Politics Lives in an Oubliette

2008 political warfare is in full swing. It's basically down to McCain on the Republican side while Obama and Clinton duke it out on the Democrat side. The two parties can have each other and with any luck, they'll destroy each other. Being a Republican or a Democrat is like being the member of an exclusive club. Some poeple take this club very seriously to the point that they feel it's country vs. country and they're at war.

To me, being a member of one of the two major parties is like being in the sewers. One group decides the left side of the crap creek is the place to be while the other group defends the other side. They're so caught up in defending their spot in the sewers, they don't realize that the better option would be to GET OUT OF THE SEWERS! They run the danger of not really focusing on the issues so much as how are they going to beat the other guy. Both parties are liars, both parties are hypocrites but it doesn't matter because they're at war and they can't let the other guy win. This sounds eerily much like religious warfare to me. They don't really know why they're fighting, they just know it's been that way for years. No need to stop and question things for themselves now.

Leprosy

I need to check my Jeep's horoscope. Bad week for it. Bad mojo or something for my nine year old vehicle.

Today, I went through a drive thru to get some breakfast. It was a bit chilly out. I unzipped the window and folded it down (Soft top Jeeps have the soft windows that are zipped) but it snapped the complete length across the middle. I broke my plastic window. That's a chilly ride.

And yesterday, I was driving around with my windshield wipers extended since we had a lot of ice in the area. As I was driving along, I watched the passenger side wiper fall off the arm, hit the hood and slide off onto the road. You should see my windshield. I can see out my side of it, but the other side is covered in salt.

Wonder how long it will be before I get around to fixing either one of these things? Seven years ago, I ran over the metal bar that weighs down and connects the back window. That's never been replaced and all of the elements have invaded the back of my Jeep behind the back seat for the last seven years.

It's a Jeep thing, you wouldn't understand.

Surgery on our two month old

My son had his second and hopefully final surgery in his very young life to treat his Hirschsprung's.

Here was the surgery schedule on Monday, February 11.

9a: Got to the hopsital. They seated us in an OR waiting room to have doctors come visit us.

9:30: The anesthesiologist paid us a visit. Went over the procedure and asked if we had questions.

10: The surgeon stopped in. Went over procedure, asked if we had questions. Told us the procedure would take about 3 hours. We were also getting him circumcised. Which is like pulling teeth (pulling something) at this hospital. Out of all the time we spent there and all the visits since he was born, we had to keep bringing it up as something we wanted done and they never seemed to remember the last time we brought it up.

10:30: Finally, nurse came to pick up our son and to deliver him to surgery. We left the OR and went to the larger waiting room.

11:15: The OR waiting room nurse told us the procedure began officially. Circumcision would be done first, then the recision and the sealing of the ostomy. We received hourly updates on his progress.

2:50: Surgery is ended. He's on his way to recovery. 3h and 35 minutes.

4:20: We paid our son a visit in recovery. He was out like a light.

He was in recovery for at least another hour or so but not because of his condition but rather, they didn't have a room ready for him yet.

Doctor said the earliest he could go home would be Wednesday but it'd be more like Thursday or Friday realistically. We were there until Saturday. Mom stayed with him the whole time, bunked up in his room, sleeping in a recliner.

We're glad to have him home and have one less hole in his body.

iBlog

Did this post?

Sent from my iPod

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Picked up a little toy called the Apple iTouch. I'm very impressed with it. I'd been wanting one for awhile, thought they looked neat ever since the iPhone was released last fall. They were just a tad pricey for me. When Apple released the 32 Gb version of the iPhone/iTouch, prices went down. And since I picked it up at our favorite wholesale retailer, Costco, that was another $30 off the price. Not bad.

So this is the first post from my 8 Gb iTouch. I really like the device. It's too bad the only real way to interface with it is through iTunes. Ugh.

Power to the Toys

There are few things neater than seeing the look on a child's face when you replace the batteries in a long dead toy, resurrecting its noisemaking abilities.

Bunner 1993-2008

And the hits keep coming. Not a good year for our pets.

