brykmantra.com

Valentine’s Day is only two days away, but here in the BrykMantra household we start our celebrations a bit earlier, by commemrating Lincoln’s Birthday, because it was on this date in 1994 that we first … um … celebrated Lincoln’s birthday.

Three times.

OKAY SO ANYWAY: Twelve wonderful years; where does the time go?

My stimulant-challenged ordeal is over! Those weren’t necessarily the drowsiest 42 hours of my life, but I’m still feeling brain lag from missing all that caffeine.

Caffeine without don’t well do so me.

I’ve never been a big coffee drinker. I have maybe four to six cups in a year, like when I’m having sinus problems, or when it’s bitterly cold and I can’t warm up any other way — and can’t find anything else hot to drink, like soup or tea.

I also drank quite a bit of coffee in my temp years, in the early 90s, when the offices I worked at didn’t provide tea or ice, and I was too broke to bring my own, but that didn’t start me on the road to a coffee habit.

It’s a good thing, too, because it might have been a gateway drug to the hard stuff: Lattes, Mochas, Cappucinnos, and all those other fancy names that let Starbuck get away with charging 5 bucks for flavored water in a cup the size of my thumb.

In fact, disdain for Java is one of the many things my wife and I have in common, which is handy because among other things it eliminates the need to have a coffe maker alongside our tea brewer.

Which is not to say that the caffeine craving from coffee is much worse that than from tea or soft drinks.

In fact, as I mentioned in my previous posts, the buzz from ill-considered consumption of Cokes and Dr Peppers in my youth was the cause of many a sleepless night.

When Caffeine-Free Coke first came out, when I was in my 20s, I decided to try some. I was working at the credit union, and Monday was always our busiest (and most stressful) day, so I reasoned that maybe cutting out the caffeiene would help the stress.

So I took a two-liter bottle to work and drank it all day instead of my usual soft drinks. I don’t recall it really helping my stress level, because after lunch I started getting really fatigued, and a had a headache that no amount of aspirin would get rid of. I promised myself that as soon as I got home — assuming I made it — I would take a nap.

Before I got home, though, I stopped at Chinese Kitchen to get something to eat, hoping that might help me feel better, and in the course of that meal I chugged back about 6 or 7 small glasses of their strong iced tea …

And guess what: My headache went away, and I no longer needed a nap.

That was my introduction to caffeine deprivation.

That didn’t happen yesterday. I was dragging a little, and unfocused just a tad more than usual, but with no major physical symptoms.

That’s probably because I went cold turkey on soft drinks about three years ago, as part of cramming for a cholesterol test. My wife had recently started the low carb thing, and had explained the theories of how sugar contributed to the retention high cholesterol more than fats, so I figured I’d give it a try.

Because back then it wasn’t just soft drinks — I was going through a candy phase too — but I was drinking way too many, so after the cholesterol test (on which my results were disappointing, by the way), I just never picked the cola habit back up. Now, I only have one or two cans a month at most. I’ll sometimes get an urge for that caffeine-and-sugar kick, as well as the carbonation bite, but I just drink one and don’t get hooked again.

It didn’t seem like I was drinking a lot of Cokes back then, but now when I go into a convenience I’ll remember how I used to always get the largest size of fountain Dr Pepper that they had, in addition to all that I drank at work, and it’s a little shocking to remember my former consumption rates.

These days my caffeine is limited to iced tea and sugar-free Red Bull, and in recent weeks I’ve been cutting down on those — although this morning I did chug two in quick succession, just to get my system back in balance after 42-hours of stimulation loss.

And now I’m able to type without making mistakes every word.

Which is a good thing, I’m told …

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UPDATE: There’s was something I had in my mental outline to include with this post, but I didn’t make it to the draft stage: I was going to mention that my wife has been off caffeine for just over five years now, so she’s like, “Welcome to my world.”

It’s required major adjustments to her lifestyle, and the headaches were quite fierce at first, but she’s learned to adapt.

Makes my under-two-day ordeal seem petty, I know — but hey, it gave me something to blog about.

Pictured at right is my new closest friend — for today, anyway.

One of the many tests my doctor ordered this week is the 24-hour urine test. I didn’t even know there was such a thing, but it’s been running my life since three P.M. yesterday.

First of all was the requirement of no caffeine for 18 hours before the test, and for the duration of the 24-hours.

I said, “Okay, but someone is going to have to wake me up to take the samples.”

