Holy Crap, Titanium Girl is Back!

Can you believe it's been nearly two months since I've posted here??? I'd tell you about them, but truth is, I don't remember a whole lot.

Nah, just kidding. Well, partly. See, back in late May, I took a header in the driveway and broke my freakin' wrist. My right wrist. Broke AND dislocated it. I spent hours in the ER, hours in the surgeon's office, and hours and hours with my arm propped up and buried in ice in an effort to get the swelling down enough so I could have surgery. ("Don't worry," the surgeon said. "If it's not down by Friday, we can do the surgery next Tuesday." TUESDAY??? Hellooo, it's Wednesday now. Wait a whole week with my bones zigzagged???)

Have you noticed that the older we get, the younger doctors get? Surgeon Boy is cute as a bug, smart, very good at what he does . . . and maybe twelve. The pre-op nurses are young enough to be my kids. And there I am Friday evening, waitng in bed with Robert -- I'm in bed, not him -- and this guy who looks like he came straight from Animal House comes strolling in. "Hey, are you Rachel?" he asks. "I've been looking all over for you. I'm Dr. Anesthesia." (Uh, Doc, I'm the ONLY one in pre-op! How could you miss me?) (At least he knew my name. He didn't come in and ask me, with my hugely-splinted right are, "Are you my wrist?")

He's cute, too, maybe sixteen, looks like he lives in the state of Dazed and Confused, but happy to go along. (He's also very good. I have only the best.)

Surgeon Boy is delayed, but I finally get into the OR 90 minutes late. I've never been in one alert and conscious. My one impression is that it is freaking COLD. We're talking, like, 50 degrees. No shit, when the nurse takes me back, the staff around the desk are wearing coats over their scrubs. Not jackets or sweaters -- winter coats. In the time it takes to push me fifty feet down the hall and into the room, I'm turning blue (and that shade of blue is SOOO not my color).

Then they plug in my Bair Paws.

Oh. My. God.

I noticed back in pre-op that the gown they gave me was pretty substantial for a disposable gown. It had a bear paw print on it, along with the name, and there was a liner that went from neck to knee, with slits cut in the outside of the gown. I didn't really give it much thought, though. Until, in the OR, the nurse says, "We're going to get you warmed up." And she plugs a hose into my gown.

The outside layer of the gown immediately puffs up from neck to knee because this hose is blowing hot air into the gown. Like 90 degree air. Wonderfully warm, cozy, hey-I'm-not-going-to-freeze-to-death-after-all air. Whoa . . .

In the PACU (post-anesthesia care unit, formerly called "recovery" -- we do love acronyms, don't we?), the nurse asks if there's anything I needed when I leave. Yes, I say. I WANT a Bair Paws. Not just the gown -- the whole system.

He doesn't give it to me. Really unfair, considering that he insisted on waking me up from the only painfree moments I'd had in four days (or would have in the next - so far - seven weeks). (And he woke me so I could go home and go to sleep. REALLY unfair.)

Speaking of pain . . . that's the reason I don't remember a significant chunk of the last few months, at least not in detail. Broken bones hurt like a sonuvabitch. So do dislocated bones, especially dislocated bones with a plate screwed into them. Oh, and the three-inch incision on the inside of my arm is no fun, either. Toss in one cute little soft-spoken hand therapist who's really Joseph Mengele in a clever disguise, and you get the idea: this ain't been no fun.

But I will survive.

I'm too stubborn not to. Rachel6:32 PM

And the other people who annoy me . . .

You didn't think the head honchos of the big oil companies were the only ones?

On the rare occasions that I watch TV news, I'll come across a protest against the high oil and gas prices. The protestors have gathered at some significant point -- outside an oil ompany or gas station or on a street corner that gets lots of traffic -- and they're marching around with signs saying, "No War For Oil" and "No Foreign Dependence on Oil," and such nifty slogans. They posture for the cameras, and the spokesperson for the group always earnestly explains their position: we need more money for research into biofuels, if people will just cut out one trip a week in their gas-guzzling vehicles, if we just boycott the gas stations for one day . . . They talk about their dedication to cutting back on oil/gas usuage and sincerely believe if all of us were as dedicated as them, we'd be seeing $2 a gallon prices at the gas pumps in no time.

Do I believe they're well-intentioned? Maybe. Do I believe they're well-informed? Varies. Do I believe they're fooling themselves? Absolutely.

These folks stand there holding their poster board signs with wooden handles (or worse, their plastic signs) -- manufactured with gas and oil, transported to the stores where they bought them with gas and oil. Some of them are talking on cellphones and taking pictures with digital cameras -- more products that require G&O for manufacture. And they're not naked, thank heavens. They're wearing clothes that again were manufactured with the use of gas and oil, transported to the stores with G&O, sold by clerks who used G&O to get to and from work in malls that use a ton of G&O. They're usually wearing shoes with sturdy rubber soles (lots of petroleum products go into making rubber and plastic products) because they don't want their feet to hurt while they're protesting.

And how did they get to the protest site? Well, most of them drove. Oops, G&O. And depending on the timing of the rally, a fair number of them, being predictable humans, had a meal either before or after at a restaurant, another place that has a huge dependence on G&O to get their products and employees and materials into place.

And then they go home, patting themselves on the back for having A Good Thing For The Environment.

Just my opinion -- and on my blog, that's the one that counts: if you're going to urge a boycott against the G&O companies, you need to go all the way. When you're encouraging people to cut out G&O products for even a limited time, you have an obligation to hold yourself up as a role model at least for that period of time. That means no driving to protests. No wearing clothes or shoes manufactured/delivered via G&O. No eating food that you haven't grown yourself, because Lord knows, there's a ton of G&O involved in commercial food production.

Don't drive your SUV, get out to march around with a sign protesting oil and gas, then get back into your SUV and go on about your life and think you've done enough. Rachel9:17 AM

$3.59 a Freakin' Gallon???

I live in Oklahoma. You know, the state of the great Glen Pool strike (or is it Glenn?) in the early 1900s, when so much oil poured out of the earth that they just dug great big lakes for it. The state with an oil well at the governor's mansion. The state freaking BUILT by oil. You name a big name in oil, we're connected somehow.

I cannot tell you how highly offended I am by the fact that I live in Oklahoma and I pay $3.59 a GALLON for gasoline. New York? Yeah, you guys go ahead and pay it. Florida? You can pay four or five bucks a gallon. Vermont? Whatever you want. But this is OKLAHOMA. Land of cowboys, Indians and oil. I want a reasonable price.

I know lots of people in the oil business, and I even love some of 'em, but this has long passed obscene and gone into gotta-be-morally-criminal territory. People can't make ends meet. Everything has gotten so expensive that plenty of folks are doing without not just luxuries but things they really need.

People in this privileged country are going hungry.

And the oil companies are posting the highest profits EVER????

The one thing that gets me through life is the certainty that, in the end, we all get rewarded for the good things we've done and punished for the bad. Put more succinctly, God'll get us.

Man, God will REALLY get the oil company heads. Rachel10:20 AM