ProfessorTomoe

I'd imagine that the Caps should have that game well covered. At the very least, I'd ink them in to cover the spread.

She's going to hate it, but I'll try to cajole her into doing it. Somehow. Maybe I'll talk her into getting a one-use-only account here, but it won't be tonight. She's going to be out trapping feral cats. How long does it take to verify a new account before she can post? Does she have to create it tonight or tomorrow?

It actually slowed it down, sorry. I'm game for playing guinea pig.

Hoo boy. I haven't heard from my primary care doctor—the one who prescribed the Abilify, Clorazepate, and Hydroxyzine. I got impatient and looked them up. Guess what I found on a web site about Abilify? Now, isn't that special? (grrrr) Looks like I'll be cutting an Abilify pill in half and taking 2.5mg tonight and tomorrow instead of my normal 5mg nightly dose. Just for safety's sake, I'll be halving my doses of Clorazepate and Hydroxyzine as well, for extreme safety's sake.

Last audiobook I listened to was The Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy. Yes, it's been that long. On my Walkman, no less. She's going to hate it, but I'll try to cajole her into doing it. Somehow. Maybe I'll talk her into getting a one-use-only account here, but it won't be tonight. She's going to be out trapping feral cats. I think It's a bit too close to the procedure date, and I wouldn't ask for such a thing in the first place, but I appreciate the gesture. I really do. In other news, I spoke to my psychiatrist a few minutes ago about dropping the Trintellix, Wellbutrin, and Buspar cold turkey prior to the CT myelogram. He said those would be fine, but warned me that my depression and anxiety will kick back in while I'm off them. Surprisingly enough, the one thing he prescribes that I don't have to drop (Lorazepam) would have caused problems—seizures, no less—if I'd stopped it suddenly. Go figure.

I think the latest Greasemonkey update may have introduced a small cosmetic bug into the way your script functions. When a forum loads, it loads with all of the posts purple at first. After the brief purple flash, they finally settle down to the way they're supposed to look. Disturbing, to say the least. Not sure if you can do anything about it, but I thought you'd at least like to know about it. This is not a computer speed issue, BTW. I'm running an i7-6700HQ quad-core laptop with 16GB RAM. It's an Intel Skylake processor, which means it's got Intel 530HD graphics, switching with a GeForce GTX 970M processor.

You know something? (I just realized this, too.) I'm not going to be able to comfortably read a book of any kind from Monday until noon Tuesday. I won't even be able to get on the internet. Reason? I've got to lay on my side and keep my spine and neck as close to horizontally aligned practically all that time, even on the ride home (I'll have to recline my Ridgeline's passenger seat all the way back and put my head on a pillow). Very few exceptions: getting up to go to the bathroom is one, since they want me to drink a lot of fluids and flush out the dye contrast material as quickly as possible afterward. I don't know about eating—I might have to eat while on my side. (Mrs. Prof is going to love prepping my food for that.) Tl;dr version: I won't be able to let anyone know how it went until the following Tuesday afternoon.

Mrs. Prof says thank you. She also told me not to take this the wrong way, but that this really is testing the "in sickness and in health" part of our wedding vows. I corrected her: "in sicknesses and in health." She said she'll be glad when she doesn't get awakened by me coughing out my larynx in the middle of the night. I reminded her of 2009-2010 and told her that this is better than being woke up by me needing help to take a piss in my hand-held urinal. She concurred.

Mrs. Prof has been thanked in general and on behalf of the forum. She got an extra round for doing my end-of-day nebulizer cleaning. In other news, I only have to wear the cardiac event monitor for one more day before mailing it back! It gets in the way sometimes, but it's been catching some of the problems I've been complaining about. I hope the electrophysiologist will be able to come up with a treatment plan based on the data it's been recording. One other thing: I asked Mrs. Prof if our son knew how sick I am. She said, "Not that I know of." I asked her to let him know, just in case I start getting worse.

The nurse from the hospital said she'd call and talk to him. I haven't heard anything since she called me yesterday. I assume that I can't be the first person to have gone through this with those medications. How many CT myelograms have been done in medical history? There's bound to have been someone in the same situation as me. I'll bet they didn't enjoy it, but I'll also bet that they survived it.

I'll try to avoid the venting. I've done enough of that already. Music doesn't help, believe it or not. I have too many counter-ideas about what I could/should be writing instead. My head has its own jukebox, 24/7. Good idea, nevertheless. I try my best, on both counts. I know I'm putting her through hell. All I have to do is remember what I put her through when I almost died back in 2009. I base my appreciations on that. Thanks for the reminder, though. 'Tis much appreciated.

