10 November 2008

hulked

Hey hep cats! Feeling existential? Let's rock it.

Therapy has been therapy, of course. Some sitting, some weight training, all sorts of Giger and RTI bike. Such is as you likely predicted. Nothing profound really happened in the three sessions (WFM) since the last post, other than constant flak for my previous statements about weights, so let's move on to something more gory.

Beware, the following is not for needlephobes...

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My hands are hilariously rainbowed again.

If possible, when I need to have blood drawn or an IV inserted, I have it done in my hands. This choice is for 1.5 reasons: first, I can't really feel sharps in my hands (that's an ASIA 0-1 on pin prick sensation, for those in the SCI-testing leet); also, kind of the same reason, I'm way way hypersensitive in the normal elbow poke zone. Then I've been stuck a million times in the past week or so. It started with surgery day last week, when they first tried to put the IV (and simultaneously draw blood) in my left hand several times, unsuccessfully, and blew a vein in the process. The IV eventually went in the right hand. You might guess that all of this was sufficient to turn my hands wonderfully green - hence the title of the post.

But wait, there's more! I take blood thinners because I had a hardcore clot in 2005; thus, surgery messes up my regimen, since thin blood is dumb when I'll potentially be cut up, and afterwards I have to monitor very closely until everything's back to normal. In other words, I had to go back and be poked again on Wednesday to check up. This one was not so great because they didn't have any of the tiny butterfly needles around, so we used the next-smallest ones on hand (pun pun pun). Let's just say it was not a particularly small weapon.

Then I had to go back in today for another check. Yay! This time we did have a butterfly, but I was not sacrificing quickly, so filling up the bottle took a long time and lots of pokes. I predict that in a few days, both of my hands will be purple and green to the point of featurelessness. It reminds me a bit of my Portugal experience - at any given time, I would have at least four IV leads in either hand... I was green up into my forearms. They really wanted to turn me into the Hulk, I guess. Eu não posso fazer!

Optimistically, as I said, I don't really feel it in my hands, so none of this has been a big deal. In contrast, if any of these pokes would have been higher in my arms, I think I would've had to injure someone.
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End nasty needle stories!

Worse than all the pokes is this lovely Detroit weather! All last week it was 60's-70's and gorgeous. Weekend: cold/rain/sleet. This morning on the way to therapy it was snowing. Summer clearly told fall to shove it and cut straight to winter. This isn't all too different from c-ville weather, but what's bad is, where a little below freezing and a bit snowy is as gross as it gets in mid-IL, I know this is just the beginning of Detroit's, umm, beauty?

Hmm, what else? Watched Juno again. Still awesome. Got the That 1 Guy discography. Addicted. For those of you who like extremely strange music - Nate - this is great stuff. It's like Ween with a whamola. What could go wrong? Nobody even knows what I'm talking about.

Ok, that's as far as we'll go for now. Sure took a bunch-o-commas. Keep an eye out for JLink's Complete Guide to Pharmacology, coming soon. Stay warm and such.

4 comments:

  1. i was waiting for you to say 'JOHN SMASH' throughout that whole post.

    still sending <3s your way anyway.

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  2. The word verification thing for leaving comments on your blog always gives me things that are either actual words, or things that are like words. That strikes me as being a poor protection.

    Anyway, keep on surviving, coolhands.

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  3. eh, it would be most effective if the captcha were completely random letters, but the human feels more comfortable if they recognize it as a word. it's hard enough to read, anyway.

    further, the captcha is there to prevent bots from spamming your comments. using real words opens the comment system up to "dictionary attacks", where the bot can guess from a much smaller domain... but since it's really hard for bot systems to read captchas in the first place, and the word changes each time, it's good enough that the bot can't guess correctly very quickly. it's more important to make it a little easier for genuine commenters than barely harder for bots.

    our network security mantra is to make things "hard enough", not "impossible" - because it's impossible to make security impossible.

    pardon the IT lecture, home boyee. rock it.

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  4. hahahaha john you're my hero talk internets more plz kthx.

    ReplyDelete