Alien vs. pancreas

After 6 months of tests and doctors visits to see why my stomach and back hurt, the doctor narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities – either chronic pancreatitis, or I have an extraterrestrial creature growing inside of me, like in “Alien.”

After the latest test, a most unpleasant thing called an endoscopic ultrasound, it looks like he’s settled on the pancreatitis. That’s disappointing, because it would be really cool to have an alien pop out of my belly. I was hoping to film it and get it on Youtube.

I hope this means the tests are over. I’ve had more things stuffed into my orifices this year than Madonna.

When they’re looking for things in your gastrointestinal system, there are two ways to get there. One is through the mouth and down the throat into the stomach. This was the method of my most recent test, and I guess it went fine, except when I woke up from the anesthesia I couldn’t breathe and my chest hurt. The nurse came in, took some readings and said something you never want to hear a medical professional say, “Well, I’ve never seen this happen before.”

They did an EKG and took an X-Ray and had me drink something that made me feel all warm inside, and after an hour said I was OK and ready to leave. My wife took me to a Folks restaurant, since I hadn’t been able to eat or drink all day, but I was cold and when I sat down to eat I started shivering and shuddering violently, like I was lying on a vibrating bed in a Panama City Beach motel. I opted to take my food with me, since the odds of my turnip greens actually hitting my mouth were pretty low.

The other way they check out your gastrointestinal system is they go through the service entrance, running some sort of device into your hindquarters. This is known as a colonoscopy. (I typed, then erased, several jokes here that were in poor taste).

The day before a colonoscopy is a lot of fun, as you go through a “cleaning out” process. I’ll spare you the details, but you wind up spending more time on the throne than Louis the 14th.

Through this process of probing, prodding and squeezing, I have lost all sense of shame and modesty. After the colonoscopy, I was in some pain, and the nurse told me that it was because they pumped gas inside me during the procedure. All I needed to do was break wind a few times. Hell, I thought, I’m good at that. But it still took about an hour.

Anyway, the colonoscopy was fine. The doctor said everything looked good back there. Well, tell me something I don’t know, doc. They send you home with pictures after these procedures, I guess as souvenirs. I’m thinking about doing a scrapbook.

I’m glad to finally have some of diagnosis, though I haven’t found out yet if anything can be done this, or how to treat it, etc. I’m not even sure what the pancreas does, but apparently you need it, so removing it is not an option. Unlike the alien, I’m stuck with it, for good or bad.

Back to the vet

I came home from an overnight trip Saturday to find that my dog Lucky looked as if she’d kidnapped by Michael Vick and forced to go three rounds with a Rottweiller.

There was a big sore on the side of her face and it was pretty ugly. There was blood caked in her fur, she seemed kind of droopy and, most telling of all, she hadn’t eaten her food in a couple of days. My mother used to say the way she knew my father was really sick was if he didn’t eat.

I had no idea what had happened. There’s nothing she could have gotten in a fight with in the back yard. She’s too slow to catch the squirrels, and the frogs don’t generally appear too violent. But whatever caused it, she looked terrible.

So I had to take her to see the vet Monday afternoon. As I’ve mentioned before, we didn’t do this when I was a child. You slapped some motor oil on the dog and wished him or her luck. But I’m a modern, sensitive man, and I decide to go flush another $200 down the toilet, i.e., take her to the vet.

She had actually been there a couple of weeks before, to get her annual shots, and apparently she remembered, because when I got her out of the car she dug her claws into the asphalt and bowed up. I told her to stop being such a baby, but she didn’t move, so I half-carried, half-pushed her into the office past a startled woman holding a trembling poodle.

We don’t really fit in at that vet’s office. For one, Lucky is a yard dog, and she’s a mutt, and quite frankly, she smells a little bit. In addition, the sore on her face had become a huge, bloody, oozing mess.

Sitting around us were a few people, holding their little polite pedigreed dogs in their laps. They took one look at Lucky and recoiled in horror, clutching their dogs to their chests in abject fear.

Meanwhile, Lucky plopped down on the floor, bloody-side down, so every time she moved there was a little red smear on the linoleum. She must have felt bad about that, because a couple of times she helpfully began to lick it up, until I stopped her. A woman holding a terrier nearly had a heart attack when she saw that.

Somebody walked through with a white dog and one of my kids said, “Hey, that’s the color Lucky used to be.” Ok, so she’s a little bit dirty. She’s the canine equivalent of Pig Pen from the Charlie Brown cartoons.