Seriously, my brain waves need all the stimulation they can get, and caffeine is my last vice. When I was in my twenties I thought I had insomnia, but then I realized that maybe if I would stop DRINKING DR PEPPERS AT MIDNIGHT, then maybe I wouldn’t wake up at 3 A.M. with my eyes as big as dinner plates.

Since then, I’ve been pretty good about not drinking caffeine after about 7 at night, at least on nights before I have to go to work.

But yesterday I had to stop at three, so I’m lucky I was able to drive home. I had a sugar-free Red Bull right after lunch, then right before the cutoff time I was chugging down a double-strength glass of iced tea, and I’ve been stimulant-free ever since.

And on a Friday night (and now a Saturday), the only nights of the week when I could have had regular iced tea later.

(And if my writing is rambling, now you know why; my thoughts don’t have the momentum to make that final leap between nerve endings.)

But back to the main point: I’ve been having to pee in a jug all day.

It seems like a simple thing, but the instinct to do business with the porcelain throne is a tough habit to break, so I duct-taped the lid down to make sure my specimens weren’t flushed away.

And here’s another complication: I’ve been have to KEEP THE JUG REFRIGERATED. That’s right: When I went to pick up the jug, the lab technician told me that I would need to keep it in the refrigerator.

Oh yeah, that’ll happen. I’ll just put it right next to the orange juice.

And besides the obvious hygeine considerations (and the general grossness of it), I’d really rather not get into the habit of walking to the fridge every time I need to pee.

For one thing, it could get confusing, especially in the middle of the night.

So I’ve been improvising: This morning when the weather was so cold I left the jug out on the back porch, then later I started keeping it in an ice chest lined with a trash bag and kept cold with ice and cold-packs. This has the added advantage that I can keep it in the shower instead of having to walk into the kitchen every time.

I guess my point here is that you don’t realize how much of a routine you get in for such simple things until something comes along to make it complicated.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pee in my jug.

Holy cats it got cold today. When I left the house this morning it was 55F, so I was wearing a thin shirt and light leather jacket. By 11 the temperature had plunged into the 40s and the wind made it feel like 30s or lower.

Still, I’m glad we’re finally getting a good hit of winter. I’ve been planning all week to make vegetable beef soup tomorrow, so I’m glad the weather is cooperating.

Plus, the more hard freezes we have in the winter, the lower the investation of bugs in the summer.

It’s Mother Nature’s preventive maintenance.

Check out this cool video mashup: Paperback Believer, a great combination of the Monkees and the Beatles.

I’ve only watched Arrested Development a couple times, because I have a low tolerance for David Cross, and that other balding guy (the younger one, not Jeffrey Tambor), and the bad magician.

But I figured I’d make an exception tonight, since it’s the two-hour series finale, and it’s pretty funny.

Well, it’s actually more like four half-hour episodes that they’re burning off, but it does seem to be wrapping things up.

But as I was saying: I figured I’d watch the last new ones, and it is a shame that no other sitcoms pack this much funny material into a half hour.

Now if only they could make a show like this minus some of the more annoying characters and actors.

Back to the cold weather: I wouldn’t have been out in the wintry weather if I hadn’t been surprised with having to go to our new building for a training session on our new phone system. Can you believe we don’t currently have voice-mail? That’s because our phone systems have always been old castoffs from The High Holy Corporate Office.

Of course, voice-mail has its drawbacks. I worked at a company with voice-mail in 1991, and I hated it. We were working more for our messages than it was working for us.

But that was 14 years ago, and it looks like the technology has come a long way since then, so I’m willing to be open-minded.

One more note about the training: One of the 3 other people in the training was Fract_L, whose name you may recognize from leaving comments here. She didn’t directly threaten me with bodily harm if I posted that picture of her with the green hardhat perched high on her head, but I am able to read between the lines in situations like this …

One of my favorite new commercials these days is the Target commercial that uses the 60′s song “(Nothing Can Change) The Shape of Things to Come”. Like all that store’s commercial of the past few years, the ads are visually crisp and entertaining, but the song on this one brings it all together.

And to tell the truth, I barely remember the song. It was used in the 60′s those-hippies-are-evil movie, Wild in the Streets. which I’ve seen, but I still didn’t recognize the song.

At any rate, the commercial’s cool, so watch for it.

