserves some spectacular in her life. [FAB-u-lous!]
The way it was explained to me, my wife's plumbing is like her husband - a little slow. As a result, she had to go with the half-week super-spectacular preparations. Rather than explain it to you, let's just say it involved pills, ginger ale, a hamster and four to six midgets.
I'm reasonably certain I missed the best parts of the prep. The only thing I really witnessed was her talking to me one moment, then leaping like mad for the bathroom (with one crazed cocker spaniel attempting to keep up). It would have been amusing if it weren't so downright hysterical.
I don't know what side effects the medicinal preparation claimed but in total they had the effect of turning a perfectly normal (and FAB-u-lous!) woman into a gas-spewing man. From all available outlets. It was like the guys digging in your yard hit a gas main and couldn't quite figure out how to shut it down. Between gaseous exhalations, my wife found this quite amusing.
The musical question then became `how do you convince a dog who knows how to open the bathroom door to stop it'?
I don't know how she did it but she finally went to bed. I was terrified to get next to her but as there were no rhythmic tents appearing and disappearing, I figured it was probably safe. The dog seemed relatively unaffected, serving as my canary in this particular coal mine. And wasn't I lucky that there were no noises as I crawled into bed..
Her phone went off at four o'clock. Never mind, I thought, that's just email. Bless her heart, she left email notification on. I can only guess at the treasure that felt the necessity to slam into her email at that time of the morning. Probably an urgent missive from some shopping site or a polite offer for Viagra.
After what seemed like moments, it was six. Even the dog wasn't interested in being awake. He kept wondering what his mommy was doing and feigning sleep so she wouldn't drag him outside. To no avail.
When the hospital tells you to be there at seven, they're not kidding. And when I say not kidding, I mean that the time of arriving is arrived at by a complex numerical and illogical process so secret that nobody in the entire chain knows what it is. Therefore they just throw out a time and hope people show up.
Check-in is a breeze, almost like a cheap motel, only forty minutes longer. There are over seventy separate forms that must be filled out with information such as third nephew's cell phone number and husband's favorite dessert. The twin ironies here are that
I don't know about you but our medical premiums have gone up nearly fifteen percent yearly, with an accompanying leap in copays but no additional coverage. In order to keep down the number of people using the emergency room for primary care, they instituted a fifty dollar fee for emergency room visits, waived if there was an admission. Now it's a one hundred dollar fee, which becomes five hundred dollars if there is an admission. Now we need a fee to discourage people from staying home when they get sick.
Having said that, the fee for the short procedure unit was three hundred. I sure picked a bad time to work in an industry that doesn't get bailed out.
We were directed to a waiting room. Do you know why they're called waiting rooms? Because the doctors get some sort of perverse joy from making you wait. I knew a physician who couldn't wait til he could afford to expand his waiting room because it made him look even more important. He felt that the more people he could make wait, the better a doctor that made him. I wonder if he ever got properly medicated....
Sitting down, one could hardly miss the concert volume of the television, which was busy blasting the blasted Kelly Rippa show. We were spared Regis, as they are getting ready to watch him fade into the sunset. The joke is on them, though.... Regis has been dead for twenty years. The man makes Al Gore look animated (and I've only seen him in commercials).
I could hardly contain my excitement when I discovered that the cohost was Katie Couric. How they could fit that much cute on one show, no one will ever know. You'd think it would reach critical mass and explode on camera.
The larger problem here, content aside, was the volume at which this nonsense poured out of the hospital television. Mind you, my television isn't anywhere near as nice as the hospital television. I also can't charge people for watching it (or can I?). But it seemed as though the telly had an entire sound system for the express purpose of making patients deaf. Even the old people's ears were bleeding....
Just as we were attempting to become comfortable in the spineless seats set out for our lounging pleasure, we were escorted to a much nicer waiting room. Much nicer in that the television was not causing deafness (just partial hearing loss).
Did you know that blasting Regis and Kelly at the unwilling (and let's face it - who is willing?) is a violation of the Geneva Convention?
At this point, someone's relic of a relative walked in with a brand new computer system to take down the same old information. We asked her why wasn't it transferred from the perfectly fine old computer system. She mumbled a bit and asked us a few questions about President Roosevelt. Then only fifty or sixty of the same questions asked at check-in. She asked pages of questions then, almost as fast as you can say shouldn't be allowed near a computer, she deleted the answers. Some of her beefier coworkers came in and gently carried her away so procedures could start eventually....
You could have knocked me over with a feather: I had cell phone reception deep in the bowels of the hospital (oh great, a bowel reference... how clever). Well, there you have it: me saying something nice about T-Mobile (nah, the hospital must have set up repeaters indoors).
So I started waiting.
About ten minutes into my waiting, a nice staff member asked if I was with a patient (apparently she didn't remember talking to me ten minutes earlier) and said that I could wait in the original waiting room. Well sure, if someone would have asked earlier, I would have gone there. Certainly don't know to go there on my own...
Unfortunately, the Katie and Kelly Show had somehow managed to attain additional volume (and additional cuteness). With a pair of in-ear phones, cranked past Painful, I could not drown out the volume (and worse, the content).
