Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 6/3/22
Still Tumescent, but no longer Bulbous Edition
More unseasonal, yet not unpleasant weather, has conspired to lull everyone here at the Bunker into a false sense of security and comfort, so that we are woefully unprepared for the sudden cracking up to 110 degrees in the shade that is surely about to descend upon us. We’ll have to do the morning walk at 5:30 if we want to only be walking in 87-degree weather, because it never really cools off, does it?
The exercise regimen is about to move indoors until, oh, probably late November.
Week Four Update
The drains are out! I am free of the squeaker bulbs! Oh, sweet baby Jesus, I’m so happy! It almost is worth the trauma of how they came to be removed.
On Saturday, I kinda-sorta overdid it, and popped both the stitches (thus, breaking the seal) on both of my drains. I know this because, when it happens, the first thing you hear is the sound of air rushing into the bulbs, inflating them back to their normal shape, like a horrible, horrible water balloon. And just as an aside, I hate that I know that about J-P drains.
There was no way to do anything about it but wait it out until everyone got back into the office, so Sunday morning, I left a message on their answering service, briefly explaining my predicament. Thankfully, someone got ahold of someone, who got ahold of one of the nurses that I’ve been dealing with since day one. The service couldn’t get the doc on the phone, since he was at some lake, so they called Christy, who was eating dinner with her family at a restaurant in Dallas. Lucky her!
We started discussing my drain output—thankfully it was decreasing and had juuust hit the threshold for removal. We weren’t very long into the discussion when she said, “I need to see what we’re doing here. Can you Facetime me?”
Oh, boy, here we go. Yeah, sure, why not? She went into the bathroom of the restaurant, leaving her family at the table, and I obligingly dropped trou, down to the birthday suit. Janice was holding my phone in front of my junk like an amateur pornographer and the nurse is saying, “Oh yay, that looks so much better!”
Then she started talking to Janice. “Okay, what I need you to do is just grab that line and pull it straight down and out.”
See, one of the lines (my leftie, if you must know), had come completely unstitched. There’s a outer lip on the edge of the drain tube that goes up into the body, which makes it easier to stitch over, you see. It’s counter-sunk, like a high end wood screw. Those stiches had broken, and I had about six inches of the white tubing hanging out of me.
Janice grabbed the tubing and pulled it down like she wanted to stop the bus and get off. And she kept pulling, and pulling, and then she had to let go and re-grasp the top again and keep pulling, like the worst party trick ever for a birthday clown. I felt it going, too, and yeah, it was...disconcerting, to say the least.
"Okay, Janice, now just do the same thing to the other one,” Christy said.
Janice paused. “Uh...one of the stitches is still stitched.”
“You’re going to want to just cut that stitch with some scissors.”
Janice looked up at me to see how freaked out I was. I nodded for her to go get scissors. While she was gone, I apologized to the nurse for turning the call into a Tinder date. We laughed. I mean, what else could we do?
Janice comes back into the room with black handled blades. “Janice, those are poultry shears! You can’t use those on me.”
“What? She said ‘scissors.’ These are scissors, aren’t they?”
“No, they aren’t. I cut chickens apart with those! You’re not getting that anywhere near my junk! Go get actual scissors!” On the phone, I could hear Christy laughing. “You’re not helping,” I told her.
Janice re-appeared with my nail clippers, the serious ones you use to strip electrical wire with. She had to walk by the bathroom, where my shaving mug was the home of no less than five pairs of scissors of various sizes, including baby fingernail cutters with the rounded tips. But no matter. She seemed confident that she wasn’t going to draw blood.
It was my turn to hold the phone while Janice did the snip. “Now, just pull it straight down like you did the other one,” Christy said.
There was a beat, and then Janice said, “I can’t. There’s a crust of something there that’s...”
“Just pull it hard,” Christy urged. “It’s all right.”
The hell it was. I felt that crust tear, and it was a “rip the band-aid off” kind of feeling, sharp and sudden, and then, the party trick started again, and I would not be surprised if the end of that drain tube was parked in my nose. That’s how much tubing she magically produced from my tortured groin.
I turned the phone back to face me while Christy gave me some care and feeding instructions. Janice left the room for the necessary supplies. I thanked Christy and hung up. Janice came back into the room with pads and compression shorts, her eyes wide, her lip trembling.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“No!” she yelled. “What’s wrong? That!”
She made vague waving gestures at the coil of surgical tubing on the floor at my feet. “You made me do that! I’m traumatized! I may not recover!”
It was, upon reflection, a thing I never expected her to have to do. What are the odds? Thankfully, she did recover, as did I, after a couple of days of taking it easy in case there was a lingering problem.
It’s been five days now, and so far, so good. I’m not out of the woods, yet. I’m still wearing the binder to keep the swelling above the surgical site from swelling. I’m still, by any measurable metric, overweight. I got more to do. So I hopped back onto Ideal Protein and now I’m waiting for Cruciferous Stockholm Syndrome to re-assert itself, which should be any day now.
I have no idea how much more I can lose, or even if I will lose very much at all. I’m not going to stress myself out about it; I’m just re-asserting good habits again. For now, being right here is enough. I look pretty amazing. I feel better now that I’ve felt in a decade. I’m going to chase that feeling for a little while longer.
In Other News...
This new body is taking some getting used to. Right now, I’m a weird contradiction of physical truth and mental image. My meat has snapped back, because it knows what its form and function is; my thighs can press together now, and the pain in my hips has vanished, for example. I can walk straight, my feet pointed where I’m going, and not splayed out to support the slight rocking gait I had to effect to lift my leg against the resistance of my stomach. Janice keeps remarking how differently I move, now, and I don’t even notice it, because why wouldn’t my legs move like they were born to?
And yet...in my head, I’m still making allowances for my former size. I think I’m going to call it phantom bulk syndrome. I still turn sideways to go through some doors. I draw myself in to slip through crowded rooms. I put my hands behind my back, clasped, so that my arms don’t flail out like seal flippers and accidently hit something. These are behaviors I had to impose on myself, because all of the above happened enough times that I needed a correction.
Now I’m having to un-learn what I have learned, to borrow from Leigh Brackett. I am quite certain that this is part of my reluctance to do a full-on victory lap just yet. And if I’m being completely honest, I’m sure it’s what is fueling my burning urge to get back on the treadmill, on the IP protocol, all of that. Mind you, I don’t think it’s a bad thing; prioritizing health is okay to do. I was just surprised and what I unconsciously held onto, and what I unconsciously fixed without giving it a thought.
Sweet New Ride
Janice recently got a new car: A silver Prius with the “Midnighter Package,” which means, there are some black accents on the body and hubcaps. It looks like what Moon Knight would drive, if he drove a Batmobile. In that spirit, we’ve tentatively christened the car, “the Specter.” This is us on the Saturday exercise outing.
Galley Notes
If you liked the navy bean soup recipe and want to see more of what I cook, let me know in the comments and I’ll throw some recipes into the mix, just to keep things interesting.
Oh, man.
I've had drains removed, I've seen someone else's drain removed, and I think I could handle being the remover better than being the removee. I'm so glad you didn't have to do that to yourself, and you have a wonderful partner who could.
(And, yeah, they go on forever, and if you're not expecting that, it's a lot worse.)
I'm glad things are on a trend of improvement!
I literally woke up this morning - a bit dreary and rainy here in Portland OR - and wondered, "where did I see that navy bean soup recipe?" Now I know where to look. I think I'll head to the store in a bit to pick up ingredients. Truly enjoy your write ups and wish you and the rest of the bunker staff well as you prep for the coming onslaught sometimes known as 'Texas in Summer'.