I’ve been thinking about Death a lot lately.  By “a lot” I mean more than usual, which means more than not thinking about it at all.  I’ve always been lackadaisical when it comes to worrying about death.  My thought is that, once I’m dead, I won’t have anything to worry about.  Right?  Anyway…

Around three years ago, I attended a funeral for a gaming friend of mine.  It was the first time I went to a funeral for someone who wasn’t family, and it was a little bit surreal.  Last month my neighbor, who had been fighting cancer for over a year, passed away.  The funeral was on a day that I had to travel, but I managed to make it to the viewing by myself.  And last Sunday, a friend of mine was murdered in his own home.  He wasn’t a close friend, but it would be an insult to say he was just an acquaintance.  His funeral is this afternoon.  Work has been busy this week, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to get out in time for it, but I want to go.  I think it’s odd that I would want to go to a funeral, when I hate them…

The point of this post, though, isn’t about going to funerals.  It’s about growing up, and accepting death.

Two weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a dull, squeezing pain in my chest.  I’ve had bad heartburn before, and the first time ever I thought I was dying.  This didn’t feel like that.  I’ve also had a reaction to an antibiotic that caused intermittent chest pains as a more serious side effect.  A side effect that could cause a heart attack.  It felt more like that.  Rather than wake Strutter up to call 911, I decided I’d wait until the morning to see.  I did, however, take my pulse and temperature, both of which were normal.

In the morning, the pains kept coming.  Once every three to five minutes, it felt like my chest was squeezing it on itself, like muscle flexing as hard as it could…  and there’s only one muscle that I know about in the middle of my chest.  So I called 911, right?  No.  I took a shower, got dressed, and went to work.

About three hours into my workday, I started to get a little bit light-headed, and then started feeling short of breath during the occurrences.  Lightheadedness and shortness of breath, combined with chest pains, are a definite sign of a heart attack, so I did what any sane person would do.  I drove myself to an urgent care facility, signed in, and waited a little over an hour to see a nurse practitioner.  Everything checked out fine, and it turned out to be heartburn.  It’s a little embarrassing to say that, but probably not as embarrassing as it would be if it was a real heart attack and I didn’t go get checked out at all.

Spending eighty-nine minutes in a waiting room full of people with colds while you’re experiencing what could possibly be a life-ending event gives one a lot of time to reflect on life, and that’s exactly what I did.  And here’s a brief breakdown of what I thought about:

I decided that my life has actually been a pretty good one, and I would have very few regrets.  My first, and biggest, regret is that I’m not a great son.  I’d venture to say that I’m actually a pretty crappy one.  I don’t buy my parents presents for Christmas, birthdays, or Mother’s/Father’s Day.  I don’t visit or call as often as my mother would like me to.  I tend to call only when I need medical advice, homeowner advice, or money.  The other regrets are petty, really, and small enough for me to accept with a shrug if I’m dying.

I also thought about the aftermath if I happened to die.  I don’t have a will, so no one would really have proof of anything I wanted.  I hope that my life insurance would be more than enough to cover the expenses of death.  (Apparently, it costs a lot to die.  How is that even possible?)  I also hope that the extra money would be enough to make house payments long enough for Strutter to find a new place, and hope that my parents, who are listed as my beneficiaries, would help her out with that.  (I don’t have mortgage insurance.  In my opinion, all insurance is a scam.  In most cases, you pay far more than you get back.)

I also thought about what I’d want for a memorial service, and decided that I don’t want one.  To me, this has always been an odd practice.  To want a memorial service, in my eyes, is vanity.  I don’t want to be remembered.  I want to be forgotten.  I do understand that some people need to see the body, need to have that service, for closure.  So the service is more for them than for the deceased.  (Because, really, what does the deceased care at that point?  No matter what you believe happens after this life, I think everyone can agree that a dead person probably doesn’t have much reason to keep tabs on the living world.)

So, since people will probably need some sort of service,  I decided that I want to be cremated.  (A cemetery is a waste of land.)  I don’t care what happens to my ashes, as long as no one pays a lot for an urn, and no one pays to put that urn in the ground.  You can throw them out the car window on the ride home, honestly.  I want my service to be held on a Friday afternoon, so that my friends and family will have a reason to leave work early and get a headstart on the weekend.  (You’re welcome.)  I don’t want people walking around murmuring to one another between somber hugs.  In fact, no sad people allowed.  Play some upbeat music.  Put out some balloons if you have to.  And once the service is done, get on with your life and enjoy your weekends.  From wherever I am, I won’t be watching.  I’ll be on some great new adventure.

Once in awhile, I look over my Internet stats to find out where the the five visitors a day come from, and what might have brought them here. Since I hadn’t done it in awhile, I thought I’d check it out for the past few months… boy was I surprised.

