I just bought a 3 day pass for ACL. This means, obviously, that I have to be back in Austin on October 2nd. The deadline has been set. It is official. This will be my homecoming.
Buy tickets. Celebrate music and my return. See you there.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Kimya Dawson - I Like Giants
When I go for a drive I like to pull off to the side
Of the road, turn out the lights, get out and look up at the sky
And I do this to remind me that I'm really, really tiny
In the grand scheme of things and sometimes this terrifies me
But it's only really scary cause it makes me feel serene
In a way I never thought I'd be because I've never beenS
o grounded, and so humbled, and so one with everything
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything
Rock and roll is fun but if you ever hear someone
Say you are huge, look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky
Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
When I saw Geneviève I really liked it when she said
What she said about the giant and the lemmings on the cliff
She said 'I like giants
Especially girl giants
Cause all girls feel too big sometimes
Regardless of their size'
When I go for a drive I like to pull off to the side
Of the road and run and jump into the ocean in my clothes
I'm smaller than a poppyseed inside a great big bowl
And the ocean is a giant that can swallow me whole
So I swim for all salvation and I swim to save my soul
But my soul is just a whisper trapped inside a tornado
So I flip to my back and I float and I sing
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything
So I talked to Geneviève and almost cried when she said
That the giant on the cliff wished that she was dead
And the lemmings on the cliff wished that they were dead
So the giant told the lemmings why they ought to live instead
When she thought up all those reasons that they ought to live instead
It made her reconsider all the sad thoughts in her head
So thank you Geneviève, cause you take what is in your head
And you make things that are so beautiful and share them with your friends
We all become important when we realize our goal
Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole
And yeah, rock and roll is fun, but if you ever hear someone
Say you are huge, look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky
Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
And I don't wanna make her cry
Cause I like giants
Of the road, turn out the lights, get out and look up at the sky
And I do this to remind me that I'm really, really tiny
In the grand scheme of things and sometimes this terrifies me
But it's only really scary cause it makes me feel serene
In a way I never thought I'd be because I've never beenS
o grounded, and so humbled, and so one with everything
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything
Rock and roll is fun but if you ever hear someone
Say you are huge, look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky
Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
When I saw Geneviève I really liked it when she said
What she said about the giant and the lemmings on the cliff
She said 'I like giants
Especially girl giants
Cause all girls feel too big sometimes
Regardless of their size'
When I go for a drive I like to pull off to the side
Of the road and run and jump into the ocean in my clothes
I'm smaller than a poppyseed inside a great big bowl
And the ocean is a giant that can swallow me whole
So I swim for all salvation and I swim to save my soul
But my soul is just a whisper trapped inside a tornado
So I flip to my back and I float and I sing
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything
So I talked to Geneviève and almost cried when she said
That the giant on the cliff wished that she was dead
And the lemmings on the cliff wished that they were dead
So the giant told the lemmings why they ought to live instead
When she thought up all those reasons that they ought to live instead
It made her reconsider all the sad thoughts in her head
So thank you Geneviève, cause you take what is in your head
And you make things that are so beautiful and share them with your friends
We all become important when we realize our goal
Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole
And yeah, rock and roll is fun, but if you ever hear someone
Say you are huge, look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky
Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
And I don't wanna make her cry
Cause I like giants
Friday, February 13, 2009
It's not a tumor
It’s hard to take a doctor seriously when all you can hear in your head is Arnold Swarzenagger. It particularly doesn’t help that the above quote is, in my mind, always immediately followed by “who is your daddy and what does he do?” If you don’t know what I am talking about, shame on you. Go rent Kindergarten Cop.
I spent the last three days in the hospital. Yes, an NHS hospital. It was one of the more terrifying experiences of my life. However, I’m glad I endured it as I have now gotten to the bottom of what most people didn’t even know has been ailing for the last 3 or 4 months.
I’ve been in and out of my GP complaining of severe abdominal pain and all the fun things that go with that. I was finally referred to a specialist after I’d lost 10 lbs and y blood work showed some high markers for inflammation. I was meant to wait until the 20th of Feb to see the specialist, but after meeting with my GP on Wednesday morning, she decided I “didn’t look like someone who can wait” and shipped me off to the hospital.
