Ponderings and Musings

So I’m in the third day of recovery from my recent surgery and things are coming along. My jaw is still a little swollen and numb from where the doctors took skin from the inside of my mouth to be used for the graft. It’s healing well, it’s just going to take some time.

After the first surgery on January 28th I was told that I could take sponge baths and an infrequent shower, but only if I wrapped myself in Saran Wrap and didn’t let water hit any of the surgical area. When I was discharged from the hospital on Saturday I was told that I could resume regular showers again after 48 hours, so tonight I took my first real shower in over a month. I even took time to shave my head again and that did wonders for starting to feel normal. With the jaw being a little tender still I decided to have some scruff on the face for a few more days. I’m sure there won’t be complaints.

The doctor’s office called to follow up on my progress and to schedule my follow-up appointment, which is for the last week of March. I can go three weeks with having a tube coming out of my parts if in the end things are going to work like it should so I’m not complaining. I’m still on a bunch of meds until then, so driving is a no-no and I’m definitely not in any shape to fly an airplane. I knew this would be the case and that’s why the timing is planned as it is. I’ll be ready to be airborne when the nice weather hits for the year (right now Mother Nature is a little erratic).

Earl is doing a bang-up job as my nurse. I think he’s enjoying cooking bland meals for me to eat (no salty or spicy food while the donor site in my mouth heals) and he’s keeping all these meds on the appropriate schedule. He also tells me to stop running my tongue over the healing area in my mouth on a routine basis. It’s amazing how quickly the skin in your mouth heals. Right now it’s basically like having a 6 cm x 2 cm canker sore in there. I have a little numbness in my lip but that has slowly been subsiding.

This is one of the many occasions where working from home is a wonderful thing. I spent most of the day writing code and I think most of it made sense. It’s rare that I can write a script that works on the first try without any bugs but I was surprised when something worked as planned on the first draft this afternoon. Perhaps I should work under the influence of prescription meds all the time.

The name of the game is relaxation and healing and that’s what I intend on doing. I’m still following the news and catching up on television, but I’ve found myself unplugging from the world and just enjoying quiet and contemplation from time to time. When I was in the hospital they offered me the television on several occasions but I never turned it on, just listening to the world happen around me was enough.

Sometimes it’s the simple things that lend themselves to the best medicine.

I have a fairly old Twitter account. I was tweeting before the days of smartphones, when you would send a text message to a number and your tweet would appear. I’ve always enjoyed the concept of Twitter, a chronological, live feed of whoever had the same interests as you. It was a great way to hear what was happening in other parts of the world. Early on I realized it was excellent for finding out about news instantaneously.

Then something changed. Twitter became political. Twitter became about branding. Twitter ramped up the self promotion. Everyone was jumping on Twitter to add their voice to the chorus, to the screaming. Ever since the run up to and especially since the 2016 U.S. Elections, Twitter has become a swamp. A moat of a swamp around the dumpster fire that has overtaken Washington, D.C. The President of the United States, bless his heart, belches out tweets with regular irregularity, trying to distract the populace from the real travesty (his administration). Folks attack one another. People call each other names.

But the better thing about Twitter is that people also unite. Protests get organized. Voices are heard. Electronic chants are shared. And despite all the screaming and the name calling and the raging dumpster fire, Twitter gives people a voice. 

And voices deserve to be heard.

I keep thinking I’m going to work in negating my social media presence but those thoughts are folly. I have a voice. I want to tweet. I want my voice to be heard.

Even if it’s on the edge of a raging dumpster fire.

I am making a commitment to write at least one blog entry every day during the month of March. This little challenge is to write a blog entry with a bit of substance. I need to say something instead of just posting a photo or a music video or something. I feel like I need to continue to contribute to the ever shrinking blogosphere. Perhaps this challenge will spark a return of the blog as a form of electronic expression. Written prose fueled by thought is better than burping out 140 characters on Twitter or dropping an intentional short-fused bomb on Facebook.

