This Should Work

… I had an abscess removed from my arm. Ouch!!

About a week ago I notice a small red spot in my underarm, but it started to grow and feel worse, so I made a doctor’s appointment to get it checked out today. I knew it was bad when the first words out of my doctor’s mouth were “Oh, Wow!”

After poking around and asking a few questions my doctor excused himself and about ten minutes later another doctor stops in to take a look and tells me that I had an infection that created an abscess. Unfortunately it was too late for antibiotics and the only alternative would be to drain it. Draining the abscess is considered a surgery, which their office is not set up for, and I would either be referred to General Surgery or the Emergency Room to get it drained. I was told by both doctors that this needed to be done today or risk the infection spreading to my blood stream. Both also assured me that once the abscess drained I would feel so much better.

OK, sign me up for surgery!

I was able to get a referral to General Surgery and walked over to the get the surgery process started. After meeting with a surgeon, who also poked around and asked questions, he agreed with the other two doctors that draining the abscess was the best route. He also said he would try to do his best to numb the surgical area, but that abscess are usually still sensitive and that the surgery could be painful.

Um, sign me up for surgery?

I was placed in surgical room and sat on the table while the nurses and surgeons prepared the tray placing plenty of 4×4 gauze pads on it. One of the nurses brought in release and consent papers for me to sign that stated the side effects from this surgery are bleeding and infection. I signed the papers, laid down on the table, and held on tight.

Just as the surgeon was drawing up the litaciane to numb the area, another doctor walks in and hovers over my head “My, My, that’s one mean looking thing.”

“Yep, that’s why I’m here,” I reply.

This new doctor then asks the surgeon “Have you tried the exo(blah-blah-blah) spray to numb the area?”

“I’ve never heard of it” the surgeon replies.

“Oh, it much better than litacaine. You spray it over the surgical area and it creates small ice crystals that numb the area evenly. That abscess will still hurt if you use litacaine.”

Now I’m not only gripping the table, but I’ve crossed my legs and I could feel my stomach tightening. The surgeon injects the litaciane in three places and starts the cutting. “Does it hurt or do you just feel pressure?” the surgeon asks.

“Um, a little of both.”

“Just hold on, this will be over in less than ten minutes”

He makes another incision and says “Oh yeah, now it’s starting to drain. I’ll just make this cut a little bit longer and we should be good.”

‘Ok, we’re almost done’ I thought. As the surgeon made his final cut I gritted my teeth and came close to screaming in pain. “Sorry,” the surgeon said, “the most infected part didn’t get as numb. Nothing we could do about that.”

After draining as much fluid as possible, the surgeon then packed the incision with gauze strips. then covered it with a 4×4. “OK, we’re done. You can get up now.” I sat up very slowly on the table with the nurse behind me the entire time saying “Do you feel like you’re about to faint, sweetie.” “I’m good.” I said.

The surgeon said that I might be in pain for a couple of days (think so doc?) and gave me a prescription for an Extra Strength Tylenol mixed with codeine drug to relieve the pain. “You may not need this, sometimes just an Advil is enough to take the edge off. But I’ll give it to you just in case.”

I couldn’t get to the pharmacy fast enough and would have taken one on the way home were it not for the big warning about not driving while taking this drug. Once I got home, I popped one in my mouth and fifteen minutes later felt nothing.

He warned me that tomorrow morning will hurt because I need to pull the gauze strips out of the wound and redress it. I’m not looking forward to it.

When we first moved into our house, the only full bathroom had a large shower stall that looked like this (click images for larger view):

Now with our new bathtub installed, it looks like this:

My wife loves the fact that we have a tub now, and both of us love the new shower head with it’s 12 different settings (even though we only use about 3).

Similar to the Lost personality test, Liquid Generation has created a personality test for the Star Wars Fans.

Apparently, I resemble Qui-Gon Jinn from EpisodeOne. I’m a level-headed cool guy who gets a light saber run through my mid-section by a Darth Maul like dude. Click the image below to try it yourself.

