Category Archives: Who stole my brain?

Notes on Being a Fake

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There are three ways to be a Fake:

  1. Unintentional
  2. Egregious
  3. Internally painful

For the purpose of this discussion, we shall dispense with the first two types rather quickly, since it is the third type in which we are principally interested, this being my blog and me being, unfortunately, the third type. Your opinion may vary, in which case you are a second opinion and you may write your own Note on Being a Fake, which you may send to me at your own expense.

Additionally, our discussion will be limited to Fakery as it refers to recovery from a stroke and/or life with M.S. and/or other such life-challenging situations. Fakery outside of this narrow field of health issues will not be considered.

Additionally additionally, I am giving my Observer to these discussions a Fake Name. I had to think for a while to come up with a name not likely to occur in human beings, and finally settled on Nilla, as in ’Nilla Wafers.

The Unintentional Fake
The Unintentional Fake is often not a Fake at all, but appears to be one by being over-enthusiastic about gains in health recovery, such as a gain in ability to walk, or speak, or even recover consciousness. The enthusiasm can be on the part of a patient or a caregiver or a health professional (doctor, nurse, etc.). The enthusiasm is genuine; the over-enthusiasm curdles it.

The Egregious Fake
The Egregious Fake usually has absolutely nothing physically wrong with him or her but wants you to know all about it. His cold is much worse than yours. Her knee is too painful to help carry those boxes into the house. He’s worried about his terrible headache—he’s had it for days. She hasn’t slept for weeks. But wait! Who’s that strolling out of the bookstore carrying an armload of books? Why, it’s your weak-kneed friend! And she’s with her friend who has overcome his intolerance to lactose and is enjoying an ice cream cone! The Egregious Fake is worrisome to be around until you realize that he or she is in fact an Egregious Fake and not For Real.

The Internally Painful Fake
The Internally Painful Fake walks among people every day, and she sees the judgment in Nilla’s eyes. Nilla sees my cane, and her eyes say, “The cane? Are you still using that cane?” Yes, the stroke was nearly two years ago, but I also have M.S., and the combination makes me stagger, makes me weak. It is internally painful for me to admit this, but whenever I leave my house I use a cane. It wards off other people, gives me balance, reminds me to be careful.

The Internally Painful Fake talks with Nilla every day, and she sees the judgment in Nilla’s eyes. She hears my hesitation, and she rushes to fill in the word I cannot find in my aphasic moment. She is thinking, “It’s been almost two years. I thought she was over all of that stroke stuff.” It is internally painful for me to admit this, but when I am speaking there are times when my mind becomes completely void of words and I cannot complete a sentence.

The Internally Painful Fake parks in the disabled parking spot near Nilla very often, and she sees the judgment in Nilla’s eyes. I don’t limp enough for her satisfaction, or use a wheelchair, or have enough missing limbs, or whatever her personal definition of disabled might be. She huffs at me to let me know that she considers me an Egregious Fake (about which see above), about which I consider acting like an Unintentional Fake (about which see above) to prove her wrong, but instead I just wobble normally into the store. It is internally painful for me to admit this, but when I park in a disabled parking spot, I am glad that I will be able to find my car easily afterwards because those lights in the store scramble my brain if I stay longer than 10 minutes.

The Internally Painful Fake is an amalgam of half-started, half-finished, half-baked disabilities. Nothing is right, but nothing is wrong. Doctors examine me and say, “Hmm, that’s not good.” Friends look at me and say, “Hey, you look great!” Family members look at me and say, “Wow, you look wonderful!” It is internally painful for me to admit this, but I feel awful. The truth is there will be effects from the stroke present in me for years to come: how I look, how I feel, how I think, how I act, how I talk.

What’s right? Nothing. That is one truthful answer from the Internally Painful Fake. Another truthful answer would be: I can read again. I can write again. I can usually remember to scribble down notes when I think of something good. I can usually remember to scribble down notes when I remember something important.

What’s wrong? Nothing. That is one truthful answer from the Internally Painful Fake. Another truthful answer would be: my eyes, my ears, my shoulder, my brain, my mood.

What is really wrong, actually, is that the Internally Painful Fake hates being the Internally Painful Fake. I would much rather be the Egregious Fake and have everyone discover my deception so I could just stop it all and go back to riding my bicycle everywhere and playing softball like I used to and taking long walks on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine.

Except now that I am verging on old and decrepit, I probably can’t play softball anyway, and the walks would probably require at least a walking stick, and the bicycle might even require fat tires. We probably need to add a fourth kind of Fake: the Old and Decrepit Fake.

Total Brain Dump

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When I was a kid (yes, I am actually starting out with New Jersey this time), we lived down the street from a dump. This is not as awful as it sounds. We were not rednecks. We did not live in some godforsaken beer-swilling rifle-cracking hog-grilling kind of place. No sir. We did not.

