I was reading this page on the health history of US Presidents and I am entirely convinced you could write an entire book on the rectal issues that have been rampant in the Oval Office. Aside from the fact that pretty much every other president of the 18th and 19th century had some encounter with rampant dysentery, here are some examples:

• James Garfield got shot in 1881 and died 80 days later. And during that time, he could not hold down food. So his doctors (and it’s been widely speculated that his doctors’ incompetence is what really killed him) had to feed him rectally, by giving him nutritional enemas.
• During the Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy had constant and acute diarrhea.
• Eisenhower had a severe bowel obstruction in 1956.  The first course of action was a tap-water enema, but he was rushed to the hospital and had a foot of his intestine bypassed with a colostomy.
• After Abraham Lincoln was shot, one of the methods used to revive him was anal dilation.
• Garfield suffered from an anal fissure that required surgery in 1875.
• In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt suffered from iron deficiency anemia due to rectal bleeding from hemorrhoids.
• In 1984, Bill Clinton underwent a colonoscopy due to rectal bleeding.
• Jimmy Carter had to receive emergency hemorrhoid treatment in 1978. It was hidden from the public, until Anwar Sadat told the people of Egypt to pray for Carter because of his ailment.
• Ronald Reagan had two feet of his colon removed in 1985 due to colon cancer.  He had a colonoscopy that revealed the cancer, and when the doctors wanted to operate immediately, Nancy Reagan consulted her astrologer, who told her to delay the surgery.  But he didn’t want to repeat the pre-colonoscopy purging routine, so he had the surgery the next day.
• George W. Bush had hemorrhoids during the time period of his National Guard service.

[I swear I didn’t make any of this up. Go read the site.]

I have allergies.  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have them, starting with a trip to the hospital when I was maybe four, when I had an allergic reaction to penicillin like most people have a reaction to agent orange.  It was a defining force of my childhood: weekly trips for allergy shots; the torture of testing, where they draw a giant battleship grid on your back and scratch you with a needle a thousand times; driving in circles in the family car with the AC running to filter out the first ragweed epidemic of the year, a washcloth over my eyes, which resembled Rocky’s after nine rounds of pummeling with an eight-foot tall Russian.  My parents thought I was allergic to chocolate, so I had all of my Easter candy confiscated and rifled over, leaving only the crappy jelly beans and no chocolate bunny.  Every day in Kindergarten, they would bring in a giant crate of half-pint cartons of chocolate milk, and I got to walk back to the cafeteria to exchange mine for plain old white milk.  And it turns out I wasn’t allergic to chocolate.  Just advil, aspirin, penecillin, ragweed, pollen, fresh-cut grass, tumbleweed, horsehair, and 96 other things bothered me.

And then, I hit my teens, and I exchanged most of my allergies for social awkwardness and crippling depression.  It wasn’t the best tradeoff, but I could mow lawns and leave the house in April.  I also erroneously thought I was allergic to Tylenol, but during the great dental rebuild of 1996, I risked it, and found I was AOK with the aceto-stuff, and started a long habit of Tylenol PM to knock me out at night.  I’m sure my liver will thank me later.

But here’s the deal: I think they’re back.  Maybe since New York, I’d have one or two bad allergy days in April, enough where I’d need a Claritin.  (I used to get them from Canada, but now they’re OTC.)  But here in the Bay area, the allergies have been pummeling me, giving me blurry eyes and headaches and that first-day-of-cold raspiness and itchiness in the back of the throat.  So I’ve been playing with the OTC drugs.  Zyrtec-D isn’t bad, although its blister pack is impossible to open without a team of engineers and a chainsaw.  Benadryl knocks me out; claritin doesn’t do much anymore.  I need something more, but I fear the chemical lobotomy the hard stuff brings.

I tried some flonase this week, and it gave me crippling headaches, to the verge of vomiting.  I don’t know if it affected my smell, since I can’t smell anyway because of allergies.  Anyway, I made an appointment with an allergist.  Maybe I will get a new script; maybe it involves a bunch of shots and whatnot.  Actually I am sure it will involve a ton of appointments and tests and copays and waiting rooms, and I will be handed from specialist to specialist who don’t want a liability issue and can’t fix anything.  You know, the usual.

I think I told the story before, but when I was in the hospital as a kid, I shared a room with an Amish kid who got his arm cut off in some kind of plow accident.  Maybe he was Mennonite; all I know is it was my first experience with strange dudes with beards and no mustaches and 19th century clothes, and my first experience with a kid with no arm.  He only stayed a day, but I remember it freaking the hell out of me.  I wonder what happened to that kid, if he’s knocking around Goshen in a buggy with twelve kids, or if he dropped out, joined the English, became a heroin junkie, and works at a Wal-Mart somewhere, or collects disability, lives in a trailer, shoots speed, and listens to Judas Priest, occasionally wondering what happened to that kid 35 years ago who was puffed up like a balloon, upset because he couldn’t watch the TV because his roommate’s parents thought TV was of the devil.

