Author Archives: kirabug

OMG THE GLASS CLASSPIDS

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I was asleep when the alarm on my IV pole started going off. I woke up enough to read “GLASS CLASSPIDS” rolling across the marquee in red lettering. No clue what that meant so I hit the nurses’ station bell and tried to fall back to sleep.

Holly had only been in here 20 minutes before, to shut off an equally annoying IV alarm, and I knew it had taken her a few minutes to respond then because of another patient emergency, so I didn’t worry when she didn’t show up right away. I fell back to sleep, but the alarm continued to sound, so I didn’t get much more than a few fitful moments of rest before I was up staring at the GLASS CLASSPIDS alert again.

I tried ignoring it two or three more times, with no luck. Finally upon re-waking I realized that the IV pole’s manual was out on my bed, flipped open to the apart for GLASS CLASSPIDS.

It said:

TELL HOLLY YOU HAVE A SORE THROAT AND YOU NEED A DRINK OF WATER.

This woke me up firmly, and I realized there was no alert on the powerless IV pole, nor was the a manual. According to Google there’s no such thing as a glass classpid. There’s just my lizard brain trying to get the attention of the sleeping brain bits using whatever metaphors it thought would work in my current envoironment.

I drank two cups of water from the pitcher at my bedside and started typing this up… And my GLASS CLASSPIDS feel much better now, so I’m going back to sleep with the hope that lizard brain doesn’t find anything else to harass me about before 7am.

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.