I spent most of my weekend building furniture and cooking all the while listening to my iPod in Shuffle Songs mode. This is was a great way of re-discovering songs in my music collection that I had forgotten about.

While making omelets Saturday morning I heard tracks from DJ Shadow, Ben Harper, and the Ben Folds Five that I’ve heard in probably three years

I also heard a Frank Black song from an album I didn’t remember purchasing during my preparations for dinner on Saturday.

Sunday afternoon was spent partially cursing to the heavens while building a bassinet, but also re-discovered “Bar Lights” by Whiskeytown.

But there were some tracks that I’ll need to get rid of-this weekend I heard The Waitresses “Christmas Wrapping” through my earbuds.

In preparation for our new born, we are replacing our shower stall with a bathtub/shower combo. This is something we have been meaning to do for a while, and we thought we should get it done before the baby arrives.

A friend recommended a local contractor who has turned out to be awesome. When I first met him for the estimate I thought that this short, thin guy with glass and big hair looked more suited to programming computers than remodeling houses. After he reviewed the site, told what our options were, and gave us a quote, my wife and I asked him to come back this week and start working.

He started the demolition on Monday and discovered two very disturbing things behind walls:

1. He found what he thought was a large shiny object, but turn out to be something he described as “a primordial pool” underneath shower floor. Apparently a basin wasn’t placed correctly and a years of condensation created a small, smelly pool of liquid.
2. He also found, maybe six inches from the pool, an electrical junction box! I’m not a expert when if comes to electrical work, but I would guess that an electrical box should not be that close to any water supply.

My wife was afraid that we would need to call an electrician to fix this problem, but our contractor said he would take care of it and move the box further away from the bathroom. I feel fortunate that we hired such a person who will do such a thorough job as to go beyond what he was hired to do in order to make things safer for us.

Last night he stayed a little longer to ensure that we could at least take a bath and hopefully by the end of today we’ll have a new tub/shower.

I haven’t mentioned this yet in this forum, but my wife and I are expecting our first child.

Soon.

Like, next month we’ll be parents.

So it’s time to get the nursery together, and today we purchased the centerpiece of the room- the crib. My wife had been telling me that cribs are notoriously hard to put together. I’ve never built a crib and everything I know about crib building comes from TV shows, where the father (or father-to-be) has trouble.

Our crib, the Serenity Crib from Baby’s Dream, was surprisingly easy to put together-possible easier than our patio furniture. I actually walked around to the crib picking up all four ends, shaking it, but it felt sturdy.

I don’t know about other cribs (or other fathers-to-be) but for me the Serenity Crib didn’t live up to the notorious status.

This week I finished a huge project at work that’s consumed many weekends and nights over the past two months. So to celebrate I thought I’d go back to playing video games on my Xbox 360 today.

I turned on the console only to see this:

If you’re a Xbox 360 owner you know the light surrounding the button should be green, not red–red means bad.

I went to the Xbox support site and tried all the troubleshooting techniques listed, but none of them would worked, so I broke down and called tech support. After ten minutes of automated messages I finally reached a real person. After speaking with him for five minutes he said “we’ll send it to a service center and have it back to you in two weeks, tops.”

Unlike my first iPod, my first Xbox360 is still under warranty, so it can be re-built at no cost to me. I’m hoping that the DVD player is broken (which is my guess) and that they replace it with one of the newer, quieter drives instead.

So I’ll be with my 360 for a while, which means a few more weeks before ChaoticScroll returns to the Xbox Live world.

image from technabob

There are a few clear signs that Spring has arrived here in Lexington: warm weather, dogwoods blooming, horse races at Keeneland. All of these thing happened this week as well as one more thing–snow.

This is a photo of our patio umbrella this evening; in the background is our dogwood with it’s whithered, pink buds.

I can’t wait for spring to really arrive.