Fireflies

A few weeks ago, MLW took the mini-BG in for her yearly heart check-up. It's a new doctor now, since the prior one no longer sees children on account of his susceptibility to infection (owing to the fact that, get this, he had a heart transplant in the last year). This year went off without a hitch, primarily because the toddler's now of an age that she can be distracted throughout the tests by various cartoons.

Aside from getting her current stats (over 32 lbs., 3'3" tall), the docs found that her condition is great. Her heart is always going to be "noisy," since she still has a mass on the outside wall, but it has not gotten larger, and hopefully as she continues to grow it will remain the same size as her heart increases in size. She had to wear a monitor for 24 hours, which she'll most likely have to do every time she goes to a check-up, but she was a real trooper and reaped a reward of "junks" (anything sugary or extremely fattening).

Three years on, I'm less inclined to remember the exact date when the mini-BG had her surgery, as it was not an easy day to have lived through. In its place are these check-ups. Every year I'm able to convince myself that I view these appointments with a certain nonchalance, and every year I find that I've been unconsciously getting more and more tense as the time MLW takes her approaches. When I speak to her afterwords, I can almost feel myself unclenching.

That night, the mini-BG and I walked to our local park. I watched as she chased after fireflies, an insect she's only really discovered this summer. She was completely unmindful of the monitor and the leads that were taped to her chest, her concentration focused solely on those brief glowing flashes. I watched, and thought back, and was thankful.

The 39 Lashes

So, I had a bit of what turned out to be a mental health scare a few weeks ago.

First though, a confession: I had been struggling with cigarette smoking, and had been indulging in them at work (this is the "lashes" part of the entry). I was fully conscious of the health risks that came along with my inability to remain nicotine-free, but this was an addiction that I just couldn't seem to quit. Finally, my shame at what I was doing, the fact that I had to keep it a secret and the thought that, were I to shuffle off the mortal coil at this point I'd be leaving behind both MLW and the mini-BG was enough to strengthen my resolve. So, I decided that enough was enough and went cold turkey.

Some days later, I started feeling like I had a lump of mucus in my throat. Nothing that interfered with eating or was anything other than an annoyance, but when it persisted for a few days, I began to think it might be serious. Then I started to obsess about it. What if it was something serious? What if I was developing thyroid cancer? Or, even better, esophogeal cancer? I was so focused on it that I had trouble sleeping. Eventually, I stumbled across a definition for Globus, which fit what I was feeling exactly. So I relaxed a bit.

A few nights later, I woke up around 3 o'clock in the morning with a slight pain in my chest and some tingling in my left arm. Since I generally sleep on that side, I thought it was possible that I'd simply cut off circulation to my arm. But I was also thinking of my step-father, who had heart problems last fall. So after about a half hour of waiting, I woke up MLW and told her that I was taking myself to the hospital.

In case anyone was wondering, waiting in an emergency room still sucks. There were only about four people there when I showed up, and I may have been the only one who wasn't under the influence of some substance or other. Yet I still had to sit there for a good half an hour to forty-five minutes. I should have realized that this was a sign in and of itself: if I were really having a heart attack, I probably would have been taken right away. At least, I hope that would have been the case.

So some three and a half hours and an EKG, blood test and X-ray later, the doc on duty said that it didn't look like I was having any heart difficulty. And although he recommended that I check myself in for observation, I went home. I tried to sleep, but I was still very anxious. I called our family doctor as soon as their office opened and scheduled an appointment for that afternoon.

Our doc listened to my tale, ordered another EKG (still negative) and another blood test. He also wrote a prescription for me to get a stress test at the local hospital (who knew you had to get a prescription for a test?) and, when I told him about my throat, an upper gastrointestinal workup. I also told him that I thought that anxiety could possibly be contributing to my symptoms. He asked if I wanted anti-anxiety medication, but I told him that I was so exhausted that I didn't think I would have any problems sleeping.

It didn't take me long to call and tell him I had changed my mind.

I was able to schedule my upper GI before the stress test, and it came back clean. So, no esophageal cancer. However, the test had revealed something in one of my kidneys. At this point, I was pretty sure my ticker was in fine shape, and I ended up canceling the stress test. And I stopped obsessing about my esophagus. But now I started to worry about my kidney. Once again I was looking up symptoms on WebMD, finding out the warning signs for kidney cancer, its different stages, survival statistics and the like. I also called my doc's office for another appointment, this time for another blood test to check my creatinine levels and a urinalysis to check for blood.

Long story short, everything came back normal. What I'd not seen or heard (or possibly not wanted to see or hear in my anxiety-ruled state) was that the doctor who performed the upper GI had already made a preliminary diagnosis: renal calculus. Or, as it's more commonly known, kidney stones.

So there's nothing physically wrong with me, although I may be in one hell of a lot of pain in the next few months.

In addition to resolving to finally do something about my weight, something that I've put off doing consistently for a few years now, I've been thinking about what caused me to drop into this spiral of the worst-case scenario. Why did I immediately convince myself that I was likely in serious trouble? And, as MLW pointed out, how the hell am I going to cope when I do have a serious illness? I've got a (cute as all get-out) 3-year-old that needs me to be around and needs me to be able to keep my shiznit together.