Our proud bunny, Bunner is in a better place today. Over the past couple of months, his appetite started to wane. The usual diet was a B.A. carrot (one guess what B.A. stands for) in the morning with a scoop of Oxbow pellets and a handful of hay. In the evening, he got another scoop of pellets and another handful of hay. On occassion, we'd swap his carrot for an apple or lettuce. But he didn't like normal lettuce. He had to have Romaine lettuce or nothing. Lately though, I've only had to feed him in the morning. Also, he was doing this thing where he had his back to us. He'd stare out the back of his cage at the wall and wouldn't face the door unless he was eating.

Over the weekend, he was struggling to stand sometimes. Had trouble getting up.

On Monday, he was lying down and not getting up. And he completely quit eating. His food just sat there. I'd see him pull himself around with his front paws, but his back paws weren't moving. We figured he had a stroke.

We scheduled an appointment with the vet to take a look at him and probably do the thing that we think has to be done. The average rabbit lives about 4 years. Ours little Bunner, was 15 and change.

When we got him to the vet, the vet said she has seen a lot of rabbits, but there were no standard procedures for one his age. She'd never seen one this old. She suspected that our rabbit had kidney failure and the pain from it is what was preventing him from standing up. Not a stroke. She said, there's not much we could do other than prolonging his life a little bit longer with treatment and probably some sort of dialysis, but we don't put our animal through that, if the diagnosis is chronic and the quality of life is degraded during treatment, it's not good for them. It's not good for anyone. The vet also noticed, with an exam, a mass on his chest.

So we made the decision. We said our goodbyes. We've asked the vet to have him cremated. We even picked out a little urn for him. He'll probably go on the fireplace mantel next to our cat.

Fifteen years. He was fun on Easter. He looked like the Cadbury Bunny too. He'd hop around the yard. He had a favorite corner he'd dug a hole into and he'd go back there and sleep. Occasionally, we get wild bunnies in the yard. You could tell, these scrawny wild rabbits didn't know what to think of our Bunner.

Speech of the Young

My two year old daugther's vocabulary. Very cute.

carrot = "carrop"
rainbow = "rainbone"
trampoline = "bebbameen"
popcorn = "pockcorn"
7 of 9 (on Star Trek) = "7 7 of 9"
milk = "meelk"
helicopter = "coppitopper"
Jeopardy = "Jeppabee"
Brother = "Brudder"
computer = "competer"
phone = "foam"
pot pie = "pie pie"
upside down = "slide down"

Doesn't do this now, but before she turned 1:

banana = "banananana" (she only did this one time, now she gets it right)
mommy = "money"

What she gets exactly right (and loves to say):

Deal or no deal!
pacifier (4 whole syllables!)
kitty cat
hungry
dragonfly

Bringer of Death

One morning, I was running a few hours late on a daily chore I call "feeding the barn." We have a cat, a rabbit and some fish. It was late morning by the time I got around to feeding the fish. My daughter noticed me grab the fish food from an upper bookshelf, pinch a few flakes into the tank and I went about feeding the other animals.

After the others had been fed, I walked back into the front room where my aquarium sits and I noticed my daughter standing on her little foot stool she uses at bathroom sinks to reach the faucet for washing, brushing, etc. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, just her standing on the stool next to the fish tank, nothing in her hands, her looking at me. No particular expression.

It was at this moment, I had a thought. She's two going on three and she has started mimicking things we do, repeating certain phrases too. I had a thought that since she just saw me feed the fish a few minutes before, she might like to try that too. I checked the fish food canister, it was still on the bookshelf where I left it, lid on and everything. Normally out of reach for a three foot little girl, but I did notice that thanks to her plastic height supplement, she was now tall enough to reach it. So I checked the tank.

Time stopped.

What I saw, or rather what I didn't see in that aquarium was unbelievable. There was so much fish food floating in my 30 gallon tank, I could no longer see the fish, the plants, the miniature roman ruins, fake rocks; nothing but floating fish food occupying every cubic inch of my tank.

I grabbed the fish food canister that didn't look out of place and I ripped off the lid. It was completely empty. I had just bought the food a few weeks ago, it was pretty full last time I checked and now I was staring at the bottom of an emptied yellow canister, awed by what my two year old daughter had accomplished.