Last night’s Lost was pretty good (Holy cats, can you believe what Charlie did just to get back at Locke!??) . I’m not going to review the whole episode, but just point out one thing: Remember the waitress in the diner? That was Kate’s mom.

Seriously.

You’re welcome.

Know how old I am? I’m old enough to remember when Steve Martin was funny.

I stopped by Fry’s today and checked out their MP3 players, but they’re still not at my storage-to-price point. Since I’m not young, single, or trendy, I don’t have to impress anybody by paying too much for an iPod, but I’m still waiting for prices to come down. Right now, anything under $100 only has 512MB of storage, which is 100 songs or so. I figure that 5GB would be a nice acceptable capacity, even though I have 64 gigs of music — seriously; no joke — on one of my drives.

Of course, 20 or more gigs of storage would be better, but I’m not willing to pay what one of those would cost, so I’m willing to put up with swapping out 8 percent of my total horde on a regular basis.

But for now, I’m still waiting for my impatience with my portable CD player to outweigh my unwillingness to pay the slowly decreasing sums of money it takes to buy a player with inadequate memory.

Got that?

Okay, I’m saving this for last: I got the results from my biopsy back yesterday, and they were on the low side of mixed.

I’ll put it this way: The best-case-scenario still involves surgery.

The good news is that the tumor in my lungs isn’t lung cancer.

The bad news is that it’s neuroendocrine cancer. The doctor ordered about a million dollars worth of further tests to see if it’s also in my midsection, like that kind of cancer can do..

Meanwhile, I had another chest x-ray today to try to get over this pneumonia that started this whole ball rolling.

I think everybody feels sorry for me — and don’t get me wrong, I’ll take all the pity I can get. Pity makes it easy to exceed expectation.

But I don’t feel bad (except for the lingering pneumonia, of course) , and I’m sure not depressed. I can take whatever life dishes out, and there’s lots worse things than what I’m going through.

It’s a new adventure! Wheee!

Okay, enough of this sick talk, let’s do some music:

Tonight was the first post-audition episode of American Idol Season 5, and my wife, who you may remember used to sing professionally, already has her pick to win: Paris Bennet.

Time will tell if she’s picked a winner.

Check this out: The (supposedly) best musical mashups of 2005, are available for free download. These 20 remixes include tunes by ZZ Top, Nirvana, and the Blackeyed Peas.

I’ve downloaded the zip file but haven’t listened yet; I hope it’s not full of fuzzy, muddy edits like those Danger Mouse edits like The Grey Album and The Mouse and the Mask.

Still, some of the mashups I’ve heard (like the one combining Avril Lavigne with 80s ska band The Selecter, and Pink with ELO) have been so great that I’m looking forward to the gems this download might hold.

I haven’t mentioned this yet, I don’t think. I’ve been working with Cool Edit 2000 and Screenblast Acid 4.0, but a couple of weeks ago I found newer versions of both on Ebay, along with a package of 9 discs full of loops, effectively increasing my loop library by about 50 percent.

I have Cool Edit Pro 2.0 installed, and the loops copied to my hard drive, but I haven’t had time to play with it yet.

So let’s got do that now, shall we?

Then let’s crash for the night.

Okay, hopefully I won’t be talking about my lung thing too much longer (assuming a good result on my biopsy), so let’s quickly cover the events of yesterday:

Registration at the hospital (at SIX FREAKING O’CLOCK) was fairly painless; even the amount I had to pay in advance was just over half of what they robbed me for last week at the CT scan.

Then they led me to my “room” — it was actually just a grotto, an indentation in a wall, with a curtain — had me put on the traditional patient miniskirt, and wait. They came and took a blood sample from my right arm, leaving a dark purple bruise. Then, even worse, they stuck a needle in the back of my left hand — a needle that they taped there that they didn’t take out. Not only did they not take it out, they taped it down, excessively, then attached a tube to it and taped that excessively too, all over my arm hair.

But the important point here is: The needle in the bony back of my hand FELT REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE.

But anyway: One really nice feature of my recovery roomlet was a small TV mounted on a retractable metal arm, with an amazing array of channels, including G4 (the video game channel), Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network. There was no clue as to which networks were assigned to which channel numbers, but contunual channel-surfing with my left thumb helped keep me sane through the whole process, taking my mind off the upcoming procedure, and later providing a cool little ad hoc light show for the last of my happy-juice high.

