Gardening and surgery

As August nears, my garden is entering my favorite time. That time of course is harvesting tomatoes. Unfortunately I will undergo another (and hopefully final) surgery to remove my stoma and return my bowel to their natural order. This of course means I won't be able to enjoy my delicious tomatoes for a couple of weeks in the middle of August. Hey, at least there is always September.

Gastrointestinal surgeons = Milton (from Office Space)

Sometimes I need to recognize the knowledge base of the people I talk to. At work, I'm surrounded by engineers where my conversation comfort level is peaked. However, in the hospital, I have dumbfounded several nurses and doctors with my questioning. For instance, I often joke about replacing various body parts with better materials. This leads me down a material selection process which effectively kills the conversation. I even asked a surgeon what material the staples inside me where made of. He didn't know. So I Googled it.

In my quick search for surgical staples, I found something more interesting. The special staplers used in the operating room. My surgeon needed at least two different staple guns to repair my intestine and skin along the incision. Then it dawned on me. GI surgeons have their very own staplers just like Milton. Try to take them away, and they'll blow up the hospital. Just kidding.

Unwanted knowledge

The last few months have exposed me to a world of new factual tidbits. Most of which are medically related. Here they are:

1. Alway bring your own bottoms to the hospital. The bottoms they have are way to big. I seriously asked if they had kid sizes. Unfortunately, kids go to a different wing in the hospital so that was a no. There is nothing like wearing pants that are three sizes to large to accentuate a dramatic weight loss.

2. Cleanses are for people that don't want a colonoscopy. The fluid you drink before a colonoscopy cleanses you just fine. That's how you know it's working. I have pictures of my colon and it is clean.

3. Salt is absolutely the best flavor enhancer ever. It's even better then MSG. Don't believe me, try not eating for a month to realign your perspective.

4. The worst time to be watching basic cable is from 5am to 8am. Many cable stations go to paid programming at some point, but 5am seems to be when the last hold-outs give in. Conveniently, I did my best sleeping around this time during my last hospital stay.

5. A hospital is the worst place to work (at least for good paying jobs). Think about it, you spend all your time in close proximity to sick people. Then if you ever become sick or inured, you get to spend more time in the hospital. I'll take a fishing boat any day.

6. I'm slowly becoming the most ironic man ever. I live in the fattest country on earth, yet I'm trying to gain as much weight as possible. Luckily, we have an endless supply of white bread and cheese to aid in my quest. Plus, low calorie fillers like like vegetables and almost all fruit are off limits. Maybe this is a true American diet.

7. I didn't realize the appeal of tablets until I sat in a hospital bed for two weeks. I can do more on my phone then I can on my IPad (thank you android), but there is still that allure of a larger screen. Combine that with the desire to lay around and you get the target buyers for tablets. Tablets are for people that think it is worth loosing 90% of a laptop's functionality for the smaller form factor. I hope to use the IPad very little once I'm fully recovered.

8. The foods I craved the most when I wasn't eating anything in the hospital were: ice-cream and ribs. After going to a liquid/easily digestible diet: pizza, tacos, and ribs.

9. Us engineers really need to come up with an alternative to the human body. Seriously, this thing is rife with problems.

10. The people that speak the loudest are usually the people I don't want to listen to. This certainly applies to the Internet. When researching Crohn's disease, I found many people/websites making some serious claims based their own experience, or outdated facts. Unless you believe that doctors are trying to keep you ill to extract more money, these people are full of shit. Every health related topic is like this.

11. JFK dealt with some serious health issues. Learning this makes me think much more highly of him.

12. Apparently your stool is liquid until it reaches the colon. This makes me think, why do we have a colon? Sure it extracts moisture, but how much energy and space would be saved if it wasn't there. Evolution has neglected the bowel.

13. People are uncomfortable talking about bowel movements. Get over it, because I will go there.

14. Hippies/greenies and etc must be really upset with amount waste generated by the medical industry. Everything that is sterile comes in a plastic bag, and since everything is sterile...

15. Sitting next to a person in the hospital bed tends to be worse than being that person. Until you get leave of course.

16. The taste of nutritional energy drinks are highly dependent on cost and calorie content. For instance, Ensure < Ensure Plus, and Off brand < Ensure. Thus far my favorite is the homemade vanilla shake Ensure Plus. I can drink it warm. Carnation Instant Breakfast THC vanilla is a close second. If this is an important topic to you, let me know. I have more knowledge to share.

2011...The year of pain

This year started great. I moved to a new position at work, bought a house, and Casey moved in with me. I spent much of my free time working on the house including building a raised garden bed. I was hoping to spend my summer watching the crops grow up and produce delicious foods. Then July came and completely destroyed all the happy thoughts for this year.