We lived in a respectable suburb smack dab triangulated between New York City and Newark, New Jersey, THE MOST POPULATED STRETCH OF LAND ON EARTH at the time, it seemed to me, and we had the BIGGEST MALL ON EARTH to prove it. Yes, we did, the Willowbrook Mall, built on land that once housed an amusement park, which somehow seemed appropriate to me.

Nevertheless, there was a dump up the street from us, on the land of a farm and nursery owned by the Pfitzenmayer family. They just let anybody who had anything to dump come and dump it. It was all very casual.

The nice thing about this was that the neighborhood kids—at least the ones that Mr. Pfitzenmayer approved of—could go rummage around the dump and find all kinds of neat stuff. We found old radios and magazines and dolls and just junk. Once we found $30, I think in the back of one of those radios.

Lately, my brain has been like that dump. I have been unearthing all kinds of neat stuff. No, not old radios and magazines, and certainly not dolls or $30. For one thing, as you might have been able to tell, it has been overwhelmed by details of my childhood. Vivid details of vignettes long forgotten have been sparking through my mind nonstop.

Just the other day, for instance, I remembered for the first time since the stroke a website I used to visit daily because I enjoyed it so much: Arts and Letters Daily. I recommend it if you want a good source to keep you up to date on the latest in all the arts journals we never get to read, the latest books we swear to buy, and the essays we wish we had thought to write ourselves. Plus it has an exhaustive list of columnists, online radio stations, newspapers, and so forth.

And then I had another brilliant find at the Brain Dump. This little gem is sure to come in handy for all of you folks who wear clothes, which I suspect is most of you, if I know my audience, which I suspect I do. Call me crazy, but for some reason I just picture most of you wearing clothes, and I really don’t think it has anything to do with me having brain damage. I think I would picture you that way whether or not I had had a stroke. Really. Not even kidding. Not even a little bit.

Maybe I should qualify this handy little tip a bit. Now those of you who know me can testify that I have an absolutely flat-as-a-pancake stomach. I mean, from my nose to my toes, it’s a straight vertical drop, 180 degrees, bombs away, look out mama, here comes trouble. Please keep that in mind as I describe the aforementioned gem in the followingmentioned explanation:

(But before we get to that—and you suspected this was coming when you saw the parentheses, didn’t you?—we must ponder the curious absence of the opposite of a word for “aforementioned,” which means CAUTION! ABSOLUTELY USELESS ETYMOLOGY LESSON AHEAD! which I have never done inside parentheses before, which shall, no doubt, present interesting punctuation issues. But in fact this turns out to be a decidedly uninteresting etymology lesson, since the proper opposite of “aforementioned” is simply “later,” yes, simply “later,” and now I’ve lost my place, oh well, let’s start a new sentence. And I am tempted to wipe out this etymology lesson entirely but I’ve tormented myself this far, and “aforementioned” is, I have found out, not even included in my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary except under “afore” [unfortunately, no more recent than 1987 but I am sure this was a word by then—and I told you we would get into some interesting punctuation issues, and Merriam-Webster confirms it was, by 1587], and now I’ve lost my place again. Oh, let’s give up. END USELESS ETYMOLOGY LESSON)

On to the followingmentioned explanation I promised a few breathless parenthetical breaths ago. Flat as pancake stomach, etc. The problem is holding up my pants. Or my shorts. Or my skirts. But I hardly ever wear skirts. I’m just not that kinda girl. And if I was, I would definitely want them to be held down.

No matter how tightly I cinch my belt or elastic, my pants have a southern mind of their own. Last week, I remembered my solution for this problem: tuck in my damn shirt. Waa-laa! Problem solved! After 18 months of pants-droopiness, I now am clam-happy. And as I’ve said before, light dawns on Marblehead. (I’m allowed to say that; I used to live there, and I’ve seen it happen.)

So that’s two very exciting finds at the Brain Dump in recent days. And then just yesterday I unearthed a third, this time from the computer pile, the long-neglected computer pile. I’d almost forgotten it was hiding there in the corner.

Now that I am no longer gainfully employed, CF and I have rearranged our house so that our computers are about six feet apart. Given my loss of software knowledge, this immediately put us at a disadvantage, networking-wise, because our cabling system was de-cabled. We would strangle each other trying to figure out cables, strangle each other trying to figure out Wi-Fi, or strangle each other paying someone to configure the whole thing. So for a couple of months, we have been emailing files back and forth six feet. Ridiculous, I know.

Then yesterday dawned light on the dump and the brain woke up again. I noticed a funny little item in my list of folders on my computer that seemed to be CF’s folder. I clicked on it, and what do you know, it was! I could copy a file directly from my computer to hers! Through the magic of my superior operating system I had complete access to her computer. At least I think that’s why. I’m not sure. I don’t understand these things anymore. Please don’t try to tell me why. Those brain cells are really gone forever. I think.

If they come back, I’ll let you know. I think.

Therefore, I am.

Stack overflow

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Better tighten your shoelaces, everyone, because I am about to combine software, brain trauma, elementary school, piles of junk, and who knows what else — oh yeah, New Jersey — into the next several hundred words.

