don’t panic

I really don’t feel good, so this writing is probably going to be crap, but here goes.

It turns out I had a hernia. Yes, had. An inguinal hernia to be precise. A nice big one that my own doctor missed for four months. When I finally piped up that something was seriously wrong he was actually surprised that he could have missed it the first time. Whatever. He ordered me to a general surgeon that day… And I then waited two more weeks for an appointment. Mind you, that’s two more weeks of pain, but you’re a number, you know.

So then, when I finally did get an appointment, I was told that I needed to talk to a neurosurgeon because of some numbness in my upper thigh. So I waited another week and a half for that appointment so he could tell me that it wasn’t anything that he would want to work on when they did the hernia, and it was probably caused by the hernia, something that my general surgeon said absolutely wasn’t the case. Again, whatever. So then I could set up an appointment for another week and a half later to actually have the surgery.

What follows is a list of things that were good and bad about having inguinal hernia surgery. It’s blunt, and somewhat graphic, but will probably be of use to anyone else who is considering it. I wish I had read something like this before I had mine. Here we go.

What you want to have – Things that will make your life a LOT more pleasant while you are recuperating.

A padded toilet seat – Throw your machoness out the window and go for the softest, most padded model you can find. Trust me when I say there is nothing manly about walking at about a half foot per second across the floor in pain and then yelping when you get to a hard plastic seat that feels like you’re butt is resting on the edge of a steel girder.

Cane – A must, if not for helping you to walk (you WILL need it) then to help you lift your pants up after you use the toilet. You will not be bending down to retrieve them.

Grabber – This can be any sort of real or toy version which basically extends your grasp by a couple of feet. Personally, I have one from my daughter that was part of a science kit. It worked fine. The point is, unless you have someone waiting on you hand and foot for several days (lucky you) there are going to be moments when you just need to reach something that has fallen on the floor and you are NOT going to be twisting and turning to reach it.

Vicodin – Oh yeah, baby. If you’re doctor doesn’t offer it, demand it. The stuff never really worked for me with anything else, but for this, I was REALLY glad to have it. Made a huge difference.

Tylenol – An extra pain buffer.

Remotes – Remotes are your friend. If you can get one of those christmas light control jobs to turn off the lamp, then all the better. You will not want to be getting up once you lay down.

A PDA timer for meds – you won’t remember, trust me. “Has it been four hours since I last took my Vicodin?” If you don’t have a PDA, then write it down.

Plum juice – Way better than prune juice, and you are NOT going to want to be constipated. A glass a day at least.

Keep a cell phone on you – Unless you have someone in the house with you all the time, be safe.

What you can expect:

Day of surgery –
The actual surgery was a breeze. They shave you in the groin area and have YOU initial yourself with a pen that writes on flesh on the side to be cut. I guess so that it’s your fault then if they cut you open on the wrong side. Pretty presumptuous of them in my opinion. But everyone needs to cover their butt I suppose. Turned out they needed to shave me quite a bit more after I was under, including on my testicles, which they apparently managed to nick with the razor. Nothing like a really really painful cut on a piece of sensitive anatomy to distract you from the more intense pain. They laid me out on the table and I was out before I knew it. Next thing I knew I was waking up in recovery. No sweat.

Having had an umbilical cyst removed a few years back, I was expecting it to hurt when I tried to sit up or use my abdominal muscles in the slightest. I wasn’t disappointed. Count on that first day hurting like hell. Just know, it WILL get better. 48 hours will make a HUGE difference. Get home. Sleep. Take your vicodin and do a short walk late in the day if you can manage it. If you can pee, great, but don’t count on it.

You should try to situate yourself in a bed or couch that is high enough that you won’t have to struggle to get up out of it. But removing yourself from a laying position is going to be the toughest maneuver for quite some time. You body is going to sort of congeal in whatever position you leave it in for any length of time, and it’s going to hurt to change that. Go SLOW. Better to be careful than to end up back at the hospital because you ripped something open again. Use that cane and accept help. It may take you 20 minutes to get to the bathroom that first day. Who cares. You will probably be a little light headed and will have a tendency to not want to breath. BREATH. Try to stand upright if you can, as it will take some of the strain off your back which will tire quickly. You need to give yourself time to stretch at each maneuver. This is why it’s good to try and walk just a little on that first day. It will help keep you loose. If you stay in bed all day and all night, God help you on the second day.

Drink a glass of plum juice if you can stomach it, but don’t push it. Have a little something before you have your meds or you will make yourself sick. I found cold Jell-o to be wonderful that first evening. Drink a lot of little sips of water, but be careful not to choke. If you cough, it will REALLY hurt. If you do have to cough (can’t avoid it) then try to lean forward and possibly press a little on the affected area to avoid the worst of the shock. My doctor said that he wanted me to cough now and then, but he might as well have told me to jab a red-hot poker into my groin two or three times a day for no explained reason.

For that first day, I wore loose sweat pants and ended up cutting the band on my underwear because even a little snugness hurts. The nick on my cojones didn’t help. After that, I went commando. My pride was dissolved after the first time I tried to go pee.