I’m last in my fantasy baseball league, BTW.  And 5 of my pitchers had wins this week.  It takes a special kind of bad to pull that one off.

So last Sunday, I broke my right arm. And I am right handed. Expect a giant drop-off in my updates until I can type again.

The summary: I was riding my bike a few blocks from home. It’s all old warehouses in the neighborhood, and there are a lot of railroad side spurs that are abandoned, like with a set of rails half-buried in asphalt crossing the streets at funny angles. I remember riding next to one thinking “it would suck if my wheel fell into that groove.” Next thing I know, the bike falls out from under me, I fall to my right, I stick out my right arm, and pow. Had to ride home with a broken arm and a fucked up left knee, although I think the knee is structurally OK, just rubbed raw with the gentle touch of asphalt.

Went to the Oakland ER, which was an adventure. 7 hours of jonesing addicts thinking that if they screamed at the doctors enough, they’d get a taste. Also a Hispanic kid was in for a heart murmur or something, and his entire extended family of 768 were all in the waiting room, eating candybars and talking on cell phones right under the “no food/no cell phones” sign, as the movie Mama’s House 2 played on a TV with no channel or volume controls.

X-Rays were murder. Turns out I chipped the elbow end of the radius. Not much of a structural issue - you can’t set it or put screws or a plate in it, it pretty much fixes itself. But in the meantime, lots of swelling, lots of nerves focused in that area, and the arm doesn’t want to bend, and the wrist can’t turn. I got this space-age fiberglass instant-mold splint that I ace bandage on, and can take off to shower (thank you - heat waves and plaster casts don’t mix.) Also got some vicodin and a sling. I missed a day of work - I can drive now, and my left handed typing and mousing slowly improves. I have to slowly wean out the splint over the next few weeks - should be AOK in a month or so.

I did this same thing in 1992 on my left arm. No space age cast then, though. And I only had codeine syrup for pain. But that was my left hand. And computers didn’t involve as much mouse work then. I don’t know how you one-armed people deal with Windows on a daily basis.

Knee update #863: the MRI preliminary results are back, and it is a sprain of the MCL (the ligament, not the shitty cafeteria restaurant in the mall.) So, no surgery, no cortizone, no complications, and I just need to keep it in the brace for a bit and it will slowly get better. I am pretty much off the cane now, although I used it today. No real pain. There’s still some swelling and fluid buildup, but that will go away. If it doesn’t subside in a week or so, I can go back for another draining. And in a month, maybe some physical therapy to strengthen things back up. Otherwise, no further drama, and it’s pretty much back to business as usual.

I had to make a couple of quick edits in the glossary, and it got me thinking maybe I should do some more, or at least add all of the half-written additions I have in the queue. I also may have some new photos to add. All of this makes me go back to my original, four-year-old plan to wrap it up into a print book. I have another project going now, but it’s slowly stalling and maybe I should go back. I don’t know. I mentioned over in livejournal that the IDS actually quoted me on something in an article recently, which I guess shows that there’s something good going on there. (Or it proves that stuff comes up in google, and someone needed a quick source.) Anyway, something to think about.

I got a new watch, because the Casio one I bought for my birthday in 2004 has been spazzing out. It has a tiny battery to preserve state, and a larger rechargable short-term battery for the watch’s function, which is charged by a solar cell in the battery face. Either I don’t get out enough, or the short-term battery has some kind of nicad memory lapse, or both, but it kept dying on me, and would require 20 hours of “charging” under a lamp to work for 8 hours. It also had some other problems, like this auto-sleep feature that pretty much constantly shut the watch off on me. So I bought a new watch (and of course, the old watch has worked flawlessly since.)

I bought a Timex Ironman DataLink USB. I had an old Ironman DataLink, which I think I got for my birthday in 1998, but the old one used this weird gimmick where the watch had a photo-eye in it, and the software on your PC would make the screen flicker with lines of data, which basically made like a 2 baud modem. The software only worked with a narrow range of Windows PCs, of which I never owned one and had to use a girlfriend’s computer to load up the watch. But it would hold phone numbers and reminders and other random shit. The new watch has the same features, but has a special USB cable that clips to the side of the watch - there is no plug, just four contacts on the watch. The software is much more advanced, and the watch is slimmer. It has one of those metal bands with a clasp that don’t adjust at all, which drove me mad because it didn’t fit my tiny wrist. I eventually figured out you can punch out some of the links on the band with a tiny screwdriver and make it smaller. So I have a new toy, and maybe eventually I will find out how to download new tones or programs to it. I don’t even have phone numbers yet. But it’s still neat.

Food’s here…

Knee update 2: my knee has been getting better slowly, but has still been pretty dicey, so I skipped work yesterday and went to an orthopedic surgeon. He took some x-rays, which I don’t understand much, because they looked just like white insides of knee, and I couldn’t see tendons, ligaments, or shit. But I realize there is a science to reading the subtle shades and fogging and whatnot, so that’s why he’s the doctor and I’m not.

My knee was pretty swelled up, so he offered to remove some fluid. If you’re eating, stop reading this. Seriously. Okay, he got out this giant thing that looked like one of those Ronco Flavor Infusers they sell on TV, for shooting spices and fat inside a pork chop or chicken cutlet. It looked a couple of inches around, and about six deep, so I’m guessing it could hold a good six ounces of fluid. And the business end of it looked like one of the nails you’d use when framing a house, but hollow. First, I put on some roomy disposable hospital blue shorts, which looked like something Urkel would wear to the beach. Then he hit me up with a spray bottle of some kind of super-refrigerant stuff that froze my knee in about two seconds. Then, the prick.

Now, I’m no stranger to needles. As a kid, I had allergy tests, which involved making my back look like that Pinhead guy in the Hellraiser movies. I also got the shots, sometimes as many as four or six skin injections a week. I’m also a frequent flier at the dentist, who admires my ability to take a gram or two of liquid novacaine without flinching. I’ve also had liquid cortizone injections in my big toes to treat gout. That involved getting a smaller novacaine shot first, and then the big horse needle, which the doctor had to drive INTO THE MIDDLE of the joint of a toe that was so inflamed I could not walk, and then when he got it there, he would WIGGLE IT AROUND to distribute the steroid as he pumped it in. So this should be a walk in the park, right?

Wrong.

The guy jabs in the needle in the side of my kneecap, which is pretty tender from being messed up all week, but is also pretty numb from the spray. I could really feel the needle going in. And staying in. And he pulled back the syringe like he was pulling gravy out of the pan to baste an extra-large turkey, and I’m wondering, “when the fuck is my knee going to stop exuding fluid?” And then he GRABS MY KNEECAP AND STARTS MOVING IT AND FUCKING AROUND WITH IT TO GET MORE FLUID OUT.

And then it’s done. And he shows me this giant baster, which contains about three ounces of fluid that’s roughly the color of a hot and sour soup from a Chinese restaurant. Now, I’ve seen some weird shit in the health arena. I’ve seen a video feed of the inside of my intestine. I’ve seen an x-ray video in real-time of me swallowing. I’ve seen a nail go through my hand. I’ve seen a dentist show me my wisdom tooth pulled out in about four pieces. But seeing a bunch of joint fluid that was just in my knee, well that’s a new one.

The knee felt a lot better, and he gave me a new brace to wear that’s pretty hardcore and much more comfortable than the $10 piece of shit I bought at Rite Aid. But there was no real diagnosis yet, awaiting an MRI, which was my big adventure today.

Okay, so I had a 7

AM MRI. Yes, in the morning. It was either that, or hobble around for another week, waiting on this shit, so I woke up early and got it over with. The place was on 42nd and 11th, which is sort of Hell’s Kitchen, or at least far enough from Times Square that it isn’t Times Square, and it’s a bitch to catch a cab. So I got over there 10 minutes early, and it turns out some other fucker is running like 40 minutes late, and he keeps moving during his MRI, and I could have slept another hour. Great.

For those of you not up on your medical imaging technology, and MRI is something that uses colossal amounts of magnetic energy to basically determine the atomic makeup of cells and water in your body, which is fed to a computer that then produces an incredibly detailed image of the target in question. It looks like the dream implant machines in Total Recall, except even more Sci-Fi and Philip Dick-ian. There’s no radiation, but if you have any metal in your body, like a pacemaker or something, it could become a fatal projectile.

The other problem with an MRI is that you have to be completely still, and it can take like 45 minutes to get a scan. I didn’t know this; I thought it was like an x-ray where you got in there, click, and that’s it. Unfortunately, this meant I had to stand in it for 45 minutes, which sucked. It also meant I had to watch 45 minutes of Olympics coverage, and I absolutely hate the Olympics. I hate the trivial bullshit morning coverage even more, the kind of shit where they go to see where the athletes shop and whip up recipies of Italian food, like we give a fuck. Anyway, the machine looked very cool. It was one of the stand-up MRIs, which looks like this. You stand up, and then a tray tilts you back, but it’s more open-air than the old tube style ones. So I sat in that for 45 minutes, wondering if I was moving or not, since my whole leg was stiffening up, and then it was done, and I went to work.

So bottom line is, the knee continues to get better. I can pretty much walk with no cane, but I used it today anyway. I go back tomorrow to find out the news on the MRI, and I’m not saying anything definitive until then, but I think it’s going to be okay in a few more days or a week or something.

Not much else is up. I got a new load of books to read (right after spending four days in bed with nothing to read, of course.) Oh, and John Sheppard has set up Smalltownpunk.com for his upcoming book (re)release, so go check that out.