Have you ever endured the pain of George Stephanopoulos discussing Dancing with the Stars on a morning show? Having to watch the premier of an Americans Idle winner's new album (fresh from the Noise Factory)?
As if it couldn't get any worse, Rachel Ray appeared. I know this is Rachel Ray from her Dunkin Donuts commercials, just like I know Regis from the Stupid Bank Commercials. In addition to being deceased, the man apparently has no nasal passages.
Rachel doesn't appear as overtly cute as Kelly, so I hoped for some semblance of sanity. In morning tv, you say? HA!
Luck just wasn't with me, as one of more attention-y whores of the Kardashian family came on to discuss Rachel and some connection they had. I had given up on my headphones, even to simply block out the cacophony. I was in such a bad state that I was starting to consider Christianity (or something) when I saw in the distance a vision. A very attractive nurse was holding up rags, attempting to call my name in semaphore.
They brought me to my wife, who looked worse than I felt. Perhaps they had Rachel Ray on in the operating room too.
But no; she was sitting up, hunched over (don't even attempt to visualize this), and rocking a bit.
Failing in the Witty Entrance Department, I asked if she was ok.
Major fail.
Apparently it was an interesting procedure, in which they did things that shall not be described nor repeated in polite (or otherwise) society. And then the aftershocks started. She was sitting there with what is referred to as an emesis basin but we regular folks call a puke bucket (in harvest gold).
She was making very good use of said basin, emesis-ing like a pro. Unfortunately with each surge of activity from the north, there was a corresponding blast from the south. The prep was still making her a man! If we could only bottle that stuff, we would end our dependence on foreign oil. And local oil.
And if we could have rocked her manually, we would have the most interesting and complex musical instrument Simon Cowell had never seen.
The problem, at the moment, was trying to decide what to do with myself. It was apparent that I could not be of any assistance. I was vacillating between making myself invisible, yelling SOMEBODY GET ME A DOCTOR, and laughing hysterically. I wisely chose invisibility (saving the hysterical laughter for the blog post I was already composing in my head).
You should be screened for All This Stuff<tm> when you reach a certain age or show symptoms.
PREP
Before you have a diagnostic instrument inserted into your choice of orifices, there's generally some sort of preparation. This can range from simply not eating to taking all sorts of interesting medicines, with what one can only describe as spectacular results.
My wife, being the woman she is, went for spectacular. And why not - she deserves some spectacular in her life. [FAB-u-lous!]
The way it was explained to me, my wife's plumbing is like her husband - a little slow. As a result, she had to go with the half-week super-spectacular preparations. Rather than explain it to you, let's just say it involved pills, ginger ale, a hamster and four to six midgets.
I'm reasonably certain I missed the best parts of the prep. The only thing I really witnessed was her talking to me one moment, then leaping like mad for the bathroom (with one crazed cocker spaniel attempting to keep up). It would have been amusing if it weren't so downright hysterical.
I don't know what side effects the medicinal preparation claimed but in total they had the effect of turning a perfectly normal (and FAB-u-lous!) woman into a gas-spewing man. From all available outlets. It was like the guys digging in your yard hit a gas main and couldn't quite figure out how to shut it down. Between gaseous exhalations, my wife found this quite amusing.
The musical question then became `how do you convince a dog who knows how to open the bathroom door to stop it'?
I don't know how she did it but she finally went to bed. I was terrified to get next to her but as there were no rhythmic tents appearing and disappearing, I figured it was probably safe. The dog seemed relatively unaffected, serving as my canary in this particular coal mine. And wasn't I lucky that there were no noises as I crawled into bed..
WHAT TIME?
Her phone went off at four o'clock. Never mind, I thought, that's just email. Bless her heart, she left email notification on. I can only guess at the treasure that felt the necessity to slam into her email at that time of the morning. Probably an urgent missive from some shopping site or a polite offer for Viagra.
After what seemed like moments, it was six. Even the dog wasn't interested in being awake. He kept wondering what his mommy was doing and feigning sleep so she wouldn't drag him outside. To no avail.
When the hospital tells you to be there at seven, they're not kidding. And when I say not kidding, I mean that the time of arriving is arrived at by a complex numerical and illogical process so secret that nobody in the entire chain knows what it is. Therefore they just throw out a time and hope people show up.
Check-in is a breeze, almost like a cheap motel, only forty minutes longer. There are over seventy separate forms that must be filled out with information such as third nephew's cell phone number and husband's favorite dessert. The twin ironies here are that
- they asked for all this information last time
- they don't need it - it goes right into the shredder
I don't know about you but our medical premiums have gone up nearly fifteen percent yearly, with an accompanying leap in copays but no additional coverage. In order to keep down the number of people using the emergency room for primary care, they instituted a fifty dollar fee for emergency room visits, waived if there was an admission. Now it's a one hundred dollar fee, which becomes five hundred dollars if there is an admission. Now we need a fee to discourage people from staying home when they get sick.
