as if i needed MORE reminders that LIFE IS FRAGILE, hmc and snapper were almost in a car accident.
unexpectedly, it was pouring in lost angels today, and when they were getting on the freeway to go meet some of hmc’s friends from an old job, the rear passenger tire blew out on the jeep, causing her to careen DIRECTLY INTO TRAFFIC. thank god that everyone was already slowing down due to congestion or the rain or whatever, but no one hit them and she was able to straighten out and get the car off the freeway without any permanent harm. no collision, just some serious jostling.
hmc is sore, but snapper seems fine.
whoever’s in charge: i’m done with the reminders now. thanks. i get it.
they’re not going to do the special MRI, and instead they’re talking about releasing my dad next week.
initially i was very alarmed and suspicious that this was of some sort of HMO cost-cutting conspiracy. but i talked to the neurologist, who said that he had consulted some of his peers that thought that the special MRI wouldn’t tell much in regards to helping determine whether there was a tumor or not. so at this point, given that my dad is showing signs of recovery, he’s recommending just coming back in a few weeks to do another CT scan to see if the clot is getting smaller. he said that if we still really want to do the special MRI, we could come back to his office and have it done as an outpatient procedure, so i guess that’s fine.
the educated guess at this point (and by that, it really does seem to be a guess by someone who is educated) is that it was a stroke (possibly hemorrhagic?) and recovery from that will take time.
the good thing is that my dad seems to be relatively lucid and make progress in bits and pieces. i can talk to him in taiwanese and although he does talk around certain areas, unless you really know, he appears pretty normal. for part of his rehab this week they gave him $1.70 and had him go downstairs to the hospital cafeteria to buy something, where he bought a bag of chips for 85¢, and he even knew that he was supposed to get 85¢ back.
dates and especially years continue to be a problem, though.
so the update is:
my dad’s still in the hospital. they moved him out of the intensive care unit after a day, into one of the normal rooms on the third floor. someone remarked that it would be less traumatic than being in the icu, which theoretically would have been true had the person sharing his new room not been some really old guy who kept giving a “AUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH” death gasp every half an hour or so. unsurprisingly, we requested a switch, so they put him next door with someone quieter. except for the intermittent sucking-slurping-through-hoses sounds every so often. i don’t think i want to know. really.
he’s a little stronger and more alert every day. which was not to say that he wasn’t alert to begin with, but that first day in the hospital he looked sooo tired and sooo old. he wasn’t incoherent, but just sort of confused and kept giving the wrong answers to things. misremembering. and counting and dates were hopeless. now at times he can count without a problem, but still dates and years escape him. when we ask him what year he was born in, he thinks, and says, “19, um, no, 18, uh, 1896.”
it’s funny because when he does this, he gives me this look. this look is something i’ve gotten for years and years, when he was telling me something and trying to make a particular point, and he’d say it and then give me the look to see if i agreed or understood. but now i see him making this look, and it’s more to see if what he was saying was actually right or not. because he can’t really tell if it is.
then there was the point on friday when he couldn’t remember what my name was.
the deal is that he’s not on blood thinners right now after all, but they’re just seeing if the clot will dissipate on its own. there’s still the question of whether there’s a tumor in there or not, but again, from the cat scan, they can’t tell really until the clot is gone. there’s talk of some special MRI that they can do which might give more information, but that requires going to a different hospital, which also requires getting insurance approval for both that and transport to said hospital. hopefully that will happen in the next few days.
the big decision remains whether to have surgery and get whatever’s in there out, if it does turn out to be a tumor. it seems like you’d want to avoid BRAIN SURGERY if at all possible, because BRAIN SURGERY is the type of thing that you can’t stop being alarmed at: BRAIN SURGERY!!! however, if the alternative is that he stays like this and doesn’t end up getting better…? that now is not just a several month recovery, that’s not a lifestyle change. and maybe my parents would move back to taiwan so more people could help.
but i’m getting ahead of myself. we’ll see what the special MRI comes up with. if anything.
