Chatter #44 - September 15, 2001

12/14/2001 — I started the Chatter section on July 27, 2000 when I noticed that the rest of my site was sometimes getting cluttered with lots of text. I'm a talkative guy, after all! So now I talk about my life here, instead of all over the place. Originally this was one huge section, but in December of 2001 it simply became too large to remain as one page, and I broke it into dated sections, as you can see. —>PM

A Night of Agony

Thursday night was one of the worst nights I've ever had. And would you like to know why? Those damn hiccoughs!

They went on for 14 hours! Once in a while they'd stop (particularly after I ate), but within 15 minutes they'd be back. And they were violent hiccoughs, too; it wasn't long before the muscles of my chest, shoulders, and back were aching like crazy, along with my throat and of course the incision. It was simply awful, and virtually unbearable.

I tried many of the usual cures, but nothing worked. Finally I went to a rather dangerous cure: I held a plastic bag over my face and breathed into it. I was careful to hold it in such a way that if I started to pass out it would fall away, but it was still a bloody dangerous thing to do and shows how completely desperate I was. Still, it didn't help.

I dosed off at midnight, but woke at 2PM and immediately went into a violent spasm of hiccoughs again—so loud that I had to leave the room for fear of waking Teri. I went into the den.

I had the strong suspicion that it was the Percocet that was causing the hiccoughs; and since it wasn't helping me much anyway, I decided to take some Tylenol instead, checking first to make sure that there were no drug interactions. There weren't, and I downed a couple of maximum-strength pills. Then I paused for a moment, and had a mild inspiration. I waited for a hiccough, and then waited again until a moment before I figured the next one would hit me. Then I took my glass of water and took a continuous stream of little gulps all in a row, for as long as I could. When I finished, YAHOO! The hiccoughs were gone! And they haven't been back since.

Otherwise...went to a Lamaze/childbirth class today, which was very interesting but painful. For the first time a little blood came from the incision. Oh, I was able to shower and take off the outer bandage on Thursday evening; one of the steri-strips (which I believe replaced stiched in my case) underneath the bandage came off when I remove the blood-caked gauze (you never have to worry about too little information on this site, huh?). But it was apparently okay. I'm worrying about damage to the muscle layers underneath—I don't want to have to go through this again—and there's an uncomfortable "sliced" feeling across my belly sometimes. But I think I'm okay, and I should be able to get confirmation of that when I have my follow-up appointment in 10 days.

What else? Well, I've done pretty well on Super Mario World...it's surprising how much I remembered without realizing it! 37 stars already. Funny, Teri isn't impressed.

I hope to persuade her to try it later. It was such a mind-blowing game to those of us who were used to 2-D worlds...or to old-timers like me. I remember when I was a young boy seeing one of the first arcade Pong units in the world. It amazed me at the time. I must have been about eight years old.