*Thank gawd!
Greetings, all. Just got in yesterday afternoon.
I don't remember it, but, according to the doctor, the first words out of my mouth when I woke up were,
I've had pleasanter experiences.
That sounds like me.
When I next woke up, I delivered a line I had practiced just for the occasion:
¡¿Dónde están las chicas calientes?!
That's "Where are the hot babes?", for those of you scoring at home. It's much funnier in Spanish because caliente literally means 'hot', so what I was really asking was, "Where are the women burning up with fever?"
Scoring in the clinic, however, proved more difficult. I couldn't believe the nurses didn't find my swollen, drooling, tube-laden body sexually appealing. I was also hampered by having to use a walker, which allowed the little vixens to scamper merrily away, dagnabbit.
What I'm saying is, my visit to the clinic was utter hell!
They also did some kind of operation, as I recall. The doctor said it was "just like a tonsillectomy — except at the other end." It turned out, however, that he told a blatant lie. I did not get a bowl of ice cream after it was over, like I did when I had my tonsils out when I was 12, so I'm still a little miffed about that.
As for my relatives in Georgia, I must have met 20 new blood relatives and about 3,000 new in-laws. We're a prolific bunch here in the South. While they were in sheer awe of being in the presence of a real, live Californian (granted, it's a small town), I don't think it was until I knocked out Pink Floyd's 'Celestial Voices' on the piano that they realized something different was going on. That piano looked a hundred years old and unquestionably had been played by ten thousand different hands, but somehow I doubt any Pink Floyd had ever been played on it.
I also doubt any Deep Purple had ever been played on my cousin's mandolin, but that's a different story.
Physically, I'm doing okay. Just weak, but that was expected. There's some residual pain but I have a veritable cornucopia of painkillers out there to choose from, lucky me. Besides costs, there are a few other advantages to having an operation in Mexico. One of them is that the doctors aren't hampered by all of that silly 'regulation' stuff and can ladle out the painkillers by the bucketful. I smuggled home dozens of 'samplers' from ten different brands. I'm currently going with Pain-B-Gon™, a finely-tuned mixture of Vicodin, OxyContin, various psychotropic drugs, all laced with the strongest caffeine allowable by law. It really hits the spot!
And let's not forget the real lesson from all this: that it was getting a complete physical that revealed the badness in the first place. As I said in the original Big C post, I was this close to skipping the colonscopy because it is, after all, a pain in the whatsis and takes extra time and money, but I'm obviously glad I didn't. I'm still facing some steep post-operative costs (expensive drugs + 3 visits to the Miami hospital), so if you missed out on the Save-Our-Doc campaign before and would like to help out, you can toss a few clams into the pot here.
Next up? Well, there seems to be some kind of debate going on tomorrow night, although I'm not sure of the details yet. I presume the GOP has exercised its right to use the Substitute Clause and have Newt Gingrich take Obama down a few notches in the warm-up round, but we'll have to see. I'll have a post on it tomorrow.
Again, my deepest thanks to everyone who helped out.
Life is so precious.
