Why yes!
In honor of the Supreme Court’s favorable ruling today on what we’ve come to call ObamaCare, I’m dusting off my “poem about insurance.”
Cross-posting, you ask? Why yes! Please, saunter over to http://www.freerangepoetry.com/?p=88 and indulge. Let me know what you think, either here or there!
Tonight, I opened a fortune cookie that came with my Chinese food. (SOBUMD is well enough to eat soft foods, into which category Hunan Tofu easily falls, and for which we are grateful and happy.) I ate the end off the cookie, as is my custom, and peered into the hollow center like a gunfighter, knowing not what fate awaits me – knowing only to be brave, to face the cookie’s fortune for good or for ill. (It is this “fate should not tempt me” attitude that lets me craft your Horoscopes every Friday with the frightening accuracy to which you’ve become accustomed.)
My cookie was empty. There was no paper, no fortune, no future. No, I hadn’t eaten it. (Yes, I checked under my tongue.) What kind of fortune awaits the man with no fortune at all? The mind quails.
“Man, the budget cuts are really hitting everyone hard,” says the Human Tape Recorder. “Don’t worry, I’ll share mine with you!” So saying, she breaks open her cookie and goes to hand me part.
“It’s not actually the ‘cookie’ part of the fortune cookie in which I seem deficient tonight…” I said.
“Oh, right, sorry,” she says. “Here’s the fortune,” and here she pulled out the tiny slip of paper on which could depend our lives, and read as follows:
The weather is wonderful.
“What the hell kind of prediction is that?” she asked. “I bet they don’t ship this one to Seattle. The budget cuts are worse than we thought – they can’t even afford actual fortunes anymore.”
I’m just going to retire and let the 13-yr-old write the jokes for a while.
I’m going to open a new medical practice and dentist office; I’ll hire the talent later. They’re always advertising about “we’ll take care of you,” “we put patients first,” or that they’ll give you that million dollar smile. Fuck that. No one cares about that – those aren’t differentiators in the market. Any decent dentist can do that. I’m going to CRUSH those people with my new business model.
“Thank you for calling On-Time Dentistry, how can I help you today?”
Build the business around the front office and you can kill people in the back room, won’t matter. Just don’t waste my time.
At least they’re playing Katy Perry.
It’s not like we haven’t been driving this van for the 9 years she’s been alive, but the Reigning Queen of Pink just discovered a new gizmo next to her seat. It opens and closes, and there’s a little hole with a metal tray in it. The following conversation took place at 45 miles an hour:
Reigning Queen of Pink: What’s this?
BUMD, craning my neck around: What’s what?
Reigning Queen of Pink: This flippy thing that opens like this.
BUMD: That’s the ashtray – where ashes go.
Reigning Queen of Pink: For dead people?
BUMD: What???
Because the only ashes she can imagine are the cremated remains of the car’s previous owners.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Some people get really attached to their cars – it becomes part of the family. What’s wrong with using it as a rolling mausoleum? Maybe the car loves the old man THAT much, and isn’t ready to let go…
I can just see the sale, though: “Grandpa conveys with the car.”
SOBUMD has gone under the knife. Well, robot. In her constant bid to be the most optimised woman in the world, she’s done away with her appendix, uterus, cervix, gallbladder, plica in her right knee, and several kidney stones. This time her digestive system was on the hit list, and so yesterday, on the eve of the seventh anniversary of her first hysterectomy, she had a paraesophageal hernia repair and fundoplication. Which is really fun to try to say after your third Scotch.
The procedure was scheduled for 10:45am, so of course we had to be there by 08:30. The procedure actually started just a little after 1pm. I told the nurse that, since I hadn’t taken anything by mouth for more than 4 hours, at this point they could operate on me. They gave her a nice shot of whatever Ruffies want to be when they grow up, I kissed her giggling head as she got loopy, they wheeled her off, and I went to find a nice quiet spot to read and type, or possibly lunch.
This hospital center was laid out by the guy who built Gormenghast – you’re either in the Main Tower or the Pavilion or the Third Side North Wing or the East Inner Waiting Area or the West Outer Waiting Area or the Shared Infection Common Area or the Cafeteria – not to be confused with the Other Cafeteria, which has coffee.
I walked through the cafeteria to see what was available for lunch. You’ve seen those big hospital cafeterias, right? This was like that, except smaller and without any of the good looking food. I checked out the Other Cafeteria, which had coffee, but they didn’t have much else that looked decent. Finally I availed myself of the “extended” cafeteria option about three blocks away, where the menu included Hanger Steak (rare), Ozzie rolls, and fries with mayo. Hey, a man’s gotta eat.
From there I found the local library, thinking that a library is a good place to read or write quietly. It turned out to be Take Your Obnoxious Brat to the Library Day; there are disadvantages to summer break. Mind you, reading is a vital part of learning, and I encourage the idea that people should take their kids to the library. That’s probably why I myself so seldom go there.
Eventually I gave it up as a bad job and went back to Gormenghast Hospital, where I commandeered the “Consult” room in the Left Outer Pavilion Common Wing, on grounds that it was small, quiet, well lit, and hey, I was consulting with my book. The Dr found me there after working on SOBUMD for two and half hours and told me all was well – or at least as well as it could be after pulling someone’s esophagus down 2 centimeters into their stomach and stapling it there – and that she’d be out of surgery in about another 30 minutes, and then an hour in recovery. (He’s the boss, so he has his minions close ’em up. It’s like the pilot who has his co-pilot do the takeoffs and landings.)
I finally got to see her, just as she was waking up from the Rohyponol they’d slipped in her IV. She saw me and asked what had happened, so I told her I didn’t know how to tell her this, but they’d amputated the wrong leg. She was still pretty loopy, so I told her I also had brought along that power of attorney document I just needed her to sign. The nurse looked up rather sharply at that, until she saw SOBUMD snickering.
Then I let SOBUMD hold her security iPhone – just holding it made her perk up a bit, even though I wouldn’t let her turn it on. The nurse was filling out the Room Attendant forms, and asked, “”Do you have any spiritual or cultural needs we should attend to or be aware of?”
“Really, just her iPhone…”
They don’t kick you out at 8pm, but they do make getting your car back a real pain in the ass, so I left before the valet parking witching hour and came home to ensure order. I left SOBUMD snoring, sleeping like a baby, albeit a baby in the NICU with a chest tube, three IV lines, oxygen, an NG stomach tube, and a catheter. Of course, babies probably don’t get as much morphine as she got, so at least she’s got that going for her.
I needn’t have worried about coming home to restore order. Our friend Lauren and her son had driven down from Delaware to stay with the three lunatic urchins this week. While I was with SOBUMD, she had taken the kids to the pool, gone shopping, made dinner, mowed the lawn, and re-financed the mortgage on the house. Today she’s painting the outside of the shed dormer, changing the oil, and bringing Candice Olsen over to redesign the basement. Lauren said this morning that she was going to sleep last night, but decided to re-caulk the windows instead. She’s amazing, and we couldn’t do this without her.
Today I’m back with SOBUMD, who’s enjoying her morphine with every shot, and mostly sleeping. She’s whispering, which is understandable considering the amount of tubes and wires to which she is rigged, but when she whispers it is a message of thanks for all the well-wishes and good thoughts and prayers that so many of you have mentioned – and I echo that whisper. (Mind you, she’s also whispering that chest tubes really suck, but hey.) Thank you all; she’s on a solid road to recovery and looking forward to getting back to life.