The key to maintaining this blogging habit is to remain committed to the task. With my final surgery scheduled for Friday and spring just around the corner, I’m feeling like I’m in a “reboot” mood. It’s time to grab a hold of what’s left of 2017, take it by storm and mold it to what I wish it to be. 

I suppose there’s been a lot of people feeling political depression since the latter half of January when our new president (and I use that term loosely) took office and started treating the White House like a second rate Walmart. If you take a step back and assess the entire picture, you can totally see the ilk of Kellyanne Conway in sweat pants and smeared mascara making her way through the “family planning” aisle after midnight at your local Walmart. Just close your eyes and imagine it. It’s really not that hard?

I’m sorry for that picture.

Earl and I are currently sitting in our local Panera, our iPads with keyboards back to back. I have my back to the wall, something I always tend to do in public, which gives me a birds eye view of what’s happening in this little chestnut of a pastry shop with casual service and casual food. A worker just used a stepladder to climb up on the counter where food is served. She walked across the counter swiping at something near the ceiling before stepping back down in a bit of a ruckus. The food on the counter was unfazed. No worries.

This is substance? 

A couple of weeks ago the groundhog said we had six more weeks until spring. Apparently he looked the wrong way when he was looking for his shadow because Mother Nature has decided to bless us with unusually warm weather this week.

Getting out in the sunshine has been doing wonders for my psyche. I’ve been feeling kind of blah, which is typical for me for this time of year, and being between my two surgeries hasn’t really helped the situation. Luckily my second surgery is a week from Friday and then it’ll be just a few weeks of recovery before things should be normal again.

Stepping out onto the lawn today and not going up to my knees in snow in the latter half of February was very refreshing. I don’t see any signs of dandelions yet, not even the precocious ones, but they can’t be that far away.

Because of the beautiful weather I’m in the mood to look for bright spots and one of them is that as a result of the Trump Administration, we’ll probably be having shorter winters and less snowfall as time goes on. Hopefully I’ll be checked out before the rivers boil.

In the meanwhile I’m just going to enjoy the warmth and sunny skies.

I’m starting to really feel the effects of SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder. Every year I go into the winter determined to not feel the winter blues but sure enough we go with three straight weeks of grey skies and I start to bum out a little bit.

There is some sun today, and I feel a little brighter for it, though it is still 17ºF with a wind chill of 8ºF at the moment. This weekend is suppose to be up around 40 and I find this encouraging.

To help counter the winter blues I occasionally start marching around the United States via Google Maps and look at sunny landscapes of places I’d like to visit or visit again.

In 2003 I drove home from Emmetsburg, Iowa after completing a computer training class in that lovely part of the world. I remember driving across the Iowa-Minnesota border on Route 4 and so I just picked a random spot along that route to gaze at for a few moments. I could almost feel the sun and warm breezes on my face again. The smell of the surrounding farms brought a smile to my face.

Every little bit of something helps.

I follow a lot of aviators on Twitter. I follow musicians, I follow fellow bloggers, I follow friends both from real life and those I’ve met online. I follow politically minded people.

This morning I decided that I needed to shut down Twitter for a few hours.

I noticed that I’ve been checking Twitter upon waking each morning to see if there’s been some sort of global catastrophe, because my spidey sense is worried about what looms on the horizon and let’s face it, the country has been a bit of a dumpster fire since the Inauguration.

My Twitter feed has been all about politics. Well, that’s an exaggeration. My feed has been about 98% politics. My tweets have followed the same ratio. My handful of followers know how I feel on any given subject.

Today I just had to step away from it all for a little while and just practice some breathing exercise to get my head back to center.

The reboot helped. I no longer feel overwhelmed and I feel ready to continue the quest to do my part to make the United States the best it can be.

Onward and onward. Now if we could just do something about the dumpster fire.

I am having surgery today. This surgery is part of the saga that has been going on for most of my life, and the subject matter might make some readers uncomfortable. I share these things so that others that share my issues may read about my experiences. I will not be offended if you do not complete this blog entry.

