Ce Temps Majuscule

I hope you have enjoyed the hiatus of posting here at Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé.

et la seine? elle est toujours belle, elle. malgré moi, elle l'est.

The silence is squashed. I was discharged yesterday afternoon, and while still not quite settled back into home life, Fred and I are slowly finding answers and sly techniques to get me and us through this... Time.

Ce Temps -- Majuscule.

Unfortunately, my left shoulder prosthesis is not back with me. Heart/San Francisco. Shoulder/Tête de Hergé. You can't always get what you want...

Surgery on Monday went well, in the sense that the orthopedic surgeon got me through it in great shape and did what he had to do, with panache and one arm tied behind his back.

He's very talented, and somehow "more" than a specialized surgeon -- meaning no disrespect to any other surgeons out there. Most of the orthopedic surgeons I have met are intensely disinterested in the "medical" side of my care, to the extent of neglecting it. Not so with ShoulderMan. He is on top of things and looks a bit askance when I bring up medical concerns. Still, given that *he* is the anomaly, the practice of doublechecking will not fade away any time soon.

Je reviens... Monday, late afternoon, in the hush of the surgical theatre: The prosthesis looked pretty good to him, as did the surrounding area -- not great but not nearly bad enough to explain such pain and dysfunction. He was about to wash it out and close me up when he decided to further check out the sturdiness of the prosthesis. It came loose too easily, so he proceeded to "ream" the shaft of the humerus -- as any talented ShoulderMan would do.

"It exploded with pus and gunk."

"Gunk" is a technical term and if you don't know what it means, well, I don't have time to walk you through Medical Terminology 101. Look it up. Live and learn. Walk and talk. Rock and roll.

The Christmas Mystery? Nothing will grow on the culture plates. Nothing. They are able to get MRSA from zeee nares and zeee skin -- but as for the actual Pus and Gunk? Nothing.

I confessed the pain of the left hip and the former right shoulder -- so they wrapped me up in a lovely off-the-shoulder yellow dress, a bit on the sheer side, with a lovely pair of blue gloves that gave my look the needed *pop* and off we went to interventional radiology in an attempt to aspirate yet more fluid. More Christmas Mystery, but perhaps the pains there can be dismissed due to bone-on-bone contact in the hip and overuse in the arm.

But my Infection Sensors are blipping and bleeping and splurching all over the doggone place. Still, there is nothing that can be done right now. A normal person would probably decide to relax and try to salvage the holiday spirit.

Cough.

We are throwing daily infusions of vancomycin at the invader(s). Six weeks of infusions through the PICC line. (If this were a freaking Gratitude Journal? tee hee! the position of the PICC line is sooooo much better than last time! and the roly-poly plastic balls of vancomycin? why, they're all gold and silver-like, as if jesus came down and gave a fluffy baby kiss on the cheap china plastic and poof! them balls, they turned into holy ornaments! poof! tee hee!)

Just like last time.

I am incredibly grateful to Dr. ShoulderMan, his PA, and his SuperDyke nurse. This does NOT go without saying. So be sure to say it.

The hospital staff? Not so great -- but as the PA said, the solution to that is quite simple: "stay out of the hospital." Wiser words were never said.

We posted signs that said "Please do not touch my legs or right arm without asking permission. I have CRPS Types 1 and 2. It is painful. Thank you."

Yes, you got it! It was like issuing a freaking invitation: Please touch my arms and legs -- pat them, swat them, stroke them -- Because when *you* do it, it doesn't hurt at all!

Anyway, I am home -- in lots of pain, extremely depressed, and challenged -- in those basic ways that ought to be second nature. Don't make me break out that gosh-darned Gratitude Journal shit. I am alive and not in a nursing home.

Yet.

There are people who care, still. Which amazes me.

When did I begin to hate myself?

A great big thank you to Dr. ShoulderMan and staff, the ID people, and All the Intrepid Nurses.

Most of all... my Fred. Dancing around my hospital rooms -- snoring in their corners -- bringing me a piece of pecan pie under the frowning visage of the Diabetes Dominatrix -- enjoying the shows on Animal Planet that we don't get at home (even if the lion gets the baby antelope) -- helping me brush my teeth, letting me pull on him so as to sit on the side of the bed.

And Fred never laughs at my bedhead.

Which makes feeling suicidal a despicably selfish and amoral impetus.

Nerves are setting in

I couldn't sleep last night. I have the Hospital Terrors and was so hoping to avoid them. There are mountains of things that need to be done and my tendency to make lists has kicked into high gear.

Now it would be spiffy if I could just check a few things off.

I will be the last surgical case of the day. Apparently, orthopedic surgeons have this hangup about operating on infected joints when there is the most remote chance that a microbe will escape into the rarefied air of the surgical suite... and then jump into the open wound of another patient. My bacteria are very social.

The pain is kind of out of sight but I am not medicating for it. I am doing a modified Drug Holiday (yes, on my own; no, Shoulderman hasn't a clue). It will help me post-op. But the pain is starting to suck, so I may have to end the vacation.

Fred has gone off to... church. Here at Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé, his worshiping options are plentiful. He attends the First Existential Congregation of TdH, an interesting group of very strange people. I stopped attending over a dispute about the ordination of Transgendered Alien Republicans [TAR]. Nothing gets to me like the pointed exclusion of a group of people, even if they are TARs.

It occurs to me that these infections may be my end. Maybe their concern over the MRSA is not so puerile after all. Shoulderman has intoned that we may end up chasing these nasty bugs from joint to joint. I haven''t had the courage to tell him my left hip is hurting.

How much hardware do (well, at this point, *did*) I have?

1999-left hip fractured and pinned
2001-right hip replaced after collapse
2002-left shoulder replaced after collapse
2002-right ankle reconstructed after fall in ICU (the beginning of a Sentinel Event that ushered in the era of CRPS)
2005-right shoulder replaced after collapse
2007-right elbow reconstructed after a fall
2008-right shoulder prosthesis removed, replaced with cement spacer
2008-Monday, December 15... left shoulder prosthesis [probably, but pray not] removed, replaced with cement spacer impregnated with killer antibiotics...

We're going to chase infection in all of these possible incubation hot spots? In that same space of time, there have been four ressuscitations, three Addisonian crises, two pneumonias, many lupus inflammations of heart and kidneys, and *way* too much time spent hanging around on ventilators. My terrific luck cannot continue to hold.

Way to talk myself into a funk!

Solution? Scrub the golden toilets of the Manor! Change the bedding of the various Sleep Chambers! Clean the Moat! Mow the Wimbledon Miniature Courts! Dust the Rubens! Refinish the Velasquez! Go to town and snag more Gold Leaf for the 16th century dinette!

Ar! Temp? 101.2. Ar! Would that those First Existentialist Congregants prayed...

I have great faith in ShoulderMan. He is easily one of the top ten OS in the country, very humble, and tenacious as heck. He is also an unusually talented *doctor* -- and by that, I mean that he doesn't shrug, mutter, and disappear when my medical crapola surfaces after his surgeries. He listens, absorbs, and doesn't coddle -- the perfect combination for me and my increasingly woe-is-me attitude. He will do his part and I must do mine. What is my part, though? I have been living with pain that stays on the very high end of that stupid 10-point scale, running fevers daily, sweating, able to do less and less, not sleeping for all the pain, and... chest pain is becoming way too frequent an occurence. It is hard not to worry about that freaking "dilation" of the aortic arch.

When did I become so fearful, so tentative?

Where is La Belle et Bonne Bianca Castafiore? On those rare days where I need that Diva-Witch, she is nowhere to be found!

Common Good

In for Bob Herbert, Gail Collins writes the op-ed "The Dreaded Fairness Doctrine," published in today's New York Times.

Any mammal can obsess about fairness. (Did I mention how ticked off monkeys
get if they find out they’re getting cucumbers while somebody in the next cage
has a grape?) The real human trick is to get past the quid pro quo and try to
focus on the common good.

I forgot to mention that the purported subject is the bailout. Oh! Which bailout?

The Detroit one, the voom-voom zoom zoom zoom one. To be technical, the auto industry.

Back in October, would you have known, without checking, that bailout was one, unhyphenated word? Was $700 billion inconceivable to you way back then? (It may be that I, alone in this nation, am just still in sticker shock, still feeling snookered*. I have a good head for maths, pure preferable to applied, but no aptitude for the burgeoning field of snookered-mathematics!)

I didn't want to read it, especially how it was pitched in my email summary:
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Dreaded Fairness Doctrine
By GAIL COLLINS
Any mammal can obsess about fairness. [My eyes fairly rolled back in my head in response to this universal cheesiness.]
The real human trick is to get past the quid pro quo and try to focus on the common good.

As a Socialist, I am considerably more grounded in reality than when I stroll around mathematically. I like my socialism applied, thankyouverymuch. So... she had me. There is nothing more despicable to me than the confusion of fairness with quid pro quo.

Collins makes a clear and simple point, rare enough these days. It can be dressed up for Senators and Congressional Representatives; It also plays well at the local playground:

The really hard lifting still lies ahead, and we cannot possibly do it if we’re going to dwell too much on the fairness thing. It’s just too easy for lawmakers to dodge the tough vote by reminding their constituents that somebody else is getting more breaks than they are.

Which somebody always is. If Senator DeMint’s constituents are going to riot over a bailout for the auto industry, they’ll wind up being met by tool-and-die makers waving torches and yelling about soybean subsidies. If the lawmakers from Alabama say their constituents do not want their tax money going to bail out Michigan, the people in Michigan are going to say that they never really enjoyed paying more taxes to the federal government than their state received in aid, while Alabama got a return of $1.61 on the dollar.

We do what is hard; We do what is right; We do it together; We recognize that now, and maybe always, need trumps fair.

How very... utilitarian. [Ar! Just checking for a pulse!]

*From The Phrase Finder:
Posted by Henry on March 22, 2004
In Reply to: Re: Behind the eight ball posted by Fred on March 21, 2004

: : Hi! Can you please tell me about this phrase? Thank you...

: If you are behind the eight ball you are in trouble. In the pool game called
: "eight ball" if you need to put the 5-ball in the pocket and the 8-ball is between
: the 5-ball and the cue-ball, you have a difficult shot. You are not allowed to
: use the 8-ball to hit the 5-ball.

The equivalent phrase in Britain is to be snookered. In the similar game of snooker, if a coloured ball lies between the cue ball and the remaining red balls, preventing it from hitting a red ball directly, then the player is snookered. The player must then play a more difficult shot, usually off the cushion although experts can make the ball swerve.

Image Credit

UFC fighter with bicuspid valve

My first, and thus far only, smile of the day? It was generated by the Google search that brought a poor fellow (a gender presumption) from Mansfield in the U.K. to this quirky blog a few hours ago.

"UFC fighter with bicuspid valve" were his search terms.

He must have been very disappointed.

And so, to help him out, I took up the search. And, like Mr. Manchester of the U.K., found nothing.

So I decided to catch up on some of my MMA reading. I came across an article at CagePotato.com that contained some information I've long wanted to have -- UFC salaries and fight pay. This is from October 2007:

UFC fighter salaries lack rhyme, reason

Big ups to the guys at MMAjunkie.com, who were able to obtain official
fight salaries for UFC 77 from the Ohio Athletic Commission. Below are the
amounts that each fighter in the main card took home that night. (Keep in mind
that the winners' totals reflect a doubling of their base salary.)

Anderson Silva ($120,000) def. Rich Franklin ($45,000)

Tim Sylvia ($200,000) def. Brandon Vera ($100,000)

Alvin Robinson ($6,000) def. Jorge Gurgel ($7,000)

Stephan Bonnar ($44,000) def. Eric Schafer ($6,000)

Alan Belcher ($22,000) def. Kalib Starnes ($7,000)

So, lots to discuss here. First of all, Jorge Gurgel earned about 35 cents for every
time he was punched in the face, which seems a little low. (I don't get out of
bed for less than 50 cents per face-punch.) His opponent Alvin Robinson came in
with a $3,000 base salary — shockingly low for someone on the main card of a UFC pay-per-view event.

Dana White insists that Stephan Bonnar is one-half of the greatest UFC fight of all time, yet pays him a base salary of only $22,000, equal to that of Alan “Huh?” Belcher. This is the part where the average MMA fan would start up with the “Dana White has no loyalty” rant, railing at how poorly White treats fighters who temporarily fall out of favor (see also: Franklin’s surprisingly-low $45k take). But Tim Sylvia was never popular, and he makes a guaranteed hundred-thou per fight. But then again, so does Brandon Vera, and Vera was never champion.

Come to think of it, that Vera figure can't be right. How does an up-and-coming heavyweight contender have a base salary that's $40,000 more than the middleweight champion's? [...]

Good observations, a good question.

My dream match, these days? I want Randy to get his long-desired fight -- within the UFC -- with Fedor Emelianenko.




Prediction? Nover and Bader will take TUF 8 tomorrow night.

And as much as I admire Mir's vast repertoire of BJJ submissions, Nogueira is just better.

"Cardio, boys. Cardio!"

photo credit

"Just when I thought I was out..."

Were I you, and you may thank your chosen deity that I am not (you, that is) -- Were I you?

I'd not mess with Fred, La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore, the Retired Educator, Marmy, Dobby, or Sam-I-Am -- today.

It won't go the way you wish.
You won't come away unscathed.

"Just when I thought I was out...
They pulled me back in."

Margaret and Helen

On the advice of the good doctor over at Musings of a Dinosaur, I visited the blog of Margaret and Helen, "[a] pair of 80-somethings who have been friends for 60+ years, one of whose grandson's set them up with a blog."

It's beyond a hoot -- it's something special, almost a balm in Gilead (For me, mind -- someone feeling a tad parched out in this desert.).

Anyway, à mon tour, I suggest you give them a read.

You know, I think that's the first official recommendation of elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle.

Heavy.

Feline Antics

It feels like something of a copout to post videos from YouTube. HOWEVER, this short production cracked me up, and these days, I choose to honor that which cracks me up. You've gotta love this pugnacious cat and his determination to eat... healthily. So yes, this is an *educational* and *health-conscious* amusement. (Also, instructive, enlightening, didactic, edifying, and informative)

Take it away, kitty.

"You've got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch"

Nothing gets me in the holiday spirit more than this contribution to the season from the great Dr. Seuss. It comes in handy when dealing with various grouches and nutters who seem to delight in Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa malfeasances. Of course, true Masters and Mistresses of Muck are active year round -- this is just the time when the rest of us are easy targets. We are full of unrealistic expectations, selective memories of childhood holiday wonders, rich food, and the unrelenting stress of trying to please everyone.

The Grinch anthem also plays upon the lips when a person has to deal with co-workers who are big bad meanies, like the infamous Condescending Nurse...


You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch.
You really are a heel.
You're as cuddly as a cactus,
You're as charming as an eel.
Mr. Grinch.


You're a bad banana
With a greasy black peel.


You're a monster, Mr. Grinch.
Your heart's an empty hole.
Your brain is full of spiders,
You've got garlic in your soul.
Mr. Grinch.


I wouldn't touch you, with a
thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.


You're a vile one, Mr. Grinch.
You have termites in your smile.
You have all the tender sweetness
Of a seasick crocodile.
Mr. Grinch.


Given the choice between the two of you
I'd take the seasick crockodile.


You're a foul one, Mr. Grinch.
You're a nasty, wasty skunk.
Your heart is full of unwashed socks
Your soul is full of gunk.
Mr. Grinch.


The three words that best describe you,
are, and I quote: "Stink. Stank. Stunk."


You're a rotter, Mr. Grinch.
You're the king of sinful sots.
Your heart's a dead tomato splot
With moldy purple spots,
Mr. Grinch.


Your soul is an apalling dump heap overflowing
with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable
rubbish imaginable,
Mangled up in tangled up knots.


You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch.
With a nauseaus super-naus.
You're a crooked jerky jockey
And you drive a crooked horse.
Mr. Grinch.


You're a three decker saurkraut and toadstool
sandwich
With arsenic sauce.


Copyright © 1957, Dr. Seuss.

ShoulderMan

Surgery. Monday, 15 December.
Exact time TBA.

Ho!
Ho!
Ho!

The good surgeon promised to do his best to preserve the prosthesis, and I know he will...

because he is none other than:

ShoulderMan!

101

I have been flirting with 101 degrees since Friday night. Flirt, flirt. The pain in my shoulders is steadily increasing.

We deigned to grace the Wound Care Center with our sniveling presence this morning -- and boohooed through the entire appointment.

It was mortifying.

Bless Brandi's heart (remember, please, that we call her Brandi because that is her name!). What do you do with such a patient and no doctor in the clinic? Why, you threaten to call the ID doctor, the orthopedic surgeon, *and* the Boutiqueur -- unless the weeping dipwad of a dingbat patient promises to call someone as soon as she gets home.

