For the past few months, I have been dealing with a rather serious back injury.  It's called a wedge deformity, and it takes place when some sort of a stressor is placed upon your spine and causes the normally roughly cube-shaped vertebrae to deform into a vaguely wedge-shaped piece of bone and nerves.  It's quite painful, and over the course of ( Read more... )

My upper endoscopy revealed that what was once a ten-inch long affected area of my esophagus has, in the last six months, been shrunk to only four inches total.

Talk about some good news.  Whew!

So I am going in tomorrow for an upper endoscopy, which I refer to as "The Alien Probe."  This is where a tube with a camera attached to the tip is put down your throat and the doctor takes a good, long look at your inner workings from the pyloric valve on up.  Now we'll get to see if my Barrett's Esophagus has calmed down any, and whether or not ( Read more... )

So the tale of the tape in the doctor's office has revealed a very interesting factoid about myself: despite being an avowed horror movie fan, a dedicated follower of the Oakland Raiders and not having killed my in-laws yet, I have been diagnosed with a "weak stomach."

You'd think the Raider thing alone would prove I have a gut of cast-iron, wouldn' ( Read more... )

Last night I went to be about 9:30 PM or so; an hour later, I was yarking my guts into the Porcelain Throne.  That's right, the return of the dreaded Night Pukes strikes again.  Once that was done I weaved my way back to bed and fell into a sodden sleep...

...which was not interrupted at the God-awful hour of 5:00 AM by the alarm clock.  See, I had ( Read more... )

Ever since the snowboarding accident I have run the gamut from my ribs feeling pretty much okay, to "Holy crap KILL ME NOW" and today was of the latter variety.  I feel like a horse's ass when I call in sick to work, but if you are lying in bed wondering how much painkiller you can take to be able to soldier your way to work and what the cutoff ( Read more... )

As I mentioned earlier, I sent the Zoom 9002 back to the dealer on Saturday because of issues with the headphone jack.  Some units come off an assembly line just fine, and some have a life of problems.  For example, there is a certain bus we have in the fleet that seemingly is always having something go wrong with it... and it's not like it's a ( Read more... )

Under duress of torture, people will agree to almost anything.  In the fine flick Reservoir Dogs, "Nice Guy" Eddie takes umbrage with the well-meaning but counterproductive stupidity of Misters Blonde, Pink and White beating down poor bluesuit Officer Marvin Nash as they try to discover who the inside man on the job.

"You beat this prick long enough ( Read more... )

I've been up since 3:30 AM. It's not my wife's fault; she's sick, and therefore her breath rasps through her lungs. However, this also means that when I awaken, I find it pretty hard to go back to sleep, doubly so if I'm dealing with my third week of sea-urchin throat myself. I'm going to take a pre-sunrise bath and maybe that will give me a ( Read more... )

I'm very hopeful of being medically cleared to return to work on Thursday.  Daytime television has been so bad that I've been reduced to watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians which, aside from having more delectable butt than you can shake a stick at, scores a big fat zero in the "meaningful content" department.  This is what I get for finishing ( Read more... )