First of all, stack overflow. For those of you who are mercifully uninitiated, that is, those of you who were never forced to learn what the heck it means, it means that the computer memory got all jammed up, and it didn’t have enough room to put everything. It overflowed. Who knows why they use the word stack? I don’t.

CAUTION! ABSOLUTELY USELESS ETYMOLOGY LESSON AHEAD! And why do they use the word “bug” to describe a problem in computer stuff? Well, it was a moth that gummed up the works way back in the dark ages of room-sized laptops. You can find it taped to the pages of a log book on display at the Smithsonian Institute. The word “bug” was used to describe something out of whack long before computers came along, but this moth brought it to the computer world, and it also inspired the invention of the word “debugging” by computing pioneer Grace Murray Hopper, a word still used today to describe the process of ridding computer software of its flaws.END USELESS ETYMOLOGY LESSON

Now where was I? Oh yeah, stack overflow. Having gone through that stroke thing, that brain trauma incident, the grand explosion, the Brain Twister, I have a new perspective on stack overflow. Some of my stacks overflowed, all right.

I’ve muttered a bit about how I’ve lost the ability to do long division, but that never really mattered to me all that much—that’s what calculators are for. More significantly, my ability to do anything sparkling on a computer just fizzled.

You’ve seen the commercials on TV where those little girls go stamping along the tops of picnic tables flinging the tops of their computers at each other, haven’t you, showing off how great Microsoft Surface is, or completely grown men in completely serious business meetings snap their laptops shut in corporate harmony while some well-paid orchestral group swells in eight-part harmony? Yeah, well, I don’t get it.

We gave NF one of those Surface things for Christmas, and I sat down with it the other night, and it sparkles, all right. Wow, does it sparkle. I mean, I wanted to play with it so much I broke a sweat. (This is the first time he has let it out of his room since paper-tearing day because he loves it so much, so it’s the first chance to play with it that I have had.)

But as I sat there watching it sparkle, I realized that I couldn’t sparkle back. I couldn’t even glimmer back. I could give off a sort of dull glow, like a flashlight about to die.

Yeah, I don’t get it. My stacks have definitely overflowed forever. I have become one of those geezers who can’t figure out new technology.

Much to CF’s dismay, I will always be a stacker. She, on the other hand, is a stuffer. I pile everything into stacks; she stuffs everything into drawers. My piles drive her crazy; her stuffed drawers drive me nuts.

I have a theory that every successful couple has one stacker and one stuffer. I don’t think two stackers or two stuffers could survive in the same house. If you are part of such a couple (stacker & stacker / stuffer & stuffer) and you are successfully sharing living quarters, please let me know, and send photographic evidence.

One of my vows for the new year was to get rid of the stack overflow from my office. That has not yet happened, and the year is nearly one-fourth gone. Therefore, in order to embarrass myself, I am posting evidence of my overflow, hoping that by next week I can post evidence of my underflow, with an affidavit from CF attesting to my honest cleanup effort (i.e., that I didn’t just stack it elsewhere).

Hmmm. I planned to post photographic evidence, really, but I have spent three days trying to do so, really, that’s why this post is so late, but my withered computer skills once again let me down. With any luck I will post before and after pix next time.

I learned to not be a stuffer the hard way in fifth grade (and, oh no, here comes the New Jersey stuff) when our teacher, Miss Coffin, asked us to rearrange our desks. These were the good old-fashioned wooden desks that had a drawer underneath the top without an end cover into which you could stuff all kinds of papers, and a groove on the top for your pencil or pen and even a hole bored in it for your bottle of ink. I know that makes it sound like the 1890s, but I think they used those desks well into the Clinton administration.

It was the first day back after winter break, and our desks were in a circle around a very bedraggled Christmas tree, which in those benighted days we were allowed to have in our classrooms. As I recall, my sister’s doll got to be the baby Jesus in the school play, and she got to play a dreidel, which offended our Catholic mother somewhat, but seemed to make everything balanced in the school’s ledger. Someone did offer an infant brother for the baby J part, but that offer was rejected,we thought because of the diaper problems, but in hindsight other issues now present themselves.

As we pushed our desks back to their normal places, out from my overstuffed desk drawer fell my brand new glasses case, which I had hastily stuffed in there as soon as I got to school that morning before anyone saw it.

“Ooh,” hissed Donna to Carol, “she got glasses.” I snatched the glasses case up as quickly as I could, but the damage was done. Donna and Carol were the trendsetters, the cool kids, the cheerleaders-in-training, soon to sprout pom-poms and rah-rahs from every pore on their body.

For some reason, I poured my fury about my imperfect eyes in the eyes of their perfect ones into stuffing. I unstuffed everything and became a stacker. I was cured of stuffing. No more stuffing for me.

Except for Thanksgiving. I was addicted to Thanksgiving turkey stuffing, especially my grandmother’s turkey stuffing. There was something unique about her stuffing.

We never figured out what made it unique, and she could never tell us what it was. We watched her every year, joked that it was her sweat, or the water in Irvington, N.J., or her well-worn bowls. The secret, whatever it was, she took to her grave.