When I arrived, they just sent me to the ER. I wasn’t very excited about this as I had been in that same ER just three days earlier and was turned away after waiting 5 hours since “only my GP could do anything” for me. However, this time I was armed with a letter from my GP which explained the situation and ended with big bold letters that said “DMIT THIS PATIENT URGENTLY FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION”. The letter seemed to do the trick and I was whisked back to a bed in record time.
The ER doc had a look at me and agreed with my GP’s “you look like shit” assessment and had me sent upstairs to the admittance ward. Let me explain something to you about English hospitals, which I don’t think exists in the States. They have wards. Not rooms. So, instead of being in a room with one other person, you are in one long giant room with about 30 other people. Fortunately, with one of the more embarrassing side effects of sever abdominal pain, you aren’t legally allowed to be on a ward with other people so I got put in my own corner room. Nice, right? Wrong.
The room was dark and musty and smelled of mold. The blinds were basically falling off the window and the paint was chipping off the walls. To top it all off, a jug of the previous patients urine was sitting on the bathroom floor.
A nurse came in and introduced himself as Jeff. Jeff said he was going to have to take my vitals and then ask me a bunch of basic questions as part of being admitted, he just had to go and get his things but would be right back. An hour later, Jeff came back and took my blood pressure. He put the cuff on the same arm as my IV and when he started to pump up the cuff, the blood started to go out my arm and up the IV tube. I pointed this out to Jeff who decided that “maybe [he] should do it on the other arm”. I agreed. After we were done with my blood pressure and temperature, Jeff told me I needed to give a urine sample and do a couple of swabs (nose, throat and unmentionables). Jeff preceded to leave a giant bucket for my urine and several sterile swabs on the table and then left without any further instruction as to how to use them or what to do when I am done. He also never asked me any of the questions he said he needed to ask me.
I managed to figure it al out – kind of, though I am still unsure of exactly how far up my nose I was suppose to cram that thing – and I left all the samples on my bed side table for Jeff.
Next thing I know, some other nurse comes in the room and we have the following conversation:
Nurse: Ms. Smith?
Me: Yes?
Nurse: I need to take a blood sample
Me: They just took some downstairs about an hour ago
long pause
Me: Well, you can have some more.
Nurse: Great, thanks.
Nurse then ties the band around my arm and is about to stab me
Pause
Nurse: What is your date of birth?
Me: March 4th 1985
Nurse: Ok, cool
Nurse almost stabs me.
Pause
Nurse: What is it?
Me: March 4th 1985
Nurse: Are you sure?
Me: Pretty Sure
Nurse: Hold on.
Nurse leaves room and comes back 30 seconds later
Nurse: Are you Amanda Smith?
Me: No, Shelley Smith
Nurse: Right. Never mind then.
A few hours pass and there is no sign of Jeff or any other incompetent nurses. At this point, it’s about 6 pm and they bring me some dinner. They place the dinner directly next to my Urine sample which Jeff has never come back to collect. I ask politely if perhaps someone could take my pee away or, at the very least, move it so I don’t have to eat next to it and the response was “Oh, this will be fine”. It was not until several hours later that someone finally came and got all my samples. I assume they were normal, as I never heard anything about them ever again.
Another hour or so pass and I finally meet the Gastro guy. I sort of lucked out in that the doctor on call just happened to be the gastro specialist and he just happened to be one of the top gastro specialists in the UK. He walked in with a gaggle of junior doctors and proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions and we went through the normal rigamaroo. I really liked him. He was the first competent person I had met since moving into the ward. He told me that he would fit me in for a scope on Friday morning and I would have to stay in the hospital until then.
At about 10:45 – just as I was about to drift off to sleep – some new nurses come in and tell me I have to be moved out on to the ward as someone else needs the room. So they wheel me down the length of this horribly depressing ward to one of the very last beds.
The woman directly across from me was clearly confused/out of it/crazy and had been tied to her bed because she kept trying to run away/break the windows. She screamed for the first 30 minutes I was over there before they gave her something to calm her down.
The woman caddy corner to me had tried to kill herself and was telling one of the nurses how angry she was it didn’t work and that she would try again when they weren’t looking.