My CT myelogram draws one day closer. I wasn't so nervous about it when it was scheduled for today, but now that I know more about what's involved—and now that I have extra time to stew over it—I'm getting more and more anxious about it. That's really going to be a problem from Saturday through the procedure day on Monday, thanks to this list of medicines I'll have to quit cold turkey for 48 hours before the procedure: Abilify Trintellix Wellbutrin Buspar Clorazepate Hydroxyzine These, plus one PRN drug, Promethazine (a.k.a. Phenergan, which I rarely take anyway), will go bye-bye after my Friday night dose. Why? They all have the possibility of interacting with the dye contrast medium they'll inject into my spine, resulting in seizures. That's all of my antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, save one: Ativan (Lorazepam). It's the only crutch I can lean on to keep me from going absolutely crazy the weekend before the procedure. However, since I agreed to random drug testing in order to get hydrocodone for my back/hip/leg pain, I can't take extra Lorazepam pills to make up for the absence of the rest. Oh, and I can't take these blacklisted medicines until 24 hours after the procedure as well. Not only will I be a nervous wreck before, I'll be one afterward. I've also realized another frightening fact: my last hydrocodone dose will be at 11:00 p.m. Sunday night. The stuff wears off, usually about six hours into the "every eight hours" dosage period. I am going to be in serious farking pain most of Monday. I don't know how I'm going to get into my truck. I think I'm going to need a wheelchair to get inside the hospital. Add all of this together and you've got one big honking basket case on your hands. I do not envy Mrs. Prof's position from Saturday through Tuesday. She's probably going to need Lorazepam by the time all of this is over.

No, but I do tend to get a bit Crabby when I'm using it.

/* PlotHole opens */ ProfessorTomoe: "Role play, yes? We experimented with that many years ago. Several of them are still growing in the laboratory. Not doing too well at the moment, we fear." /* PlotHole closes */

Bit of a schedule change. I was supposed to have my CT myelogram tomorrow (Wednesday). The hospital called me this morning and went through the standard pre-op stuff, with a few unexpected bits. One such bit was that I have to be off of most of my antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs for 48 hours—cold turkey—prior to the procedure. Needless to say, I can't go back in time a day and cut off my meds, so the procedure's been rescheduled for Monday, with my follow-up rescheduled for next Wednesday. Meanwhile, I've been through three nebulizer treatments so far. I think I'm starting to get the hang of how to do them. They're not trying to talk to me anymore. Or at least I think that's what they've been telling me.

Moving words. I appreciate them, along with the hugs. I really do. Thank you.

Second nebulizer treatment finished. (The first one was last night.) COUGH COUGH COUGH WHEEZE COUGH GASP COUGH Still sounds like an old Stutz Bearcat trying (but failing) to start. Next treatment in eight hours. Now waiting for the hydrocodone to kick in. Sleeping was hell overnight. The pain relief wore off around 2:30 a.m. — woke me up. Couldn't get back to sleep until almost four. Woke up just after five and went straight for the hydrocodone, then the aforementioned nebulizer. Then the coffee.

Thank you. Very much obliged, especially now. Do you know how hard it is to cough when you've got a nebulizer mouthpiece in your mouth? You'd best aim away from your computer, or you're going to end up with ipratropium bromide on your keyboard. It's also best that you're not prone to hearing voices from nowhere, because I swear the nebulized solution is trying to form coherent words. Either that, or I'm picking up Mexican radio from the nebulizer unit ...

More like Mrs. Prof taking care of me at the moment, but I get the idea. I'll do my best. Thank you for letting me rant.

Back from my primary care doctor. Result one: I'm on a nebulizer, taking ipratropium bromide every 8 hours. Result two: I'm being referred to a pulmonologist. That's doctor number nine, for anyone who's keeping count. I didn't have this many when I was in ICU back in 2009. Result three: he doesn't want the back doctors doing any surgery on me while I've still got this laryngospasm cough. Too dangerous, he says, and in retrospect, I can see why he said so. No matter how much my back and right leg hurt, if I go into one of my coughing spasms while recovering from back surgery, I'll tear things all to hell, and then some. What the farking hell did I do to bring this onto myself? Huh? Can someone answer that? I am in full-on vent mode, and I've got my engine tuned to belch as much smoke as possible. I'm sorry, but there are just some things that tear the crap out of me, and today's events fall under that category. Damn it, who the smeg decided it was going to be "gang up on the Professor day" today? Well, by God, I am NOT going to take this lying down (actually, I probably will, thanks to the damned hydrocodone, but I won't go gentle into that good medicine coma). If someone wants to take me down, they're going to have to do it with me kicking and screaming as hard as my body and my laryngitis-afflicted voice box will allow. If this is going to be the death of me, it's going to have one hell of a fight on its hands getting me there. Thus endeth the rant. Go in whatever mood you choose.