in the meantime, i hear that they’ve moved him to the fourth floor for recovery, to do more physical therapy to help him walk better as well as possible speech therapy (although i don’t really feel like he seems to need it at all). the upside is that he’s now in a private room. look, an upside! yay!
i flew back home this morning, while hmc and snapper are staying in lost angels for the week. since i need to come back down for work on friday, hmc thought it would be easier for her to hang out for the week down there, because she could have her mom help out. i’ll fly back down thursday night, and then we’ll drive home on sunday.
of course, all plans subject to sudden drastic change. as usual.
we took a whole crew out to see the murakami show at the moca, including hmc’s family, oscardelachoya, and natedog. it was pretty fantastic, although it was a little hard to concentrate on anything when you’re also trying to keep a baby pacified (literally) and also navigate the crowds with a stroller. still, it was totally worth it. when else do you get to see a whole room wallpapered with jellyfish eyes? and the overwhelmingly aggressive happy flowers covering your entire field of vision? and i don’t even know what to say about the breast milk jump rope and the ejaculate lasso.
there’s a good shot of snapper and me in front of once of the works, but this will have to do for now.
ok.
let’s just cut to the chase.
my dad’s in the hospital right now. he’s got a blood clot in his brain, which is causing the confusion and maybe the vomiting he’s been experiencing for the past couple of weeks. they’re giving him stuff to break it up, and then we’ll see if he gets better. or if there’s maybe a tumor in there or not. but with the cat scan they really can’t tell until the clot goes away.
i went to see him in the emergency room yesterday, and he suddenly looked so old and so thin. he’s tired and confused, and has a hard time remembering things. like dates. birthdays. counting. the neurologist says that in these cases, often they lose more ability to speak and understand adopted languages, which seemed to be the case, as he could count in taiwanese much better.
at this point, there’s not much to be done. they’re not going to go in and take the clot out unless his condition gets worse. and until the clot has dissipated we won’t know if there’s a tumor in there or not.
if someone could explain to me why i can’t get to my domain from home, that would be great. because it’s fricking weird. sassyass.net resolves, and it tries to connect, but it just times out. it seems to work from everywhere else. if i vpn into the corp network, i can get to it fine. i can get to it from yahoo! but not at home. i checked the lookup and the dns is resolving to the same address in both places.
sure, i guess i could call comcast, but that just sounds like HOURS OF MY LIFE i’ll never get back.
matthew and rachel were in town last weekend, so we went to see the whole k clan at rachel’s sister sarah’s house. it was great to see them, and we got to see how much miles had grown. plus we got to meet jude, who’s an adorable little running roughneck. which is good, because he can survive miles using him as a jungle gym.
miles let us know that when snapper is having a hard time feeding and fussing while nursing, the proper term is, “she’s in bumpy shape!”. also acceptable: “she’s in squiggly shape!” hmc’s been reading the scientist in the crib, and says that this is a good illustration of the child development they describe: miles is learning grammar and understands how to make adjectives out of nouns. but since he doesn’t have the experience to know what is idiomatic, he comes up with phrases that logically make sense, but sound odd and end up hilarious. of course, he’s just saying that the nursing is not going smoothly. the opposite of smooth is bumpy. thus, she’s in bumpy shape!
as we were leaving, miles said to me, “goodbye, groovy man!” and then he said to hmc, “you’re too spongey for me!”
word.
although daddy roots for the pistons first, she goes for her hometown team.
i just survived my first night solo with snapper.
whew!
hmc wanted to go down to lost angels to attend the beowulf cast and crew screening, and also worked in her last visit to the superstar OB. she’d fly down midday then come back first thing in the morning so we could both go to snapper’s two-month doctor’s appointment.
the hand off was a little tricky: i worked out my schedule so i could do a half day yesterday, but that still wasn’t enough time for hmc to get to the airport, so i had to pick snapper up from sam’s nanny (eeek! first babysitter! of course everything was fine. thanks a million, sam!). then we made a quick trip to the berkeley bowl to pick up some organic formula at hmc’s behest in case we ran out of breast milk (which couldn’t possibly have happened given our stash, but whatever).