Here are some of the more interesting things, in bold, searched for that brought people to my domain:

nair holy shit my balls hurt
I tried to warn you, brother. That stuff is ACID!
did elaine ever have a horse
That joke is still as funny now as the first time I heard it
what part of body was covered with lard and cooked during spanish inquisition
I don’t know. But I bet it was tasty! Mmmm… lard….
trutv penis weight lifting
I don’t like to brag…
feltching my ex
Now I’m tempted to do a word search on this blog and remove any occurrence of the word “feltching”
i fell back and hit my head on my headrest, it hurts really bad but there is no blood coming out. what should i do?
Go to the doctor.

I had debated writing this post or not, primarily because it’s an embarrassing and gross topic, but I’ve gotten a lot of questions about it, and my everyday friends already know, so there’s no point in hiding it. Besides, I was introduced to a brand new level of humility in the hospital… but I’ll get to that. I’m writing about my surgery. If you don’t want to know, just skip it.

In high school, all of the football players were required to take weight lifting as a class. This was fine with me, because I wanted to build some muscle and once football season was over, I could cut this class and leave school early. (I was a senior, so they didn’t care if I wasn’t bulking up for next year.) The downside to lifting weights was that there wasn’t a lot of supervision, so our techniques were sloppy, and this led to something that plagues many power lifters: hemorrhoids.

I will wait while you get the “Eeeeew!” out of your system. All better? Good. (There are more to come, so go ahead and get ready.)

It wasn’t a huge deal back then. They would flare up on rare occasions and go away in a day or two. But this year, in mid-June or so, they became terrible. (In fact, I even wrote about it back in June.) The pain was at its worst when I was lying down, so sleeping became a luxury that didn’t come very often. When I went to see the proctologist (which is coming up as a spelling error, but I’ve double-checked it three times) about it they weren’t “too terrible to take out” (his words), so he recommended several hot baths and a colonoscopy which I’d been putting off for a few years.

The hot baths didn’t help, medicine didn’t help, and by October, I was making another appointment with him. This time his reaction was a little different. He said “Wow, those have gotten big.” Big, in case you were wondering, means two of them were the size of a golf ball. Now, I don’t mean to be too graphic about it, but imagine doing your business on the toilet and having to maneuver that business around two golf balls and a marble that hurt like hell when you touch them. Now you know the misery that I was in. He gave me a prescription cream and told me to come back in a month.

A month later, there was no change, and he said it was time to take them out. Because they were mostly “inside”, this would have to be done in the hospital as an outpatient procedure, and I’d need to take at least two weeks off from work to recover. And so, one Friday morning, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room.

Thankfully, I don’t remember the procedure. The IV they gave me didn’t knock me out, but it blurred a lot. The only part I remember is my parents coming by to see me before they wheeled me off and being broken down like a double-barreled shotgun on the operating table. The rest of it is fuzzy. Afterward, though, I have the distinct memory of being in the worst pain I’d ever felt. Like I’d been ass-raped by a chainsaw. So bad, that my doctor admitted me to the hospital and put a morphine drip in my arm.

The first couple of days of the hospital are blurry. I remember my parents and Strutter coming to visit, but I couldn’t tell you what we talked about. I remember nurses coming in all the time to take my temperature and blood pressure, and to roll me on my side to look as my ass and giggle. (They probably didn’t giggle. But this was the beginning of my lesson in humility.) I also remember, quite vividly, getting a catheter. I remember jerking upright and screaming, and scaring the hell out of the nurse. (Just a note to all the men out there: If a woman is holding your penis and pushing a flexible tube into it, do NOT sit bolt upright and scare the hell out of her.)

And so there I was, wearing nothing but a pair of tighty-whitey underwear that they gave me (I’m normally a boxers guy, if I choose to wear underwear.) laying in bed for four days with a tube of piss pouring into a bag at the foot of my bed. The first two days I was fighting off an infection, but by the third day, I was feeling well enough to tell them to take me off the morphine. I didn’t eat too many solid foods during my stay, although there was no restriction on my diet. I was too afraid to take a crap. So I stuck to soup, grits, and noodles.

Once I was home again, I was still eating soft foods out of fear. I knew it was coming, but wanted to make it as painless as possible. When it did come, after six days of waiting and with the help of Milk of Magnesia, it redefined my scale of pain.

You know how when you are describing pain of a medical provider, and they ask you where it is on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst pain imaginable? When I tore the meniscus in my knee, and the doctor was bending my knee and asking me what the pain ranked, she bent it one way that hurt like hell. I managed to say “seven” right before I passed out. When I came to, she told me that passing out from pain would be a ten. I replied with “But I can imagine much worse pain, like being burned alive or eaten by a shark.”

Taking a crap for the first time, after six days of not doing so, and after having three piles cut out as well as a fissured sphincter repaired, became the new ten. That little knee injury… that’s a five. I can not describe how awful it was, I will just say that I imagine being burned alive or eaten by a shark would be less painful.

It became my morning ritual. Wake up. Stagger into the bathroom. Grab a big fluffy towel and clutch it my chest. Scream into the towel for five minutes. Take a hot bath and try to push the residual pain aside. On a follow-up visit with the doctor, I joked that I wouldn’t know when I’d recovered because I’d become so used to the pain that I wouldn’t notice when it stopped hurting.