The woman next to me was, bless her, obviously unwell. She was having a lot of trouble breathing and did look pretty miserable. They had to keep giving her these nebulizers (the things that poison me) which are really loud and last about 20 minutes at a time. She also had some machine/alarm that kept going off and it would BEEP BEEP BEEP for five minutes or so until a nurse would come and turn it off. But, what really put me over the top was her moaning. She just laid there and made the most horrible sounds a human being could make. The nurses would come around and ask if she was in pain and she would say no, but then she would just keep moaning. If you’re not in pain, shut the hell up! I felt guilty for being mad at her, but I was also not feeling well (which is sort of why we were all in the hospital) and I just wanted to go to sleep and I couldn’t.
I think I finally fell asleep about 1:30 and then was up every couple of hours when the nurses would turn the lights on to deal with the moaner.
The next morning, my mom turned up. She’s not very good at being a long distance mom when there is a crisis – or really, at any time – so she had hopped a plane the night before to come sit with me in the hospital. At first, I thought this was silly, but ultimately I was really glad to have her there.
Thursday was a bit of a better day. They moved me to a nicer/quieter ward and I was given and very nice and attentive nurse named Barry. What made Thursday suck was that at about 2:00pm I had to start “prepping my bowel” for the scope. We don’t need to go into details. We all know how much this sucks. Let’s just say it was a long day/night.
Friday morning, I was woken up bright and early to finish my prep and head down to the scope room. I’ve had a colonoscopy before, when I was about 13, and they totally knocked me out for it so I don’t remember anything about it. This time, they kept me awake in a “twilight” state. There wasn’t anything twilight about it. I was pretty much completely lucid. It was kind of cool, because I could see the screen and my insides, but it also hurt really badly. As it turns out, poking inflamed things from the inside hurts WAY worse then poking them from the outside. After about five minutes of this, they realized I was in pain (probably because I shouted profanity) and they gave me a second dose of the sedative.
Then I was high.
I actually remember more of the procedure than I do of the hour or two after it, which I don’t think is how it’s meant to work. Apparently, the doctor talked to me right afterwards, but I couldn’t tell you what he said if my life depended on it. About four hours later, he came up and re- explained it all to my mom and me.
Though he technically can’t diagnose me until he gets the biopsies back, he told me I have Crohn’s Disease. There is a good article on Wiki, if you’re interested in details, but basically it’s a chronic autoimmune inflammatory disease, which you have to be genetically pre-disposed for.
It’s kind of interesting because they don’t really know a lot about it. They say it’s genetic, but not 100% of Crohn’s patients have the genetic marker. They classify it as autoimmune, but only because you have to suppress the immune system to control it not necessarily because it’s caused by your immune system attacking you. It can present at any time in someone’s life, but most often it’s in your mid-twenties. They don’t know what causes it. They have no known cure for it, but they can control it pretty easily.
When you have a flare up – like I do now – you have to take steroids to reduce the inflammation and suppress your immune system. I’ve been given seven weeks of a pretty serious steroid to take, which means I am going to have super chub face and might possibly go manic depressive (two very unfortunate side effects of steroids). I have to take next week off work just in case they make me go crazy, but I’m sure I’ll be fine on them.
After the steroids, I have to go back to the doc and be tested to make sure I’m not one of the 1 in 300 people who do not produce a certain enzyme. I’ll need that enzyme in order to break down the drug they want to give me as a daily medication. I’ll have to take it, or something like it, every day for the rest of my life, which is kind of weird.
I’ll also need to do another scope after the steroids so that they can judge the extent of the disease. If it’s only in my large bowel, there are far fewer complications. If it is in my small bowel as well it can affect the amount of nutrients I absorb from my food and I might need to take/do some further things to help with that.
If all goes smoothly, it’s a very manageable thing and all I’ll need to do is take regular medication and have yearly check ups. Once I get through the steroids, I should be back to a relative normal and finally start feeling like myself again. All in all, it could have been a lot worse – Arnold could have been wrong.
I spent the last three days in the hospital. Yes, an NHS hospital. It was one of the more terrifying experiences of my life. However, I’m glad I endured it as I have now gotten to the bottom of what most people didn’t even know has been ailing for the last 3 or 4 months.
