August 2007 Archives

Jonas left lung collapsed yesterday afternoon. That is why he had trouble breathing yesterday morning. I am sorry I said to friends earlier it was a hum-dum day for Jonas. It was not, in the end. The medical team found out at around 5:30pm from a radio and immediately put a tube on his side to suck the fluids out.

Liquid did come out but Jonas still had trouble breathing and a fever. Dr. Ferri came over and decided, based on the radio, to insert a tube higher up near the collar bone to see if air would come out. I actually witnessed the operation while holding Jonas hand.

As soon as the tube was put inside, little bubbles of air started coming out on the other end which meant that air stuck inside the thorax pressured the lung to completely empty itself and shrivel. Letting out the sealed up air by the tube helped the breathing a little bit. The surgeon decided that we need to figure out where that air is coming from and ensure it is not from a leak in the redone stomach/oesophagus. That means Jonas is currently waiting to be brought to the operating room where the surgeon will do a complete check of the insides to resolve this situation.

I am going back to the hospital in the morning. It is a long night. I cannot wait to go back to Jonas bedside.

I will post again later today.

Rose

The nose tube cannot come off yet. It drains the stomach, filling with brown muck a container near his bed. The tube gives him a weak nasal voice that comes out in brief sentences interspersed with sighs. He seems to have retained his deep voice but I suppose we have to wait after he tubes come off. The surgery can sometimes induce palsy of the vocal chords but I know they had brought in a neck specialist to remove the lymph nodes there, a man with a light hand and a swift scalpel who would be careful not to damage the vocal chords.

The hardest part: standing up to walk. We were told day 2 and 3 after the day of the surgery are the most exhausting of all days. All the energy is taken up to heal and yet, starting to sit and then, walk, is important to make sure recovery will be happening normally. Here, Jonas holds on to a cart and walks outside his room and comes back while surrounded by two physiotherapists.

The thing that stays with me right now is his reassuring smile. Even as he was being wheeled to the operating room, he kept his good spirits and sought to bring the tension down a few notches. He smiled at me, said he was going to be ok and the elevator door closed on him.

If leaving comments throws an error, rest assured that the comment was probably received regardless. I will still have to moderate it, though.

However, I would strongly encourage you to register through Typekey before Monday when I go under the knife. Then leave a comment. I will approve you once, then you don't ever have to wait for your comment to appear. Otherwise, it could be a long time before your comments appear. Given the amount of spam I expect to receive during that time, there is a risk that your comment would get lost.

Also, Rose will be making updates to this blog while I am away, so she will keep you posted.

More updates over here, if you care to see them.

The surgery is in four days, and although I don't seem like it, I think I am getting rather anxious about it. It's going to be a bad time, and it will be long. I will find out more about this tomorrow when I finally get the details from the nurses and doctors.

I stopped working on August 8. I felt like a lot of crap that day and the next day. It was as though if I wanted to do anything, anything at all, it required that I move a 500-pound block out of the way before I could do anything. But when I woke up the next morning, I felt like a million bucks. However, something else happened to me. In my renewed independence, I could no longer tolerate anything that bothered me. I couldn't deal with it in any sensible way. I can count the number of times that I yelled or screamed at Rose on one hand, and two of them occurred that weekend. I would represent it mathematically as:

lim_x->x0d(x) = ε

For those that remember their first year calculus, this might make sense. For the rest of you, skip this section. x is the number of times that I have to deal with something that someone does really irritates me. x₀ is the number of x's where I start to crack. It may have been 1, or 2. d(x) is the "ability to deal" function, that is, my capacity to deal with the x's. ε is an arbitrarily small positive number that is close to zero. In English it reads:

As the number of irritating incidents approaches some arbitrary but particular number that I didn't choose, my ability to cope in an appropriate manner approaches zero.

That's life calculus.

In 8 days I will be chopped up like so much very valuable meat. That's a sobering thought.

Firstly, I apologize for not blogging sooner. I couldn't because until last night my blog was sick. (Yes, even my blog gets sick. Chemo fucking sucks.) Something about my mt-config.cgi file disappearing. Anyway, I am back now. You can go back and see what I wanted you to see on the days I wanted you to see them. I've also started drawing again. There will be a couple of updates here, as soon as I can get that blog working properly again.

There was more that I wanted to say, but I have forgotten. If I remember, I'll be back.

Back here, I was looking for an artist to make me a tattoo. During my week in the hospital, Suj not only presented me with designs, but an actual T-shirt!

This looks as good as anything given what I was looking for. The best thing was that it was done using nothing other than Microsoft clipart. Not bad at all.

The following pictures were taken in a park on Bellechasse.

Is it wrong for me to be so fascinated by how fat this kid is? He's only about 4 or 5 and was in the same park, next to us.

I was going to the library when I discovered this: giant chess at Parc Emelie-Gamelin.

The blond kid has a clear advantage.

Here he goes for the kill.

And that's all she wrote. Checkmate!

It just hasn't been my summer so far. even though the war against the infected vein was won, the recovery was awful. I was pretty dozy at work the week I returned, and in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have bothered to even go. The following week I was back to form, but unfortunately I was only there for the first three days of that week. I think that I got some work done, though.

Here's where things start to go awry again. Last Thursday, August 2, I started my third and final round of chemo before surgery. It was more or less normal. Instead of a PICC line in my venously mangled left arm, they put one in my right arm. After all, it was to be the final treatment lasting only five days after which they would remove the line. However, on Sunday night I started feeling some discomfort in my right arm. Monday morning around 11 am, I decided to see what they could do at the hospital, although I didn't hold out much hope. I figured that I would be there a couple of hours, they would tell me that there wasn't much they could do (I was hoping maybe for an adjustment of the line) and I could go back to work and my Hamburger Helper which I had packed with me.

I was in emergency for 30 hours. During that time I learned that: