Category: The Body Eclectic

Of Kevin’s Day Off with the Simpsons, 22 episodes on DVD all with directors commentary. This is as self-indulgant as it gets.

myself off the pain medicine. Throat is on fire today. Youch!

From my surgery. All went fine. I just have a raging sore throat and feel like I’ve been playing Ring-Around-The-Rosie for the last 7 hours. I think I’m going to bed.

Thank you to everyone for your well wishes. It made a world of difference.

And so it begins. See you all in a few days.

I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine.

I’ve been thinking the last few days if I’m going to post here during my surgery and I think I’ve come up with a yes. While two weeks of recovery is going to be both unnerving and painful, I think it will be better for my well-being if I try to function as normally as possible, to act like the next two weeks will be a healing instead of mimicking a punishment. So you’ll see me here.

I hope I see you.

Some of you may know this already but I’m having surgery next Tuesday. Here’s the email I sent out, alerting everyone to this fact.

______________

Some of you may already know this but I am headed into surgery next Tues. morning, Dec. 10 at the Stanford Sleep Clinic. The deal is I have something called Sleep Apnea, which means that I stop breathing when I sleep. This is caused by a combination of factors: enlarged tonsils and uvula, an irregularly small jaw, a deviated septum, and a history of parental snoring, all of which I have. Left untreated, Sleep Apnea can cause early cardiac trouble, strokes, and at worst, your heart can stop in the middle of the night. This is why I’m doing the surgery now.

Details: The procedure takes about 90 minutes. I will head down to Palo Alto with Suzan next Monday afternoon for a Pre-op consultation. I’ll be staying that night in a hotel in Palo Alto with Suzan and my parents who are coming into town for the surgery. Surgery is Tuesday morning and I stay overnight so they can observe me sleeping. With any luck, I head home Wed. morning.

I’ll essentially be out of commission for a solid week, with a very very sore throat. I’ll be subsisting on mush and other soft foods for at least ten days and for the first week, it will be hard to talk and swallow and do much of anything except sit around and pass time. After that I should be on the mend and back up to full strength by Christmas, New Years at the latest.

Optimally, the surgery will cure the apnea by 50-75%. It’s still something I’ll have to keep an eye on for a long to come.

So what I’d like to do is rally ya’ll, the people whom I love, these upcoming two weeks. I know this is what’s best for me and my health and that it’s less dangerous than a giant pain in the ass but I’ve never stayed overnight in a hospital or been operated on before. It scares the hell out of me.

Therefore, beginning that Saturday, Dec. 14, I will be welcoming any and all visitors (real or virtual) as well as donations of mushy or liquid food (soup, Jell-O, pudding, anything mashed or pured). I can’t promise I will be thrilling company, but I will try to entertain in any non-verbal way I can (sock puppets, mime etc.). Plus, you’ll to take a spin on my new XBOX (a Chanukah) gift, watch a very large stack of DVD’s and borrow anything from my library you like.

So please let me know if you can stop by any day between Saturday the 14th and Christmas Day. Believe me, I’m not going anywhere and I would love to see all of you. Or if ya don’t live around here, just to hear some well wishes.

Your friend,

Kevin
_________________

If you like to pay fine attention to the mundane as I do, have a look at Soap in the City, a New York store specializing in handmade soaps of every conceivable size, texture, odor and sensation. It’s not cheap stuff, but fun to think of rubbing yourself with a cucumber/honey/cinnamon sugar mix with a great smell and feeling as your reward. I walked out with a bar of read clay something, that felt neat and looked like showering with a bar of raw earth.

Warning: Their site has a completely illogical, hard-to-navigate design but the clerk told me they do a decent ecommerce business and seem nice enough that they’d let you return a soap you didn’t like the smell of it. But I’d ask them first.

My dad used to say that the sign of a good vacation is when you are ready to leave and happy to come back. And while I had a large time in both Baltimore and New York, with much to share in the coming days, all I’ve been saying this afternoon is “God, it’s good to be home.”

So Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to the holiday season, WTS-style.

Off we go…

Feeling better, fever broken. Life goes on.

I have a fever. This sucks.