CPAP Elephant.

I've been using one of these for the past 3 weeks. Not nearly as fun as this guy makes it look.

I got saddled with the CPAP thing after a couple of sleep studies showed me having a high rate of anomalies.

I got saddled with the sleep studies because I've been feeling exhausted. My main doc figured I wasn't sleeping enough, or not sleeping right, or whatever. He prescribed Ambien and referred me for the studies.

Screw the Ambien. I'm not having TROUBLE sleeping so much as having trouble maintaining it. Ever since Aorta Day 7 years ago, I sleep at most 3 hours at a time. Maybe I'll go back to sleep in a few hours, maybe in 12 or more. I never know, but once I'm awake I'm wired awake. I went from doing 8-9 hours overnight to "who the hell knows when?"

So. This CPAP thing is supposed to help me sleep better--hold my soft palate open in back.

So far, all it's doing is waking me up after an hour or so feeling like I'm suffocating.

"That's normal," the discussion groups all seem to say. "Stick with it."

"That's normal," the medical company's 'coach' tells me during his weekly call. "Stick with it."

"That's normal," the medical company's respiratory expert told me. "Stick with it."

When I've had all I can take and make it stop breathing at me, the little bastard machine at the other end of that elephant nozzle shows me how long it was forcing air up my snout, then shows me how this session rated against yesterday's. I've got to do a minimum 4 hours in every 24.

There's no slacking or cheating, either. It listens to my every breath and snort, writes everything down, then calls the medical company each day to tell them about it. The medical company makes up a report and sends it to Medicaid.

Nobody likes a tattletale.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I was calling this thing the "Snortmaster 3000"...now I'm leaning toward "Puffaluffagus." Or "Huffaluffagus." One of them was funny 10 minutes ago.

Medical...bleah

When we left off in April, I was about to get the lower half of my aorta stented to reinforce its damaged lower end from a little below the diaphragm all the way down to the branch that leads to the femoral arteries and other piping below the navel.

No complications from that, other than losing all the improvements I'd made since the upper half was lined. Everything--the improved circulation in my lower legs that saw me lose a few pounds' worth of water weight, saw the swelling in my left shin and calf almost vanish in a matter of a few weeks (MASSIVE difference), had me walking better and feeling better for the first time in years.

Gone.

I was assured by the vascular doc's nurse that there wasn't a vascular problem.

Except that...there WAS. How else to explain a sudden reversal that immediately followed the second surgery?

Jet forward to this morning, when my new vascular doc (old doc moved to Texas) asked some questions about medical tests I'd had, the symptoms I'm having, and his answer was basically "We need to get you tested; this sounds like a vascular problem."

Imagine that.

He figures that one or both of the two big veins coming up from my legs and joining the Big Vein headed up to the heart might be pinched where the aorta branches to the legs. Makes sense to me: both of  the iliac branches are stented now, which stiffened them up and could be pressing against--and pinching--the veins against my spine, inhibiting return blood flow.

That is vascular.

So now I'm waiting to get scheduled for an internal ultrasound; a needle goes into a convenient vessel headed in a convenient direction. Needle's got a little ultrasound transducer. Doc can basically scan the length of both of the veins at that possible pinch point. If there's a pinch, he can throw a stent in to open the restricted area and get my tired-ass blood flowing again.

Tomorrow, dammit, I want it tomorrow. I'd settle for NOW.

This shit's old. Very old. I've gone almost a year with so little energy that I basically sit up on the edge of my bed and surf the Web on my old laptop because moving over to the desktop computer is too much. The laptop's so out of date (running Ubuntu Linux Heron from '08; can't even upgrade the copy of Firefox that's on it, can't install another browser) that in the course of the last 6 months it stopped being able to load Facebook, Twitter and Blogger. I end up reading a few political and news blogs and a few Reddit pages (AskReddit is usually entertaining), wear myself out, and go back to sleep for another couple of hours. I get over to the desktop every few days to handle email and all that. Today's one of those days.

I haven't had a solid 8 hours' sleep since the night before my aorta crapped itself in July of 2010. It's usually somewhere from 2 to 4 hours, wake up for several, and repeat. I'm getting REM sleep, but I don't know how the interruptions are affecting things.

The one thing I DID accomplish was eliminating my migraines. This is almost worth all the other crap and all it took was one of the meds I was already using. I stopped it for a few months to see if it would help with all the swollen leg and fluid-retention stuff. Nope, no effect there--but the gawdawful weekly migraines I'd been tormented by before Aorta Day came back with a vengeance. I was back to having my room utterly blacked out, no sound, no TV, no moving, no lying down. I was practically mainlining BC Powders, the only thing that would touch those headaches from hell.

Then I saw or read something about blood flow along the under side of the brain having something to do with migraines. I went back on those meds to see if there might be a connection. Three months along, the headaches are gone. I'd dance, but I'm too tired.

***

I don't really have an ending, here, other than being hopeful that I can finally get my legs back in order. I haven't been to a fort since 2011. I'm not counting Fort Point in San Francisco, since it was CLOSED. Not counting Fort Pike in Louisiana, either, since it was not only CLOSED but fenced the hell in to protect it from generating any tourism money for the state.