I’ve been in and out of my GP complaining of severe abdominal pain and all the fun things that go with that. I was finally referred to a specialist after I’d lost 10 lbs and y blood work showed some high markers for inflammation. I was meant to wait until the 20th of Feb to see the specialist, but after meeting with my GP on Wednesday morning, she decided I “didn’t look like someone who can wait” and shipped me off to the hospital.
When I arrived, they just sent me to the ER. I wasn’t very excited about this as I had been in that same ER just three days earlier and was turned away after waiting 5 hours since “only my GP could do anything” for me. However, this time I was armed with a letter from my GP which explained the situation and ended with big bold letters that said “DMIT THIS PATIENT URGENTLY FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION”. The letter seemed to do the trick and I was whisked back to a bed in record time.
The ER doc had a look at me and agreed with my GP’s “you look like shit” assessment and had me sent upstairs to the admittance ward. Let me explain something to you about English hospitals, which I don’t think exists in the States. They have wards. Not rooms. So, instead of being in a room with one other person, you are in one long giant room with about 30 other people. Fortunately, with one of the more embarrassing side effects of sever abdominal pain, you aren’t legally allowed to be on a ward with other people so I got put in my own corner room. Nice, right? Wrong.
The room was dark and musty and smelled of mold. The blinds were basically falling off the window and the paint was chipping off the walls. To top it all off, a jug of the previous patients urine was sitting on the bathroom floor.
A nurse came in and introduced himself as Jeff. Jeff said he was going to have to take my vitals and then ask me a bunch of basic questions as part of being admitted, he just had to go and get his things but would be right back. An hour later, Jeff came back and took my blood pressure. He put the cuff on the same arm as my IV and when he started to pump up the cuff, the blood started to go out my arm and up the IV tube. I pointed this out to Jeff who decided that “maybe [he] should do it on the other arm”. I agreed. After we were done with my blood pressure and temperature, Jeff told me I needed to give a urine sample and do a couple of swabs (nose, throat and unmentionables). Jeff preceded to leave a giant bucket for my urine and several sterile swabs on the table and then left without any further instruction as to how to use them or what to do when I am done. He also never asked me any of the questions he said he needed to ask me.
I managed to figure it al out – kind of, though I am still unsure of exactly how far up my nose I was suppose to cram that thing – and I left all the samples on my bed side table for Jeff.
Next thing I know, some other nurse comes in the room and we have the following conversation:
Nurse: Ms. Smith?
Me: Yes?
Nurse: I need to take a blood sample
Me: They just took some downstairs about an hour ago
long pause
Me: Well, you can have some more.
Nurse: Great, thanks.
Nurse then ties the band around my arm and is about to stab me
Pause
Nurse: What is your date of birth?
Me: March 4th 1985
Nurse: Ok, cool
Nurse almost stabs me.
Pause
Nurse: What is it?
Me: March 4th 1985
Nurse: Are you sure?
Me: Pretty Sure
Nurse: Hold on.
Nurse leaves room and comes back 30 seconds later
Nurse: Are you Amanda Smith?
Me: No, Shelley Smith
Nurse: Right. Never mind then.
A few hours pass and there is no sign of Jeff or any other incompetent nurses. At this point, it’s about 6 pm and they bring me some dinner. They place the dinner directly next to my Urine sample which Jeff has never come back to collect. I ask politely if perhaps someone could take my pee away or, at the very least, move it so I don’t have to eat next to it and the response was “Oh, this will be fine”. It was not until several hours later that someone finally came and got all my samples. I assume they were normal, as I never heard anything about them ever again.
Another hour or so pass and I finally meet the Gastro guy. I sort of lucked out in that the doctor on call just happened to be the gastro specialist and he just happened to be one of the top gastro specialists in the UK. He walked in with a gaggle of junior doctors and proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions and we went through the normal rigamaroo. I really liked him. He was the first competent person I had met since moving into the ward. He told me that he would fit me in for a scope on Friday morning and I would have to stay in the hospital until then.
At about 10:45 – just as I was about to drift off to sleep – some new nurses come in and tell me I have to be moved out on to the ward as someone else needs the room. So they wheel me down the length of this horribly depressing ward to one of the very last beds.