And now I must go make short work of at least one pile of my precious crap before next week. It pains me, it really does. So much of importance in that stack of paper, so much of significance, so much of….overflow.

Will You Be My Valentine?

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All of you, each of you, every one of you who reads this blog any time I manage to post something wins my heart. You are my Valentines.

I don’t know what it is that keeps you reading me, week after week, blog after blog. Maybe you are a friend, a relative, a stranger who stumbled on my blog, or someone I met in passing.

Maybe you read me while waiting for your iTunes to download. Maybe you read me while waiting for the teakettle to boil. Maybe you read me while waiting for the dog to do his business. Maybe you read me on your iPad while on the Green Line in Boston and no one reading over your shoulder can figure out why you’re reading about someone in Washington who keeps talking about New Jersey.

Writing a blog like this one isn’t easy. It’s all very self-centered, since I’m writing about my stroke, my brain damage, my recovery. My, my, my, ain’t I selfish, talking about myself?

Just before I graduated from high school (in New Jersey), I remember I promised one of my teachers (who happens to read this blog) that I would talk more in college. I wasn’t very successful at that, but a few years later, two friends pummeled me good-naturedly enough that I learned to carry on a decent group conversation. I thanked them for teaching me to learn how to talk, but I still prefer to write.

When I first started to recover from the stroke I was having a very hard time putting thoughts together. Since writing was still my preferred method of communication, it was natural for me to at last come up with the idea of a blog, rather than try to talk things out.

But since I was convinced I made no sense, I gave everything to CF to read first. For all I knew, I was spewing forth in dactylic pentameter unconsciously, or nattering about celebrity gossip I had overheard on TV while drooling the day away.

Only after the writing had gotten CF’s seal of approval did I post it online.

Even after she started to assure me week after week that I was making perfect sense I continued too make here read me, word for word. I was convinced i was making an idiot of myself somewhere biy lapzsing n2  co0mpleeete nonnseeeense unknown 2 me  and she had to sAVENE ME FRUm nyslfef.

This is the first blog entry she has not read ahead of time. That is because the rest of this blog entry is about her, and I didn’t want her to have a chance to stop me from writing it. She is my loveliest Valentine.

Many years ago, when CF and I were young and in love, she used to worry that there would come in day when I would take her for granted.

After nearly 31 years that day has not arrived. I don’t think it ever will.

Because I have MS and because I had a stroke and because the stroke gave me diabetes and because all this made me unsteady and I fell and tore my rotator cuff and because I needed surgery from that fall and because I got blood clots from the surgery and because I now have to have my blood thickness tested, I have had an enormous number of doctor appointments in the last 18 months.

CF has driven me to and/or from most of those appointments. She also sat next to me in the doctor’s office, making sure I understand what to do. Which was rarely.

She has also almost single-handedly maintained our household and raised our son.

She has been a fierce protector, a tender caregiver, a tough coach, and a gentle soulmate. Could I ask for more?

It’s not as if her own life has been quiet. Remember, she broke both of her hands in one way or another last summer. One of her sisters moved out of town last year, which placed more responsibility on her for their elderly mother, also. She has accepted more responsibility at work, also, with a nice promotion, meaning more responsibility, of course.

When I think back over our years together, I realize we’ve been through three heart attacks, three strokes, one bout of colon cancer and two deaths together. Everything but my stroke belongs to our parents.

We’ve also invited two of her sisters to live with us for extended periods of time, stood by my sister through a difficult time in her life, helped nurture an infant nephew through his first year, adopted a child, moved cross-country, lost a house to the mortgage crisis, and suffered through an interminable lawsuit. (I don’t use that word “suffered” lightly. It was truly awful, as many of you know. If you don’t know, just Google “Madsen v. Erwin” for 33,400,000 explanations.)

I suppose in some ways I have come to take CF for granted. I’ve come to take for granted that she will be honest, that she will be loyal, that she will be true, in some sort of grand and glorious post-Girl Scout way. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

CF and I have always agreed to not get “mushy” on Valentine’s Day. I have always gotten her a card with lace and hearts and a red envelope and she has gotten me nothing, at my insistence. I am breaking with tradition by writing this blog. She will not speak to me after she reads this.

Just kidding. I hope. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Crossing birds and dotting eyes

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Sometimes, as they say in Massachusetts, light dawns on Marblehead.

The double meaning of the name “Angry Birds” finally dawned on me. It’s a rather silly double-play on “crosswords,” as in, cross meaning angry and words rhyming with birds. It took me only 18 months to realize this.

It also took me only 18 months to be able to solve the Monday crossword puzzle in the New York Times, something I used to be able to do without glancing up from the newspaper. There was a bit of consternation and foot dragging and gnashing of teeth, but I did do it in pen with only one slight over printing, and no cheating by looking things up in the dictionary or on the web, I swear.

Of this I am very proud, even more proud than of my Jumble Triumph a few weeks ago, I blush to say.