You said a double-red-tape mouthful, which must now be recorded in triplicate, signed, reviewed, stamped, reviewed again, re-filed, and submitted to the appropriate department head who will stamp one copy and send the rest back through the whole damned process. I told you I worked for the Internal Revenue Service (the U.S. tax agency). I got to see it at its worst when I was something called a "Payment Tracer" back in the mid-to-late '80s. That's sort of a White Hat position among the IRS staff. Lots of authority to go digging through records, looking for records of lost payments. I got to see just how relatively ancient some of the technology was during that time. Case in point: some payments had problems with their identification that made them "unpostable" to an account. Those were recorded on trays of punch cards, which were Xeroxed after being run through the mainframe. Usually, if the taxpayer provided sufficient proof and we could match it to an unpostable record, we could "force post" the money onto their account. However, we had a long-standing problem with a certain range of unpostable ID numbers—no one could match anything in that range to any documentation the taxpayers sent. One night, I went back to the dusty hall where the records were kept (yes, it was an old, poorly lit, brick-walled, dusty dead-end hallway) and did some deeper-than-normal research into the issue. You won't believe what I found. Someone had dropped a pair of punch card trays and had put them back together out-of-sequence. It resulted in Taxpayer A getting Taxpayer B's money, Taxpayer B getting Taxpayer C's money, and so on. At least a thousand taxpayers were affected by this "slipped unpostable" problem. My finding resulted in the closing of a metric crapload of lost payment cases. Ahem. Back to the topic at hand. Going back to my primary doctor for my laryngospasm cough today. I'm expecting him to prescribe a nebulizer plus some medicine to go with it.

See you when your body lets you back on the internet. Man, even with all my ailments, I feel you drew the shorter straw. Get better soon.

Incidentally, I got curious and pulled up Continental's website last night. Guess what I found? Rich Beefy Mince! It's in a new packet, which means they may have temporarily stopped making it and then restarted. In either case, I shot off an e-mail to AussieProducts.com and asked them to order some the next time they do an import container (that's how they get their stock from Australia into the United States). I said I'd buy at least half a dozen. I'm not trying to plug their site, but I am encouraging the adventurous among us to go to Continental's Recipe Bases website and see if there's anything there that appeals to you. If so, send an e-mail to AussieProducts.com and ask them to bring some over. Don't bother telling them I sent you—they wouldn't know me from a hole in the ground, and they don't give out "referral points" or anything like that. There, tOH. I'll shut up now. I hope I didn't overstep the bounds of the Off Topic forum.

Skipping the onions for now. Just finished off the last of a pack of Black Forest Tim-Tams. Nom. Mrs. Prof gave them a "meh." I swear, if we ever do go to Australia, she's going to die of starvation once we're there, since everything I've bought from http://www.aussieproducts.com has received a "meh" from her, with one exception: Continental's Rich Beefy Mince, which the company doesn't make anymore.

I tried some Keurig-brewed Pinhead Gunpowder green tea today. Not as effective on my horking as jasmine oolong. Then again, neither is effective against the hydrocodone I'm on now. It tries to put me in a coma around three hours after I take it. I fought it with coffee today. Eighty percent success. I stayed awake, but I got nausea to the point where I had to dump a promethazine after it. Still stayed awake, though, even if the coffee didn't help my coughing. In other news, Mrs. Prof announced yesterday that she was making a trip to the local Albertsons. I asked her to bring back soup—Campbell's—cream of something. I figured she'd know what a sane person would eat for a meal. Again, 80% success. Among the rational stuff, she brought home a can of Cream of Onion. Let that sink in for a second. Cream of Smegging Onion. Who the hell eats that as a standalone meal? That's an ingredient, for cryin' out loud. All I can think to do is mix it with a can of Cream of Mushroom and have a bowl of Cream of Onion/Mushroom soup. Geez. Cream of Onion.