End of Year Post (Includes Personal Update of Sorts)

I was laid up for a week in the middle of December with a kidney stone, which I still have, but I had a stent put in about 2 weeks ago that it is keeping me from being in pain while my system gets cleaned out. As it is likely too big to pass on its own, I am going to have to have another procedure soon to get it out but hopefully the recovery from that will be fairly quick. Between the four days of pain before I had the stent put in and four days I had to spend attached to a catheter afterwards I was pretty depressed at the beginning of last week. However after a couple of sluggish days even once I got the catheter out I have been feeling more like myself again. While I don't like allowing myself to get into the clutches of the medical system, and they took the opportunity of my presenting myself to them to draw blood and run a bunch of tests on me, there was good news in that apart from the stone I appear to be pretty healthy. One of my remaining goals in my life as a nominal member of the downwardly mobile former white middle class is to live long enough not to contribute to the in some quarters celebrated decline in life expectancy that has become a signature characteristic of this group, so I am (cautiously) happy about this apparent state of affairs.



As this was the first time in my life that I have had any problem requiring real medical intervention, as I noted above, it had a depressing effect. It was not a terribly serious problem, but it effectively took a week of my life from me, insofar as I wasn't able to drive or go out or eat or drink very much, and while I could read a little, the discomfort I was in made it difficult to derive much enjoyment from it. While the days when I had the catheter in were not as painful as what had come before, it was difficult to move around and while I won't say that was worse than being in pain, in that stage I was at least thrashing about and I couldn't concentrate as much on how depressed I was. When I was in bed with the catheter I was looking at photo albums of myself when my children were younger and we were at the beach and going on trips and eating and drinking and I thought "there is my old life, when I was healthy and strong, before I had this thing attached to me", as if all the happy part of my life were over and I would never be able to leave the house or do anything enjoyable again. It certainly made the prospect of getting prematurely sick or terribly old much more vivid and terrifying than it was previously. Even for a few days after I got the catheter out and being able to return to my routine, which I thought would energize me, I still felt rather flat and out of it. At that point I hadn't done much to take part in the Christmas season, and I didn't know if my mood would allow me to enjoy anything very much. But this week I have felt much better and have in fact been unusually happy, which kinds of mood swings are not uncommon with me anyway. I don't even care about the bill anymore. If it takes three years to pay it off so be it. I always want to be a good little dog of course and honor all my debts but I have had to learn to accept some limits with regard to how dogged I am in these responsibilities so as to not impinge too much on my actual life you know.


Three days before I went to the hospital was my 20th wedding anniversary, which was a lovely day. My beautiful wife even took off from work to hang out with me. We drove up to the Lakes Region of New Hampshire with our 2 year old (everybody else being in school) and had lunch at a venerable restaurant that has been in the same family since the 1950s and retains much of the atmosphere of those bygone days, which makes it a favorite of mine. Being both a weekday and well off-season for vacationers, there weren't many people there, but one of the perks of spending the winter up here is getting to go to popular places, assuming that they stay open, when they are quiet and calm.


I was given percoset to take to manage my kidney stone pain before they could get the stent put in. As this was my first experience taking an official opioid I was mildly concerned about developing an addiction that eventually spiraled into the ruination of my life and a premature death of the sort that I imagine would be amusing to my imaginary social rivals. While it did do an admirable job, once it kicked in, of dulling the force of my pain (I was scrupulous about not taking it more frequently than at the recommended 4-6 hour intervals), once the pain went away I felt no desire to take it any more. One interesting note I have about it is that I happened to be reading a late Henry James novel (The Awkward Age, fwiw) when this all hit and of course this was impossible to try to read before I got the medication. However when the percocet did take effect, as I had nothing else to do, I did find for an interval everything to be so slowed down and calm that I was able to read this somewhat excruciatingly dense and subtle book with much more penetration and less distraction than I was in the more normal state in which I tried to read the book before and after the period in which I was drugged. So in addition to controlling pain, one other useful function of opioids at least seems to be as an aid in reading Henry James novels.


Percoset also tends to induce a fairly heavy sleep, and when I was taking it I had the most drawn out and boring dreams I have ever had in my life. There was one where I was in a department store walking around a long table on which various customers had set down piles of purchases and I was taking an inventory of the piles: one green shirt, one red skirt, one washcloth with Pac-Man on it, etc. And I literally went through this process like 18 times! In another one an airplane I was flying in broke apart as it entered a hanger and the passengers were left floating in the air on individually numbered planks that were attracted to velcro magnets bearing corresponding numbers that were held up by numerous Africans standing on high platforms inside the hangar. As my plank, which was #34, drifted in the direction of the platform, it was apparent that the velcro on magnet 34 was worn off and the attraction was not working, meaning that my plank was going to crash at an inconvenient angle into the edifice towards which it was moving. I was shouting at the Africans that the magnet wasn't working and for them to help pull me up onto the platform as I approached it, but no one seemed to hear or understand me and I woke up just as I was about to crash into the tower...


I didn't have any new Christmas videos that I liked enough to put up this year, and we are already three days past anyway, so I guess I will skip it.


This is probably the last posting I will be making here this year, bringing my total for 2017 on this blog to a whopping 11 (I did manage to make 30 posts on my other site, which is a record for it), the eighth straight year that my post total has declined here. I have to think this will be the nadir, and next year I can manage to get that total up again somewhat. I hope so anyway.