Then I got greedy. I tried the Tuesday puzzle. And it didn’t go too bad. Not being a big consumer of Apple products, I got hung up on the iMac clue, and having no idea who Emma Stone is also hung me up, but other than that, I sailed through.

Unfortunately, those two clues were in critical places, which gummed up the works significantly. Then, one thing led to another and I missed doing Wednesday’s puzzle. When I looked at Thursday’s puzzle, it was full of puns and little quiz-like things and references to pop culture, never my strong suit (I have referred to my sister’s gift of an iron buttercup before, when I got the name of the band The Iron Butterfly wrong.)

Thursday’s puzzle was a disaster; Friday’s puzzle was a no-go. I will look at Saturday’s, and despite the promises I made several weeks ago, I have yet to make it through a Sunday newspaper.

But I have, haven’t I, made good on my promise of a weekly blog entry, whether you’ve wanted one or not?

As for my third promise, a tidy office, well, I’d have to say that promise has been half-way fulfilled. And that half has been half-way fulfilled by CF.

Since I am no longer gainfully employed, it seemed a bit selfish of me to continue to occupy an entire room of our house as an office, especially since her desk was perched uncomfortably next to the kitchen counter. So we decided to rearrange the room that was my office so we could share it. This meant that someone had to clean half of it. More precisely, this meant she had to clean half of it.

So right now, our dining table is stacked with piles of my crap. This dining table, I should point out, is handcrafted from 200-year-old pine boards harvested from the floor of the old barn behind our first house in Maine before it collapsed of old age. It is the most gorgeous object in our house. But right now you can’t see an inch of it.

Nor can you see an inch of any other surface in my office, except the surface of my monitor and keyboard, which is all I need to keep working. Oh, and that of my headset, which I need to keep speaking into my handy-dandy Dragon software, which has worked surprisingly well for dictating this blog.

My son snickers at my headset, which has those big, comfortable ear cushions that make you look like a real science geek. He of course has his iPhone earbuds flung casually around his neck 24/7, which is good because if they were actually in his ears I think they’d be pretty painful.

As I admitted earlier, I’m not exactly up-to-date with everything Apple has to offer. I’d never heard of the iMac, for instance. But I do own an iPhone and iPad (a huge admission from a diehard PC programmer), although I do look at that Windows phone with some envy.

I don’t know if it’s because of my brain injury, or because I was a PC programmer, but no matter what I did, I could not figure out how to copy a paragraph from one place to another on my iPhone. In desperation, I asked my son. He glanced up from his Xbox (a Microsoft product), rolled his eyes, grabbed my iPhone, copied the paragraph, handed the phone back to me, and went back to his game.

Was this the day that I was undone by technology? Was this the day that my son knew more about it than I did? Or was this simply a day that my brain injury got in the way?

None of the above, I decided. It was…just a day.

But it was a day when I knew a four-letter word for a mound containing prehistoric remnants (TERP) and a three-letter word for a boggy land (FEN) (sorry, that’s an in-joke, that some of you might happen to be aware of, that is, you might happen to [KNOW]), and some day there will be a crossword puzzle with both of them in it, and I will take that puzzle and shake it under my son’s nose and point out those clues to him, and he will pull his earbuds from his ears, glance up at me, and roll his eyes, confirming, once and for all, that I come close to the craziest of all two-word phrase for an AMC series starring Jon Hamm (MAD MEN).

Poof! The Magic Dragon!

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Those among you who are writers or who have ever done any editing or writing know that one tends to rearrange the odd bits and pieces of sentences one puts together as time goes by and inspiration strikes. That’s what I’ve done here, not necessarily to improve this piece of writing, but to demonstrate my frustration with my best efforts to take care of myself.

Ever since I had shoulder surgery in November, it has been impossible to type. It’s been impossible to do anything with my right arm, including drive a car, wash the dishes, put on my $996 sling, or clean the cat litter.

Finally Amazon had pity on me and sent me a $49 coupon for Dragon Naturally Speaking, which was cheap enough for me. I’d nearly bitten at $139 two weeks earlier. When the package from Amazon arrived, I ripped it open, ran through the installation, went through all the required training sessions so the Dragon learned how I talked/croaked, and started to dictate this blog entry.

The first thing I wanted to do was make the display in my word processor a bit larger and easier to read by using its zoom command. So I calmly and clearly dictated the proper Dragon command:

SET ZOOM TO 125

This is where the editing I mentioned earlier comes in. Everything I’ve written so far I wrote after I tried to set the zoom setting to 125%. Now I will show you exactly what Dragon Naturally Speaking typed for me when I told it to set the zoom setting to 125%:

set soon to 125

select resume to 125

set assume two 125

set soon to 125

Those are the exact lines it printed for me, rather than zooming. Then I gave up. The last line above them that I just typed is the first time it has ever printed the word “zoom” when I told it to. Victory! I just had to look up how to make it print an exclamation mark. I finally zoomed myself.

However, DNS has done pretty well with my general typing otherwise in this blog. I’ve been able to keep my right arm in my lap and use my left arm for everything. My physical therapist will be very happy to hear that tomorrow.