everything turned out fine. she was up for most of the day, with little naps here and there, we played and danced around a lot, and she ate at normal intervals. she did a good sleep from midnight to about five, and then another one until nine in the morning.
people ask, what’s it like to have a baby? it’s like that opening scene in raiders of the lost ark where indy is trying to swap that bag of sand for the golden idol: carefully put down that baby without waking her up and have the whole temple collapse on you. of course, there’s that whole sleep training thing, where you’re supposed to have the temple collapse, but that’s for another time. certainly not for my first night alone.
it turns out that hmc overslept and missed her flight, but she managed to catch a later one in time to meet us at the doctor’s office, where snapper acted all calm and friendly as if she never cries ever, and then proceeded to push up on her hands and hold her head up as if she was a four month old. HA! well played, snapper, well played.
for those of you keeping score: 9lb, 6oz. 22.5”
just got back from our annual monkeyboy reunion in vegas. much fun was had, none of which i can clearly explain.
this year we opted to stay downtown at the golden nugget. which was both as crappy and less crappy than you’d expect. the suite that we hung out in was suprisingly nice, but all the restaurants in this part of vegas are painful. i think the only good meal i had nearby was the almost dozen krispy kremes we got. (hick note: didja know that it’s the only place to get dr. pepper in vegas? now that’s a documentary that needs to be made.)
i’m not sure how much i can really summarize. there was a lot of good catching up, we watched michigan get beat up and then finally beat up on state, we ate a good but ultimately disappointing meal at stripsteak, and we went and saw spamalot.
interesting that this is the first year that everyone of us is now married, and furthermore, the majority of us now have kids. i might have tipped us over that scale— thanks snapper! speaking of which, i did miss her dearly. not to say that i didn’t want to be there, but i couldn’t help thinking about snapper waking up in the morning, and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the way she does before she figures out she’s awake and hungry and starts crying.
this is quite unlike the calisthenics the strippers do on the poles, not that i saw anything like that. but i was DAMNED if i was going to let that free daylight savings hour go to waste on just sleeping or some shit like that. it’s an FREE HOUR OF STRIPPERS! you can’t waste opportunities like that. i mean, there are bettie pages to be seen. and swedish daft punk twins. hypothetically speaking, of course.
dear snapper,
you’ve made it to two months already! you’ve charmed everyone you’ve seen, and now there are hordes of grandmothers out there lurking, waiting for us to walk by so they can pounce out of their knitting shop foxholes and exclaim, “oh, what a darling little baby!”
alas, it’s certainly not your fault. you’re amazingly cute, which is interesting because you’re certainly more cute than the two of us put together. so i’m not sure where you’re getting the extra parts from. i hope there’s not going to be some baby mafia thugs coming by later to collect on some borrowed cuteness. with interest.
you’re getting stronger, holding your head up pretty well, and even starting to push up a little bit! you’re continuing to follow us and look at us when we talk to you, and you’ve even started to laugh a few times when we do silly things. which only encourages us to do more and more silly things. remember this when you’re in your teens and you’re embarrassed because of us: you started it.
this is also the month where you began your poop strikes and only started pooping every few days. now you stretch it out for longer and longer days, each time you wait until we say, “ok, if she doesn’t poop by tomorrow, we’re calling the doctor,” and then the next day you POOOOOOOP. and we’re so overcome with joy and poop and busy cleaning up many days of poop that we fail to notice that you’re clearly just messing with us. well played, snapper, well played.
we’ve taken you to your first two movies, both of which you more or less slept through. i don’t know if this bodes well for your film career, but you certainly can start your film review gig any day now. hmc says that it’s my fault that you’re sleeping through films, as you’re just taking after me. good girl. if we can sleep through taxi driver, we can sleep through anything.
we’ve started you on the pacifier, so you can give my pinkies a break. orthodontist bills be damned! it’s not like you have teeth yet. you’re just starting to figure out how to suck directly on your fingers, which is going to be a VERY exciting day indeed.
that’s it, i think. good job. keep growing. not too fast, though! now excuse me while i pop off to vegas to see monkeyboys and strippers.