Day after surgery – Day 2:

Repeat of day one for the most part, but you should start to find certain things easier, like walking. Watch out that first morning as you are likely to be very weak. You may get lightheaded after only a few steps so take it easy at first. Have a place to sit and rest on the way to the bathroom if possible. Try to get yourself to pee. It’s important to get those functions going again, and the fluids are probably building up. It may be difficult and frustrating at first, but again, it WILL get easier.

Through the day be sure to have that plum juice (It will really pay later, trust me) and start eating more solid foods. You are likely to be hungry. I had a fever at this point which came and went over several days. It made me a little nauseous so I didn’t get enough food down. That left me a little weak the third day.

If you can manage a shower (a seat really really helps) then do it. It feels wonderful. I waited until the morning of day four, but I wish I had given it a shot earlier.

Day 3:

More plum juice. Walk. Try to walk completely upright. There is a tendency to crouch over but you will wear yourself out if you walk around that way. Try to have a bowel movement. If you drank your plum juice, things should be nice and regular. God have mercy on you if you get constipated.

Day 4:
Should be getting easier now. Getting out of bed and standing will be vastly easier than day 1. Certain unexplainable movements will still cause pain, but there will be less of them.

That about brings me up to date. I’ll update as I go.

I upgraded my phone this week. I really needed to, as my old cell phone was literally falling apart, and the battery was past it’s expiration date by a good year or more. I liked that phone. It was really cool when it came out, and frankly, worked better than any other phone I had owned by a good margin… at least until about three months ago. Suddenly, I started noticing that I was dropping calls a lot more.

After many calls to Verizon, trying to convince them that something had changed (I still don’t actually think it was my phone) I buckled in and decided to upgrade. But, as much as I wanted an iPhone, I just couldn’t justify the cost when our family financial situation is unknown for the future. There were other “smartphones” available through Verizon’s website, but again, the price wasn’t in my range. If I’m going to shell out 200 bucks for a phone, then it might as well go to Apple. I settled on something that was still “free” (you pay for the taxes), but did what I wanted it to. The things I was looking for were:

Speakerphone
Bluetooth (syncing would be nice)
A reasonable camera
Music player if possible, but not required
Good reception

That last was really the clincher since I was already dealing with a phone that was doing poorly in my home. I ended up choosing the LG enV 9900. In green.

I had read reviews of the phone and it seemed like a good deal. The comments were positive, and although the phone came with some features that I probably didn’t need (such as a qwerty keyboard) I liked it. And after a few days of use, I still do. But in a number of ways I still feel like I kinda got gypped, and they mostly have to do with Verizon and not the phone itself.

I knew that Verizon had hobbled the Bluetooth on their phones, but how badly they had done so only became apparent when I tried to do a few basic things… Like transfering music to the darn thing. Sure, you can play music on the phone – IF you have a data cable and a PC (not a Mac) and use their software (not iTunes). You can also use a microSD card in the phone, which they conveniently DO NOT supply. Bluetooth is fully capable of transferring files but Verizon has purposely disabled access to the Music folder from Bluetooth. They want you to use their service, you see. They want you to buy a song at their online store, then pay them again in airtime and data subscription fees to download that song to your phone so that you can then listen to it.

Next up was syncing. Again, there is no technical reason why Bluetooth could not provide a link to my data. LG has just chosen not to support it… At least not through Apple. iSync will not work with ANY LG phone. Bummer. I was able to send selected vCards to my phone from Address Book via Bluetooth, but only one at a time. This leads me to believe that it’s just an unwillingness to make any kind of real standard that is keeping me from consumer data bliss.

The interface is OK. It sure isn’t an iPhone, but the cell industry has at least sort of adopted a standard bad interface that uses same structure and (mostly) the same terminology to describe things. I have yet to buy a phone that used the same charger as any other phone that I have ever owned, but hey. It’s like movie concessions. They have to find some way to screw you over since they are practically giving away the things now.

So how could it all be better? Here are some tips from Joe Consumer to Verizon and the cell phone industry.

1. Open the damn things up. Stop limiting technology so that you can eek out every last penny from us. Let US choose if we want to use your stupid music service. I’d bet that 99% of your users don’t even know what Bluetooth IS, let alone how to pair devices and download music. So free up the stupid limitations and advertise the fact. The flood of happy customers will more than offset the unhappy customers who “settled” on Vcast.

2. Work together!! Decide on a data format for contacts and calendars and make it a standard. vCards aren’t enough. Allow services like iSync to backup our data. You want us to replace our phones every other year, fine. But stop wasting our time and allow us to sync our contacts!! I noticed in my “Tips” book a brief mention that Verizon offers a “backup” service so that all our data is “downloaded” and stored someplace online so that we can then get it to our new phone. Of course, they never mentioned anywhere else how to do this. Aside from the obvious security risk this “service” could create, why not just let the USER do it??

