Ranting Rex

About two weeks ago I had my first ever surgery.  After a decade of taking great care not to pee on my shoes, because my urine stream had all the velocity of a French military invasion, I decided it was time to see the urologist.  I would basically stand in front of the commode, find a comfortable position, and wait for the time it takes to roast a chicken before anything happened.  As evidence, my thighs now have permanent marks where I’ve slept sitting on the toilet with a pillow in my lap to at least get some sleep between attempts to urinate.

I’m a very active guy.  While my body is almost 55 years old, my mind thinks it’s 16.  Seriously, I mountain bike aggressively, ski, rollerblade skate parks, run, rock climb, swim, and dodge sharp objects thrown by my wife.  There’s rarely a weekend where I’m not patching some wound from a spectacular fall, or a rock or tree branch.  So, to admit that my body was failing me miserably has been quite the bruising to my ego.  For while my mind thinks I’m a teenager (just ask said wife), my prostate thinks it’s a 90-year-old dementia patient.  I mean it must be that because 30 seconds after I’d peed, I’d have to pee again.

BPH was my condition which is a short way of saying that my prostate was so large that it strangulated my urethra to a point that urination was just a fond memory.  The doctor recommended the gold standard of prostate surgery for my condition called a Transurethral Resection of the Prostate, or TURP.  What this “Gold Standard” entails is sticking a garden hose with a light on the end and an electrode into your penis to burn away portions of your prostate, in my case the parts pushing into my bladder, preventing me from urinating.  If you’re wondering, it really is as bad as it sounds.       

When they told me what I needed the doctor gave me a nice four-color tri-fold brochure to read, because evidently surgery needs Marketing.  This was supposed to explain the procedure to me and answer all my questions, because let’s face it, doctors fly in and out of the exam room so fast that asking them questions is impossible.  I therefore I went to the Internet where, to my amazement, there was a host of information, almost all of it wrong.  What I learned was that most people who got this procedure were in considerably poorer physical health, or much older than I, so much of it didn’t really apply.  So much for Dr. Google.  

So, on faith, I scheduled my surgery for 7:30 a.m. in the morning.  I use the term “scheduled” loosely since the surgeon was late.  After repeated calls, texts, and emails to me over the weeks before the surgery with threats of financial penalty if I was late or didn’t show, I learned I was evidently the only individual participating in this event under that directive.  It obviously didn’t apply to the person doing the surgery, the nursing staff, or anyone else invited to the party.  

I learned this when I got to the surgery center and was promptly handed stacks of paperwork to fill out.  I was glad my wife was with me since most of it made zero sense.  It basically stated that if anyone in the facility mistakenly killed or crippled me that they were held harmless.  My wife, an attorney of renown in these matters, looked at the confused look on my face as I pointed this out and said, and I quote “uh huh…good luck with that.” I can assure you, had one of those issues came to fruition, my wife would have made them extremely uncomfortable.  I’ve seen her do that for her clients, and all joking aside, I can only imagine what she would do if it were someone she cared about…even it it is her adolescent husband who made her leave her winter hideaway on the beach so she could help me after surgery.  

After literally signing my life away, I was ushered back into the pre-op room where I was given what amounted to half a robe, a pair of pressure socks (to prevent blood clotting) and some nice thick fuzzy yellow socks to keep my feet warm.  Oh, and they have these really awesome blankets that they pull out of a warmer to keep your feet warm.  Where can I get one of these?  They’re awesome!  

I was also given an IV which was a good thing since I hadn’t eaten or drank anything since the day before.  Things started to get pretty interesting when my wife and I were told the doctor would be two hours late for the surgery and then when two hours passed, and then two more hours passed, my wife and I started to become a little frustrated to say the least.  Now…I was pretty tired, having not eaten or had water for 23 hours at this point, but I still feared for the staff.  At that point I would have happily gone to jail after pummeling one of them for their PB an J.