That's kind of where I'm at right now. I'm trying to eat a bit more healthy (or at least not quite so crappily) and exercise a bit more regularly. It ain't easy, though; my body isn't terribly thrilled about giving up fatty red meat in favor of rowing my way to a slimmer me. But I've got 20 pounds to lose, and it's not going to get up and move out on it's own.

One last note of interest: my brain was actually able to manifest symptoms for whatever ailment I thought I might be suffering. When I was worried about heart trouble, my chest hurt; when I thought I might have kidney trouble, my sides hurt. When I knew there was nothing wrong with me, my pains just miraculously went away.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the other part of this entry's title, I'm currently 39.

My next bit will be somewhat more humorous and will contain dick jokes.

Get Ready to Wiggle

I'm not quite certain how I managed to pull this off, but I somehow managed to avoid contracting the flu that had afflicted MLW and the mini-BG. After my last post, our nanny also came down with the bug, so it's not like it wasn't contagious. I did have some persistent indigestion in the form of gas for a couple days, but that was the extent of anything untoward.

Mind you, me being the only person in the household not coming down with an illness never happens. MLW has an immune system like a...like a...well, something both healthy and sexy. So I'm counting myself extremely lucky.

In other news on the family front, the beach ghostlette has been going through an interesting stage the past few days of requesting that I adopt the persona of "Daddy Wiggle." This despite the fact that she really doesn't watch the Wiggles much anymore (although she did ask if she could see them in person this week). So in order to adopt this persona, all I have to do is attempt an Australian accent (which, while pretty bad to begin with, usually slips into an even worse attempts at Cockney) throw in the occasional "beauty, mate," and add the word "wiggle" to pretty much every noun in existence: wiggle toddler, wiggle cat, wiggle bet, and so on, ad infinitum.

What's particularly interesting about this phenomenon is that she's being much more reasonable about everyday requests when Daddy Wiggle makes them. Usually, dinnertime is a series of unending (and increasingly forceful) reminders about eating the food in her bowl. However, Daddy Wiggle only needs make these requests once.

So, the way I figure it, this is because she either:

--Likes the Wiggles
--Likes Australians
--Prefers Daddy Wiggle to my actual personality
--Wants to make certain her father keeps his role-playing chops up to par
--Is preparing for her own entry into the gaming world

Alternate theories being accepted in the comments.

The Sword of Damocles is Hanging Over My Head

The new year has not gotten off to a healthy start here in house beach ghost. Both the mini-BG and I came down with head colds immediately after Christmas, and I'm still somewhat congested a couple weeks later (by the way, there's nothing quite like waking up in the morning and coughing up a semi-hard lump of dark green phlegm. Yum!).

Then, the mini-BG woke up around 2 in the morning on Sunday night/Monday morning complaining that she was not feeling well. After injesting about .01ml of Children's Tylenol, she began vomiting, a process that she would repeat throughout the night at approximately every hour and a half. MLW began feeling nauseated yesterday morning, and felt so bad by the time she got home that she went directly to bed and has barely left it since. The beach ghostlette is still not 100%, but after a day of eating very little and drinking her own weight in fluids, she's probably over the worst part. Hopefully MLW will also be improved by the time I get home.

But I have a hunch that I'm going to be spending some quality time with the plumbing by the time the week is out. I'll let you all know what color things turn out.

Home at Last

MLW, the mini-BG and I spent Sunday at my mom and stepfather's (in a potty-training test of wills, but that's a post for another time) and then I stayed the night while the wife and child went back home.

After being transferred, the expectation was that my stepfather would be going under the knife early on Monday afternoon. When Monday morning rolled around, this time got pushed to later on Monday afternoon--and then he was pushed to Tuesday. Turns out an emergency case had come in, which had to take precedence. While completely understandable, the patient was getting a wee bit antsy. In a classy move, the hospital gave him and my mom a special dinner for two: surf 'n' turf. Unbelievably, some hospitals have recognized that their food service was, if you can imagine it, not quite yummy, and have even more incredibly decided to actually upgrade their culinary experience.

So Tuesday rolls around, he's dosed up on morphine and taken into surgery, while my mother, aunt, uncle and I get to...wait. And wait. And wait.

The operation was, from what the surgeon described, pretty much textbook. They needed to do four bypasses, but they had no issues harvesting the veins or attaching them. When we were brought in to see him, I pretty much knew what to expect, having had to watch the mini-BG go through it. He actually looked better than she did, partly because he was almost completely covered by blankets. He was intubated, and had a number of IV leads and a tube in his chest to drain fluid, but he looked pretty darn good, all things considered. The nurses still had some work to do on him, so we left the hospital and I went home. When I got there, it felt like I had been away forever.

Yesterday, he regained consciousness and they removed some of the leads and tubes, including the one down his throat. He was, as we expected, cranky as hell, and stated flat out that he wanted no visitors for the next day or so in order to get more sleep. He has stated his intention to be home by Saturday--more power to him.

The kicker to this entire experience was the fact that my stepdad had a pretty low risk factor for heart problems: his cholesterol was low and he had regular stress tests and EKGs. What he also had, as my mother discovered, was a family history of heart trouble. Had he not been smart and gone to the hospital when he first start having chest pains, the outcome of this ordeal would have been much worse.