I’m still not fully recovered, a month after the surgery. Two wounds haven’t fully healed, but they’re getting better. I’ve been back at work for a couple of weeks. The only bad spots are my daily crap and the few hours following it. At least now, I’m back to my original level of discomfort, and I feel like it will get better from here.

Through all of this, Strutter has been there for me every step of the way. We may have gotten on each others’ nerves once or twice during the journey, but anytime I wince of groan, she’s by my side quicker than she can say, “Poor Mookie!”

I am the luckiest man alive.

Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say I’ve spent the past two weeks recovering from surgery.  It wasn’t life-threatening, or cancer, or anything really major.  It did, however, cause an infection and a lot of pain and crying and clawing at whatever was nearby.

Throughout this recovery, Strutter has been by my side.  Her steadfast concern and warmth have been an incredible medicine, and it’s proven to me that I’ve found the right one.  If I wasn’t so goddamned poor (four days in a hospital is expensive), I’d be ring-shopping today. So this Thanksgiving, I’m dedicated the entire holiday to her.

Thank you, Brittney, for being who you are, and allowing me to fall in love with you.

First, let me say that I’m alive, and I feel sort of bad for vanishing off the face of the blagosphere. Finding love and a relationship tends to make me write less, because the things that Strutter and I share are OUR things, and writing about them might somehow sully them a bit. I’m happy. We’re happy.

Anyhow… on to the meat of my post. Strutter has become addicted to a television show on the TruTV network. It’s called Haunting Evidence. If you’re aware of the show, bear with me while I explain the premise to those who are not.

A team of paranormal folk come in to an unsolved crime and, using their spooky powers and high-tech gadgets, gather evidence to help further the investigation. The team consists of three people:

John J. Oliver – Medium and, according to the link I’ve provided, actor. His job consists of making maps based on dreams he has and following those maps to a site relevant to the crime. He also hypno-regresses himself to the night of the crime and has the spirit of the victim give some extra insight.

Carla Baron, Psychic Profiler – I’m not really sure what the technical difference is between a Medium and Psychic Profiler, but the biggest difference I can watch and gather is that John tries to give more facts and details, where Carla talks about the emotion and psychology of the attack… much like Deanna Troi ranted and raved in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’re laughing at that. I promise.)

Patrick Burns, Paranormal Investigator – No show is complete without a gadget-geek, and Patrick fills this role perfectly. He’s always on the scene with his EVP detectors (commonly known as microphones) and temperature-change-monitors (also called thermometers). While it sounds like I’m mocking Patrick, I’m not. Out of the three of them, he’s the one who I think actually BELIEVES in what he’s doing. He just got stuck with two gypsies.

In every episode, Patrick drives John and Carla out near the crime scene, and tells them nothing of the case they’re about to work aside from the name of the victim. For ten minutes or so, John and Carla wander around talking about how they feel something peculiar… and eventually the peculiar feeling grows as they come up to a place of significance, usually the crime scene or the house of the victim. The narrator always reminds the viewer at this point that John and Carla have no prior knowledge of the case, and have amazingly led the camera crew straight to the place of interest.

Then the show becomes a seance, while John communicates with the victim’s spirit and Carla has an emotional seizure. (In fairness, Carla does give details that many times correspond to John’s revelations. I exaggerate for the sake of humor.) Patrick sits in his command center, monitoring the almost-never-changing temperature and listening for very-seldom-recorded EVPs… When something does happen, though, he’s the most animated person on the show. He leaps into action with his electromagnetic field detector thingy and his portable laser temperature-taker. It’s awesome.

At the end of the episode, Patrick compiles a list of evidence to hand of the authorities, hopefully to give them a new direction to look in. After two marathons of this show, I’ve only seen one where they actually caught the guy, and even then it was because he’d been arrested for a different crime and his DNA matched. That’s my biggest disappointment with the show. They never catch the bad guy. There’s no closure. My second biggest disappointment is that the ghosts don’t get pissed off and start smashing shit. My third biggest complaint is the motto of TruTV is “Not Reality. Actuality.” This show has no actual scientific merit. It’s fringe science, and still widely debunked.

On a positive note, though, I like the idea of the show. I’m a fan of True Crime stories and a fan of ghost stories, so it’s a perfect blend. I just wish it offered more closure. Even if only half the episodes resulted in an arrest, it’d be worth watching for me.

So if you need a laugh on Saturday night, tune in and watch Patrick Burns and his gypsies. And I say in all honesty, Patrick, I hope you find something. You’re the star of that show to me.

So, the part I left out about the colonoscopy was that the doctor ripped out a polyp and send it off for a biopsy.  He called me yesterday and told me that it wasn’t cancerous. I think this situation was all I really needed to be able to say “No” to cigarettes from now on.  I haven’t had one since June 30th, and I haven’t had the desire for one.