Taking my grumpy ass to bed. :p

Medical Update

After chasing my vascular doc around for a few months, I finally saw him face to face a few weeks ago. Good news is that the aortic dissection is "stable" (he had me get a full-length CAT scan of the aorta back in April). All I have to to is keep my blood pressure under control to keep it from getting any worse.

It's still bad, running from the top of the arch all the way down to the iliac branch. It's just not getting any worse (at this point, that would mean dissecting back toward the heart, which is what killed John Ritter).

It'll never heal, either. That's the big one for me; I'd been led to believe that it would.

That other embarrassing medical issue hasn't come back, so that's something.

In the wake of the San Francisco trip--or, the "Hiking the Airports of The World!" tour--I'm even more convinced that my leg troubles are from the aortic dissection. Now it's time to get out the anvil gun and get my little collection of medical specialists to listen.

Wingnut Punk to Libs and Non-Christians: "Get out" of U.S.

So Frothy Mix was hosted by some punk-ass preacher-boy loser in Louisiana over the weekend.

Preacher-boy doesn't like non-Christians or Liberals. Says we gotta go. Doesn't like the gays, either. Buys into the comical notion that this country was founded by third-rate Billy Graham wannabe wingnut losers like him.

Loves him some Frothy. Babbled prayers and drooled over him for a bit, then made the obligatory anti-Obama squeals and whines and asked his imaginary sky-buddy to "do a mighty work" on the bad black guy.



Packed house. Lots of gray and blue hair. I wonder whether there's even one stooped-over Rascal-driver in the room who realizes that ol' Frothy is one of "them ol' Catholics."

Oh--and preacher-boy?

You and what army?

[UPDATE!]

Preacher Boy is apparently embarrassed by all the attention he got when this video went all over the Interwebs and has scrambled to yank it off the Web by...deleting it from the church website.

Y'all be nice and don't tell him about the rest of the Internet, 'kay?

Fuel Tank 1-Year Follow-up (with Product Placement)

For the past two years, the days surrounding June 3rd have been aggravating.

In 2009, I discovered a fuel leak in the X-11's gas tank and made what I thought was a solid repair using a sheet-metal screw, a Sobe soft drink bottle cap (before they switched to plastic), some J-B Weld, and the 2-part epoxy putty from a "fuel tank repair kit" available at any car-parts store.

Don't waste your money on that kit. The epoxy lifted and peeled off over the next year, and 6 days short of the anniversary of the first fix my car was incontinent again.

For the fix, I used only regular J-B Weld slathered and a pop-rivet to seal it off.

A year later, the patch is solid. That's some good stuff.

Goodbye to a beloved old friend...?

I know it's just a piece of code, a little DOS-based text-editing program, but I've been using QEdit for more than 20 years.

Until now.

Every computer I've ever had 'till now would run QEdit, from the elderly-but-still-cool 8088 PC I was running until 1998 (green mono monitor, DOS 5.0, a 2400 baud modem) to the 386 with Windows 3.1 that replaced it to the 486 that followed to a little Pentium II with Windows 98 to the asshole Sempron and Windows XP that deviled my every waking moment from 1995 until the last days of June.

A friend knew a guy selling an evil black box with all this in it:
Windows 7 64 bit
Athlon x2 dual core 2.9ghz - new
3 gig of ddr2 667 ram
160 gig sata hard drive
Dvd/rw disk drive - new
Hd3850 video card ati (over clockable) 512 ram msi
5 cooling fans
500 watt power supply
Brand new motherboard

Three hundred bucks. *droooool* I'm not wild about some of the features--screamingly bright blue LED's in a couple of the fans, more blue LED's on the motherboard that flash like beacons when the CPU is thinking, and even more blue LED's on the front panel that look like blue neon on a jukebox. I don't like a lot of light in my room when I'm trying to sleep, so I disconnected what would disconnect and cover the thing with a towel to keep the motherboard beacons from FLASH!! waking me FLASH!! up in the FLASH!! middle of the FLASH!! night during FLASH!! overnight downFLASH!!!loads.

Something to really like about it: the fans and hard drive are all whisper quiet.

This was a few weeks before my aortic meltdown, and I was all over the opportunity to be rid of the worst computer I've ever had--the one that shat itself several times over 5 years and took a hard drive or two with it each time, losing all my data and making my blood pressure skyrocket to computercidal levels.

So far, the Black Box hasn't killed my data. It's got some maddening habits to amuse itself with, though. A few weeks ago, right in the middle of a Blog post, the screen went black--just a little hyphen in the upper left corner--and attempts to reboot got me nothing but "Disk read error. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot." Turns out the SATA cable had worked itself loose.

Before that, the thing would randomly start up without the keyboard or mouse (one or the other). I don't know HOW it has anything to do with it, but jiggling the connectors to the front panel (power & reset switches, status LED's) fixes the problem. [UPDATE--It was caused by a couple of extra standoff screws between the motherboard and case. They shorted something at random and kept the system from recognizing USB and keyboard.]