Which brings us to the procedure itself: When the blood tests came back okay (for typing and clotting), the doctor who would be performing the procedure came in — his name was John Sullivan, a fine Irish name! — and went overthe process with me. He asked if I had any questions, and I said that there was something that nobody contacted with the whole thing would yet give me a straight answer on: If this growth on my lung is not, um, The Big C, then what else could it be? “Oh, well, it could certainly be an infection. Those are impossible to tell from malignant lesions on an x-ray.”

At last — a straight but reassuring answer. The best I could get from other sources (and then only indirectly) was a vague reference to “scar tissue”; my own doctor’s nurse refused to let any information leak out of her brain at all.

So anyway: Two nurses, Esther and Liz, then came in — a young woman from Kenya, and a woman from Canada; I knew that because she said the procedure woud take “a-boat 45 minutes” — and explained that I would be locally anesthetized, plus given “waking sedation”, since that way was less dangerous than full sedation. They then wheeled my bed down the hall (I felt it was my duty as a cheerful patient to say, “Wheeeeee!” as we went) to the CT scan room, since they would be monitoring their progress on the scanner to make sure they were at the right place.

I was face down on the scanner’s “bed”, and I couldn’t get comfortable because the bottoms of my ribs were pushing into the hard plastic surface, and my neck was hurting from pushing one side of my face into the pillow. Also, I was trying keep the prongs of the oxygen tube in my nostrils from slipping out. More importantly, I had to extend my arms up over my head so that my elbows didn’t stick out beyond the edges of the bed, but I still had to keep very still. I told them that doing that was difficult, because I didn’t have full range of motion in my right arm, having sprained it back in December.

Nurse Canada said, “Okay, let’s just start your meds now, and maybe that will help.” I said, okay, great, and she began taking my the tube to my saline feed, Meanwhile, I tried one more time to stretch my arms over my head and relax at the same, and maybe I could manage to hold still long enough for at least the initial scan.

Then I was back in my room.

Wait … back in my room? What just happened??

What just happened was the whole thing. The “waking sedation” knocked me right out, and the needle biopsy was carried out without a hitch, in about half the time that they had anticipated.

They told me to roll onto my right side, so I did, and I turned on my trusty tiny TV and moved it to in front of my face, then proceded to drift in and out of sleep for the next couple of hours.

Then the x-ray technician came in and woke me up to zap me with his portable x-ray machine. I was all for it because that meant that my chance to eat was coming up next, and that my second x-ray and subsequent release were right around the corner.

He propped me up and put an x-ray plate behind me, then went back to adjust his machine, and came back to me and woke me up again, then went back and took the x-ray.

Then he woke me up again to get the plate back.

Then I laid back down to let the waking sedative kick in again.

When the x-ray showed no internal bleeding or collapse lung (each of which the doctor had warned me occurs in OVER FIFTEEN PERCENT OF THESE CASES), a nurse (I think this one was named Tina) came in to see if she could get me something to eat or drink.

I told her I needed water first of all, and second of all, yes, I would like something to eat. Anything. Anything but fish, that is, but other than that, pretty much anything.

My wife had brought a couple of bottles of water, so I knocked one back in about 30 seconds before Nurse Tina could get back with my food, then I devoured a “Big Grab” bag of nacho-flavored Doritos, then a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread, then two great chocolate-chip cookies, then some cherry yogurt.

Gotta keep up your strength, you know.

By now I was sitting up under my own power, and resumed channel surfing, while also working on Saturday’s New York Times crossword. The second x-ray came and went (much faster, since I didn’t keeping falling asleep), followed soon by my release.

On the way home, my wife kept insisting that she would stop anywhere to get me something to eat, and finally my defenses broke down and I told her she could stop by Braum’s.

If she really, really wanted to.

That double hamburger and deluxe banana split really hit the spot.

So anyway: We came home and I slept another couple of hours, and my recovery continues.

But we still don’t have any results from the lab, which is the important part.

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And again, that much to everyone who has left good wishes in my comments and on your own blogs.

To show my appreciation, I’ll stop talking about all this soon, very soon. I promise.

It’s done! And it wasn’t so bad! We won’t have the results back for a day or so, but at least the Health Care Monster has spit me out, for now …

I was thinking about writing out a detailed account, but instead I decided to upload some of the insane number of pictures that I took, and you can see those pictures here. At right is the little TV that was a total blessing for my waiting and recovery. Can you name the movie?

