If Hazel is sick in bed does she hafta get dressed? Does she hafta change her pajamas? Her underwear? I rather enjoy letting the clothing warm to the body temperature and then remaining in said night clothing for the length of time one is sick or until warm underwear becomes blotchy with female fluids and such at which point one may want to remove the underwear and put the same cozy pajamas back on.
Fear not! If you have read about the hypertonic pelvic floor, Hazel is not bothered by that currently - it has become regular tonic, or maybe gin & tonic, but not hypertonic. Thus, the underwear is dry, toasty, and unchanged for days. Oh, admit it, you do it too!
Why refer to Hazel rather than myself? Well, I went to type this post and the image of Hazel in her apron outside the little house came to me. She was bold, so 'out there' about all kinds of taboo issues. You know when she went out at night, she took off the uniform and wore only the apron? If only. Hazel was a television maid, of course, beloved to all: white skin, quacky voice, red hair, stout posture. She loved her little family and needed nothing more than to make them happy. Kinda like the tree in Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree. No! I am not going to link to Amazon.com here. Find it yourself. Hazel was happy to be a stump and let her family take the apples, the branches, the wood. She'd just watch and shake her head happily.
So Hazel's watching the world go by, except this Hazel's contemporary, wearing dirty underwear, reading, and watching bad t.v. And not giving a goddamn thing. I did watch t.v. yesterday - what a mistake. I think it made me sicker seeing Vicky doing her split personality again. Honestly, I have been watching bad t.v. my whole life: Ryan's Hope, All My Children, One Life to Live, Room 222, The Partridge Family, Family (Kristy McNichol), H.R. Puffinstuff, and other varied horrors. Twenty five years I've been watching a bad actress pretend to have multiple personalities. Every time I have been utterly embarrassed for her, yet riveted to her ability to continue, unabashed.
They useta have a commercial in which a reporter-type would knock on someone's door and ask when a housewife had last changed her Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. "Last June," said one. "Thanksgiving?" asked the second. And the third shrunk her face up. "Was I supposed to change it?" My friend from across the street switched the question to "When was the last time you changed your underwear?" Thirty years later, I dare to ask the same question, but slightly edited. Last time you were sick in bed, how many days did you go without changing your underwear? Hazel is heading for a record at 4 days. In this endeavor, I follow Vicky's lead: unabashed, but also unwashed.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Monday, February 06, 2006
A Cute New Moan Yaa
Didja ever wonder how ya got yerself into the position of having two kids, a husband with a broken foot, and a chest that feels like an ogre's foot is resting atop, not-so-lightly? The Nice Nurse Lady said to take it very seriously - this is my first day sitting up at all - and then she said I could go back to work Wednesday! (It was Friday afternoon.) I'm not sure how nice she is. "They used to hospitalize people for this," she told me. But now there are strong medicines, with names like floxamoxatoxapox. Whatever happened to 'spend two weeks in bed?'
My friends are very excellent because they get me stuff like food and they call me and they bring dinner. Chrystal actually took dictation so I could send the appropriate notes into work. I have two bobbing heads in my brain, like in those old cartoons, with good and evil, only these are both slightly malevolent. Left shoulder: above-mentioned Nurse Lady, apparently sweet but sending me back to work strangely early, as she tells me that I won't fully recuperate for weeks. She speaks out of a lipsticked little mouth, on a teeny-tiny face, in front of a tiny head, atop a big bosom like some of my old aunts. Maybe she is actually a character from an indie film? The other head is my boss, a go-get-'em Irish broad who told me recently that my work is not quite what it was in the fall. Her message upon hearing of the new-moan-aaa, "I hope you feel better, and thanks for keeping me up to date," obviously meant 'get your ass in here.' Hello? I'm Jewish and my family adheres religiously to the stereotype: 'stay in bed;' 'I'd visit, but I don't want to catch anything;' 'What's the name of the antibiotic?'
Anyway, why work for people who really give a shit about what you're doing? Can I just be mediocre?
I did bathe today and that was a big effort and this is a big effort and I feel like total crap. Waaa.
My friends are very excellent because they get me stuff like food and they call me and they bring dinner. Chrystal actually took dictation so I could send the appropriate notes into work. I have two bobbing heads in my brain, like in those old cartoons, with good and evil, only these are both slightly malevolent. Left shoulder: above-mentioned Nurse Lady, apparently sweet but sending me back to work strangely early, as she tells me that I won't fully recuperate for weeks. She speaks out of a lipsticked little mouth, on a teeny-tiny face, in front of a tiny head, atop a big bosom like some of my old aunts. Maybe she is actually a character from an indie film? The other head is my boss, a go-get-'em Irish broad who told me recently that my work is not quite what it was in the fall. Her message upon hearing of the new-moan-aaa, "I hope you feel better, and thanks for keeping me up to date," obviously meant 'get your ass in here.' Hello? I'm Jewish and my family adheres religiously to the stereotype: 'stay in bed;' 'I'd visit, but I don't want to catch anything;' 'What's the name of the antibiotic?'