In May, I went to the emergency due to pain in my lower right abdomen. The initial diagnosis was a ruptured appendix. Unfortunately, that turned out to be false. The real diagnosis is Crohn's Disease. I started treatment to keep me in remission, but as the I tapered the medication down another flare occurred. On June 30th, I returned the emergency room for four days. The doctors believed that I would get better but wanted to start more aggressive treatments. Eight days later I returned to hospital before any more treatments. Which brings me to my current state. I've been in the hospital for two weeks now and it appears that I will be released in the next week. The problem is I cannot eat or drink anything due to a hole in my bowel. So I'll be on IV nutrition while at home. In six weeks I will get surgery which will hospitalize me for another two weeks with a six week recovery time. I only hope is that I will start to put some weight back on before the surgery. I've lost 30 pounds in the last three weeks. I was already thin, but now I look sickly.

Through all this my number on craving is ice cream. How I long for the day where I can have a vanilla soft serve ice cream cone. I'll settle for a milkshake though. Stay tuned for more depressing blog posts. The most depressing thing, I'm ready to buy an Apple product. Sitting around all the time, and I finally get the point of the Ipad/tablet revolution.

Second Hand Hippie

Living in Portland is having a disturbing effect on me. I now think of how "green" things are. It's a color!

Recently I bought some weed-killer, and when spraying said weed killer I thought, "isn't there something that is less harmful to the environment". Luckily I kept on spraying. Theses tendencies are becoming everyday occurrences. I always think to recycle before I throw garbage out, and all those plastic bags mock me for not giving them the heave ho. Some of my food purchasing habit fall into this neo-hippie realm of buying local. This is not a purposely green behavior (see my other blog post for more info).

So what will cure these hippie tendencies? The only corrective action I can think of is quite elegant in its simplicity and joyfulness. Watching South Park.

SLC vs Puddletown

Casey and I just got back from a brief visit to Salt Lake City. Here is what I took away from the experiance.

Food:
Hands down, Portland is a better food town. I'm not sure of the reason, but the Foodie in me was not satisfied. SLC (or Utah in general) needs to find a signature food or and master it. That would make me happy. For now, I'm just spoiled with delicious breakfast places all over town each serving up a unique twists on old favorites. As transportation costs increase, I'm worried about the cost of shipping most quality foods a greater distance. The vegetative diversity of the Pacific Northwest is tough to compete with.

Weather:
The first day was nice. The second day was not. I definitely get the feeling that days of rain are less frequent that day of dryness. Growing up in an semiarid climate, I would enjoy that.

Driving:
SLC definitely has Portland beat when it comes to driving. Less congestion, wider roads and etc.

Like I said, it was a brief trip.

New Year for most of us

Returned to work after a three week break. I manage to forget my login password at work. It is a first for me, and it feels pretty good. Half of the three weeks was spent buying a house and recovering. The other was typical holiday rituals. I received a Kindle for Christmas, and I must say it is great. This piece of technology really makes me want to read more books. There so many works that are now public domain in electronic form, I can easily download and be reading in a classic in a matter of minutes. Even after spending some quality time with an Ipad, I can honestly say that I would not consider using it as an e-reader. There are simply to many distractions on it. Why read when I can play a video game or surf the web? Plus, plus! Battery life. As with all mobile electronics, the battery simply under-performs. Less time charging is a huge win in my book (pun intended), and don't forget about the eye strain from staring at a backlit screen for hours.

So new years resolution time. They are usually lame, and never happen. Of course, many people are using it as motivation for a big lifestyle change. The problem is they just don't realized it. My gym is fairly small and I usually recognize 75% of the people in there. That number has dropped to about 10% during the last two days. The numbers are fuzzy, but they still get my point across. Losing weight and getting in shape takes more than dieting and exercising at the beginning of January. So I get to work out in a much more crowed environment until people finally give up on their dreams resolutions. Now back to my New Years resolution. I decided that I need to eat more pizza. I'm not sure the best way to quantify it to make achievable, but my best attempt to try one new pizza place every month. I will blog later about such visits. Maybe someday creating a master pizza ranking list of the greater Portland metropolitan area. The answer to the question your asking is yes - I really like pizza. You might be thinking that pizza once a month isn't much, why not more? Or, how do you stay thin with all this talk of food? The answers to your questions are already provided in this paragraph. So let me reiterate anyway. I don't eat pizza that often so I don't have to make New Years resolutions about losing weight, and stay thin by going to the gym year round.

Blog post over.