Which she does.

It was my first call to the Boutiqueur since his move to the new office, with the new setup, with the guarantee of being able to reach him "24/7" -- an expression that I have never been fond of.

I got the same answer that I would have received a month ago -- back in the old effed-up office, before the Grand Guarantees: "He's with patients. Can I take a message and have him or the nurse call you back?"

That, my friends, is an oldie but a goodie. I am timing him.

[Granted, I am very confused as to what he could possibly do for me. What is it about 101 that makes it a differentiating marker of some sort? What? Blood cultures? Like hell am I getting back into that damn car. I cried the whole way home and screamed during the transfer to my chair. There had best be a promise of an answer... Zut. I hate myself when I get this sick. There is this guilt that takes over -- and even without decades of therapy, I know where it comes from. The evil stepmother -- just joshing! She really is swell and I love her lots -- but everytime any of us got sick, she got mad at us. I will never forget trying to hide the fact that I had pneumonia, out of pure trepidation. She caught on when I collapsed and coughed up a lung... and she said: "What did you have to go and do that for?" You see, we were about to go on vacation to Japan... We still went. I spent most of the time in the hotel room. Hmmm. I'll clue you in on something else -- I babble when over 101. Tears, babbling, and guilt -- I have hit the trifecta.]


Edit -- and not even five minutes after publishing this! Total embarrassment. Maybe there is something to this concierge medicine after all. Boutiqueurs nurse just called -- she is the greatest. What did I do? You get three guesses. Right! I burst into tears. She is all fired up now... and the orthopedic surgeon -- who completely blew me off last week -- is about to get hit by incoming... Bless everyone's bones. I really am grateful. I really am.

Hajj 2008

Still on an admittedly febrile cruise of the web, I found this site that offers continual live coverage of the Hajj, courtesy of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington. Estimates of the number of pilgrims range from 2.5 to 3 million faithful.



Edit: In what is a fairly creepy move, the Saudi Embassy checked out this humble blog within 10 minutes of this posting.
Aasalaamu Aleikum!
Ahlan wa-Sahlan!


photo credit

A la recherche

I enjoy haphazard travel in the blogosphere. With Blogger, it's as easy as a click -- look to the upper left and choose "Next Blog."

Should your faith in humanity flag a bit, doing so may well restore it. People are amazing: They have tiny babies, and little ones, upon whom they depend (despite the folklore that posits dependency as the child's role!); They make beautiful paper and Bento boxes; They make better flashlights and mousetraps; They explore rhythm and wine.

Anyway, it's the time of year wherein we desperately want to suspend our disbelief, and if you are a cat-crazy socialist... Well, you, especially, are in need... You, especially, may want to embolden and italicize your desperation.

And so, my first click took me to The Holmes Family Adventure and a world of celebration -- with not one, but *three* lovely Christmas trees in the house: the white tree, the gold tree, and the family tree. Don't miss the annual Hartford Festival of Light -- and definitely pause a moment to admire their Scotty and his various ensembles. They are clearly a family of faith, but I confess that I am starting to get the willies, so let's move on...

Click.

And voilà Gavroche, who begins her blog of visual appreciation with works by Jim Warren and has, most recently, wrenched a bestiary from the grips of medievalists (annoying folk who get their panties in a wad over something as ordinary as a lettre historiée!). Admittedly, I opened yet another browser window to welcome a wonderfully tangential blog, Chimaera, which somehow foisted itself into my blogroll. Strange how these serendipities serendip!

I had to forcefully reel myself in!

And... click!

Errrr. Okay, I love the collie and -- lacking the translation skills of La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore -- am perplexed by the rest of Treeniblogi ja vähän muutakin. But heck, the blogger is 19, from Helsinki, and loves The Lord of the Rings, both the movie and the books, so she hasn't had time to be all bad! She writes about orbits, barriers, and I am lost.

Again, love the dog -- whose name, I think, is Niki.

Click...

We're in Norway now, in Oslo -- visiting min skravleblogg! [Help, someone. Skravle = Jaw. My jaw blog?!] Aase enjoys knitting, crocheting, most handwork -- and also wants to share recipes. I confess that what most tickled my fancy was learning the Finnish for that abominable expression "LOL" -- *ler*! She has a Christmas tree widget that is counting down the days to what must be, for someone as "crafty" as she is, the most important day of the year. Her photos of Vinter i Oslo are charming -- there is a wonderful snowperson who looks a lot like Mrs. Butterworth.

