doubting thom

The television and Internet are showing me scenes of serious flooding and downed trees and power lines, and report that record numbers of people are without power in Virginia and that some residents of Alexandria and Fairfax County are being asked to boil their water before drinking or even brushing their teeth. My mom confirms that she is without power still at the temporary apartment in Richmond, and that the hospital is without power or water (though it does have generators keeping the essential equipment running, it has no air conditioning and no working bathrooms at present). Even other parts of Arlington have been reported to have been hit with power outages and property damage.

Yet here at elf central, you’d be hard pressed to know that there’d even been a hurricane through here last night and early this morning. Even at the peak of the winds, my condo building was nearly completely and almost oddly unscathed. We never lost power for more than two or three minutes at a time, and certainly less than a dozen times altogether. While I could see swaying trees down the hill in the townhouse subdivision next to my condo building, those in our courtyard seemed barely to move, and the dirt on my balcony–which during normal rain storms usually swirls madly around in the strong wind gusts that sweep along the back side of the building–wasn’t even disturbed, even though it was the only thing there given that I’d removed all the furniture and plants so they wouldn’t be blown off. The angle of the winds also meant that my vertical blinds only occasionally fluttered gently despite keeping the windows and patio door open; in fact, the blinds are moving much more actively now, with just normal winds outside.

I’m not complaining, exactly. I’m glad that Jeff and I were safe and comfortable–hell, even the satellite signal on the television only went out from rain fade a couple of times, significantly less than I expected, given that it normally goes out during more typical and ostensibly more gentle Washington thunderstorms. And I’m very happy that I have power, drinkable water, and that my phone, television and Internet connectivity are working now and continued to operate almost without fail throughout the hurricane. But I was perhaps expecting and hoping for something a little more thrilling.

Currently the temperature has dropped into the sixties and we’re getting some steady rain, but the brunt of the storm is still several hours away from Arlington. The trees outside the condo are relatively still at this point, with only occasional mild gusting disturbing them.

Jeff stayed over last night, and today we’re both still here at my place; the federal government, my employer, made the decision to close last night, and Jeff’s employer made the same decision sometime between midnight and 7 am. At the moment, the rain isn’t even heavy enough to disrupt my satellite television service, and as long as the power holds out we’ve got TiVo, popcorn, Hint-of-Lime Tostitos, Diet Vanilla Pepsi and dozens and dozens of DVDs for entertainment. I must confess to some excitement about the approaching storm; I’m also looking forward to hunkering under the covers and making love as the rain lashes the windows and the winds howl around us when the worst of the storm hits here this evening.

At least we don’t have to worry about the possibility of some little Thom or Jeff arriving nine months from now.

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Fortunately, Mom got into an apartment just next to the hospital this morning, so she was settling into it before the storm reached Richmond. She’ll be there during the rest of Dad’s hospitalization and recuperation, which takes a load off my mind. She’s much more comfortable and self-confident once she’s in one of those apartments, where she can save money by cooking for herself and where she has easy pedestrian access to the hospital rather than having to drive back and forth from the hotel in a much larger and relatively unfamiliar setting (though not so unfamiliar as once, given that she’s spent several months living in Richmond over the past two years, while Dad has been hospitalized there off and on).

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[Update] I only just posted this, and within a couple of minutes we had a very brief power outage and accompanying sound of thunder outside. It was so quick that only some equipment was affected: the TV shut off briefly, for example, but the TiVo and DVD player continued to stay lit. The UPS for the computer beeped indicating it had lost power, but the two digital clocks in the house are still showing the correct time, without having reset to the flashing 12:00.

While there seemed to be an attempt from the family as a whole to make Mom and me feel guilty about it, we did manage to do a little shopping together. We were out briefly Thursday morning so that Mom could pick up some things she’d forgotten to pack–sufficient underwear, deodorant, etc.–when the hospital called to get permission to insert the ventilator, upon which we rushed right back. However, I made the mistake of telling one family member that we were “at the shopping center,” and every one who called after that seemed to know about it. You’d think we’d flown to London to shop for Prada while Dad lay gasping his last.

Mom was so upset that for the next day and a half we were nowhere except at the hospital or at the hotel or on the road driving between the two. I finally convinced her that it made no sense for us to sit staring at the waiting room or hotel walls for the remaining 18 hours when we spent every minute of the six hours we were permitted to be with Dad in his room holding his hand and talking to him. The hospital could reach us, if needed, on our cell phones just as easily at the shopping center–which was no further away than the hotel–as in the hotel room. And during Dad’s other hospitalizations he’s made it very clear that it upsets him if we do nothing but sit around the hospital; he’s always encouraged Mom to get out and do other things while she’s waiting.

