Month: February 2006

I just got released after three days in the hospital cuz I got something called optic neuritis. Started off with eye pain/headache a couple weeks ago, the my left eye went blurry. Both my normal eye doctors couldn’t find anything wrong so they sent me to the hospital. They couldn’t find anything eye-wise either so they took six vials of blood for god-knows-what-tests and sent me for an MRI immediately. That was monday.

Wednesday I came back to the hospital for results. They told me the MRI looked good except for an enflamed optic nerve. (They were worried that I would have other brain problems. This optic neuritis can be a symptom of MS.) Also, I learned that I do not have syphilis or lyme disease, which is always a plus. 🙂 So after it was determined that I was generally clean they said that my eye would get better by itself, but would take weeks or *months* for it to return to normal.

The other option was to say in the hospital for 3.5 days and take high doses of cortical steroids via iv every six hours. They said this would give me back my vision in a much shorter time, so I went for it. Good choice; the hospital food was great. I got to pick off a menu and had rabbit one night. I was treated very well and my eye is back to a semi-usable state and the pain is gone. I have to take smaller doses of the roids for another 3 weeks. Hopefully I’ll get ripped in the process.

It took four nurses and 5 pokes to get the iv in. That was fun. Everywhere I went in the hospital I have to haul around this hat rack on wheels to hold up the two bags of goo for my iv. I am wearing a hospital gown and what looks to be a 70’s Starfleet-issue gold & brown bathrobe. I was fucking styling.

Side effects of the steroids include me being *really really* thirsty all the time and apparently no longer needing much sleep. I had few dreams, except for the one where each of my fingers was a finger puppet of the various doctors and nurses I encountered. So far have not experienced any fatigue from lack of sleep; I expect that to kick in today. I am probably immune to all sorts of pain; I should walk around hitting things and starting fights with the other inmates. Yeah bitch I’ll whack your ankles with my rolling hat rack and, encumbered though I am, still kick your ass in a dance battle in the hallway.

My lack of command of german was all that prevented me from asking the night nurse for a sponge bath. Anne also researched schnitzel-serving strippergrams–which would have really hit the spot–but to no avail.

They did all kinds of wacko tests on me; they tracked my blood sugar three times a day, they took more blood to test for other oddities. It’s seriously crazy the amount of tests they did. Yesterday I had to watch this red dot on a black & white checkered background that shifted back and forth for 100 seconds at a time. For each eye. Six times. With electrodes glued to my head. That was apparently to measure the response time from when info reaches my eye to actually getting into my brain. There is a 35 millisecond delay on the left side. I get the impression that they don’t get cases like me very often so they snuck lots of weird research tests in.

The other day I saw a neurologist who looks like Steven King and wants me to come back in 4 months and do a fucking *spinal tap* just to make sure about he MS cuz that’s the only real way to find it. I’ve always heard that those were dangerous, but apparently it’s outpatient and safe but rather painful.

Note: there’s no way I would have received this kind of care in the American system. This is the kind of healthcare that everyone on the planet should have. I don’t know how Switzerland manages to do it; every person here is required to have private insurance, but it’s cheap, doesn’t have weird loopholes about what is covered and what is not, and so far has just been virtually hassle free.

Long story, but the deal is that my eye should go go back to normal, it just might take a couple more weeks. Thank goodness I don’t seem to have anything permanently debilitating.

I knew I would only be in there for less than four days so I didn’t tell too many people. Thanks to everyone who visited & called.

Dear IKEA,

Thank you for your sincere–if misguided and futile–attempts to lure me back into your lair. I really want to believe it when you say that I am a valued customer. However, I am still suffering the effects of the hallucinogenic neurotoxins that you pump into the air at your store.

Despite your continued efforts to retain my business, I would rather shove a kilogram of Swedish meatballs up my ass and then go for a horse and buggy ride around the parking lot of speed bump factory before entering any of your stores again.

Therefore, please find enclosed a gift voucher for 59 Swiss Francs. It is my ultimate wish that you use it to purchase 6 cheaply made, brightly coloured, wall mountable 18-CD storage totes and send them to the victims of hurricane Katrina.

Burn in hell you fuckers.

Sincerely,
Mike Packard

I just got new glasses. They are freaking thick, weigh about 17 pounds, and create an amusing ghort-within-a-ghort effect:

The word for cafeteria in Switzerland is “mensa”. Ours publishes their menu in german every week, and Babelfish helpfully translates. Some tasty-sounding items include:

– pouletbruestli in the corn flakesmantel
– kraeutermayonnaise
– geschnetzeltes schweinefleisch according to kind of inhabitant of zurich
– calamares in the paste
– daily supplement
– sea radish foam
– pegususfilet
– dorschnuggets
– robot hog

Ok one of those is something I apparently said loudly in my sleep.

While trying to remember the word tmesis, I found the wikipedia entry for shit, which contains this paragraph:

Non-native English speakers should take note that shit and fuck often serve different uses as expletives, such that (for instance) the gerund, shitting, is rarely used emphatically. Ex.: In the sentence, I was so shit-scared of that shithead that I shit-talked him into dropping out of the shitting karate match, the phrase, shitting karate match, would be incomprehensible to native speakers except in suggesting a singularly unsanitary form of karate. (In the UK, phrases such as shitting hell as an emphatic are not unknown.) A correct and clear vulgarism would be, the fucking karate match. Similarly, shit is never used as an infix: While in-fucking-credible is comprehensible English, in-shitting-credible is not. Shit you! is likewise a puzzling and ineffective expression of defiance. It is not uncommon, however, to encounter an adjective constructed partially of the word shit, such as “Shittastic” or “Shittacular”.