Tag Archives: charity

Tonsils go bye-bye

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Got my tonsils out today.

As with most of my life, I appear to be running about 20 years behind the rest of the population on this. For things like learning to knit or joining a martial arts class, that’s not necessarily bad. But for getting your tonsils out, apparently, the experience is much more painful as an adult than as a child.

So let’s cover the basic questions first:

Yes I can eat ice cream all week if I want to, though they actually recommended shakes and smoothies over dairy products because of mucous production.

Yes I get two weeks off. Yesterday this sounded like a great opportunity to get some small things done around the house, but today post-surgery I’m convinced I’ll be asleep for the whole time. I’ve now been awake for almost a half hour and it’s closing in on the longest I’ve been awake since they took the loppers to the inside of my throat.

Right now it feels like the worst sore throat or case of strep or whatever that I’ve ever had, and that’s with the pain drugs having worn off. If I could stay awake when the drugs were in effect, I’d probably feel ok when not swallowing.

I have zero appetite.

I also have a whole new appreciation for my iPhone and my iPad. Since I can use them from the sofa comfortably (unlike my desktop or even my 17″ laptop) they’re my main source of communication when my throat hurts too much to talk. I cant imagine how isolated or frustrated I’d feel without them.

I still swear Steve Jobs designed the iPad when he realized how much using a computer in a hospital bed sucks. No one else believes me, but I say it’s no coincidence the guy stuck in a small sterile room for weeks at a time devised a one-button computer with good-sized keys and the ability to complete the day-to-day tasks that keep us as part of the human race. His liver cancer was the greater hands-on study of technology in a medical setting that an innovator could ask for.

Having an extremely limited ability to communicate by sound has also given me a new desire: to find a charity (or charities) that provide children with language issues iPads so they can interact with their world.

If you know of any, can you drop them in the comments?

I’m falling asleep writing this, so you’ll hear from me again later.

Child’s Play 2006

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This year, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia finally finally finally got involved in Child’s Play and while I don’t honestly expect anyone to give me anything in exchange for this scrawly comic and whine-fest that I host, with the holidays coming and much stuff going on, the best present you-the-reader could give to me would be to give to them.

Why, you ask?

Well, as has been mentioned before, my husband has Cystic Fibrosis. (As does Lila’s husband Cole in the comic. Coincidence?) Nighthawk’s been treated at CHoP. He’s been hospitalized at CHoP. He’s become healthy again within their halls. And he’s been bored senseless in between.

Hospitals look scary when you first get there, especially where emergency rooms and stuff are involved, but really most of the time they are boring. Sometimes you’re so sick you don’t care. Other times, you’re so healthy that you can get up and wander around and make trouble scaring the nurses by drinking apple juice out of the plastic urinal bottles. In between, you’re too tired to get up (or not allowed because of IVs or tests or whatever), and you’ve already seen everything on TV (or can’t afford to have it on) and you filled up your coloring book and you can’t even hang out with the other kids because you’re contagious or they are or maybe they’re too sick to play. And when it’s over the holidays and your folks are strapped for cash because you’re in the hospital and they have to miss work and they have to pay ridiculous co-pays on the insurance and Philly isn’t anywhere close to where you actually live, and gas isn’t cheap, well, it sucks big time.

So if all you do this winter is buy one book, or one video game, or one movie that’s going to keep a bored and sick kid a little happier, well, you’ve done something that looks little but is actually very big.

(And you don’t have to give to CHoP — you could give to any Child’s Play hospital. Or to any other hospital that’s put a wish list up on Amazon. Or just to your local hospital. You know, whatever works for you.)

As for me, I have some money I’ve saved up for charity that I have to go spend now. Thanks!