Before I purchased DNS, I tried some other dictation software that I found on the Web, some free stuff that had good recommendations. I tried to use it but it was the week I was writing about pretzels, and things didn’t go very well.

In fact, things were worse than with that zoom command. Unfortunately, in my frustration, I did not record the results. It was a ridiculously complicated pun, probably best forgotten, undoubtedly unnecessarily reproduced here. After numerous false starts and stops, deep fat fryers, plump young friers, and plump old friars, I ended up with:

Pretzels were invented by friars who baked them. They just as easily could have been invented by bakers who fried them.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I tried out those sentences in DNS. Except for unnecessarily capitalizing the word “friars,” it cranked them out perfectly.

Speaking of deep fat frying, I was a bit worried about opening the DNS package. “Ignite, ignite, ignite,” it read, no fewer than eight times, in some sort of marketing ploy to inspire me to the heights of creativity. “Ignite Fun At Your PC.” “Ignite Convenience.” “Ignite Control.” This just sent me scrambling for the fire extinguisher to hose down the package before I opened it. Fortunately, CDs are waterproof.

Perhaps I am straining at gnats and swallowing camels as the Bible says. Hah! That actually came out as “straining at bats.” As you can see, I am having way too much fun with this software.

I have other bats to strain and I hope this Dragon will help me strain them, although dragons are usually associated with slaying rather than straining. Once again, the metaphor gets pushed beyond its natural boundaries.

By other bats I mean I have other things to write rather than this blog, things to get done before my arm is ready for me to do them. For example, I write the obituaries for Bates College, something I enjoy doing, believe it or not, because I write a little profile about every person. I’m also working on a novel. So I need either both arms or a microphone.

And now that DNS understands my conversation, I just have to get it to understand my commands. “Sit.” “Roll over.” “Zoom.” “Good boy.” Hey, we’re getting somewhere.

My Own Mr. Mxyztplk

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To tell the truth, I was always a pretty casual Superman fan. I only bought the comic books on snowy days, when school was cancelled and my sister and I got permission from our mother to trudge three-quarters of a mile from our house, past our elementary school (where classes had been cancelled) to a small delicatessen known to us as Bob Butt’s, where we bought a pound of sliced liverwurst, six hard rolls, and a can of cream of celery soup.

We then went to the little newsstand/tobacco shop two doors over (there were only three stores in this little row) that we called Al’s. Here we perused all of the usual kids’ magazines, conveniently placed on the lowest shelf. I have no idea what sort of salacious magazines he had on his upper shelves; I never looked. I only ever bought Mad Magazine or Superman.

Mad Magazine cost a dime. I still remember “The Sound of Mucus.” It was this dyspeptic movie satire that finally broke me of the MadMag habit, sad to say.

That rascal Mr. Mxyztplk should be here

Mr. Mxyztplk

Mr. Mxyztplk wasn’t in every issue of Superman. He was some sort of evil guy from another dimension who could thwart Superman with practical jokes. What got me was his name. He could be banished only if you got him to say his own name backwards: Kltpzyxm.

But Mr. Mxyztplk is in my newspaper every day in the form of the Jumble puzzle (by David Hoyt and Jeff Knurek). You’ve seen it: four mixed-up words to unscramble, some letters circled. Take those circled letters and form them into another word to solve a riddle, usually some sort of ridiculous pun, usually not worth solving.

Pre-stroke, the Jumble puzzle wasn’t worth my time. (Sorry, Mr. Hoyt and Mr. Knurek.) I would glance at it, just glance at it, and the four jumbled words would leap into order. RREVI? RIVER, of course. DEEWG? WEDGE, easy. DRANTS? STRAND. COTREK? ROCKET.

Post-stroke, I found I had to avoid that part of the newspaper. Staring at those nonsense clumps of letters hurt my head.

Of course, I was also avoiding the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. And not just the Sunday puzzle, legendarily the hardest one. I was avoiding all of them, even the Monday puzzle, the easiest one.

Oh, I’d tried them all, and failed them all. I’d gotten a clue or two (“Fab Four leftie”) but nothing cross-worthiness. (Paul, of course.)

I was avoiding all games, word and otherwise: card games, board games, strategy games, computer games. Actually, I’ve always avoided card games. The brain rehab therapist tried to get me interested in some online brain game sites; I refused to try them. Even when CF’s mother or my mother had Jeopardy on TV I couldn’t watch it.

This was all stuff I used to gobble like potato chips. It was my junk food. Now I couldn’t go near the stuff. It was from another planet. No, wait. Not to push the metaphor, but … it was kryptonite.

But then last week something went … kltpzyxm.

Abruptly changing metaphors:

You know that look of surprise a baby gets when something happens—the wide open eyes, the rounded mouth? That completely innocent, babe-in-the-woods look?

Surprised baby goes here!

Wow!

Yeah, that one.

Or maybe that was an analogy. Anyway.

