Trying New Things

I've always wanted a blog that was a little less template-y and a little more smab-y, but without any real Web design skills, I have to fake my way through the half-way house.

Some day I will persuade, coerce, or trade enough sexual favors to my loverly Bear to help me design a real site. (Yes, I have been asking. And sometimes I ask real nice like. You know, Real Nice Like.) He tells me he'll help. But he has to finish Ted's art site first. And then Ted's blog.

(Maybe I should be more concerned with what Ted is trading Bear for all those sites.)

So for now. I'm playing. There's a new banner up there and if it doesn't scream "amateur," I think we can all agree that it does at least scream. I'll work on that. And I've fiddled with the colors in this very inflexible and only seemingly yielding world of blogland. We'll see what I can get this baby to do--and maybe along the way I'll pick up the fine art of subtlety. Or at least something passable.

But for now, enjoy the Parade of Horrid Banners. And if there's a blogger award out there for that, please, do not hesitate to nominate me.

I Had No Idea

In our last episode, Bear had just come home from an emergency cauterisation surgery-type thing. We were happy, I made jokes about his new nose. Things were good.

About six hours after we got home, Barry started bleeding. Again. Two hours later, he got another nosebleed. He controlled it and I started frantically calling our ENT--who is apparently difficult to reach, as he serves all of the nether regions outside of the Kansas City's asteroid belt. We were determined not to go the ER, so I started calling other ENTs that we had visited in Bear's last episode two years ago. They wanted nothing to do with us. Then, an hour later, he got another. And that's where I packed him in the car and headed for the ER.

They admitted us on Tuesday. On Thursday, the doc (and the only ENT that serves our hospital, what's up with that?) scheduled Bear for "real" surgery. On Friday, Bear had lost so much blood from the nosebleeds (that continued after the surgery) that the doc signed him up for a blood transfusion.

Yeah, that's what I said. From nosebleed to blood transfusion. That's one way to spend the week.

So, in all and in short, Barry has spent the past five days bleeding and turning various shades of white and green, pre- and post-op, and I've spent it arguing, fussing, and hiding in the vistors lounge under the pretense of making phone calls so I could cry and generally freak out of Bear's ear shot.

Thank God for Barry's parents and my best friend KiKi, who drove and flew up special. Apparently, Kiki's spidey-sense is so keen (or I'm so very transparent) that after about five seconds on the phone with me, she dropped everything, including her tickets to see her hunk-a-tv-love Stephen Colbert and booked a flight to KC.

Yes, I have a friend like that.

And I've learned a lot that I didn't know over the past week. Like which ER you go to severly affects your after-ER care. That choosing your hospital is as, if not more, important than choosing your doctor. That getting a second opinion is excessively discouraged and some nurses will even bully and terrorize you to make sure you're scared so shitless that your husband and father to your child will bleed out in the ambulance that you won't dare to mention the request-that-will-not-be-named again. And that not even doctors will cross the Missouri river willingly.

The Nose Knows

Reader, forgive me, for I have sinned. It's been nearly two weeks since my last confession. And I do feel really, like, bad about that, because I, like, totally, promised to keep up with this, both for my sanity and your occasional amusement (or disparagement, just don't tell me which one).

Last night, Bear was checked into the hospital for an emergency surgery. Since last Saturday, he's been having these uncontrollable nose bleeds--or I suppose it's really just one uncontrollable nose bleed. We visited three ERs in two different states, and on Monday, finally got into an ENT (which reminds me of those tree monsters in Lord of the Rings). After a prod and poke and an endless stream of blood, he decided to do something besides stuff tampons up Bear's nose. Thirty minutes later, Bear was in surgery.

His nose looks the same, and I'm very glad. He has this nice Roman nose (minus the hook, so maybe not very Roman at all), and he looks much lovelier than he did Saturday and definitely better than he did Monday before the ENT, with bloody (I'm using the American and English sense of the word at this point) gauze strapped to his nose and a bucket of blood waiting anxiously underneath his chin.

I was secretly hoping--you know, after I controlled the panic and screaming--that they'd do a little something something for the snoring. We'll see how that works out.

I have to say that I much prefer being on the other side of the OR doors. I don't handle waiting well, and if you know me, you know I like my information, on my terms and my schedule. I didn't much get my way on either count. There were no diagrams, I didn't even get a chance to research the ENT we went to see for what I thought was a follow up.

It's nerve wracking, this bloody thing. This getting older thing, this seeing someone you so dearly love in pain and, at the same time, trying to figure out how to communicate all this confusion to a four-year-old with the right tone and information. I always thought I'd get to check out a book from the library first before I had to explain to Finn why his dad is bleeding into bucket and why he has to go to surgery. Seriously.

(And this is where you're either gasping at my naivete and or laughing. Indulge. I am a silly, silly woman.)