However, what I really worried about was my wife.  She was starting to get annoyed at the lack of communication coming from the staff.  She’s volatile on a good day, but with me lying in bed with tubes coming out of me and children for care givers giving half answers to her inquiries she started to get a little terse.  Also, a little advice for the nurses in the world.  Never tell anyone that the “doctor is busy” ever!  It discounts the patient’s importance and makes it sound like the doctor is the one you serve.  It especially doesn’t work with an attorney whose professional ego is on par with any surgeon.  It’s not going to play well…and it didn’t.  For the safety of all I had to tell the nurse I was leaving.  It was at that point the surgeon finally appeared.  I’m glad too since I would not have gone back.

Within seconds of the doctor’s appearance they quickly rolled me into the OR.  I can only assume since I, on my way out, was going to get a refund of what I had to pay for this ride.  I was happy to see the anesthesiologist though.  In my opinion he was the most important person in the room.  I made sure I was nice to him.  He was going to keep me alive.  When I lay there on the operating table, he told me I was going to feel drunk.  I have never in my life felt drunk, so I didn’t have a point of reference.  I was telling him a story about why I don’t drink and the next thing I knew my wife and the preop nurse were standing at the end of my bed in the recovery room.  I lost an entire 90 minutes and had zero recollection of any of the events that happened after I started my story.  My surgery was done, my wife was at my side, and I had a nice catheter as proof that something had happened.

I knew going in I was going to go home with a catheter but having a small garden hose inserted into something that was never intended to have anything inserted is extremely uncomfortable.  As I started to come out of the anesthetic the nurse asked me how I felt and it took a few minutes for me to realize what was happening, and with every passing moment my discomfort was turning into pain.  The nice nurse gave me a little pain pill and I can tell you that as of today, a little more than two weeks later, that’s the only pain pill I’ve taken.  That’s not the only pain I’ve felt, but I’m used to a little pain, and I don’t need pills for that either.

I’ll spare you the comedy act of having a 20 something nurse help me get dressed with a catheter connected to me, so let’s just say it was not a pleasant experience.  All I’ll say is my legs were still covered with so much blood that I was grateful I was completely out cold during the surgery.  I was also glad I had some cheap sweatpants from Walmart.  Had it been anything more I would have been a little upset, as it was, I just wanted to get the hell out of there.  

The night at home was interesting.  Suffice it to say, having a six-foot hose with a bag on the end inserted into your penis makes moving very difficult and very painful.  When I finally made it into my man cave and my wife, bless hear heart, took great care of making sure I had everything I needed, I settled down for the evening.  She was a little concerned for me, but in the end decided she’d go to bed and leave me to my own devices.  This was a good thing because when I awoke the next morning with one leg over the right arm of the chair and one leg over the left, a position that alleviated all the pain, I was thankful she didn’t have to wake up to see that.  I, myself, thought it was hilarious.  

So fast forward to 4 a.m. the morning after surgery.  If you’ve never seen a catheter, it is a long tube about the size of a garden hose.  OK…I’m joking, it’s about as big as a standard auto fuel line.  Still a size that should never be intended to be shoved into a penis.  To keep it all in place there is a balloon on the end that is inflated once it is inside your bladder.  The nurse walked me through the procedure for removing the catheter, and while I was none too excited about going through the process, I was more than happy for it to be over.

The nurse walked me through what needed to happen so I waddled into my workshop in the basement, basically the only way to describe how to move with this contraption attached to you, got a pair of scissors from the peg board, and went to work.  The procedure goes something like this:  You reach down, about a foot below where the hose is hanging and cut it off.  This deflates the hose and allows the catheter to be removed.  They then tell you to stand there and let gravity do the work.  However, they left out a few key, and in my opinion, extremely important details.  