So we finally did do a little more shopping Saturday evening, though I was so exhausted and headachy I just couldn’t concentrate on and enjoy it as much as I usually do; this gay boy and his mother, always pretty close, usually bond particularly around the activity of shopping. Mom says that I’m the same way about shoes that she is about handbags; to be honest, though, I think I’m more extravagant about my camp and tropical print shirts than I am about shoes, though I did firmly but regretfully forego two gorgeous silk camp shirts in favor of a great deal on two fabulous and funky pairs of Steve Madden and Kenneth Cole footware.

Thanks for all the emailed and commented support, hugs, thoughts and prayers for my dad and our family. The bad news is that Dad’s health has continued to decline over the past week, with a rapid progression of the Guillain-Barr黠the good news is that, so far, his new kidney, at least, has been relatively unaffected.

As I reported earlier, last Monday Dad was taken to his local hospital where over the course of the day the diagnosis of Guillain-Barr頷as made. Tuesday morning his medical team in Richmond from the Transplant Center ordered him transferred to the hospital there by helicopter and on Tuesday they began the first of five plasmapheresis therapies recommended for treatment of some autoimmune disorders, including Guillain-Barr鮦lt;/p>

I left Arlington for Richmond early Wednesday morning and, fortunately, was able to spend some time with Dad that day while he was still conscious and breathing on his own. By Wednesday evening the paralysis already had reached his arms, over which he had only gross motor control (e.g., he could flail his arms but not grasp things with his fingers). His breathing wasn’t visibly labored, but the diagnostics showed that his oxygen intake continued to lessen.

On Thursday morning he was visibly gasping for breath and, within twenty minutes after Mom and I had left the hospital after morning visiting hours, the hospital called to ask for permission to put Dad on a ventilator. When we returned, he was still conscious and very distressed, grabbing at me and mouthing that he couldn’t breathe. The nurse acknowledged that it would feel to him as though he weren’t able to breathe–she said “It feels like you’re breathing through a straw”–but assured him and us (and the monitors confirmed) that he was actually taking in more oxygen than he had been managing on his own. It was nonetheless a very frightening and disturbing experience to have someone you love pleading with you to help him, when you’re helpless to do anything other than try to be comforting and assuring. For my mother’s sake, too, I have to be the strong one.

Fortunately, the order soon came for sufficient sedation to calm Dad. He remained able to communicate roughly with us through head shakes and nods and eye movements only briefly; as the sedation deepened that afternoon he has appeared almost comatose since. The medical team tell us that he can hear us, but he has no way of communicating back and we have no way to know how much he hears or how much he understands.

Thursday evening we learned that he’d also developed a pneumonia, and they added antibiotics to the mix of anti-rejection drugs, blood pressure medications and insulin passing through a maze of IV lines. On Friday–the day that Dad turned 65, asleep and sedated in a hospital bed halfway across the state from his home–they inserted a feeding tube via his nose, and on Saturday began giving him nutrients through it.

Saturday we also met with the pulmonologist who recommended that a (temporary and reversible) tracheostomy be performed so that a trach tube can be used in place of the ventilator, given the sense that Dad is going to require mechanical breathing support for several weeks to months; that a PEG be inserted into his abdomen so that the esophageal feeding tube can be removed (thus reducing the risk of sinusitis, which frequently occurs with the use of feeding tubes and to which my dad, immunocomprised as he is, would be particularly susceptible); and that an arterial PIC line be inserted. These procedures are to be scheduled for the next day or so beginning tomorrow.

For our part, all we can do is sit and wait. The implication from our conversations with the doctors, our research into this syndrome, and Dad’s presentation is that this is going to be a long illness and recovery, certainly on the order of weeks and very possibly months.

I stayed in Richmond with Mom through the rest of the week and into yesterday morning. Mom notes that this is the longest since before she and Dad married that they’ve gone without talking to one another. My sister will drive to Richmond tomorrow for the day, and I’m planning to spend my weekends down there, but I hate that Mom is alone there otherwise–while Dad is in the CCU, we’re only permitted to spend three two-hour periods with him, two of us at a time; the rest of the time is exhausting and frustrating, especially for my mother there alone, in an unfamiliar and relatively quite large city, when she is accustomed to being almost continually surrounded by her husband, parents, daughter, grandsons, sister and in-laws.

Jeff and I were musing last night about what a chant would sound like if directed to a crowd of the indecisive or apathetic:

What do we want?

We don’t know. What do you want?

When do we want it?

You decide. It really doesn’t matter to us.

In the continuing saga of family health crises, car woe and appliance death, I offer up the past couple of days.