By the time I clamped my mouth shut, the letters of the Jumble puzzle had settled back into their scrambled places, but I still knew what their unscrambled order was.

YOW! KA-BLAM! BAZOOKA JOE! Oops, wrong comic strip.

I took another peek at the Jumble and my brain did it again: another jumbled Jumble unjumbled. Two out of four jumbled Jumble words had unjumbled themselves so far!

This called for a pen with which to scribble on the newspaper, easier said than done, since there are four pen-hiding cats, one pen-eating dog, one pen-squirreling son, and one pen-hoarding partner in this household, not to mention one pen mis-placing me. Not to mention approximately two dozen unsharpened pencils, despite having approximately three pencil sharpeners, including a handy desktop electric sharpener, ready, waiting, and plugged in.

Nevertheless, given this landmark event, I persevered. At last I unearthed a slightly salty yet workable Pilot EasyTouch gel pen from a forgotten summer baseball take-along bag, and confidently wrote in WHARF where it said FRAWH and MOUTH where it said TUMOH.

That left me with GLEPED and NOYRED. Ignoring the obvious –ed endings (which these guys never would be so obvious about), I stumbled on PLEDGE pretty quickly, but YONDER took a few minutes. They claim the four jumbled words are ordinary words, but the only person I’ve ever heard say “yonder” is Romeo. Then again, I barely pronounce the “R” in WHARF myself so I guess we’re even.

Even though I haven’t bought a Superman comic book since those snow days in elementary school when I still ate liverwurst, I felt pretty Superman-ish having actually solved a Jumble puzzle some 17 months after a stroke. We take our small victories as they come along.

I don’t plan to leap any tall buildings in a single bound although I think my cane would give me a nice vault for a head start. The $996 arm sling might hold me back, though.

Pretzels. Finally.

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Pretzels were invented by friars who baked them. They just as easily could have been invented by bakers who fried them.

Let that twist around in your mind for a while. It can be your first pretzel thought.

My pretzel thoughts aren’t limited to ones about doughy treats purchased from sidewalk vendors in New York City or giggling teenagers in any decent-sized suburban mall. Or any suburban-sized decent mall.

No, mine are twisted unlimited doughy blobs oozing from my cranial orifices as I attempt to puzzle my way through what were once simple daily chores of life or questions of being.

For instance, CF and I might be chugging down the highway on our way to visit her mother in the next town when she innocently asks me, “Do you think we should stop at the grocery store on our way home?”

Could there be a more innocent question? Could there be a simpler interchange between two people who have lived together for thirty years? Could there be an easier way for things to go wrong so easily, so quickly, so completely? Continue reading →

Do, Ti, La, So, Fa, Mi, Re, Do

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Julie Andrews, in the guise of Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music, would have you start at the very beginning. But I’m going to start at the very end, and go backwards, you might say.

I’m out of the hospital.

I’m in one piece and in one place. And I’m still not talking about pretzel thoughts.

But I’m home, after two long and boring nights in the hospital after CF insisted on taking me to the doctor when all I wanted to do was go shopping for interesting and silly items to Kris Kringlize for her oversize footwear hanging from our ersatz fireplace.

The doctor decided I needed to go to the E.R., which decided I needed to be admitted to the attached hospital because I had blood clots in my lungs as a result of the rotator cuff surgery I had had several weeks earlier.

The hospital decided I needed to be on blood thinners for the next six months, so they stuck needles with a blood thinner into my stomach until it turned black and blue all over. I would have howled like a dog with rabies, except I had a very nice roommate this time, not to mention my own television, which I kept turned off except for The Good Wife marathon I stumbled upon.

But now I have to take Warfarin every day and go to a special clinic all the time where they prick my finger and test my blood to make sure it is nice and thin so it doesn’t clot up again. Me and Hillary. La ti la ti la.

The shoulder surgery was quite successful, day surgery actually, no hospital stay involved, and it happened on November 20, 2012, as planned. I emerged from it wearing a flimsy little sling on my right arm and clutching a bottle of Vicodin in my left hand. The bottle of Vicodin was covered by my insurance, but the sling was not.

It was ordered by the surgeon from a company that is “out of network.” It is your basic cotton polyester sling, absolutely basic, one that even I with my substandard sewing skills could manage to make from a hunk of cloth. It is so insubstantial that the physical therapists laughed at it when they saw it. They laughed at it! In fact, they had to modify it to make it fit me properly. One of them looked it up online and found a similar one selling for about $10. Now, here is the kicker: the out-of-network company charged me $996 for it. My insurance company covers half of that. Cost to me: $498. So. Too much “Do.” We’ll see about that.

What with my arm in a sling and my ever-handy cane, I presented quite the sight this holiday season. All I needed was an eye patch to complete the picture. I kept thinking about buying one just for the effect, but for the first few weeks, before I was diagnosed with the blood clots, I was feeling worse and worse and really could only concentrate on trying to breathe and stay awake.