I leaped to action. Emergency extraction from the tank into a breathable water to try and save my fish. The hard part was that I couldn't find them, the tank was so cluttered. I shoveled out as much fish food as I could, like ski patrol digging for survivors in an avalanche to get a location on the life inside. Eventually I spotted them.

They didn't want to go willingly. They hadn't been in the net since I cleaned the tank over a year ago but after a lot of chasing around, I was able to get them out and into a miniature tank I had ready.

They were finally out and in clear water while I worked on cleaning the tank.

The next day, the catfish died. Unfortunate, but I happen to know this particular breed does not deal with excitement very well. I figured the transference to the new environment was too much for it. So I flushed him and hoped for the best on his roommates.

A couple of days went by and the Black Skirt was swimming on his side. That's not good. I knew he didn't have much time left. The next day, he was still on his side but on the bottom of the temporary tank, no gill movement. Flushed. Also not a good sign as generally Black Skirts are very hearty fish. Nothing kills them unless they're on dry land.

Over the next couple of days, the remaining fish begin to swim crippled as well and eventually they all died.

The number one killer of fish is over feeding. All that excess food they had temporary access too and the excitement of the transference must have been too hard on them. The last three fish died in the same day so I had a 3-way toilet funeral for them. The executioner of these fish was standing beside me in the bathroom during my send off. She thought it was neat to see the fish corpses floating around in the toilet bowl. When I pulled the lever to send them to the great beyond, she said, "Bye fish!"

Handicapped

You never realize how much you use the back of your index finger until you remove a layer of the skin from it.

Hirschsprung

My second child is finally here but not without some excitement. And I'm not even talking about the excitement of the delivery which you can read about in the last post.

He has a condition called Hirschsprung's Disease that makes a portion of his colon (the tail end, pun intended) not function. Which means he can't pass waste properly. If nothing's coming out, nothing can go in (no room) which was the first symptom we noticed. He wasn't holding anything down when we fed him.

On day two of my son's new life, the doctors sent him to Riley Children Hospital for diagnosis, which conveniently sat next door to the hospital he was born in. He was checked into the NICU for observation and hopefully a diagnosis, hooked up to IV's (one coming out of his head) and a suction tube down his throat to remove whatever he hasn't already vomited.

Our hearts were broken.

Before we knew he had Hirschsprung's, most cases of newborns vomiting green fluid indicates a blockage somewhere in the digestion system, usually somewhere between the stomach and end. The green is the bile in the stomach used in digestion. Since he wasn't eating anything, all that was present in the stomach was this stuff and since there's no way else out of the body, the stomach sends it back up. A blockage in the intestines is much more common than Hirschsprung but it is also more of an emergency to deal with. It can be a twist in the intestines somewhere or an actual obstruction, both of which require immediate surgery to correct.

In Hirschsprung's, the temporary solution is to install an ostomy bag while the infant grows a bit stronger and bigger, then brought back at a convenient time (convenient for the patient) to correct the deficiency with surgery. It might be several months (up to nine) after diagnosis before the big surgery is done to correct it. There's no real hurry.

The surgeons discovered he had Hirschsprung's by performing a test done with a biopsy of his colon, sent to a lab and tested for a genetic defect where the nerves of the colon that function to push the waste out don't develop during gestation. The gene responsible for this is also a gene responsible for certain types of pheos, which is a condition his mother has. But it's the wrong kind of pheo. My wife's genetic defeciency is called SDHB. The Hirschsprung's gene creates pheos of MEN type. The surgeon wanted to make this connection, but the odds of a mother and son having pheos of differing types is more astronomical then any of the lottery systems in the world. It's rare enough to have a pheo. For 2 people in the same immediate family to have unrelated (non-inherited) pheos is just virtually impossible.

The one funny thing about this whole ordeal is that this hospital deals mostly with premature babies. After hauling our 10 pound full-term baby in there, he was Goliath among many David's. The wonderful nursing staff there had to readjust their expectation when picking up their newest patient and maybe their stance a little to steady themselves. Getting themselves checked for hernias after their shift was probably something they considered, I imagine.