I'm all aquiver as I prepare for my last coincidental click.

Click!

Ah, well. It is the price for playing an honest game. Ligeiramente Blasé. Diego, from Brazil, promises us a traumatic time as he details the quotidian, mixing his "no-good Portuguese with his Mexican," and planning to combine this doggerel prose with his propensity for... drama, for the "lightly blasé."

Good luck to you in your travels, Dear Reader! Click...

image credit: Chimaera, British Library, Harley MS 4751, Folio 6v

أنا انظر إلى الضحك لي في هذه المرآة الجميلة

Good evening from Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé. La Belle et Bonne Bianca is booming through her inevitable "je ris de me voir..." -- except that she is putting herself through some linguistic paces. Whenever I hear her relax into Italian, I am reminded how difficult it must be for her -- she is Italian, after all, even if a rabid francophile. We make no allowances and she is so incredibly fluent that it rarely occurs to me to -- "to" what? Recognize her exile? Sooth her marginalized soul? Please, this is no grand drama! She can wield whatever language she likes, whenever she likes, but she, like most of us, has this incredible fondness for having people respond to what comes out of her mouth.



En tout cas, it is sounding not unlike a papal Christmas greeting around here tonight. Around her, tonight.




I ridere a vedere me in questo bellissimo specchio!




Late last night, my Personal Physician, the Boutiqueur, e-mailed me the wonderful news that *nothing* grew in the cultures of the personal ambrosia that was the aspirate from my left shoulder. From the expansive comfort of my wheelchair, I have been Happy Dancing à la Snoopy ever since.

Actually, I just now got out of bed and while in bed was hurting too much to attempt dance of any sort. (I've been known to do a mean horizontal shimmy. Ar! If you knew the shimmy like I know the shimmy, you'd know I wouldn't be caught dead in mid-shimmy these days. I mean, really, I only have *one* shoulder at the moment and the other one is nothing but a troublemaker.)


Ik lach me te zien in deze mooie spiegel!

What is difficult to explain is my steady tendency to take less pain medication as I hurt more. It's actually not complicated and the logic is stellar, but I am receiving odd silences and regards askance in response. Dr. Paindude's PA, the Lovely Lass, added a fourth dose of 10 mg of methadone. I tried it for a week and know that it will be -- perhaps -- another week for it to leave my system. While there was less bone pain overall, there was not one iota of benefit to the specific pain that is sucking my sanity into its black hole. (Is this where women toss in the odd "LOL"?)

My preference is ibuprofen. It has the important advantage of also bringing down my temperature.

Я смеяться видеть меня в этом прекрасном зеркало!

[These things write themselves -- think Rita Skeeter with her Quick Quotes Quill -- still, the Cyrillic alphabet comes off as uppity when italicized, don't you think?]

Fred is trying to be happy about it. Neither of us think back to July, when this scenario was last in play. The Boutiqueur has conveyed the lack of results but the orthopedic surgeon, ShoulderMan, has yet to weigh in. I imagine forlorn tones as ShoulderMan calls the ID-Dudette, who has already told me that another surgery to remove the remaining shoulder "must happen."
There are times, and this is one, where I think my teetotalism is ill-advised, and is -- indeed -- contrary to good health.

أنا انظر إلى الضحك لي في هذه المرآة الجميلة

Hilary Lister

I confess that I rolled my eyes, and swore.

Jim Broatch is at it again, leaving salient little e-news report thingies in my already overstuffed inbox. There is, thank God, no stopping the man. He's always shamelessly trying to promote that rag -- the RSDSA Review.

Still, as I read the first few lines of his e-alert, I could not help but think how tiring it is to be exhorted continually by tales of Super People. This time? Some quadriplegic yachtswoman. First of all, she doesn't even have CRPS, she is a quad, that is something totally different! Second, I don't take well to language such as "yachtswoman." Such appellations make me want to cry "[H]ow piquant!" and dig out my jar of capers -- after replacing all my onions with shallots. (I haven't had breakfast, lunch, or brunch, yet -- although afternoon tea in the gazebo is looking providential.)

Iceberg lettuce is much maligned, you know, you friséed arugula freaks!