Saturday, for example, while downtown enjoying the nice weather with Jeff, I started experiencing trouble with the convertible top, which kept reporting an error when I tried to open it. I did eventually get it open, and got it closed again once home that evening, but it’s been sluggish and recalcitrant since, so I’ve been afraid to try to open it.

Then I arrived home from work yesterday to discover that the heat pump that provides cooling and heating in my condo apparently has given up the ghost (after having been preceded by the refrigerator, dishwasher and computer monitor, in a race with the widescreen TV to see which would fail next). Given its age (about 20 years) I’ve been expecting this sooner or later, but I kept hoping for later. Fortunately it failed just as the weather has begun to cool, and I don’t need its air conditioning or heat for the foreseeable future.

But as I was feeling sorry for myself about the state and presumed cost of repair or replacement of what are, after all, only just things, I got a real kick in the pants when my mom called last night to tell me that my dad was back in the hospital, just a few days before his 65th birthday and the same morning that my cousin and aunt both had outpatient surgery.

Yesterday morning Dad began to lose feeling in his legs; fearing at first that he had had or was having a stroke, he was admitted to the hospital. The progression of his symptoms, though, led to a diagnosis later that day of Guillain-Barr

I was just looking at my referrer log, and someone recently was referred to my site via a Dogpile search for “how to steal and capture souls.” Now, the page to which the search engine directed them here is just my photographs of myself, friends, family and travel, entitled “Stealing Souls”; fortunately for the acquaintances of this unknown searcher I don’t actually offer a how-to manual on the process of capturing others’ souls.

Other interesting searches that brought people here over the past few days–beyond the overwhelming majority who seem to be searching for lyrics to Stephen Lynch songs and a fair number apparently looking for shirtless pictures of Queer Eye’s Kyan–included “forearm prominent veins,” “contra dance naked,” “manscaping” and, more times than I might have expected, “elf clothes.”

Great. If it weren’t bad enough that my email accounts receive more spam than real mail on a daily basis, today my blog received its first spam in the form of a comment containing links to all the spam world’s greatest hits: online casinos, viagra, penis enlargement, lingerie, porn, etc. And unlike email spam, which feels rather impersonal to me since the marketers purchase lists of email addresses, commenting to a post on the blog was a much more deliberate action.

And what’s the return on the investment here? It’s not like I’m a major destination on the Internet, and I’m confident that my regular readers are not in the least interested in this junk.

The spammer left an email address, but I’m not going to post it since it’s probably some poor soul who had nothing to do with this, but whose email address occasionally gets used as the reply-to for a spam mailing. However, the IP address did get logged; the originator was posting from a machine on the CHINANET Tianjin province network.

Last night while surfing DirecTV, we came across a Julia Child marathon on PBS You. During my irreverent running commentary (Jeff noted that it was like watching an MST3K cooking show), I reminded Jeff that I felt I had an especial right to satirize Ms. Child given my up close and personal encounter with her, and I realized that while I’d previously told him the story and had mentioned it in passing here, I’d never fully blogged the story. So, here is the saga of The Day Julia Child Ran Into Me:

The time: 1985.

The place: Somerville, Massachusetts. The old Savenor’s Market.

The scenario: After college, I lived for a year in Somerville just a short walk from Harvard Square. Up the street from my apartment was Savenor’s Market, a specialty meat (I remember they even carried such exotic meats as ostrich, rattlesnake and kangaroo, among others) and cheese market where Julia regularly shopped. Next to Savenor’s was a laundromat where I did my laundry.

I had just finished several loads of laundry and was walking home. As I passed Savenor’s carrying my stacked baskets of clean clothes, Julia came backing out with her own parcels as she conversed with the proprietor. I couldn’t see well over my clothing, and she was walking backwards without looking behind her at all. Bang! Crash! Down I went, and down came Julia on top of me.

After I extricated myself from under her, I helped her up and we apologized to each other. It was only later, once I was home opening a box of Kraft Dinner, that I kicked myself, wishing I’d thought to suggest she might make it up to me by inviting me over for a meal.

[Note: I actually later met Ms. Child on several other occasions, as well as Fred Rogers, Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop (I even briefly wore the Lamb Chop costume at a Capitol Hill function on behalf of public TV), among many other PBS notables over the years that I worked in public television, but this first meeting had a special impact, as it were.]

During a particularly but not unusually giddy PoCo (a la PoMo, my new abbreviation for post-coital, the coinage of which arose during this same PoCo moment) conversation this weekend, “Dzheph” (not his real name) and I were discussing–in the context of his predilection for handwritten thank-you notes–a possible niche for printed greeting cards for just such an occasion. The following sentiment then sprang to mind:

My co-workers note I’ve been smiling all day.
Thank you for being such a wonderful lay.