My son was in the NICU from Tuesday December 4th until early Saturday December 8th, after which he was upgraded to the Infant Unit part of the hospital. Besides not being able to poop, the boy was too healthy to remain in NICU even though he still hadn't eaten anything since being born. During this time, Mrs. Lock was discharged from the hospital, deemed fit to return to society after her C-section. That was on Thursday the 6th.

The two hospitals are actually connected by an underground tunnel. While Mrs. Lock was in her hospital, we'd run over to visit our son in the neighboring hospital. I say run, it was actually wheel since Mrs. Lock was still recovering from C-section surgery. Imagine navigating old, smelly, creepy, dank tunnels with a patient in the wheelchair. We did some late night crossings to pay him visits. I don't know how far it was, felt like a mile of walking (pushing), but realistically it was probably closer to a quarter of a mile. Since we've been discharged though, the visits would have to be by car now.

It occurred to me at this point that for most of my son's life, all one week of it, he knows nothing other than IV's and feeding tubes and beeps and alarms and strange people dressed in blue catering to his every need. For most of his life so far, he's been in a sterile environment, laid up in a steel cage they call a bed, with little or not contact with his parents. They say bonding with your newborn, that physical close contact has an effect on a child's development, and yet we can only hold him for a few minutes a day. His first impression of life must be a strange one. Any situation for a newborn, sick or healthy is a strange one after incubating in a dark womb for nine months. This is what his cells are going to remember.

On Tuesday the 11th, my son had minor surgery (is any surgery minor?) to have a colostomy bag installed to remove from his body what his body couldn't. We were fearful and dejected to consent to this but he was a week old and still had nothing to eat. We knew it wasn't a good thing and we were starting to feel desperate.

After the ostomy procedure, they wanted to give our son about 12 hours for his system to flush out any fluid which was now going into this clear plastic pouch attached on a hole (hole = stoma) on his gut before they tried to feed him. We went home for the night, hoping for the best. We knew they'd be feeding him at some point on the midnight shift. We went to bed that night hoping for good news in the morning.

Wednesday morning came. We were anxious. My wife handed me the phone, asked me to call to get the news because she was too nervous about what they might say. I don't remember if I had any expectations. I think I was thinking that whatever the result, we would deal with it... somehow. So I called and listened to the nurse explain to me what happened. I'm sure my wife wanted to listen too but she didn't. She waited for a sign from me.

We got the news. For the first time in his life, our son ate.

I gave my wife the nod, whispered "He kept it down." Much relief. Actually, we were giddy to hear the news. Clapping in the bed. Eyes swelling up. We couldn't wait to go in to see him.

We got to the hospital and we continued to feed him every few hours with little to no problems. They even decided to give him some breast milk his mother had been pumping and refrigerating since he was born. We were happy to see he was keeping that down too.

He was doing so well after the surgery, that on Thursday the 13th, they decided to discharge him and send our little boy home with us. We were surprised to be taking him home two days after the ostomy surgery but we were also happy to get out of there.

We got home. My mother was watching our daughter for us. I sent Mrs. Lock into the house ahead of me and I quietly brought Baby Lock in behind her. I set him on the floor (still in his car seat I should point out), out of view and I walked in behind my wife. We greeted my mom and our daughter as we have been doing every day for the past week and as expected, my mom asked, "So how's he doing?"

I said, "Well..." and then I disappeared back into the hallway where I had set him down, picked him up, brought him into plain view and said, "You can ask him yourself."

If we were surprised to be taking our boy home today, my mom must have been triple surprised to see him. She was ecstatic that her grandson was home for the first time and she flocked to him like a grandmother would. She asked a million questions about how we were able to bring him home so soon, all the while not taking her eyes off of him. Maybe she thought if she looked away, he would disappear.

After getting situated, everyone de-coated and sitting down, my mom called my dad to tell him the good news. It was welcome news for all of us.

So now our family is finally home. Me, Mrs. Lock, Daughter Lock, Newborn Son Lock. And we couldn't be happier. We just wait for the day when they can do the surgery to fix him for good. The prognosis for infants with Hirschsprung's is very encouraging too. He should lead a very normal life after it's all said and done and he won't remember a thing.

That's a good reason to write about it.