The first detail they left out was that when you cut the hose, urine and blood stream out of you like one of those fountains you see in Italy where the little boy is holding onto a pot and pissing all over the ground.  There’s nothing you can do to stop it either.  In fact if you do try, the pain is something I will spare you from description.  So the only thing you can do at this point is to let gravity take the hose out because if you touch it, you start to get quite dizzy and the idea of lying in my own blood and urine without so much as a punch thrown is just humiliating.  

What they also fail to tell you is just…how…fucking…far…this thing is inserted into your body.  What I thought was only going to be a few inches of hose ended up being about a foot and a half long.  I’m sure it was only a minute or so, but the process of this traveling along my urethra was literally torture, and I was getting very light headed.  I wanted to sit down.

I’m so thankful the nurse had the forethought to tell me to do this in the bathtub.  It literally looked like I had butchered a rabbit.  Seriously, this is not something you want to see coming out of you.  What you basically have is blood, urine and tissue from inside your body pooled below you as you straddle to keep your feet dry.  No one wants to see that.  It took a bit and it was kind of uncomfortable until the end of the tube passed my prostate.  At that point I was so dizzy from the pain that I only hoped it would be over soon.  Once it was done, I had to sit on the edge of the tub for a bit to get my wind back.  

The next little gem was passing copious amounts of blood for the first few times I peed.  After that things calmed down quite a bit.  Now I’m back to almost normal with a clump of blood passing each time I pee.  Not enough to make it miserable, but enough to annoy me.  I’m told that this will happen for a couple of months before all the scabs have passed and my prostate heals.  I can honestly say that I’m glad I had it done, I just hope I never have to do it again.      

Rex

I’m having surgery Wednesday.  The procedure is minor, to be sure, but the idea of being unconscious while someone sticks a tube into my urethra so they can cut into my bladder doesn’t bring me to memories of joy.  The fact is that I have never had surgery of any kind, and the prospect terrifies me.  All I do is think about all the horrible things that can happen.  When I ask the doctor about the risks, all he can do is tell me not to worry about the pain.  Well…I wasn’t really worried about the pain.  I’m used to pain.  Pain is why I’m seeing the doctor. 

What I’m not used to is being given Class A narcotics by someone I’ve never met, or by anyone else for that matter.  Not to mention giving over control to an establishment, that truth be told, has a horrible track record of keeping people alive, but a pretty good one at taking all their money.  Everyone is telling me not to worry, but as someone whose entire career is based on my ability to worry about the things that might happen and prepare for them, I’m going to prepare for the worse case scenario. 

So, since that’s the case I want to bring up a few things.  The first is that I want to have my funeral in Colorado and Iowa.  In Colorado, I don’t care where, but pick someplace where at least a couple of people from work can attend.  I love the job I do and all the people with whom I work, even the annoying ones.  I’ve rarely worked with a group who is as dedicated as they.  Even the ones that are annoying are only that way because they feel so deeply about the importance of what it is we are trying to do.  When everyone has the same goals, it’s hard to be angry, even if you do occasionally fantasize about giving a couple of them a swirly. 

In Iowa I want to have it at Capitol Hill Lutheran Church to be exact.  Why you ask?  Because I was Baptized, Confirmed, and Married to the most wonderful woman in the world in that church.  And while I’m by no means religious at this point in my life, that place is very dear to me.  I was raised there, and I made friends there.  Just like my family and my schools, that church shaped who I am as a person and as a man.  Besides, I just like to be consistent. 

So now that the particulars are out of the way, let’s talk about religion for a moment.  While I was raised in the church, I have lost my ability to follow that, or any other faith.  Why do you ask?  Because while God is a creation of nature, religion is a creation of man.  There are people who argue that man is the tool by which God provides direction.  But let’s face it.  The key word there is “tool.”  Man is certainly a tool, and in my opinion not a very good one.