3. Write better manuals. You try. You really do. But you guys REALLY need to get past listing a series of button presses to activate a given function. Putting “Left-Softkey, 1, 1, 5, Right-Softkey, 6, Q” is about as intuitive as launching the space shuttle. It’s FAR better to explain WHAT we are doing than memorizing a lame set of commands. An interface should make sense without having to consult the manual or call tech-support or it has failed. You can take a lesson from Apple on that one.

4. Give me email. Yes, my phone can do email… for the low low price of only $19.99 a month… Plus airtime… plus a data package… plus a major headache. COME ON!! You want to draw customers away from your competitors? Give me email… for free. Yes, you can put a cap on size if you want, but really. When you’re streaming freaking video on demand, how much bandwidth is a burst of text in comparison?? Get real. Just because the average consumer has no idea that txt messaging uses about .01% of the data in an average voice conversation, doesn’t mean that you need to charge us 25 cents a pop… oh, and 15 cents just to receive it. There are all sorts of practical uses for email. Everything from alerts to news.

5. You’re phone is a watch. I stopped wearing a watch about five years ago. Why have a watch when a phone can tell you the time? So why haven’t the phone manufactures figured this out yet? My latest phone has a front clock display that requires at least two key-presses to see, and then it’s in a tiny little font that requires me to have my glasses on just to read. My last phone would display the time in standby, but only in a dinky font with no backlight. Get a clue. Go to your favorite Walmart and take a peak at the digital watches. See how easy they are to read, even at a distance? EMULATE! This isn’t rocket science!

So there ya go. Five things that could change the industry. I like my new phone. I love the camera (2megapixels – ZOMG!) and the voice commands are slightly spooky they are so good. The speakerphone is awesome, and the displays are simply beautiful. You’re SO close… You could REALLY please the customer and revolutionize the market with just a tiny bit more effort.

So… Can you hear me now? DO IT!!

In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference recently, President Bush said, “I say we need judges who respect our values, do not follow the political winds and revere the plain meaning of our Constitution. We need more judges like John Roberts and Sam Alito.”

To me, this is exactly why I feel the President, and most conservatives for that matter, are dead wrong in their perspective of our government. I don’t want a judge who is going to respect “our” values… I want a judge who is going to respect our laws. Our values are as varied as our ethnicity. More so. And to be blunt, it is NOT the place or purpose of a Supreme Court Judge to decide what is morally “right” or “wrong”. They are there to interpret the law, NOTHING else. Technically, they aren’t even there to make law. That’s the job of a different branch. We are bypassing our own system when we allow a very small, very elite group of picked individuals with unlimited term length to decide for the entire peoples of this country what makes them good and bad. To say that we need more “conservative” judges is akin to making the Christian church (and no other) ruler of our nation.

Sorry, but I for one don’t want a Pope.

The last three days have been an internet hell for me. It seems that my cable company (COX Communications) has had an unspecified outage in my area. By “unspecified” I mean that they were unwilling to tell me anything more than,”yes, we are having an outage”.

And to be fair, it only seemed to effect my internet access, not my television. But I hardly watch TV. The net on the other hand, is something I literally rely on. I pay my bills online, get my mail, stay connected to the world for news and weather, etc… It’s a part of my daily life. An important part of my daily life. For example, I was trying to track down a problem with our medical insurance. My wife is currently in the hospital an unable to come to the phone. But the insurance company won’t talk to me because it was a service relating to her. Go figure. In any case, they directed me to their website, where, they explained, I could see all the information I needed. Only I couldn’t get to their website thanks to my cable company who was randomly dropping my internet connection. It would tantalizingly come up for a few minutes, only to drop again just as I was about to get the information I needed. It was maddening.

It also made me see just how tenuous our digital world really is. One little break in the chain and poof! … it might as well be the year 1850. No TV. No internet, and if you choose to use your cable company as your phone carrier, no telephone. That’s a really big deal. I don’t have a land line since we use just our cell phones, but in this day and age where people use 911 for anything and everything that might possibly be an emergency, having that randomly cut without explanation or even an idea of when it might be returned to service is just plain unacceptable. It also made me see just how good a job Ma Ball has done all these years. I almost can’t recall a single time as I was growing up when the phone stopped working. And if it did, you could look out the window and sure enough, there was a guy up on the telephone pole. And most likely, he left a note on your door explaining that the line would be down for fifteen minutes while he made some changes at the pole.

My “friend in the digital age” cable company, with all it’s high tech monitoring systems, couldn’t even tell me WHAT they were doing, let alone when it might be fixed. Lame.

So then I hear about a couple of undersea cables that were “cut” recently, leaving most of the Middle East and parts of Asia in the internet dark, so to say. They also handle phone communication as well. The news service mentioned the possibility of a boat anchor as the culprit. The news also stated that one of the cables was cut off Alexandria, Egypt, but the other was cut two days later northeast of Dubai.

Say what? An anchor?

So, we just happened to have two major undersea cables slashed mysteriously within two days of each other? Right.

I call shenanigans. Dirty, nasty, coverup shenanigans. Somebody wanted most of the Middle East and Asia in the dark for two weeks.

By the way, our ally Israel happens to use a completely different system for global communications.