Anyway, why work for people who really give a shit about what you're doing? Can I just be mediocre?
I did bathe today and that was a big effort and this is a big effort and I feel like total crap. Waaa.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
The Neighborhood
Announcing the dreaded return of the hypertonic pelvic floor: incontinence and pain, probably the result of back surgery. I gotta drink less or no coffee and do more kegels. What perceptive morsel of insight can I write about this topic? I am utterly disgusted. Urinating on one's self is an act of degradation, and wholly uncontrollable under these circumstances. It is not enough to soak everything, just enough to send a message that I am revolting. More to the point, I suppose, is that my body is revolting. 'Stop working so hard,' it says. 'Put me to sleep!' Or maybe 'give me some yoga.' Still, when a mini-pad becomes a necessity, and it is reassuring to have 20 pairs of underwear, a gal becomes disheartened.
I am not sure that any other proper human being - like not counting dogs in heat, or gorillas - actually has a hypertonic pelvic floor, except for me. The urogynecologist's office and the physical therapist's office were both strangely empty when I was first diagnosed. Any other female I did see was obviously virginal, pure, and without any unsightly pubic hair to speak of. Not the sorta babe who has painful tightening of the cunt. That would be me, the sexually questionable and gynecologically sordid type who might - in theory only - have an extra nodule inside the vagina from a lousy stitch job after an episiotomy deemed necessary when both babies chose to fly out like criminals. Which obviously, we learn now, they were.
So the plan to reflect meaningfully on this obscure hypertonic not-supersonic-at-all malady remains half-inflated, something like the stretched muscle reaching from the inside of my pelvis to my back. I've nothing clever to say about pissing my bed and cramping up. Okay, one thing: vaginal deliveries are overrated and the unpleasant sequellae go appallingly unreported. My back, my vagina, the whole pelvic neighborhood! Those damn kids.
I am not sure that any other proper human being - like not counting dogs in heat, or gorillas - actually has a hypertonic pelvic floor, except for me. The urogynecologist's office and the physical therapist's office were both strangely empty when I was first diagnosed. Any other female I did see was obviously virginal, pure, and without any unsightly pubic hair to speak of. Not the sorta babe who has painful tightening of the cunt. That would be me, the sexually questionable and gynecologically sordid type who might - in theory only - have an extra nodule inside the vagina from a lousy stitch job after an episiotomy deemed necessary when both babies chose to fly out like criminals. Which obviously, we learn now, they were.
So the plan to reflect meaningfully on this obscure hypertonic not-supersonic-at-all malady remains half-inflated, something like the stretched muscle reaching from the inside of my pelvis to my back. I've nothing clever to say about pissing my bed and cramping up. Okay, one thing: vaginal deliveries are overrated and the unpleasant sequellae go appallingly unreported. My back, my vagina, the whole pelvic neighborhood! Those damn kids.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
I'll Just Write Here By Myself.
The fact that very few people read my blog does not bother me at all. I am forty-one years old; I watched Mary Tyler Moore before Nick at Nite was born. I don't mind looking at the statistics that show me that 3 people looked at my blog. It's like being the second-to-last kid picked for the volleyball game. Okay, it was last. But it was a quirk - I had friends, just not friends on that particular team, and I had never played before. I like being oblivious to the opinions of others. It's like receiving rejections in the mail. When I get one, I tell myself "Lucy, this proves that you are confident. Who cares what some snotty literary magazine thinks of your story?" Then I walk around wondering why I didn't get an MFA in Creative Writing after college.
The blog thing is really just a hobby and if people read it, that's cool. If people don't read it, that's okay, too. If a blog takes up space on the web and no one reads it, is it still a piece of writing? My philosophical side says yes, of course. I wouldn't want too many readers anyway because that would be such a fucking awful hassle to think that I might have to respond to them. Or check their blogs all the time - yikes. Then I would have to notice the many very active intelligent bloggers out there. (A friend told me about them.) How could I possibly do that? It would be so draining to have an ongoing correspondence with persons who enjoy my writing. So I'll continue to type into my robot/computer because it doesn't matter to me at all if you read this. Or this. In fact, I am not even awake right now. I am sleepwriting. See you in my dreams, or maybe not.
The blog thing is really just a hobby and if people read it, that's cool. If people don't read it, that's okay, too. If a blog takes up space on the web and no one reads it, is it still a piece of writing? My philosophical side says yes, of course. I wouldn't want too many readers anyway because that would be such a fucking awful hassle to think that I might have to respond to them. Or check their blogs all the time - yikes. Then I would have to notice the many very active intelligent bloggers out there. (A friend told me about them.) How could I possibly do that? It would be so draining to have an ongoing correspondence with persons who enjoy my writing. So I'll continue to type into my robot/computer because it doesn't matter to me at all if you read this. Or this. In fact, I am not even awake right now. I am sleepwriting. See you in my dreams, or maybe not.
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