Blood clots on your lungs make you feel really glum and dull and depressed. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I couldn’t walk from one room to the next without losing my breath. CF thought it was asthma or allergies, and kept making me take puffs from an inhaler, which did no good, but I kept pretending it was a help, mostly because I am an idiot, but also because I didn’t want to know what was really going on, such as something scary like congestive heart failure or pneumonia or FA FA FA FA I’M NOT LISTENING ANYMORE.

So let us review, backwards of course. Blood clots on lungs, because of rotator cuff surgery, because of a torn tendon, because of a fall, one of many, because of a stroke, because of a bad reaction to medication, because of multiple sclerosis. Anyone want to play dominos?

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the holidays? They were quite lovely, albeit low key, except that I completely missed a dear friend’s birthday, was very late with my sister’s present, sent a bizarre gift to my nephew, struck out completely with my present to my mother, but managed to somehow pull it together enough to bring smiles to CF’s and NF’s faces. And I hear that the LL Bean mad bomber hats I sent to my niece and her husband were the hits of the day.

Thus we wobble into 2013, thinner in blood, stronger in spirit, shored up in shoulder. We vow before you to set these goals for the coming year: to clean our office; to resume our weekly blog; to read the Sunday New York Times before Tuesday. Modest goals, but goals nonetheless.

And as Julie Andrews, in the guise of Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music would tell you, we must climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, ’til we find our dream.

My dream, modestly speaking, is a clean office, a weekly blog, and a fully-read Sunday New York Times.

A Shoulder To Cry On

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Loyal readers are no doubt sputtering at that headline, wondering how on earth I am going to segue from “A Shoulder To Cry On” into a discussion on pretzel-thoughts, which I promised last time I would discuss this time.

Well, I’m not going to. You’re going to have to wait a week for that scintillating discussion, maybe even longer.

Depends on how good the anesthesia is.

See, on Tuesday, Nov. 20, the bone doc, Doc Z., is going to pin my tendon back on to my rotator cuff so I can use my right arm again without rattling the roof rafters with my screaming. And that little bit of surgery is all that’s on my mind right now.

“Pin” is not the correct medical term, of course. I believe he will actually sew it back on, a technique I never quite mastered, despite two terms of home economics classes in seventh and eighth grades at Grover Cleveland Junior High School, the same school where I was taught to dance the hula and square dance.

Along with Vicky L. and Kathy R., I was quickly identified as a H.E.H. (home economics hopeless) and forced to sit in the kitchenette closest to the teacher, where we scorched the toast, burnt the broiled grapefruit, spilled the tea, and generally lived up to our potential.

When it came time to switch over to the sewing half of the course, we were faced with the task of making a wrap-around skirt. I chose a trendy denim fabric, and stared at it helplessly for several class sessions, measuring out my pattern pieces again and again. Even Vicky L. was ahead of me. I never did sew the buttonhole; I just punched it through with the scissors and let it go at that.

It was worse in eighth grade, where the normally shy and sedate Sandy B. led the rebellion to make an A-line skirt and weskit (very trendy) rather than the normal jumper (very fifties), leaving all us H.E.H. in a panic. I didn’t even try. I gave my fabric to my first-cousin-once-removed, who gave it back all sewn up. I didn’t care. I managed to hold my head up high when forced to trot across the stage in the mandatory home economics fashion show. I wore the hated stockings but refused the makeup. I have my limits.

So I can’t blame M.S. or the stroke for my inability to sew, sad to say. But I can blame both for the shoulder surgery. Without M.S., I never would have been taking BrainScar, the drug we all (tacitly or not) blame for the stroke I had in August 2011. And it was either M.S. or the stroke that caused me to stumble and fall up the stairs that night in September that tore apart my rotator cuff.

Rotator cuffs can fall apart all on their own, because they are used for so much. They lie deep inside your shoulders, underneath all the muscles and bones and tendons. They’re kind of like Grand Central Station for your arms. Move your thumb? Gotta go through the rotator cuff.

One of the last things I did this week was have a tooth fixed. I found out that my dental hygienist is recovering from rotator cuff surgery, caused by years and years of cleaning people’s teeth. Poor Laurie!

It takes months to recover, lots of physical therapy, with and without physical therapists. Fortunately I already have found some good P.T.’s. I was working with them on this shoulder until we decided that the pain wasn’t getting any better and an MRI was needed to see if the rotator cuff was in fact torn.

Answer: Yep.

So a week after the surgery (just long enough for all the anesthesia to have worn off), I’ll return to the physical therapists to start the recovery process.

I’ve been trying to picture what sort of bandaging they’ll wrap me in after this surgery. The doctor was a bit vague about what sort of incision he was going to do: arthroscopic, he said, but then opening it up a bit, waving his fingers around in the air as if that explained it all, assuring me that he would also remove the arthritic matter that was in there. Seventy minutes, tops.

So I figure either a little Band-Aid, like you can get at the supermarket, or a two-by-four strapped across my shoulders with a roll of duct tape. I’ll have to go through doors sideways and carry a beeper for when I back up.

In either event, it won’t be me rattling the rafters anymore. And for that I am very happy.