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pooing

I think something that maybe isn't really common knowledge is that sedatives stop up your bowels. So, it was kinda weird that I didn't poo for like 5 days. And then it was just a couple of tiny doots. I weighed myself and I was 5 pounds over. So, one day, I decided to take that orange flavored fiber laxative. The next day, pooing up a storm. I lost literally 10 pounds that day.

morphine

the first night after surgery was particularly harrowing because they gave me morphine. Morphine kills the pain, but it also gave me trouble breathing. So, they hooked up this pulse-oxygen reader to my finger. And the alarm in ICU would go off everytime my oxygen went too low. I found that if I didn't consciously think about breathing, the oxygen alarm would go off. I spent a very unrestful night waking up everytime the alarm went off. Then I'd start taking deep breaths until the alarm would stop. It went off every hour or so until around midnight.

Around midnight, the nurse in ICU found me still awake. He asked me if I wanted some painkillers to help me sleep. I was like no. He gave me the option of percoset. a milder painkiller. He said it was just like aspirin. So, I took that and was able to get a few more hours of sleep without worry about breathing.

ICU

I was in ICU for 2 days after my surgery. ICU was kinda nice. Nice in the way that you got nice caring people washing your ass. There's no privacy at all in ICU. You're sharing a room with a dozen other people. You're always only only a few feet from a nurse at all times. There are no bathrooms in ICU. You're supposed to pee into this 'urinal' that you keep by your bedside. You buzz the nurse and the nurse comes and takes it away and logs how much you made. They log everything you intake and output. I wasn't able to poo during the entire time I was in the hospital.

post surgery

Okay, post surgery is mostly about having a neck full of staples. And having your mom ration out the vicodin that helps you deal with the staples. And not having a good position to sleep in. And also blood coming from your penis due to some catheter accident that is not in any way related to cancer.

papillary carcinoma

I have papillary thyroid cancer. It's a really common, really curable cancer. I'm going to go into surgery on Friday. They're going to remove the lump and my entire thyroid. After that, for 2 weeks i shall live without thyroid hormone. Then, I get a single dose of radioactive iodine to kill any remaining thyroid that I might have. And from that day on, I will have to take synthetic thyroid hormones for the rest of my life.

I may or may not have a voice after. There's a chance I may not have a voice for 6 months. In rare cases, I'll lose my voice permanently. That's the scariest thing to me. This cancer could be the death of karaoke guy.

Vegetable factories

Wired has a story about these fully automated, hydroponic, organic vegetable factories are coming to a town near you.

Organitech,ORGT, is a company that is building vegetable factories in Israel, Russia, and now New Jersey. They use no fertilizer, no pesticides, and no dirt. While the cost is higher than dirt-based vegetable factories, aka "farms", the fact that it's on the east coast makes it cheaper than produced shipped in from California.

Hippies will like it because the shorter distance to the supermarket means that less gas will be used to transport it. And it uses up much less land than a dirt farm does.

I'm playing the Cashflow game by Robert Kiyosaki. One of the dreams is the Urban Mini-farm. I always thought, "how cool is that?" And I was wondering if anybody actually did it. Turns out that they do, but not so much in the United States as they do in the UK. But in my Googling, I came happened acrossed Organitech which I think will be the future or agriculture.

lumpy

I guess the big news in my life these days is this lump in my neck. I noticed it in Ocean City back in August. I asked my brother, a doctor, whether or not my head seemed lopsided. He just said some people are just lopsided.

Over Labor Day weekend, I asked my mom about it. Mom felt it and said to show it to my dad. Dad, another doctor, said it was probably a benign lipoma, which is a clump of fat that spontaneously generates on old people. I guess I'm old enough to have one.

Anyways, I go to the doctor. The doctor is like, "Omigod! Why didn't you come sooner?" And he sends me off the to radiologist.

The radiologist feels it up. Does a CT Scan and an Ultrasound on it. He proclaims it to be a complex cyst. Then I wait a week for him to actually type up a report and send it to my doctor.

That's where things stand right now. The fact that nobody is really rushing me to do more tests seems to indicate to me that this is some sort of non-lethal malady. It feels huge in my head though. And I don't like it. Sometimes it feels kinda hard. And sometimes you can move it around.

I'm meeting with my doctor next week to discuss the radiologist report. The suggested next step is to stick a needle in to see what happens.