(I have reposted this article that appeared on my old site because it was a popular page and I don’t want it to get lost when I shut the old site down…..so here you go.)
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Hi family, friends and fans,
This is just a note to let you know that I am still alive and survived my surgery!!
I was in surgery last Thursday May 20th all day from 8:30 am until 6:00 pm….Then I was in ICU for a day and a half and finally got discharged from the hospital on Tuesday of this week. I hope to be able to be released from doctor’s care in early July.
Unfortunately during surgery they found more “dehiscences” (medical term for a hole in your head…..) besides the one they had already visualized through the superior canal bone via the CT scan. The other dehiscences were in my mastoid bone…..they could not see these particular dehiscenses from the CT scans. Basically I had perforations through my skull base and I was leaking cerebral fluid out of my head into my inner ear and sinuses. Very appetizing, I know! LOL. Among other things, this could have caused me to get meningitis if not corrected, but they tell me they got them all patched. I also ended up with a cerebral spinal fluid leak and an air pocket that caused me the hugest headache I have ever had and took several days to get under control. A lumbar “blood patch” did the trick, thank God, otherwise I would have been staying the night again at Hotel Swedish. Home is good. 🙂
So, right now I exercising my faith in my surgeons and God as I currently cannot hear in my left ear at all except for sporadic very weird, “zinging” and “buzzing” sounds. I could swear every now and then I can hear some kind of radio transmissions in my left ear as well! I am serious! They tell my my they monitored my hearing during the entire procedure and that my sensorineural hearing is just fine and that right now the reason I cannot hear is because my mastoid bones and inner ear are full of fluid that should dissipate over time and they expect me to fully recover my hearing and have normal balance again once I am all healed in 4-6 weeks. I also came away with one heck of a scar! I told the surgeon I liked to play the bass and wondered if he could fashion a bass clef shaped scar!! He must of thought I was serious because I think he came pretty close!! LOL! It’s very bad. Here are some lovely pics for you at the bottom of this post. 🙂
At the risk of being redundant, but for the benefit of anyone on the Internet reading this who might also have SCDS and had or will have the surgery, here is a bullet list summary of my post-surgical experience:
Unable to hear in my left ear Day 1 post op to present
Spinal headache Day 1 post op to Day 5 post op
Very dizzy Day 1 post op to present (this will be a longer term healing and adjustment process according to doc. Position changes still cause me a lot of dizziness, especially driving in circles!)
Unable to see or focus on things steadily, especially things more than 5 feet away Day 1 post op to present (this has improved slowly each day.)
Nauseous Day 1 post op to Day 3 post op. (I’m glad that stopped! The hospital actually had some really good tasting food.)
Able to get out of bed and walk with a walker by day 3 post op
Able to walk around hospital without a walker and use handrails by day 5 post op
Able to walk out to mailbox and back with my wife’s assistance by day 7 post op. Now we will be gradually increasing my distance each day.
I have a post-op follow up appointment to have my 35 staples will be removed next Tuesday.
Pam and I would once again like to thank everyone who has stopped by the hospital, our house, called, and emailed and brought us food and other things. Old fashioned thank you cards will be going out to you in the snail mail. Thanks to all my family and friends for your love and generosity.
A friend sent me this today in an attempt to cheer me up and break my nervousness over my impending colonoscopy. BUT, I almost don’t need a colonoscopy NOW…..I think I just had one reading this.
ROFLMAO!! OH, I CAN BARELY BREATHE NOW!!
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This is from newshound Dave Barry’s colonoscopy journal:
…….I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenteritis, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy. A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis .
Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner. I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn’t really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, quote, ‘HE’S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!’
I left Andy’s office with some written instructions, and a prescription for a product called ‘MoviPrep,’ which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I will discuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America ‘s enemies.
I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous. Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn’t eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor. Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes – and here I am being kind – like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.
The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, ‘a loose watery bowel movement may result.’ This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground.
MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don’t want to be too graphic, here, but: Have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and star t eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.
After an action -packed evening, I finally got to sleep. The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage. I was thinking, ‘What if I spurt on Andy?’ How do you apologize to a friend for something like that? Flowers would not be enough.
At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked.
Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down. Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep. At first I was ticked off that I hadn’t thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house.
W hen everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point. Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand. There was music playing in the room, and I realized that the song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA I remarked to Andy that, of a ll the songs that could be playing during this particular procedure, ‘Dancing Queen’ has to be the least appropriate.
‘You want me to turn it up?’ said Andy, from somewhere behind me. ‘Ha ha, ‘ I said. And then it was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.
I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling ‘Dancing Queen, Feel the beat of the tambourine,’ and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood.
Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that It was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.
A friend of mine sent me this by email originally and I thought it was hilarious. After looking at it I wondered what some other stars that I grew up with look like now, so I added a few of my own celeb findings which are also quite astonishing.
If you have days when you wonder why YOU have to get old and think if you only had the money and resources that money can buy to stop and reverse the aging process, if you think that then even you could finally find that elusive fountain of youth that even eluded Ponce de León, then read on and you will see that you and I are not the only people getting old! This confirms the wisdom of the Bible: “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” Ecclesiastes 1:2
Check out Paul McCartney. Paul: What have you done to yourself? How did you go from jet black hair and beard and dark eyes to strawberry blond with no beard and a face that looks like grandma? You should have just let yourself age naturally like your mate Eric Clapton.
And Burt….Burt….man, you look like you belong in Madame Tussauds wax museum.
Jack: Have you no dignity?
Kirstie: What can I say? Life’s been hard.
Nancy Wilson: You still lookin good girl.
And Robert Plant: Could this be Johnny Depp in 30 years?
I am not a scientist or academic. But I have always had the gut feeling that somehow listening to music is somehow therapeutic, that it might bring healing and even if it didn’t, it surely could bring pleasure. I have felt this no matter the genre or artist within a genre (well, OK, there is indeed some “bad” music out there, but I try to avoid those anyway…) whether it be John Adam’s Harmonium, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Dvorak’s Slavic Dances, Mozart’s Requiem , Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, BB King’s Every Day I Have the Blues, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, AC-DC Back in Black or Coldplay’s Viva La Vida….it doesn’t matter too much….music like this moves me.
Now there is a paper out in Nature Neuroscience documenting what happens in our minds and bodies when we listen to music we love. Wired Magazine ran a story on this here that included this great bit of information:
Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI) they were able to obtain an impressively precise portrait of music in the brain. The first thing they discovered (using ligand-based PET) is that music triggers the release of dopamine in both the dorsal and ventral striatum. This isn’t particularly surprising: these regions have long been associated with the response to pleasurable stimuli. It doesn’t matter if we’re having sex or snorting cocaine or listening to Kanye: These things fill us with bliss because they tickle these cells. Happiness begins here.
So, go put on your favorite tunes first before you pop a pill and relax and soak it up.
This research adds additional credence to the benefit of bringing music to places such as nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, hospitals and facilities and homes for the developmentally disabled. Music is cheap and risk-free therapy! Rock on!! (The fine print: Make sure to protect your hearing.)
We had a “Super Moon” the other night. I have never seen the Duwamish River in Seattle this low. I wonder if it was due to the “super moon” influence on the tide levels? And I learned some interesting history of the river system after reading the Duwamish River entry in Wikipedia:
Until 1906, the White and Green Rivers combined at Auburn, and joined the Black River at Tukwila to form the Duwamish. In 1906, however, the White River changed course following a major flood and emptied into the Puyallup River as it does today. The lower portion of the historic White River—from the historic confluence of the White and Green Rivers to the conjunction with the Black River—is now considered part of the Green River. Later, in 1911 the Cedar River was diverted to empty into Lake Washington instead of into the Black River; at that time, the lake itself still emptied into the Black River. Then, with the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1916, the lake’s level dropped nearly nine feet and the Black River dried up. From that time forward, the point of the name change from Green to Duwamish is no longer the confluence of the Green and Black Rivers, though it has not changed location.[1]
The native Lushootseed name of the Duwamish River (and of the Cedar River) was Dxwdəw. The Lushootseed name of the Duwamish tribe was Dxw‘Dəw?Abš or Dkhw‘Duw’Absh. Both of these have been anglicized as Duwamish.