Anyway, I’ll write something tomorrow, but for now the pictorial history will have to suffice.

And I need to take this opportunity to thank all of you that have sent encouraging comments and emails, and to Pamibe and ILuvNUFC for asking their readers for their prayers and thoughts.

Nothing helps you get through times like this than your friends!

We have to get to bed extra extra extra early tonight because we ave to get up at FOUR FREAKING O’CLOCK in the morning, because the American medical establishment hates the rest of us and wants us to suffer as much as possible.

So this is me trying to get a post done quickly:

Was there some kind of sporting event on TV tonight?

Seriously though: I used to halfway monitor the Super Bowl just to see the commercials, but thanks to the Internet I can ignore the game completely, and watch the ads some other time — like on Budweiser.com.

I did watch the pre-game salute to Stevie Wonder. Man, that Joss Stone has a set of pipes on her …

Also: Within a minute of the game being over, my wife came across a “Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl Champions’ t-shirts on HSN.com. They didn’t waste any time posting that offering …

The first Simpsons episode tonight (there were three) was a rerun of the most recent Halloween episode, whose intro segment ended with this great quote from one of the space creatures: “Smooth move, Space-Lax — You’ve just destroyed the totality of existance!”

It’s funnier when they do it …

Check it out: The Whiskey Bottle Computer. Pretty cool!

Now that the biopsy is looming, I’m finally getting to where I can deal with the fact that the important thing is the result of the test, not the procedure itself.

I’m being fairly optimistic about the whole thing. Half my brain is envisioning a time a year from now when I’m saying, “Hey, remember last year when we had that biopsy scare? We were all frantic for nothing!”

The other half of my brain is humming songs like “My Way” and “Dust in the Wind“, and making lists entitled “Things I Want to Accomplish in My Life”.

Still, no matter the outcome, this whole situation is motivating to finally do some things I’ve been putting off. For instance, I’ve always figured that someday I would do a video blog (basically what I’m doing now, but in front of a camcorder), and there’s nothing like an impending biopsy to make you realize that someday is NOW. So yesterday I charged up my video camera batteries and set up the tripod, and recorded a few minutes of rambling, to test out various camera positions and to see how well my lapel mic works.

So far so good.

I’m sure I’ll have lots to talk about in days to come; meantime, I’ll be taking still pictures at the hospital tomorrow, for as long as I’m fully conscious or they confiscate the camera …

It’s now less than 36 hours until I’m thrown to the jaws of the American health care system, for the first time since my tonsillectomy 43 years. I’m having trouble being worried about the outcome of the biopsy, because I’m too busy having panic attacks about the procedure itself.

And this morning I had my first anxiety dream, and it just covered the process before the biopsy: I dreamed we were trying to get ready and running late and going to the wrong places and having to take care of other things and running all over the place and being told we hadn’t done what we needed to do … I woke up exhausted.

I’m sure that tonight and tomorrow we’ll be covering my remaining anxieties.

In the meantime, I’ll be putting together my survival kit: Reading material for the inconsiderate wait before the procedure, lip balm to compensate for the breathing tubes, anything else I can think of.

On Friday I finally got hold of someone who could fill me in on the specifics of the procedure, and she told me there would be a local anesthetic for the incision area, plus some kind of near-hallucinogenic to make me not care what’s happening.

I said I’d have to bring my Pink Floyd CD’s, and she said, “Sure! They’ll be glad to play them for you!”

Anything to distract the subject.

My wife had some exploratory surgery about five years ago; she calls what they’re going to give me “Happy Juice”. She says it’s some really good stuff.

And it won’t get me in trouble with the Corporate Pee Nazis at work.

It’s a tiny little silver lining on a huge nasty storm cloud.

Anyway, I’m trying to decide on a CD or two that will complement my industrial strength high: Pink Floyd, as I said? Wish You Were Here would be good and spacy … Laurie Anderson? Bob Marley? Enya?

Should I go ultra-mellow like Sigur Ros? Or weirdly rock out with some Zappa?

Or a nice mix, like the Lost in Translation soundtrack?

Of course, I won’t need too much, since it’s Standard Procedure in cases like this to kick the subject to the curb as soon as possible, so they’ll just keep me there long enough to come down so they can prop me up in a wheelchair and ship me out.

Anyway, stay tuned for more of my whining and panic … I believe it can be entertaining if I do it right …