There is such a thing. Anyone who lives near or has lived in ranching country knows what that is. For the rest of you: divide a pasture field into a grid. Number the resulting squares, and then have people put money down on a square they think the cattle you let into that pasture will take a dump. The winner gets something as a prize, but the event is generally a fundraiser kind of deal.
Winter in Florida is a lot like cowpie bingo. Every so often, Mother Nature drops by to take a dump on us, just to remind us that while we may be tropical most of the year – and sometimes even all of the year, in some cases – she can and will come down for a short stay, even given her very busy schedule.
We’ve already had six days in a row with freezing overnight temps, with one in the 20s. Then things went back to a rather Florida-like “winter”. Tonight and tomorrow, however, actual winter is back for a two day show, roping us in with the misery it’s creating up north.
Tonight, just before I geared up and went out to turn on a couple of the far taps around 10PM, it was 32F. Two hours later, and it’s dropped to 28F.
The wind has also picked up, as the blue line at the bottom shows. It’s cold. Very cold. And a terrific reminder why I will never live in the northern reaches of the country again. Had enough of that in my childhood, and I’m not anxious for more. We, unlike people in the great north who have to spend a quarter of the year at least playing host to winter, will get right back to our version of it.
In other news….see below the fold, as there’s a pic that may make some people a tad squeamish. If you don’t like blood, don’t go there.
When we last chatted, or at least when I wrote and you read, I was slated to have the tube replaced on Tuesday because the tube had split when I flushed it before beginning a feed.
The doc was not thrilled about removing it entirely, and I agreed to have him replace it with a button type (more on that in a minute) to be less intrusive in my daily life and so I could keep working on boosting my weight. I’m not sure how that’s going to go, but we did do the thing Tuesday morning. With the old one, there were small pieces of my insides on the outside of my abdomen where the tube went in. This can happen for any number of reasons, but the result is that they irritate the skin where they’re resting, and they are prone to bleeding if you happen to bump one while cleaning around the thing. You always bump one, it’s almost impossible not to. I got used to it.
I meant to ask the doc as we were in the procedure room and about to knock me out about putting my insides back into my insides, but forgot. The anesthesia started to roll in, and for once I actually felt it starting to zone me out instead of just being awake one moment and asleep the next. It was kind of odd and kind of interesting at the same time.
Anyway, my insides. When I woke up in post op, I was a little sore, but that’s to be expected when they remove a grody old balloon that’s been in your gut for almost a year by pulling it out of the hole in your abdomen and stick a new one in. But I also found out that the good doc had lased those pieces of my insides. They’ll die and slough off, he says, as he’s showing me the endoscopy pictures, and from what areas he took biopsies, as the images showed I had some bloody areas in my stomach/duodenum. Testing for h. pylori and other nasty bits of business to be done by the pathology department.
Now, what’s interesting about this is that you can’t just get home and decide you’re going to try a DYI to get these lased things off before they decide to come of on their own. Why? Well, because they are still attached to living skin, and even when lased, they can still have blood in them. Don’t try to do it on your own, kids. And also – and this is to myself – do not bump the damn thing or catch it on the sweatshirt you’re trying to take off. Because if you do that, you pull on the entire thing, not just on corner or section of it. You end up with this:
The little dimpled area to the left of the new PEG in this pic is not my navel, but a scar from one of my other surgeries. The piece of gauze over the left end of the PEG is just there to keep that entrance port from getting gunked up with stuff like lased tissue sloughing off or a bunch of blood thanks to the derp move of catching the thing on a shirt.
Something I’m going to like quite a lot is not having to wear a lanyard 24/7 to keep a length of external tube held in place – the alternative to the lanyard is tape, and that would be even more annoying and likely more irritating of the skin it was on. It’s also going to be nice to not have to worry about fouling the tube on something while working with the bees or in the gardens.
It did ache quite a bit as Tuesday late evening rolled around. I almost wrote “And yesterday was a little sore” but I just had the procedure done yesterday. Somehow it feels longer ago, or more removed from today. So: today it was little sore, and was a LOT sore after I did the above. It’s calm now, either because it settled itself or because of the pain meds. Either way, Thursday will be better, I’m sure.
Until next time, peeps: bundle up. Be well.