But this wonder of technology, this marvel of silicon and copper and lead won't natively run QEdit. I used that program for EVERYTHING from writing my [as yet never published] book to coding to putting together MP3 and other index entries. All the keyboard shortcuts can be assigned where you want them, there are some very useful text-management functions that make stripping a standard DOS-style directory listing down to just the parts I need. Sure, I can do it in Word, but in more time and with more cleanup. I just like QEdit.


*Followup*
But wait. There's hope: DOSBox!! I'm saved! The Mighty Q is back, and working more smoothly than it did with WinXP's clunky DOS emulation (up through Win98, we had a proper pure-DOS environment; with XP, you got a weaker simulated DOS shell).

I never thought about my old "Star Wars: Dark Forces" game not running on the Black Box. Might be time to try running it, too.

Down, Down, Down

The Old Man's been in Hospice care for several weeks; at the time, the docs gave him 3 to 6 months.

We got a call this morning: they've put him on oxygen; his heart keeps trying to stop; the pneumonia he's been beset with for more than a year isn't getting any better--and the Hospice folks aren't taking him to the hospital.

I've long since accepted that he's going to die; Alzheimer's just does it agonizingly slowly.

I wish his daughter--my step-sister [let's call her "Screech"]--wasn't having such a hard time with it. Her coping mechanism has been denial and shrill accusation: he doesn't have Alzheimer's. He's not going to die. He didn't have a stroke. You've gotten him locked up like that so you could take all his money. You've got him in that place to kill him. At first, she was venting at the top of her lungs over the phone, screaming at my mother, who has Power of Attorney and has been managing all this shit the best she can.

Mom hung up on her ass. Screech called back--"Did you just hang up on me?!?!!!11!1!!?"
Mom said, "Yes." And hung up on her ass again.

So now Screech is doing her screeching by proxy, I think through an aunt.

Funeral's going to be interesting. I've been assigned the task of keeping Screech away from Mom. Not really sure how I'm supposed to do that. Do I loom with amiable menace like a bouncer? Stand hip-shot like a gunslinger, one hand on my trusty Peacemaker? Show off my mad bo-staff skillz like Napoleon Dynamite?

Shit. I don't want to go to the funeral. I don't want to deal with Screech's childish rantings or the other asinine family politics--the cousins who pretend I don't exist at the yearly reunions; I don't want to see my insane step-brother (yeah, I've got some stories about him...the entire neighborhood does).

[ETA: The funeral went quietly, nobody misbehaved.]

Song of the Day: Cereal Killer (Green Jelly)--update

Just added the video for the song to the original post.

Song still has me rolling!

Pic of the Day: It's a Cross, It's an Air Freshener!

Like Linus with his blanket, some folks apparently have to have religious trappings everywhere they go.

Are these things blessed at the factory in China? If so, is that before or after the crappy fragrance is added?

Is that real wood from the original cross?

This isn't quite as funny as the "odor-preventing"--but scented--air freshener on a nearby hook.

[Updated--original post pointed to a Flickr page instead of having the picture embedded.]

Song of the Day Bonus: All or Nothing (Small Faces)

I'd never heard of this band--let alone the song--before GB had us play it in our first rehearsal. The Small Faces were only together for 4 years (1965-69), but that's still 3 years and 7 months longer than that band I was in. After the Small Faces broke up in 1969, some guy named Rod Stewart joined and they re-formed as The Faces. What have we got? Me, writing a blog. Wodger is somewhere in Virginia, probably still being a douchebag who doesn't return phone calls. GC and MC are still in town. I never even learned Navy Jim's last name. No idea where he is now.

We played the song pretty straight--GC and I doubled the guitar part, with me throwing in harmonics on the main arpeggio figure. It was slow enough that I could handle playing all-downstrokes on the chorus (I couldn't do that on our faster stuff--had to cheat with alternating strokes, and still have to on one song I can remember).



I've got us playing this thing on that video of our first gig...woof. Maybe one day I'll throw it up--or throw up--(ha ha ha) on YouTube.

Song of the Day: The Act We Act (Sugar)

This is the opening track on Sugar's "Copper Blue," their first album. The band was formed by former Husker Du singer Bob Mould in the early '90s.

This was also the second of two cover songs played by the band I was in, Soma Holiday. Note that I don't call it "my band"--I've never really felt that was mine, and it'd feel conceited to call it that. Funny thing: both Sugar and Soma Holiday broke up in 1995.

This is easily the best track on the CD, and when we were trying to come up with another song to cover, GC popped in the disc. I liked it immediately. Mould's guitars and his nasal punkish voice really work well (though the vocals are kind of buried in the mix). It's not hard to play--and that was a bonus for me, given that I had so much trouble keeping up with some of GC's ideas. I've got a quick ear for learning a song, but back in 1994 I simply didn't have the chops.

The down side was that MC didn't have the chops to sing it. We're not talking about a song with, say, Aerosmith's vocal pyrotechnics. Mould's not doing a great deal--but what he does has presence.