They finally called her back, and the doctor said that she had contracted a bad staph infection. Nothing to worry about, but she was going to need to stay overnight, because apparently the initial attempts to shave the hair around the affected area had not gone well, and they were going to need to sedate her in order to do it. Do you see now why I don’t attempt to groom her?

I asked the vet what could have caused the staph infection, and she said to me, with a straight face, “Well, their immune systems can get compromised when they’re experiencing stress.” Stress? This dog does three things – eat, crap, sleep. All in voluminous fashion. What could cause it stress?

I’m the one who’s stressed. I’ve spent more on that dog in the past two weeks than I paid for my first car. It’s a good thing she’s so lovable and sweet and licks my toes, or she might be walking around right now with a face covered in motor oil.

Sleepless nights

The song “Sleepless Nights,” penned by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, is one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

However, there is nothing at all beautiful about actual sleepless nights.

I have gone through a lifetime of sleepless nights, or nearly sleepless ones, anyway. Lying there unable to sleep hour after hour is one of the most miserable feelings you can experience, just between stubbing your toe and losing to Florida on the misery scale.

The first sleepless night I can recall is when I was a young boy, and I watched an episode of “The Night Gallery” in which this old couple who had been murdered crawled out of their graves in the night and then attacked their killer with pitchforks. I slept with the windows locked for a few nights after that, even though it was hot and we didn’t run the air conditioning after dark.

It was a big thrill when I was a boy to see if I could stay up all night. My friend Greg and I would camp out in a tent in his back yard and talk big talk about things we knew nothing about, like jumping motorcycles over cars or kissing girls. One night he snuck out one of his daddy’s cigars and a Playboy magazine, but we were afraid to light the cigar. I’m not saying whether or not we looked at the magazine.

One night we were out there in a little camper-trailer his parents owned, trying to stay awake until the day broke. We were lying in our sleeping bags and we had the radio playing, and the song “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers came on. It was one of those songs that radio deejays would play in the ’70s because it was 11minutes long, which gave them time to go in the studio bathroom and do something illegal before they had to come out and change the record. Why else do you think “Free Bird” and “Stairway to Heaven” were so popular?

Anyway, when it got to the part where the song slows down and they just chant the word “time” over and over, the record got stuck. I guess the deejay figured he’d caught a break because he just let it play, and for about 10 minutes all we heard was an echoing beat of the drum, then the singer saying “time” over and over and over. It freaked me out more than the old couple with the pitchforks, and we didn’t try to stay up all night again for quite some time.

Even when I do sleep, it’s not very restful because I have a lot of vivid and long and involved dreams. Some people say they don’t remember theirs, but I usually do. I have a bunch of recurrent dreams – dreams about tornadoes, and being chased, and going to school or work in my underwear, and going in for a final exam I haven’t studied for, and going in to a big office to do a mindless job every day. Wait, that last one might be real.

I don’t really think dreams mean anything. At least I hope they don’t. I don’t think they really reflect what you want in your subconscious. For example, I never dream that I’m winning the Masters, or being interviewed about my Pulitzer-prize winning book, or being called onstage by Bruce Springsteen to take the second verse on “Born to Run.” Instead, I dreamed the other night that I was plunging down a steep bank toward a river in my minivan. I assure you, this is not what I want.

Often times, I realize in the middle of the dream that I am indeed dreaming, and I try to do something to wake myself up. Just last night I dreamed I was on top of a building with people shooting at me, so I made a conscious decision to jump off, and sure enough, I woke up before I landed. I hope I don’t do this one day and realize about halfway down that I wasn’t actually dreaming.

When I can’t sleep, I usually just get up for a while and try not to fight it. I’ll read a book or watch TV until I think I can go to sleep again, or maybe just some put on my iPod and listen to music until I drift off. You can believe I don’t have any songs by The Chambers Brothers on there.

Me and my big mouth

My family and I go to a relatively small Methodist Church, and I have learned a valuable lesson in the three years since we joined. And here it is – don’t ever let anybody there know that you have any skill at doing anything, because if they find out, they will ask you to do it for the church.

I learned this the hard way recently, when I accidentally let it slip that I once played drums in a band. Within the week I was being approached by people who had never spoken to me before, saying, “What’s this I hear about you being able to play drums?”

