WHILE IN THE ER, A LITTLE TASTE OF HEAVEN

Shot up with Thorazine and enjoying a tuna salad sandwich box while waiting for the Thorazine to take effect. No lie, I love hospital box lunches, with tuna salad being my hands down favorite. Delicious!

BACK IN THE ER

From my Facebook page.

I swear, I just cannot catch a break.

After I ate my breakfast of oatmeal on Friday morning, I began to hiccup but could not do my trick with downing and purging 40 ounces of water to stop them, due to needing time for the food to at least partially digest before I do it, and I finished breakfast maybe fifteen minutes before my car would show up to take me to dialysis. I would just have to endure roughly six hours of hiccups until I got home, where I would do the water purge.

 

Dialysis went fine, and when I got home I did the water purge and got some brief relief. As I was hungry, I hauled ass to the Chinese Popeye's in Sunset Park and enjoyed my favorite meal on their menu, the 5-wing combo. But as I rode the bus to Sunset Park, the hiccups began again. They were quelled while I ate, but they started up again on the bus ride back home.

 

Upon returning home I did the purge trick again, but it provided relief of maybe ten minutes. Over the hours between 5pm and 2:30am I did the purge trick seven times, with the same results. As of 3am, I just did the water trick again and I have utterly voided my system and I feel like a spent tube of toothpaste. That said, the hiccups stopped for another ten minutes, but then they kicked in again, only with less intensity, instead manifesting as spasms of my upper GI tract without any shortness of breath. As I write this, they have decreased to roughly two-second intervals.

 

I am exhausted but I am now also too tired to sleep. I wanted to avoid another trip to the Brooklyn Presbyterian Methodist Hospital's ER, especially in the wee hours, when the place is like something out of Heironymous Bosch, but I am packed and ready to head over there. STAY TUNED

ER AFTERGLOW

Upon getting home from the ER, I slept solidly for approximately 9.5 hours. Ah, blissful sleep without catheterized elders, ghetto thugs, or schizoaffective drug moochers...

SHIT OUTTA (SUN) LUCK

Sun Luck, my go-to Chinese takeout joint, just changed ownership and name (to something I did not bother to remember), and the new owners have changed the menu to an alarming degree. 

When I went in a half hour ago, the place, which is usually glutted with people making and picking up takeout orders, was shockingly empty. The aged placards illustrating the dishes that were once available, with their prices, were now gone and the walls were bare. They also appear to have restored dining in, but no one was seated and eating. I saw and greeted the usual counter guy, who looked miserable, and without looking at the new menu I attempted to order some ribs and an order of yung chow fried rice, but neither exist there anymore. I then looked over the new menu and found that all of my favorite items are gone and the menu is now more generic, seemingly designed to appeal more to the local white hipsters who don't frequent the place anyway. I was not impressed with its bare bones offerings, so I turned around and walked out.

I have gotten takeout from Sun Luck innumerable times during the 25 years I have lived here in Park Slope, and the white-a-tizing of it fare has cost them having me as a customer. (Not that they care.) Hopefully my reaction is a common one that will make the new owner rethink what they have done. 

Oh, and they also raised the prices to a ridiculous level. $12.75 for chicken fried rice? Go and fuck thyself with a hot wok.

REGARDING THE NOVEL OF JAWS (1974): STICK WITH THE MOVIE.

The 1974 first edition of JAWS. If not for the superb film adaptation, would the source novel even be remembered today?

I'm about halfway through the audiobook of JAWS, a novel I have not read since perhaps 1976. I remember finding it boring, especially when stacked against the film adaptation, and that's because the movie trims all of the unnecessary fat from the book. 

The book spends a lot of time on a sub-plot about the slimy mayor wanting the beaches to remain open because he owes money to the mob and the drop in tourism caused by the closure causes tourist not to rent or but summer lodgings, and a mobster has his finger in that potential pie of profit. Much is also made of the attraction between Chief Brody's wife and marine specialist Hooper, and both sub-plots bring the narrative to a screeching halt, utterly forgetting the situation with the shark sometime for a chapter at a time. If the movie had remained fully faithful to the source novel, I kinda doubt that it would be the revered classic that it is today. 

The book is a summer reading potboiler at best, and if you ask me, author Peter Benchley happened to be in the right place at the right time and with the right page-turner for the American book consumer in 1974. Worth reading for the curious and also for those who want to see what birthed the movie. For all others, you can give it a polite miss. It's not terrible, just mediocre.

 

 

AAAAAND I'M BACK IN THE ER YET AGAIN

 

I am once more in the hospital, this time at Mount Sinai, and for the same reason as what landed me at Brooklyn Presbyterian-Methodist. I opted for professionalism over convenience of location, and I am grateful that I did, because there were minor chest pains involved. Nothing serious, likely just irritation due to muscle fatigue from all the hiccuping. I’m being kept overnight for observation and thus far my heart is testing out fine, though I am scheduled for an echocardiogram tomorrow. Please keep me in your thoughts and stay tuned. Oh, and do NOT tell my mother. She would only freak out, which she absolutely does not need. And now, some much-needed sleep.

