Working for the Weekend

Okay so I don't know why I didn't post this when I wrote it and it is now like a month outdated so expect there to be missing links or unfinished thoughts. But no matter, now just for you here it is, digging in the crates....

[The Mgmt.]

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I hope everyone has been having a good 2010. I have been focusing a lot of energy looking for good stuff to write about and just like that these past 5 months have flown bye. For better or for worse I think I can say I’ve enjoyed these 4 months more than any other 4 in my entire life. There may have been a stretch back in 1998 but it’s hard to say. Part of the reason I’m having so much fun is that life is hard. Life fucking sucks and I have had just as much to laugh about as to cry about so instead of doing either I try to just enjoy each moment. When things start to get epically bad, I curl up in bed and don’t move just like anyone else might but when things are good you had better believe I soak up every stinkin’ moment of it. I don’t have any grandiose notions of life and what I can expect from it so the littlest things are starting to mean more to me.

Take this weekend for instance. It was filled with lazy days and sleepless nights. I honestly wish I knew how much fun college could be because right now this schedule is spoiling me rotten. I saw a world-class athlete run track at noon, a softball game with one of my best friends at 1, then watch a great film (Up in the Air) that night with some close friends.

I woke up around noon the next day and though I was woefully dehydrated from sleeping in front of a sun washed window, I still had a whole day to waste. I then played what would become my first games of Bocce ball ever. Awesome game that it was I then had to break to share a BBQ with a buddy who is going to ride his bike to Central America later this year. The night ended with a great playoff game between the Portland Trailblazers and the Phoenix Suns. This is the investment I made 5 years ago. The chance to have weekends like this, are why people go to college. Never again will I be able to invite a model and her friends to my place or any other for that matter just to chill. The good is always balanced by the bad but I have so much negativity reserved for other things that all I will say is this: sometimes you have good ideas, and sometimes you have horrible fucking ideas. Inviting Waffles to the Fucking BBQ was not one of my brighter ideas.

And now time for another random story from my time in the hospital.

I wasn’t always in just one hospital. I actually had 3 surgeries over a 5 month period so all in all, it came out to 4 hospitals in 2 states over 6 months. Not a bad total and for the low-low price of only about $1.5 Million you could take the same trip. I don’t think the miracle of my story has anything to do with my new heart at all. What is miraculous is that I made it that long in the first place. I came home in March to have an AICD implanted which basically gives you a jolt of electricity to try and get your heart back into rhythm. My heart would sometimes beat upwards of 160 times per minute so in order to get that back down to a normal resting rate sometimes shocks were needed. Without the device I was running the risk of my heart getting stuck at such a high rate, passing out, and eventually dying from VFib. So in March of 2009 I came home for spring break and had the surgery done. All went well and I had a pager sized bump in my left pec. I didn’t hurt and it really had no purpose except for in extreme cases. The morning of April 17, 2008 was one such case. That story culminates with me at Memorial hospital in Long Beach and a night in which I often woke up to a nurse standing over me in hysterics. See for me, the heart rhythm had nothing to do with my physical exertion so if I were to be asleep I could still experience these tachycardias. So apparently some nurse was given more than she could handle because apparently while I slept my heart raced wildly out of control. Now obviously this had been happening for quite some time before I’d had the surgery and I had no ill effects. Yet now I was hooked up to a monitor and someone was hearing a lot of alarms most likely because this nurse did what any rational person would do…She woke me up and told me to calm down.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Long Beach and will always consider it home. But in the end those nurses were about as far from competent as I think I’ve seen and TRUST ME, I’ve seen some incompetence in my day. I guess the on call doctor, who was not my doctor, did not want to be bothered. My real doctor was leaving for Europe that night and was unreachable. So these poor ladies were in over their head with a patient who seemed like he might just up and die right before their eyes and were too scared to call the doc. I have hazy memories at best of what happened that night and even then had far less understanding of what was happening than I do now so it’s unlikely I’d be able to make any conclusions of what was going on anyway. I made it through the night and no one had to be called in. I hopped in an “Ama’lance” the next day and made the most nerve-racking drive to Westwood I’ve ever made… yes more nerve-racking than even the one when I got the call.