Our church has one of those new-fangled “praise bands” that plays at the early service every Sunday, with guitars and drums and bass and keyboards and all sorts of things that aren’t even mentioned in the Bible. The regular drummer is in the military reserves and often gets called away, so when word got out that there was another potential drummer in the house, they were on me like fire ants at a picnic.

Calling me a drummer, however, is a stretch. It reminds me of an old Henny Youngman joke: An orchestra is playing, and after the violinist does a solo, somebody stands up and says, “Tell that sonofabitch to stop playing.” The conductor turns around angrily and says, “Who called the violinist a sonofabitch?” And the guy answered back, “Who called the sonofabitch a violinist?”

Understand, I last played the drums in 1986, in a band in college in Athens, Ga. I played a very basic style, because I didn’t know how to do anything else. There were no fancy Keith Moon-like sonic explosions emanating from my drum kit. It was just “boom-boom-boom-bam, boom-boom-boom-bam,” over and over and over.

I remember once Michael Stipe came to one of our shows, and he was talking to us outside after we finished, and he looked at me and mumbled, “I really like the minimalist thing you’re doing with the drums.” And I said, well, Mike, you know, my philosophy is to not let the drums overpower the music, but to play a more subtle, supportive role, underpinning the lyrics and the melody. He mumbled something else and walked off. True story.

Anyway, after only one practice, I took the stage this morning, playing a set of electronic drums through six songs, all of them “contemporary Christian”, except for the Jackie Wilson song, “Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher.” This was really quite a leap for me to do this, because it involved a number of things I am against, including electronic drum kits, contemporary Christian music, and getting up early on a Sunday morning.

I guess I did OK. Nobody laughed or covered their ears, I didn’t drop the drum sticks, and they’ve asked me to fill in again next week. And truth be told, I actually had a pretty good time doing it and wouldn’t mind playing some more. Just don’t let anybody at the church know.

A break in tradition

For 12 of the past 13 years, I’ve celebrated the Fourth of July by getting out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and going into Atlanta to run 6.2 miles in the Peachtree Road Race with 55,000 other idiots.

I varied that routine slightly this year by instead sleeping to 9, then taking the kids to Waffle House, where I ate a nutritious breakfast of bacon, grits, eggs, toast, and a biscuit smothered in white gravy. In my defense, I only ate half the biscuit.

Our waitress was a little younger than your normal Waffle House beauty. My daughter whispered to me after the girl took our order, “She was in P.E. class with me my freshman year in high school.” See, I said. She’s gone out and gotten herself a job. Maybe you could do the same.

My daughter got the same disgusted look she always gets whenever I say something inappropriate (you know, words like “work” or “job” or “no”), and said, “She dropped out of school because she was pregnant, dad!” Well, I said, that just shows you that she’s doubly ambitious – she’s working AND raising a family, and I can’t get you to feed the dog, except at gunpoint.

The drive over to Waffle House was a lot of fun, as I let my son take the wheel. Armed with a learner’s permit and an ego that far outstrips reality, he confidently drove us the one mile to the Waffle House while only giving me three minor heart attacks.

I am learning some things about my son as he learns to drive. For one, apparently he suffers some form of dyslexia I never knew about before. For example, he sees the word “Stop” on a sign, he reads it as “Slow down a little bit.” And to him, “Yield” translates to “Accelerate.” This disability also apparently causes him to add 10 miles per her to every speed limit sign.

Seriously, it should be against the law to have two teenagers at one time. The Chinese know how to handle this sort of thing.

After the Waffle House trip, I continued celebrating my country’s independence by plopping down on the couch to watch a little TV. I watched a few minutes of "Shatner’s Raw Nerve," and William’s guest this morning was Jenna Jameson, whom he described as a “modern renaissance woman.” Thankfully he didn’t go on to list her talents.

My better angels took over and I changed to channels to watch a few episodes of “The Revolution” on The History Channel. It’s interesting to contrast the courage and character and determination of the leaders and politicians of that time with the morons and preening lightweights we have in office today. Nobody ever had to listen to George Washington whine about his Argentinean “soul mate.” If you even said the words “soul mate” to him, he would shoot you between the eyes with a musket.

The Fourth of July is probably my favorite holiday. Later on I’ll grill some burgers, then we’ll drive over to a local elementary school, from where you can see three fireworks displays at once. Then I’ll come home and spend the rest of the night reassuring Lucky, as she freaks out when all the neighbors start setting off their own fireworks in the street. She’s not a fan.

And next year, I swear, I’m skipping Waffle House and running in the Peachtree.