Wash your mouth out with sunsets

That last post was gross. I apologize, gentle readers. To make up for it, I will give you some sunset pictures.

Leaving work before it is completely dark is a thrilling thing that happens in the early months of year. Leaving work before the sun has even gone done is a revelation. I often find myself taking pictures as I walk to the Metro after work because sunsets, like perfectly ripe peaches, make me feel spiritually inclined. These have zero doctoring. They are just natural splendor, captured by my little device whose primary purpose is to play music.

Silver Spring Metro

Silver Spring Metro

Senate Office Buildings

Warning: This is genuinely disgusting

But it's my blog, and I say what I want.


In the last few days first Colin, and then I, got hit by a nasty stomach flu. He got it over the weekend and was convinced it was food poisoning, so I tried to ignore the pains in my gut that started midday Monday. I chalked it up to paranoia. As I sat in a meeting from 3:30 to 4, it became increasingly difficult to speak because the discomfort in my stomach was so great.

15 minutes later I was vomiting harder than I have ever vomited. I vomited up Monday's lunch, Sunday's dinner. Gasped for air and vomited up Saturday's lunch. I vomited so hard that I blew my nose afterwards and little bits of rice and beans flew out. I vomited so hard that my abs, throat, and tongue were immediately sore from heaving. Thanks be to God that Colin was, by this point, well enough to get a Zipcar and pick me up. I did NOT want to vomit that hard on the Metro, or on a sidewalk between the Metro and my house. Or in a cab. Have you seen how cabbies drive? Jesus.

Within four hours I had lost literally everything in my system. I had dry heaved so hard that my gasps for air caused me to heave again. I had shivered with cold while my body worked up the vigor to vomit, and then torn the hat off my head as my blood boiled while my body heaved. Afterwards I tried to walk downstairs and halfway down just sat on the step. I tried to walk back upstairs, having realized that I wouldn't be able to make it up if I had to vomit again. Got up to the hall and lay down so I wouldn't faint. I guess that's the bonus to having practiced. Fainting, that is. Did I tell you about that time in the ER? Came in fine, saw the blood, fainted 5 minutes later. Yeah. Good one, Inez.

That's it. That's the story. Then I just got a fever and slept for most of the next 24 hours. Oh, except for the part where I woke up at 1 AM last night smelling onions. I blew my nose, and the onions started to smell bad. I went into the bathroom, hocked and spit, and my spit was black with little bits of black bean skins. So yeah, I waterpicked my nose at 1 AM because there was leftover rice & beans stuck in my sinuses.

This kind of thing is so disgusting, so excruciatingly unpleasant, that I just had to share. I know that's why you read. All three of you.


Note: the vomiting wasn't all, but I'm choosing not to go into detail about the other elements of this stomach bug. I have my dignity to consider.

Keep walking, stony-faced, to work

I made the mistake of laughing at something funny a homeless guy said as I walked from the metro to work today, and he decided that was encouragement enough to walk with me for a block or so. He opened with "Can I be your bodyguard for 30 seconds?" Kept up a running stream of -- admittedly humorous --  commentary, and closed with "Can I help it you're beautiful?" Me: silence, looking straight ahead. "You don't know you're beautiful? Well that's your fucking problem. Good luck."

What I should have said: "Look, you're funny, but following me when I've made it clear I'm not going to give you any personal information is disrespectful. Leave me alone."

What I should have said: "No, you know what my fucking problem is? Guys like you. I know I'm beautiful. I own a mirror, and I have eyes. Moreover, I know because guys like you feel the need to tell me constantly, as if I don't know. My fucking problem is that guys like you think that because I'm beautiful I owe you something. I don't owe you shit. Yeah, I know I'm beautiful. Now leave me the fuck alone."

What I said: Nothing. Kept walking, stony-faced, to work.

Abnormally diminished content of glucose in the blood

My mama came to DC for a conference and stayed an extra night to see me. Realizations we had during our visit: maybe I'm hypoglycemic. It would explain so much. Jamie also has hypoglycemia and she basically described it as having inefficient metabolism and needing to eat every few hours. That is definitely my experience, and I think it has been getting worse in the last couple years. Lately the only way I can last between breakfast and lunch without eating anything else is if I have eggs for breakfast and then have lunch around 11:30 (3 1/2 hours after breakfast). If I have cereal or something else lower in protein I usually can't last past 10 am without needing a snack, and I am hungry enough to eat lunch right then. I'm not even riding my bike to work these days and I still feel like I basically need two full lunches in addition to regular breakfast and dinner. Packing two lunches feels like a big pain in the ass, but the alternative is to constantly snack on things like soy nuts and protein bars. I don't really like protein bars because 1) they're expensive, and 2) they're always sweet. When my body craves protein, it doesn't want that protein to be covered in sugar. It occurs to me that maybe I should look into making some sort of protein bar myself.

Ineptitude

A phone call as part of my job.

[I've been on hold for 5-10 minutes --with no hold music, so I wasn't sure if I was on hold or wasting my time -- after being transferred a few times.]
Her: Department of Health and Human Services, how can I help you?
Me: I'm calling with a question about Medicaid.
Her: That's under Social Services....
Me: I'm sorry, I was transferred here.
Her: Under the Health and Human Services we have MaineCare. You need Social Services.
Me: [Staring at the website where it says "MaineCare (also known as Medicaid)."] I'm sorry, I thought MaineCare and Medicaid were the same thing.
Her: No, Medicare blah blah blah...
Me: No, I'm not calling about Medicare, I'm calling about Medicaid. [Silence.] I'm sorry, I wasn't calling about Medicare, I have a question about Medicaid.
Her: We call it MaineCare.
Me: That's what I thought.

Assurances

I finally got in touch with my vet last night, having decided about a week ago to try to describe to her in detail the process of Raleigh's dying and death, and see if she had any ideas abut what may have happened. I had put the dogs in the back yard because they'd been wrestling at the top of the stairs so rough that Raleigh had actually fallen down a few stairs before stopping himself with paws spread wide and then bounded back up to Hazel. They had the crazies. So I put them outside. But I wanted to ask her, is it possible that fall precipitated his extremely sudden death 10 or 15 minutes later?

The short answer, of course, was that there was no way of knowing what had happened. She didn't seem very worried about his fall down a few steps, and she threw out a number of ideas about what could have happened -- a simple seizure, which can in some cases be fatal; a blood clot; a stroke; an embolism, which I had to look up (Wikipedia says: "an embolism is the event of lodging of anembolus [a detached intravascular mass capable of clogging capillary beds at a site far from its origin] into a narrow capillary vessel of an arterial bed which causes a blockage  in a distant part of the body"). In short, when something that fast happens in a young healthy dog, you just can't really tell.

However, she did say say that given how quickly it happened (over the course of 45 second or maybe a couple of minutes -- my panicked brain may not have been judging time accurately) it sounded like there was absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it, and nothing I could have done to fix it once the process had started. She said that it was doubtful that anything could have been done even if a vet had been right there when it happened.

So I guess that's reassuring.

And sad.

Mostly sad.

Translating supervisor speak

What she said: You didn't put the times down here.

What she meant: I can see quite plainly that you put the correct times next to each interview in the second table, but I would prefer that you make the cell borders visible.