I think we can all agree that whether you call it nature or God it is the thing that binds us and the universe and all things together.  However, I don’t think that what people call God is aware of us.  Just like the sun rising in the sky, ancient people used to worship it because they didn’t understand that whether they worshiped it or not, it would still rise in the west and set in the east.  The same is true of God, or what many people understand to be God.  It doesn’t matter if you worship it or not, it will still be there.  By man applying some perceived consciousness to it is an invention of man.  And since man is the aforementioned tool, I’m taking the safe bet that spending my Sundays listening to an idiot tell me how to live my life while paying them 15% of my weekly wages makes me an equal idiot.  As Bono said “The God I believe in isn’t short of cash, Mister!”  So, I’ll keep my money.  After all the doctors want it.

Now a bit about politics. Trump is an idiot, and Republicans are cowards, is too easy. What’s happened is that an entire generation has lost the ability to communicate, think critically, and question the information they are provided regardless of the source. “Mom said it. This agrees with my world view. This is obviously fact.” Nope. People need to learn to question their perspectives on EVERYTHING. I actually listened to an interview yesterday from a guy who said he’s tired of being called “racist,” and then spent the next 20 minutes talking about how he didn’t trust Muslims, Jews, Asians, or Black people. Also, can’t we just agree on things like, you know, facts? What’s going on in this country today is a Farside cartoon gone too far. Can we bring it back to Family Circle?

Liberals are not free from hypocrisy either. They will spend hours talking about how kind and gentle they are, and how the world just needs to be nicer. Then when someone shows up on a college campus to talk about something they don’t agree with, they shun them, drive them from the campus and hold rallies to prevent them from exercising free speech. The double standard is astounding. My favorite one was a girl in the audience when another woman was talking about how “Me Too” had gone too far. She cried and spoke about being “micro raped.” The speaker asked her “What is micro rape.” The girl said “A boy put his hand on my thigh without asking.” Oh just kill me now ya fucking snowflake. No wonder we have a failed gameshow host as President.

Liberals talk about how mean the right is, running to their “safe spaces” on college campuses and covering their ears when they hear an opposing opinion rather than listening. They need to spend less time on MSNBC, and more time listening to Chris Wallace, or, I don’t know, learning math? If you think Bernie is going to get Medicare for all, you’re living in a fantasy world. It would be nice, that’s for sure. However, the only way for that to happen is to convince an entire industry of healthcare professionals and executives (a.k.a. criminals) that they need to make less money. Good luck with that. I mean if I had a 6000 square foot home in Beaver Creek Colorado, I’d be hard pressed to say “Sure! I’ll give up my seven figure salary and now make 50k a year!” Good luck with that!

OK…now that I got all that off my chest, I honestly don’t believe I will die tomorrow.  I’m really more worried about waking up and puking my guts out.  To be honest I’d almost rather die.  In fact, if given the choice between the two, I can tell you I’m not sure which one I would pick.  This is why I never drank as a teenager.  I preferred to get stoned and place my face in a a gallon of Orio ice cream than spend my evening with my face in a place that was never meant for my face.  So just take this as the rantings of a terrified 54 year old man with an 85 year old prostate.  I’m more likely to go with my bicycle wrapped around a pine tree, or if my wife has her way with a shovel wrapped around the back of my skull.  For as she says, it’s not a matter of “if,” but a matter of “when.”

I love you all,

Rex   

Yesterday, a seventeen month old baby was shot in the face by an AR-15.  Seven more were killed, and many, many more injured as a gunman fired off shots while being chased by Odessa Texas police.  While the little girl did survive the ordeal, it turns out that this was just another day at the office for President Trump.  Per his quote about the shooting “this really hasn’t changed anything about gun control.”  Those present at this announcement were in shock beyond belief to hear the President say something truthful.  It hasn’t changed anything…and it won’t.  In fact just yesterday, Texas passed laws to expand gun ownership.  How astonishingly brilliant of them.  

