Category: ranting

Last year I posted about my first ever experience spending a night in the hospital [confusion.cc]. Initial diagnosis was that I had an H. Pylori infection. Which was true, confirmed by endoscopic examination. But… 10 days later and we’ll into taking all my drugs I woke up at five in the morning in a hotel in Jakarta —I was on a business trip— with the same crazy agonizing pain in my lower chest and even in my back. I struggled through it for hours hoping it would go away, drifting in and out of sleep till close to noon. At that point I gave up and managed to pack my shit, checked myself out of the hotel and get to the airport where I took the next available flight back to Singapore. Luckily these flights run every hour or so and they are used to business travelers changing to the next available one when they finish early.

As a side note: with all the scanners and health checks, in place even before COVID19 in this part of the world, no one questioned a guy who looked like death warmed over, sweating and pale, wincing in pain at either the Jakarta or Singapore airports… anyway.

When I landed I went straight to the hospital and checked in. After a long discussion with the doctor who was treating me, going back over the entire history of issues starting in January and describing the pain again he asked about the back pain. Was it present in the other attacks? Yea I think so. After that he suggested that I might be having gall stones and based on that he requested a specialist to take over.

The specialist was fairly certain it was gallstones after an interview and a few hours later it was confirmed by an ultrasound. Ultrasounds are much, much, much more pleasant than endoscopic examinations. Someone sliding a plastic thing like a tennis ball covered in lubricant over you is weird but not so much unpleasant, even if the lube is cold. Endoscopic examinations on the other hand is… well, read the other post [confusion.cc] for my thoughts on that. But the ultrasound worked, diagnosis: gallstones, treatment: cut them out. So the doctor explained the surgery:

In summary, it’s a laparoscopic procedure, meaning they poke a few holes in you and use instruments on sticks to look around and cut shit up. Then they pull said shit out of one of the holes. Basically surgery by chopstick through a button hole. There is always a small chance they can’t complete the procedure via laparoscopy and will still have to make a big hole so they can get in their and work better. 

And now, a second aside: doctors handwriting is really another language they learn to speak in med school. Why do you think it takes them so long? As evidence I posted the doctors explanation to Facebook to see if anyone could guess what it was. Answers ranged from the location of the lost ark of the covenant to, oddly, Vladimir Putin’s notes (I have a wide variety of friends…), to a lost page from the Necronomicon or Voynich Manuscript. A few observant people did note that the words liver and gallbladder are there and so guessed it was something to do with anatomy. But the winner was my uncle, a surgeon himself, who was spot on:

It sounds like he’s making it up, but no, I checked: Pancreaticoduodenectomy [wikipedia.org] and Cholecystectomy [wikipedia.org]. I did not, in fact, need a Pancreaticoduodenectomy but I was going to have a Cholecystectomy. So, yea, anyway enough five dollar words: I had to have my gallbladder removed. Unfortunately, before I could have my gallbladder removed, I had to finish my H. Pylori treatment which would take another month. So surgery was scheduled for September.

Luckily I had no more painful issues after that and I arrived for surgery early on a Monday in mid-September for a quick three day stay. After all the checkin and prep they put me under and…

I woke up in the early evening back in my room with tubes running into me and way more bandages than a few small holes would justify. A bit later the doctor came to explain to me that he was not able to remove the gallstones laparoscopically and had to cut me open. Apparently my gallbladder was in fairly bad shape so he was not able to separate it for the liver using he tools-on-sticks.

Long story short, I spent a full week in the hospital on good drugs but still in crazy pain every time I moved or, especially, when in coughed which I was told to do regularly to ensure I didn’t develop pneumonia. Though the doctor did say I had a very high pain threshold as I was able to get up and walk after only a day and usually it took people two days due to the pain. Maybe he was just encouraging me.

In any case I made a full recovery, even going on holiday on schedule in November though I was not able to do any heavy lifting of luggage so the kids had to help, and we packed light. This did not prevent us from doing over 150km of walking around Amsterdam. And I’ve had no problems since. I have an 8 inch scare across my upper stomach like some sort of war wound and I got to keep the gallstones. Yea! Souvenirs:

Less than two weeks to go to the 2020 US election… greatest show on earth, the US election; can’t make this shit up: megalomaniacal fascist vs demential pederast both up to their ears in corruption nepotism. Or so social media “the feeds” as Spider Jerusalem would scream, tell us. Or at least tell me as best as I can follow in my personal filter bubble.

Actually, you can make this shit up, and Warren Ellis did, in his comic Transmetropolitan [wikipedia.org], specifically in the The Year of the Bastard story arc where the protagonist, Spider Jerusalem takes on both the incumbent and challenger in a eerily predictive dystopian presidential election. How eerily predictive? Well… the candidates are neo-nazi/American fascists, fake smile authoritarians, nepotistic, corrupt scum bags. Either straight up spewing their white supremacy or hiding their secret cabal of power faces behind a made-for-the-media facade. You have to read it; it’s drug addled cyberpunk crazy written at the turn of the century under Clinton and Bush the younger and is somehow more relevant than ever. I mean when you set aside the fact that eating tank grown people and injecting Ebola is day-to-day normal in The City. It’s not for everyone…

This is the fourth presidential election I have watched from afar. And each one, with the exception of 2012, seems like one more step along the path to some sort of end-of-the-American-experiment. The polarization and breakdown of what made the system work is soul crushing.

Ok. Enough election depression for the day. But I have one more election inspired trip back to the 90’s to post before November third. Oh the antici……pation.

I’m sure it’s not an original thought but I think the reason so many people don’t trust the government or any authority and are so high on conspiracy theories is they watched too much X Files back in the 90’s.

My older daughter is watching the X Files and its realise that everyone is Mulder now days. Everyone is lying and there is some grand conspiracy to hide the truth from the public. There is a bunch of shady old men behind the curtain orchestrating the grand conspiracy.

Too many Mulders and none of them listening to any of the Scullys.

“Mulder, the Internet is not good for you.”

Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 10: Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster