my jaundiced eye

the little bastard

MJE seriously underestimated the depths to which she would be subjected when she thought she’d bottomed out what with being forced to lie in the gas chamber for hours on end. Turns out, the god of malicious medical technology was just warming up. The first indication was that the doc of the perpetually afflicted decided to double the number of sessions. The good news is that according to urban legend, the use of hyperbaric chambers reverses the aging process! By the end of these treatments MJE will likely be a prepubescent tween. Just my luck, on top of everything else, I‘ll get to go through adolescence again.

But the coup de grace is my new negative pressure wound treatment, a device that is the 21^st century equivalent of leeches. Without going into the gory details suffice it to say it is not something to which you would like to be attached. The size of a pocketbook, housed in a black rayon carrier, and tethered to me with yards of latex tubing it is definitely not the accessory of choice. But there’s more! Not only does it make me look like a rental car agent (a woman stopped me in the Budget lot the other day and asked where she should return her car) but it emits an endless chorus of burps, gurgles and growls as if suffering from a particularly savage case of irritable bowel syndrome. Good luck trying to explain that to the people at the next table.

I was describing this god awful contraption to my cousin Salubrious and she commented that it sounded like a goddam suicide vest, which it might well be if I have to wear it for too much longer. With that in mind I imagined what the scenario might be if the little bastard and I tried to go through airport security. Its whirling dials, flashing statistics, tubes, wires and noxious noises would most certainly propel the bored TSA agents into a frenzy. They’d send for the bomb squad to dispose of it and I’d be dragged to an unmarked room by some attitudinous high school dropout in blue gloves. She wouldn’t believe my story about negative pressure wound treatment devices or read any of the informational brochures I’d brought. Without benefit of due process I’d be hauled off to Guantanamo with a hood over my head to spend the rest of my days in a cage with a bunch of religious crackpots.

Man, that gas chamber is starting to look positively inviting.

blast off

The latest salvo to be launched against MJE’s body’s seemingly unquenchable desire to self-destruct is Hyperbaric Chamber therapy. It involves lying on a gurney inside a plastic tube into which pure oxygen is pumped and pressurized to three times the normal. The purported benefit is an increase in the oxygenation of the blood, stimulating the release of growth factors, promoting the development of stem cells and wound healing. The downside is the possibility of perforated eardrums, lung collapse and seizures, not to mention being blown to bits.

The list of things you are instructed not to bring into the chamber includes lighters, batteries and petroleum based (e.g. flammable) products. You would think that those precautions would be fairly obvious with all that pure oxygen wafting around, but given the vacant look of some of the people I have run across in the center it’s probably best to be specific. Before each session, a tech attaches a grounding wire to MJE’s arm, its purpose presumably to reduce the risk of my ending up either charbroiled or in bits and pieces. MJE is not sure exactly how a puny grounding wire is going to keep a tube of hyper-pressurized oxygen from igniting and blasting off like Sputnik, but the tech assured me it would. Maybe.

The next directive is no underwear! (although it is not clear exactly what sort of interference MJE’s 100% cotton granny underpants might present). Patients are strictly limited to wearing XXX size scrubs in the chamber. MJE prefers to secure her personals in a locker in the changing room but other patients seem perfectly at ease leaving their unmentionables strewn about for the whole wide world to see. That is what MJE charitably characterizes as way too much information.

However, by far the most tiresome aspect of this therapy is the forced tedium. Each session is 90 minutes to 2 hours long five days a week and no diversions of any kind are allowed within the chamber. There is however a television mounted above which offers an endless stream of seventies television shows featuring terrible acting and all of the fashion faux pas we all want to forget from that era: bellbottoms, afros and double knits. Isn’t it enough to suffer the anxiety of immolation and the indignities of stripping down to your altogether in a changing room full of strangers’ underwear without that?

Salt in the wound for sure.

X$&? #@

The last post was dedicated to MJE’s current state of hairlessness, which at press time seemed to be a fairly significant side-effect of the chemo treatments. But this week I have careened into the fine print in the drug pamphlet. Those side effects that are on about page 40 and are described as “possible, but very unlikely.” Mind you my surgeon said the chance of infection in an IV port is “less than 3%” and guess what readers. I have always aspired to be in the top percentile but I was mostly thinking about SAT scores or net worth.

Continuing with my tale of woe, I started to notice red spots on my arms last week. Like army ants, they slowly but surely advanced and now cover the entire front half of by body. I can’t be sure whether they got as far as my face because I have also developed rosacea. It frankly doesn’t seem fair to give the appearance of a red-faced drunk without the accompanying joy of having habitually consumed too much alcohol. Well, I’ve done that too but I really don’t think that’s relevant here.

Hold on, I am not done yet. I also now have plantar fasciitis or whatever that’s called when the heel and instep of your foot hurt like hell. The FDA did a study on the incidence of this condition as a result of chemotherapy and only 26 of the 4525 patients in the study got it, that’s only .574%. Once again MJE lands a spot in the top percentile!

The good news is I haven’t lost my toenails or fingernails and my eyes haven’t turned yellow. Yet.

the human thumb

MJE continues to be plagued with various unwanted consequences of a few too many cocktails, and no I don’t mean waking up and finding the dog wearing her underpants or discovering the bird feeder on the kitchen counter filled with mixed nuts and surrounded by bloated house mice. Those are the result of an overindulgence in delectable ethyl alcohol-based cocktails. No, I refer here to the vexing aftereffects of cocktails based on a mixture of far less congenial drugs, the sort that are literally designed to kill you. In MJE’s experience, consumption of even way too much of the enjoyable variety won’t off you, at least not right away, although you may wish you were dead.

Chemo cocktails are designed to attack fast growing cells like hair follicles and fingernails. And cancer. So like a fish, MJE started to rot from the top and the first thing to go was the hair on my head. Eyebrows and lashes, kaput. And then suddenly, just at the point where I could really use it, the molting stopped. My moustache and hag hairs seemed to be totally resistant, ditto leg and armpit hair. Now, I’m not sure if chemotherapy also induces paranoia but I strongly suspect a male correlation to this phenomenon. Any woman drug researcher worth her sodium chloride would conjure up an emulsion that would work from the bottom up and generate leg, armpit, upper lip, bikini line and hag hair loss from the very first drop. She’d put off the buzz killers until the very last.

MJE looks like a 5’3” thumb.

interiors for idiots

You can imagine MJE’s surprise upon opening this week’s Sunday NYT Magazine and finding the house where MJE and the OB&C got married! Back in the day, it belonged to my stepfather Monsieur Zero whom my mother had married in the vain hope that he would provide her with a carefree existence of travel and easy living. Sadly she neglected to conduct an adequately thorough due diligence prior to the I Do’s or she would have discovered that M. Z still had his third grade lunch money and his idea of travel was a drive downriver in his Dodge Valiant for a weekend of fishing at his moth eaten camp on Bay Roquette.

The house had not been renovated since the beginning of time when we moved in. The spirit of the old south lived on in the kitchen which was the only room in the house without benefit of air conditioning. It was a glorious architectural treasure of 14’ cypress doors and windows, elegantly proportioned rooms, interesting nooks and crannies and an attic that Anne Frank would die for. When me ole muddah used to get a snootful, which was pretty much all the time, she would flounder through the house slamming those big ass doors one after another making the huge windows rattle like a CAT 5 was blowing in.

But now some aging groovsters from New York have taken possession of the manse and tricked it out as some sort of post modern magnum opus. The beautiful rooms have been chopped up, the small drawing room where we used to enjoy countless cocktails has been converted to a bathroom and the industrial kitchen would be right at home in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The swimming pool now resembles a dark swamp and the dining room is furnished with nothing more than a red ping pong table. The family members enjoy a “gentle chaos” which somehow translates into the children wearing nothing but their underpants throughout. The family portrait is a picture of solipsistic chic although the madam coyly declines to show her face. Perhaps she’s in a witness protection program. Maybe that’s why they decamped NY.

It surely makes my head ache to think how hard those people worked to establish their obvious innate hipster bonafides.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/paul-sara-ruffin-costello-home-new-orleans/

solar pope

MJE doesn’t like to beat a dead horse vis a vis religion, but a friend sent me a solar powered pope today in honor of his holiest’s visit to South America and just couldn’t resist. First, a wise geographic move il papa, since there are only two continents worth your time, the one you’re on and Africa. They’re the last places on earth that still get ginned up by roman catholicism. Good thing they’ve got short memories about colonization and entire indigenous populations wiped out by the missionaries’ bible borne diseases. And they probably also aren’t totally up to speed on all the whole priest abuse thing, which of course wasn’t your fault, but just saying. MJE would place molto blamo at the red prada shod feet of your predecessor Benny, who turned a blind eye and definitely looked like a nazi. Even I, who doesn’t believe in the supernatural (ghosts maybe, but holy ghosts, no) and therefore doesn’t have a dog in this hunt was still glad to see the back side of that mitre. But it was sort of chicken shit of him to creep off to retirement (on the pesos of those peasants you’ve been proselytizing to in the Andes) when the going got tough. I thought popes were in it for life, but leave it to a german to make up his own rules.

But back to my personal pope. He looks like Frank and does the pope wave (which coincidentally is a lot like QE II’s royal hand swivel, both of which seem to require the bare minimum exertion) but only when he’s in bright sunlight. When he’s in the dark I don’t know what he does, but he doesn’t wave. But even if he did, it’s a whole lot better than what a heap of other Vatican-validated guys did where the sun don’t shine.

Frank does seem like a solid guy, working hard trying to drag the first estate over to thinking with the left sides of their brains in order to get to the right side of some important issues. It takes a lot of guts to tell your flock that they, god’s signature creation, the one he made in his own image, is primarily responsible for dangerously fouling its planetary nest and putting all of god’s handiwork at risk.

God, we all understand that it’s a total bitch to have to go back and fix what many believe was your best work, and which was totally finished 6000 years ago, but you might want to take a quick look, if you have a sec.

god talk

MJE was listening to the radio this morning and happened upon a panel discussion among evangelical churchers regarding the recent supreme court decision legalizing same sex marriage. Frankly I don’t get the whole flap. Most married heterosexual couples I know want to kill each other on a pretty regular basis, and if same sex sex is what’s making everyone crazy I can tell you that the visual of any of my heterosexual marrieds doing the nasty would scar me for life.

So if you can round up two people who actually care enough about each other to be shackled for life well then have at it. I may have missed something when I ducked out of confirmation class, but I thought the whole point of Jesus and his merry band of brothers was love, love, love. Whoa nelly, not so fast according to Franklin Graham whose head I could see explode through the radio when he talked about the decision. According to Franklin, who’s only on the radio because his dear old dad has really long coattails and continues to amaze people not with his sermons but with the fact that he’s still above ground, the supremes just “legalized sin.” Head’s up Frank, sin’s been legal pretty much since the beginning of time.

Anywho, one of these blathering churchers used the term ”god talk.” As in “during god talk”… What does that even mean? Whilst having a theological discussion? If so then say that. A “teachable moment” was hot on its heels, which about threw me into a diabetic coma. I was just waiting for someone to “reach out” to put the last nail in my coffin. Now I have no idea how that mealy mouthed expression wormed its way into the vernacular but it needs to worm its way right back out. I guess I can understand a bunch of navel gazers using a verbal marshmallow like that amongst themselves, but I’ve seen it used in professional correspondence for god’s sake. I can tell you what, years ago my boss was not what I’d call reaching out to me when he screamed “you’re fired” from across the office.

But that was a teachable moment.

infusiastic

MJE is relaxing in a periwinkle blue recliner getting infused. And I’m not talking about with the holy spirit either. And from the looks of it am glad because if this place is what the kingdom of heaven looks like then I’m taking a U turn at the next opportunity.

My fellow infusiasts look like a mixture of cast members of night of the living dead and the actually very nearly dead. They are accompanied by their bored caregivers who seem decidedly unenthusiastic about having been roped into this cheerless duty. Fortunately even the most seemingly cretinous among them has figured out how to furiously negotiate his or her mobile devices and kill off even more brain cells on mind numbing games and celebrity gossip during the course of the their charges’ treatments.

The atmosphere is further enhanced by the constant blare of the television set, currently offering up Hoda Kotbe (who used to be a great local news anchor in New Orleans before she sold out for a Today show gig) and Kathie Lee Somebody who speak at a volume and pace that is both frightening and incomprehensible. Apparently their shtick is to drink “booze” out of their coffee cups during the show which is highly implausible given the over caffeinated dialogue. Besides, if you are going to drink from first light then own it girl. Ditch the mugs, open a real bottle of wine and chin chin.

Their cast of “guests” so far have been some sort of over gelled and highlighted guy shilling his latest “project.” Which from what I gathered was not an international peace intitative. Now we’re being offered a zookeeper asking audience members questions about different animals. Each contestant is more vacant than the last. Next to going to Walmart, this is the most depressing view into American culture I have had the misfortune to witness. Unfortunately we infusiasts apparently have no control over the video content we are force-fed. All I can say is it’s better than the Fox news I am subjected to at the dentist. A root canal without novacaine.

will maybe work for tats

The OB&C and MJE made a major decision the other day, after years of extortion we decided that we would draw a red line on the yoga mat and no longer pay Albatross’s rent. She is able bodied, if feeble minded, she shares her apartment with another person and presumably she is milking Krylon’s alleged father for a pound of flesh every month. Not to mention the generous state of CA which pays for therapy sessions for those seeking employment so they’ll feel better about themselves in case they ever decide to get off the dole and look for a job. I am sure the US taxpayers are also footing part of her expenses as well as god knows what other “sources of income” might be involved. She attends yoga classes in her endless leisure time and sports hundreds of dollars worth of tattoos. My guess is they both probably required cold hard cash payment in advance, but paying her own rent is apparently one expense too far. A tat on the wrist trumps a roof over the head.

The OB&C suspects she’s a prostitute, which would not be the #1 career goal I’d advocate for my child, but hey the world’s oldest profession probably pays pretty well and then she could damn well pay her rent. Of course it all boils down to the well being of “our grandchild” who will be homeless. Excuse me but how did we suddenly become Krylon’s primary custodians? Doesn’t he have a mother (and technically a father too)? Besides, we’ve already been there and done that with Bandoliera-Saturnalia and our child rearing get up and go has long since gotten up and gone.

Albatross’s lack of education or skills which are hindering her job search have also somehow become our burden to bear. We did everything short of shackling her to the school desk and paid for several failed educational forays into things such as aesthetician and hair dresser schools. Unfortunately the money that was to to pay for tuition went elsewhere and she took out student loans for the programs she never attended. Those bad boy collectors are still on her like beans on rice. Insert smiley face emoticon here.

Actually, she should put her dominant personality trait and skill set to productive use and find employment as a professional harpy. There are any number of career paths in which she would excel: meter maid, toll booth collector, health insurance claims agent. She’d be happy as a pig in slop telling people that she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about their problems and before they get too wound up, the answer to whatever they might need is a resounding no. Next!

Or maybe she could join the ranks of the collection agents hounding people to pay back their student loans, one field in which she has extensive experience.

wig wam

My pal Aloe and I went to the big city to buy MJE a wig earlier this week. The local cancer center had recommended some joint that is geared toward the “special needs” of chemo patients. It’s called “Aftercare Essentials” a head scratching (literally) name that doesn’t give a consumer who’s not in the know the vaguest indication of what it sells. What it should be called is “A Place for Sick and Downtrodden Chemo Patients to get even more Depressed.”

AE stocks every sort of prosthesis and undergarment known to woman as well as make up bags, canes, creams and lotions, bibles, journals and a series of books called “Uplift” which might not be the most comforting title for mastectomy patients. Almost every item is pepto bismol pink, just in case you might however briefly forget that you are a cancer patient. Is it not enough to have a bald pate, does MJE really need a tee shirt with a huge pink ribbon embroidered on it to broadcast her membership in the breast cancer sisterhood. It felt like I had inadvertently pledged a lousy sorority after a rough night.

Anywho, “Kay” is the owner and the one who was to give MJE the rundown on wigs: types, hand knotted vs machine knotted weaves, synthetic vs human hair vs blends, etc.. She issued an interesting caution: do not to stand over a hot stove or open an oven door whilst wearing a synthetic hair wig because it will melt. A pretty drastic way to get out of K-P duty but at least there’s some upside to this miserable mess.

She ushered us into a small room and proceeded to tell us about her own hair loss experiences, all five of them. Yo Kay! Verbalizing that there is a distinct possibility that cancers may recur is most definitely not what a client wants to hear. I think MJE speaks for most cancer patients when she says that she really, really wants to be a one hit wonder. So zip it Kay; fetch me a goddam wig and let me get the hell out of this dreadful place.

She finally allowed us to inspect her inventory, which ranged from elaborate backswept Charlie’s Angels bouffants to tightly curled church lady coifs to straggly granny mullets. Aloe and I finally settled on the least offensive and what I am sure was probably the most expensive of the pelts. A bobish thing that will require having a wig hairdresser cut it to my face, a somewhat unsettling thought because if she screws up, it’s not like it’s gonna grow back.

MJE picks up the rug next week, and despite best efforts will probably end up looking just like that crazy lady down the street who has 47 cats.