Really this shooting is just another example of one more deraigned white guy exercising his right to kill everyone he feels like killing.  Afterall, according to modern Republican dogma, the right to bear arms supersedes the right to Life, Liberty, or Happiness.  I mean how can anyone be happy if they can’t kill their neighbor?  Isn’t that in the Bible?  Kill thy Neighbor?  It must be. That’s the only book the gun lobby reads.  I know…I heard La Pierre say it in an NRA speech.

I also just heard on Fox News that the only way for this to be prevented is to add more guns.  I’ve heard this little gem for far too long. Add more guns?  What the hell do you do when you see someone choking? Choke them?  If you think like this, I’m sorry, you’re an idiot.  More weapons never, in the history of forever, prevented less death.  Ever. Look it up!  In a book.  You know what books are?  They’re in these buildings called Libraries.  You should go in one once in a while.  It will help you when people use words with more than one syllable.  

Maybe you’re right though. Maybe we do need more guns in the world. After all, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is to have a good guy with a gun.  Then again, I’d like to try option B.  That being neither guy has a gun.  We could try that option.  Then again, according to your beliefs it’s the responsibility of the victim to protect themselves.  That’s the law of nature after all.  I guess someone should have told that little girl.  I guess if that little tiny defenseless baby would have had an oozy or something, she’d have her face today.  

You know, you’re right. A good guy with a gun is a defense against a bad guy with a gun.  That kid should have had a gun, and she’d be just fine today.  She should have gone out and bought that oozy.  Then today she’d have a perfect, priceless little face, with teeth and lips and everything so she could eat and be a normal kid.  How dare she ruin the life of a murderer by not being able to defend herself.  Damnit! She should have gone out and bought a gun.  What was wrong with her?  Stupid kid.

Rex

I honestly don’t know what to do with what’s considered conservative media today.  They sit and listen to the President of the United States, members of Congress, and people of the public spout the most ridiculous claims, and then either hop on the band wagon, or deny entirely the things that were said. Think about that.  Imagine being on a ship that is sinking, with thousands of guests on board, watching it sink, and the captain and crew are saying “Nope…it’s all good!  Go back to your cabin, you’ll be fine.”

I was in my early 20s when I first started watching the news and paying attention to what was being said. I became fans of people like George Will, and William F. Buckley who espoused conservative ideas that really made sense to me.  These were, and for Will, still are, ideas based in fact and reality.  I didn’t, and don’t, always agree with them, but I could respect where they were coming from, and if you provided them with new information, they were and are capable of changing their point of view.  

Not today’s conservative!  To be a conservative today you have to deny that the earth is round, poison kills, conservatives lie, and believe that, radio, eyewitness, notarized, and gold-plated evidence is nothing but fake news.  As long as it is the guy on your team that’s making shit up, you’re good with it.  However, let that be the other team then we should just hang him.  Hell…the other team doesn’t even have to be lying.  They just have to be stating a fact that is contrary to your doctrine, and you seem to have the right to disavow, dishonor, and many cases murder him.  Spanish Inquisition anyone?

Take the example of Fox New’s Stuart Varney.  This guy actually went on TV the other day and stated that he doesn’t believe the President ever lies.  Really!?! Never?  He never, ever lies?  Even though we have all watched him lie?  According to the WashingtonPost, Trump has lied more than 12,000 times in less than 1000 days.  Seriously…Fox…you know we have video recordings now.  We can actually review what he says and compare it to…you know…facts?  We can also review when he says one thing, denies that he says it, and then says it again, denies it again, and then says something else.  It’s called TECHNOLOGY!

I really don’t know what’s going to happen to this country in the next few years.  However, I do know that I’m considering Canada and Mexico as options when the shit hits the fan.  At some point the wackadoodles on both sides are going to come to a head, and the end result is going to be bloody. I’d just as soon not be a part of that. Am I a coward?  No.  I just don’t want to be in a situation where I’m fighting an idiot for no other reason than they’re an idiot.  That just seems a ridiculous reason to sacrifice my life, and when it gets to that point, that’s when there’s nothing worth fighting for.

Rex