The woman directly across from me was clearly confused/out of it/crazy and had been tied to her bed because she kept trying to run away/break the windows. She screamed for the first 30 minutes I was over there before they gave her something to calm her down.
The woman caddy corner to me had tried to kill herself and was telling one of the nurses how angry she was it didn’t work and that she would try again when they weren’t looking.
The woman next to me was, bless her, obviously unwell. She was having a lot of trouble breathing and did look pretty miserable. They had to keep giving her these nebulizers (the things that poison me) which are really loud and last about 20 minutes at a time. She also had some machine/alarm that kept going off and it would BEEP BEEP BEEP for five minutes or so until a nurse would come and turn it off. But, what really put me over the top was her moaning. She just laid there and made the most horrible sounds a human being could make. The nurses would come around and ask if she was in pain and she would say no, but then she would just keep moaning. If you’re not in pain, shut the hell up! I felt guilty for being mad at her, but I was also not feeling well (which is sort of why we were all in the hospital) and I just wanted to go to sleep and I couldn’t.
I think I finally fell asleep about 1:30 and then was up every couple of hours when the nurses would turn the lights on to deal with the moaner.
The next morning, my mom turned up. She’s not very good at being a long distance mom when there is a crisis – or really, at any time – so she had hopped a plane the night before to come sit with me in the hospital. At first, I thought this was silly, but ultimately I was really glad to have her there.
Thursday was a bit of a better day. They moved me to a nicer/quieter ward and I was given and very nice and attentive nurse named Barry. What made Thursday suck was that at about 2:00pm I had to start “prepping my bowel” for the scope. We don’t need to go into details. We all know how much this sucks. Let’s just say it was a long day/night.
Friday morning, I was woken up bright and early to finish my prep and head down to the scope room. I’ve had a colonoscopy before, when I was about 13, and they totally knocked me out for it so I don’t remember anything about it. This time, they kept me awake in a “twilight” state. There wasn’t anything twilight about it. I was pretty much completely lucid. It was kind of cool, because I could see the screen and my insides, but it also hurt really badly. As it turns out, poking inflamed things from the inside hurts WAY worse then poking them from the outside. After about five minutes of this, they realized I was in pain (probably because I shouted profanity) and they gave me a second dose of the sedative.
Then I was high.
I actually remember more of the procedure than I do of the hour or two after it, which I don’t think is how it’s meant to work. Apparently, the doctor talked to me right afterwards, but I couldn’t tell you what he said if my life depended on it. About four hours later, he came up and re- explained it all to my mom and me.
Though he technically can’t diagnose me until he gets the biopsies back, he told me I have Crohn’s Disease. There is a good article on Wiki, if you’re interested in details, but basically it’s a chronic autoimmune inflammatory disease, which you have to be genetically pre-disposed for.
It’s kind of interesting because they don’t really know a lot about it. They say it’s genetic, but not 100% of Crohn’s patients have the genetic marker. They classify it as autoimmune, but only because you have to suppress the immune system to control it not necessarily because it’s caused by your immune system attacking you. It can present at any time in someone’s life, but most often it’s in your mid-twenties. They don’t know what causes it. They have no known cure for it, but they can control it pretty easily.
When you have a flare up – like I do now – you have to take steroids to reduce the inflammation and suppress your immune system. I’ve been given seven weeks of a pretty serious steroid to take, which means I am going to have super chub face and might possibly go manic depressive (two very unfortunate side effects of steroids). I have to take next week off work just in case they make me go crazy, but I’m sure I’ll be fine on them.
After the steroids, I have to go back to the doc and be tested to make sure I’m not one of the 1 in 300 people who do not produce a certain enzyme. I’ll need that enzyme in order to break down the drug they want to give me as a daily medication. I’ll have to take it, or something like it, every day for the rest of my life, which is kind of weird.
I’ll also need to do another scope after the steroids so that they can judge the extent of the disease. If it’s only in my large bowel, there are far fewer complications. If it is in my small bowel as well it can affect the amount of nutrients I absorb from my food and I might need to take/do some further things to help with that.
If all goes smoothly, it’s a very manageable thing and all I’ll need to do is take regular medication and have yearly check ups. Once I get through the steroids, I should be back to a relative normal and finally start feeling like myself again. All in all, it could have been a lot worse – Arnold could have been wrong.
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