For some reason, many doctors suspect that it was because I might have rammed my parts into my bike when I was young kid, I have scar tissue that likes to grow in my urethra. This is not hugely uncommon among men; the scar tissue is called a stricture and it makes it difficult to urinate. Don’t worry, everything else is functional and I’m happy in the sex department.

I have had four surgeries to remove the scar tissue to open things back up. They started back when I was 13 years old so, with surgery in 1982, 1986, 2005 and 2015. Since the last surgery in 2015 I have used a catheter on a daily basis to keep things open. In the back of my mind I knew it was a stop gap measure and there have been times that I’ve had to use the catheter two or three times a day to keep things feeling and working the way they should. Shortly before Christmas the catheter went the wrong way, I had a lot of blood come out and then scar tissue started filling in the gap again.

In the 2015 entry I mention that there is another procedure that they can do that should correct the problem permanently. This involves taking some skin from the inside of my mouth and grafting it where the scar tissue is in my urethra, thus completely eliminating the scar tissue instead of just cutting it back and hoping that it doesn’t come back. My urologist wanted to do this procedure the last time but it was summer time and I wasn’t in the mood to be down for the count for 10 weeks or so during the summer, so I opted out. It wasn’t a mistake, but it ultimately just delayed the inevitable.

So this morning I am having what is called a Supra-pubic catheter put in so things can “calm down” in my urethra. This catheter will be a small tube between my belly button and my junk. I figure if folks fighting cancer can have ports installed to go through chemotherapy, I can run around with a pee tube for five weeks. So after today and through March if we talk face to face, I could be peeing in your presence and you wouldn’t even know it.

In March, if all goes to plan, I will be having the second surgery, where they’ll do the skin graft thing and rebuild the parts that are currently damaged. I will then have two catheters for a few weeks, a traditional one that makes some men shutter and the other pee tube that I’m getting today, the latter being the backup plan if something goes wrong after the reconstructive surgery.

When all is said and done, I should be as good as new. I should be able to pee across a football field and if I don’t have one of those handy, at the very least blow toilets off the wall like a superhero but without the laser beams.

The success rate of this type of procedure is 90%-95% for long-term success and as all the medical information I’ve read on the Internet says, “should be considered the gold standard as a solution for this type of problem.” The previous surgeries have a very low long term success rate so it’s comforting to know that my body is behaving just as doctors expect.

I’m apprehensive about the length of time for the procedures and the recovery; when all is said and done it’ll be like 11 weeks of prep and recovery time. But, other than a couple of weeks after the reconstruction part in March, I should be able to carry on just as I do today, albeit with just a little extra hardware. I did it before in 2015 and I can do it again in 2017.

I’m looking forward to not living with this issue anymore; all my life when I’ve had to go the bathroom I’ve had to say a little prayer, “please let everything work”.

From now on I know that everything should just work.

In November 2013 I took a solo trip to Minneapolis because I had never been there and it was a non-stop flight from Syracuse on Delta. It was the first time I ever sat in First Class.

I planned on just exploring the city and picked out a reasonably priced hotel downtown. Much of downtown Minneapolis is connected by the Skywalk, which allows one to walk from building to build throughout the downtown area without ever going outside. When I left the hotel on my first exploration of the Skywalk, I suddenly realized that I was staying adjacent to the IDS Center, which was the location of many shots from the opening to The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I found the escalator that Mary had used.

I had to take my own photo.

Then I looked up and saw the restaurant where Mary and her then husband Grant Tinker are having lunch in the opening credits.

I ate lunch in the “Mary Tyler Moore booth” that day.

I was absolutely delighted to find this piece of Americana while visiting Minneapolis. That trip was life changing for me, for it was during that trip that I decided that it was time to become a private pilot.

Mary Tyler Moore passed away at age 80 today. I’ve always enjoyed her show and hearing the theme song and seeing clips from the show has made me smile today.

Love is all around. Thanks for the smiles, Mary. RIP.