(Pssssssssssssssst! Nasturtium seed pods make a nice replacement if you can't put your manicured hands on that jar of capers.)

(Did I type my schizophrenia out loud?)

What... oh, yes! I remember. A quadriplegic. Who "yachts." And Jim Broatch.

I felt totally manipulated without even subjecting myself to a reading of the article. What? Me, sitting here in my wheelchair, in more pain than I care to express -- what am I? Is CRPS not a pitiable disease? Hasn't Jim heard that we're on the map now -- that our wee little brains are white instead of grey proper, and smaller than the brains of your average bear?

In other words, what am I, chopped liver? (One day, I will have to extol my readership with the tales of my many famous malapropisms... "What am I, chopped suey?" comes to mind... so wrong, on so many levels. And my well-known version of The Turtles lyric: "No matter how they toss the tights... it had to be...")

I almost feel sorry for little Miss Quadriplegic Yachtswoman, trapped as she is in her dry, humorless life of leisure, her private pinky-up. How would she like to be stuck in a wheelchair on dry land, in too much severe and constant pain to zip on down to the marina? I don't even get to float in the bathtub, for Christ's sake!

Okay, so it was kind of humiliating to have my eyes trip and fall near the end of the rich bitch's story -- "progressive neurological disease, reflex sympathetic dystrophy..." Oh. Ohhhhh! Major oops. How faux is my pas!

Still... yachtswoman?

Am I supposed to conclude that CRPS/RSD occurs in a demographic other than my own? Am I supposed to be shocked that the condition of quadriplegia even *happens* in CRPS patients?

Whatever. What I resent the most is the continual exhortation to be extraordinary. To stop whining "I caaannnn't! It huuuuurts tooooo muuuuccchhhhhh..."

Yeah, well, I'll show that sadist, that Jim c'mon-you-can-do-it Broatch. I'll publish a copy of Hilary Lister's show-off of a story. Geeez, can't a person be a person just by waking up in the morning?

[Shhh! Way to go, Hilary! I can imagine the frothy spray, the smell of sea salt, the blues, the greys, the many kinds of white, the clang and flap of the sails, and your beautiful happy face...)

Disabled sailor to attempt record

A yachtswoman is to make a second attempt to become the first quadriplegic woman to sail solo around Britain.

Hilary Lister, who is paralysed from the neck down, plans to embark on the journey next May using a "sip-and-puff" system of straws to control her yacht.

Her first attempt was abandoned in August because of technical problems and bad weather.

Mrs Lister, of Faversham, Kent, said she was "confident" she would succeed.

She spent six months preparing for the first record-breaking challenge, which was expected to take three to four months in her specially-adapted vessel, an Artemis 20 called Me Too.

It has been designed to be operated through three "straws".

One works the tiller and one the sails while another allows her to select five different functions to help control the craft.

Mrs Lister became the first quadriplegic sailor to sail solo across the English Channel in 2005 and two years later was the first quadriplegic woman to sail around the Isle of Wight.

Her round-Britain attempt started in Dover in June and ended in Cornwall two months later.

Mrs Lister, a biochemistry Oxford graduate, said: "I'm confident that with the experience gained this year, we will achieve my round-Britain dream in 2009.

"Despite terrible weather, this year we sailed the entire length of the South Coast, which is further than any female disabled sailor has achieved before."

'Light switched on'

She was wheelchair-bound at the age of 15 because of a progressive neurological disorder, reflex sympathetic dystrophy.

Mrs Lister lost the use of her arms and hands in 1998, aged 27, but in late September 2003 she was taken sailing on a lake by a friend and fell in love with the sport.

She said: "Sailing came along when life didn't seem worth living any more.

"Within seconds of being on the water, a light switched back on inside me. I knew that I had found what I was going to do with the rest of my life."

Unraveling Patience::Persistence Is On My Mind

Odysseus
W. S. Merwin (1927- )
For George Kirstein

Always the setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore

The identical reproaches and somewhere
Out before him, the unraveling patience

He was wedded to. There were the islands
Each with its woman and twining welcome
To be navigated, and one to call "home."
The knowledge of all that he betrayed
Grew till it was the same whether he stayed
Or went. Therefore he went. And what wonder
If sometimes he could not remember
Which was the one who wished on his departure
Perils that he could never sail through,
And which, improbable, remote, and true,
Was the one he kept sailing home to?