Having said that, the fee for the short procedure unit was three hundred. I sure picked a bad time to work in an industry that doesn't get bailed out.
AT LEAST IT WASN'T KATHY LEE
We were directed to a waiting room. Do you know why they're called waiting rooms? Because the doctors get some sort of perverse joy from making you wait. I knew a physician who couldn't wait til he could afford to expand his waiting room because it made him look even more important. He felt that the more people he could make wait, the better a doctor that made him. I wonder if he ever got properly medicated....
Sitting down, one could hardly miss the concert volume of the television, which was busy blasting the blasted Kelly Rippa show. We were spared Regis, as they are getting ready to watch him fade into the sunset. The joke is on them, though.... Regis has been dead for twenty years. The man makes Al Gore look animated (and I've only seen him in commercials).
I could hardly contain my excitement when I discovered that the cohost was Katie Couric. How they could fit that much cute on one show, no one will ever know. You'd think it would reach critical mass and explode on camera.
The larger problem here, content aside, was the volume at which this nonsense poured out of the hospital television. Mind you, my television isn't anywhere near as nice as the hospital television. I also can't charge people for watching it (or can I?). But it seemed as though the telly had an entire sound system for the express purpose of making patients deaf. Even the old people's ears were bleeding....
Just as we were attempting to become comfortable in the spineless seats set out for our lounging pleasure, we were escorted to a much nicer waiting room. Much nicer in that the television was not causing deafness (just partial hearing loss).
Did you know that blasting Regis and Kelly at the unwilling (and let's face it - who is willing?) is a violation of the Geneva Convention?
At this point, someone's relic of a relative walked in with a brand new computer system to take down the same old information. We asked her why wasn't it transferred from the perfectly fine old computer system. She mumbled a bit and asked us a few questions about President Roosevelt. Then only fifty or sixty of the same questions asked at check-in. She asked pages of questions then, almost as fast as you can say shouldn't be allowed near a computer, she deleted the answers. Some of her beefier coworkers came in and gently carried her away so procedures could start eventually....
WAITING ROOM. AGAIN.
You could have knocked me over with a feather: I had cell phone reception deep in the bowels of the hospital (oh great, a bowel reference... how clever). Well, there you have it: me saying something nice about T-Mobile (nah, the hospital must have set up repeaters indoors).
So I started waiting.
About ten minutes into my waiting, a nice staff member asked if I was with a patient (apparently she didn't remember talking to me ten minutes earlier) and said that I could wait in the original waiting room. Well sure, if someone would have asked earlier, I would have gone there. Certainly don't know to go there on my own...
Unfortunately, the Katie and Kelly Show had somehow managed to attain additional volume (and additional cuteness). With a pair of in-ear phones, cranked past Painful, I could not drown out the volume (and worse, the content).
Have you ever endured the pain of George Stephanopoulos discussing Dancing with the Stars on a morning show? Having to watch the premier of an Americans Idle winner's new album (fresh from the Noise Factory)?
As if it couldn't get any worse, Rachel Ray appeared. I know this is Rachel Ray from her Dunkin Donuts commercials, just like I know Regis from the Stupid Bank Commercials. In addition to being deceased, the man apparently has no nasal passages.
Rachel doesn't appear as overtly cute as Kelly, so I hoped for some semblance of sanity. In morning tv, you say? HA!
Luck just wasn't with me, as one of more attention-y whores of the Kardashian family came on to discuss Rachel and some connection they had. I had given up on my headphones, even to simply block out the cacophony. I was in such a bad state that I was starting to consider Christianity (or something) when I saw in the distance a vision. A very attractive nurse was holding up rags, attempting to call my name in semaphore.
IS IT SUPPOSED TO SOUND LIKE THAT?
They brought me to my wife, who looked worse than I felt. Perhaps they had Rachel Ray on in the operating room too.
But no; she was sitting up, hunched over (don't even attempt to visualize this), and rocking a bit.
Failing in the Witty Entrance Department, I asked if she was ok.
Major fail.
Apparently it was an interesting procedure, in which they did things that shall not be described nor repeated in polite (or otherwise) society. And then the aftershocks started. She was sitting there with what is referred to as an emesis basin but we regular folks call a puke bucket (in harvest gold).
She was making very good use of said basin, emesis-ing like a pro. Unfortunately with each surge of activity from the north, there was a corresponding blast from the south. The prep was still making her a man! If we could only bottle that stuff, we would end our dependence on foreign oil. And local oil.
And if we could have rocked her manually, we would have the most interesting and complex musical instrument Simon Cowell had never seen.
The problem, at the moment, was trying to decide what to do with myself. It was apparent that I could not be of any assistance. I was vacillating between making myself invisible, yelling SOMEBODY GET ME A DOCTOR, and laughing hysterically. I wisely chose invisibility (saving the hysterical laughter for the blog post I was already composing in my head).
SMALL PRINT
If you are to have any sort of procedure involving tubes and orifices, it will not go this way (at least in terms of gas, emesis and pain). You will absolutely fall victim to the hospital and its staff but that's as it should be.
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