 

A DAY OF BURNOUT

I try to be strong, I really do, but there are times when I just burn out and today was one of those days.

After two trips to the ER within nine days, plus the regular time and energy drain that is dialysis treatment, returning home from the hospital in the wee hours last night left me mentally and physically spent, so I crashed hard and slept soundly for something like nine hours. I then got up to have some breakfast, but after I ate I just felt too wiped-out to do anything other than return to bed.

Sheer mental and emotional breakdown, so I ended up back in bed for about four hours, bundled up under comforters while listening to Douglas Adams reading THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY on low volume. It registered mostly as mumbling, as I wanted the sound mostly as ASMR — when I want bedtime sounds that I can really pay attention to while going to sleep, my go-to is Stephen Fry reading Greek mythology and/or short stories by Oscar Wilde — and I spent the hours of that audiobook in a state where my mind had more or less turned off. Not quite asleep, but definitely not awake and alert.

My head just needed a serious time out.

MORE FUN IN THE ER

It's 1-something in the AM and I just got home after another trip to the ER.

I discovered an ugly open wound on my left big toe and, being a diabetic, I was concerned that it might be another case of infection like a few months back. So I hauled ass to the ER at Brooklyn Presbyterian Methodist and landed on a night when the place was packed and the staff was super-busy. I waited for two hours before I was admitted, and once inside the ER I was shown to a lounge chair where I sat for another two hours before getting my foot X-rayed.

 

After that it was back to the lounge chair, but I managed to finagle a bed in the aisle — it was a dialysis day, so I was exhausted to my limits — and a box meal featuring one of the hospital's stellar tuna salad sandwiches (seriously, I love them), fruit cup, 1/2 pint of low fat milk, and some apple juice. I enjoyed the repast, and some time later a podiatrist showed up. She told me the toe was definitely not infected, and then she debrided a good deal of the dead, callused flesh away. I was also set up with a local podiatrist to call and book an appointment with, which will spare me having to schlep all the way up to Mount Sinai for the same service.

 

Anyway, I am finally back at home and exhausted after a day spent in two medical environments for a toital of just over ten hours. Oy a broch...

RETURN OF THE LIQUOR MAN: THREE'S COMPANY(?)

Today's driver for the journey home from treatment was the infamous "Liquor Man," and I found myself in the role of his therapist.

He was freaking out over having been involved in a threesome with a pair of swingers over the weekend, a threesome where he was one of two men involved. He got into it because the woman in the equation was "a Dominican chick with a so-so face, but that slammin' Dominican body," but her partner was a black dude who stipulated that he would get to have sex with Liquor Man. I'll spare you the graphic details, but after Liquor Man had his fun with the woman, he found himself on the receiving end of a solid buggering from the guy, which led LM to note "My ass still hurts from it. Extremely painful." The freakout was due to LM realizing he's not into guys, but he liked the way the guy touched him. That revelation was punctuated with numerous utterances of "I'm not into guys" and "It's just not for me."

I spent the half-hour ride assuring him that the experience does not make him gay, and if anything it served to clarify his stance on his sexuality, and hearing that made him feel better about something he swears up and down he will never do again. And bear in mind that the guy is a fat, unattractive 50-something who you would not look at twice of you saw him on the street.

Oh, and he also went into more detail about his early-30's career as an oral sex prostitute to bored housewives. He claims he plied that trade for nine months and enjoyed it very much, but he quit after encountering a client whose state of feminine hygiene was roughly equivalent to the bottom of a particularly nasty birdcage. (Not how he phrased it, but you get the idea.) It was like hearing Fred Flintstone confess his hidden history in the most crass and graphic language imaginable, and due to his face, the sound of his voice, and his body language, I believe every word he said, no matter how absurd and unlikely this unattractive slob of a guy getting up to Skinemax shenanigans. His fear and confusion over his sexuality in the wake of getting raunched up the fudge tunnel was 100% real.

UP MY NOSE WITH A COPPER HOSE

 The eagerly-awaited manoscopy went well, though having a camera on the end of a catheter shoved up my nose, down my throat, and into my stomach was...interesting. It was new state-of-the-art equipment, so a team watched the procedure and learned in the process. My gastroenterologist will review the findings and get back to me soon with where we go from here, but for now, SLEEP. (Insomnia once more plagued me, and I had to be up at 6:30 for 7:30am arrival at the endoscopy concourse. Worse, the COVID test that I sent in was too old by three days, so I had to go out of the hospital to a rapid results COVID test truck around the corner for an up-to-date test. That only delayed matters by a half hour, but still.)