Hospital: Surgery and post-surgery

This article is part two of a three-part series on my hospital experiences. Part one is called A day in the life, and part three is Recovery at home. When we last left our hero, he (that is to say "I") had been in the hospital for over 5 weeks and was getting pretty tired of being there.

24 Hours Notice

For the entire month of February, Gail and I kept asking the doctors what would be happening next, mainly to try to figure out when I could go home. They told me I'd eventually be getting my gallbladder out, but they couldn't tell me whether that would be days, weeks, or months away. The most common answer to any of these types of questions was "We'll just have to wait and see". At one point near the end of my stay, a nurse told me that I had been very patient through this whole thing (I guess I was a patient patient HA HA HA) but the truth is that I had no real choice. All I had heard for five weeks was "wait and see", so my options were (1) be patient or (2) go insane. At the beginning of March my stomach seemed to be growing larger and more uncomfortable. The doctor said that a pancreatic pseudocyst was forming, and all of the dead tissue from my pancreas was collecting there, as well as blood and other fluids and stuff. On March 15th I was told that they wanted to do surgery tomorrow to remove my gallbladder and drain the pseudocyst. By this point, I was getting quite uncomfortable so I welcomed this news. Not to mention that this was the first step in actually solving the problem – all the ultrasounds, CT scans, and X-rays were just for diagnosing it.

The surgery began around 4:20pm on March 16th and went for a couple of hours, followed by about three hours in recovery. They wheeled me down to the operating room in a stretcher and Gail stayed with me as long as they would let her. But eventually they told her she had to go to the waiting room and they wheeled me into the OR. They hooked my IV up to the anaesthetic, and then the anaesthesiologist put a mask over my face and said "You'll be under in ten seconds". I didn't make it to five. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the recovery room several hours later. Gail, my parents, and my sister were all in the waiting room the whole time and they all remember the exact moment that Dr. Pace walked in after the surgery. He wasn't smiling. They all stood up and walked over to him. He took Gail's hands in his and the first thing he said was "It was a mess in there. <pause> But he's going to be OK." The pause only lasted a second or two, but they all remember what they were thinking during that time. Gail thought "Oh God, either he's dead or the surgery didn't go well". My sister figured that both Gail and my mom would collapse and she was trying to decide which one to catch. Perhaps if Dr. Pace had reversed the order of those two statements, some momentary anxiety might have been avoided.

I had figured I'd be mentally out of commission (i.e. either sleeping or awake but incoherent) the rest of that day and part of the next day, but once I woke up in recovery I was pretty much alert. I remember being wheeled back to my room and when I saw everyone, I attempted to be as upbeat and chipper as possible to convince everyone that I was OK. I didn't think about the fact that I'd already been out of surgery for a few hours, and everyone else knew far more than I did about how it went. My gallbladder was removed, and most of the pseudocyst was drained. I almost fell over when Gail told me that four litres of "stuff" was taken out. Four freaking litres. They couldn't simply remove the pseudocyst because it was physically attached to my pancreas and as far as I know, it's still there.

Tubes, Staples, and a Pain in the Ass

I lifted my gown the next morning to see that my abdomen was covered with bandages, and I had two drains in – a "J2" tube and a T-tube. I don't remember what the J2 tube was for, but it was basically a little plastic bulb. The T-tube went from my common bile duct out through my abdomen into a bag to drain off the excess bile that would normally have been stored in my now-absent gallbladder. The J2 was only there for ten days, while the T-tube was there for several weeks, even after I was discharged. I also had yet another tube up my nose which went to my stomach but this time rather than pushing nutrients into my stomach, it was pulling stuff out. This was, again, to make sure my stomach stayed empty to let the pancreas rest. When I had the bandages changed the next day, I saw the actual incision for the first time – a long nasty-looking cut with staples holding it closed. The staples (all 43 of them) were removed on March 29. My sister Trudy had had abdominal surgery a couple of years before, and she told me that the staples were similar to your standard paper staples, but longer and had little hooks on the ends to make sure they didn't come out. When the nurse came to take the staples out, she couldn't figure out why I was so nervous about it. I kept asking how this was going to work and she showed me the tool she was going to use to do it, but I was still nervous. Eventually I asked about the hooks on the ends of the staples, and she had no idea what I was talking about. Turns out that the staples I got did not have hooks, so they just looked like three sides of a square. The tool would bend the middle one, forcing the other two up (making the whole thing look like a capital M) and straight out. No pain, no discomfort, and the whole thing was done in maybe 15 minutes. I was ready to call Trudy and yell at her for scaring me but she assured me that her staples did have hooks, and by the end of our conversation, she was ready to call her doctor and yell at him.

About a week after surgery, I had a CT scan that showed that there was a collection of fluid in my pelvis. The doctor said that they were going to put another drain in, but it might be uncomfortable. The best way to do this would be to go through my buttocks. So they inserted the drain by putting a needle straight through the middle of my right butt cheek. This was done in the CT scan room – I lay on my left side in the CT scan machine. They took a scan then started to insert the drain. Every now and again they'd stop, take another scan to see where they were, and then continue. After my surgery, I was given a pain pump, which was a machine on an IV pole that dispensed a measured amount of painkiller whenever I pressed a button, so I could control how much I was getting. Of course, there were some rules – pressing the button more than once every five minutes would do nothing and if I pressed it more than some number of times in an hour, it would lock out and have to be reset by a nurse. During the insertion of this drain, I forgot about the second rule, so I stared at the clock and pressed the button precisely every five minutes. About halfway through the procedure I hit the second limit (though I didn't realize it) and so all button pushes after that did nothing. This meant that I was getting no additional painkiller for half of this procedure. As a result, this was the most painful thing that happened to me during my entire hospital stay. The fact that the radiologist hit my sciatic nerve twice didn't help. Once they were done, they padded the hell out of my butt so I could still sit down comfortably, and I had another bag to pin to my gown. But this one didn't drain much at all – a few mL a day - and Dr. Pace (who was on vacation when it was put in; another doctor made the decision to do it) told me later that it was either put in the wrong place or entirely unnecessary. Great.

On March 29, Dr. Pace told me after yet another CT scan (I had a ton of those) that there was still a gallstone in my common bile duct, and it was likely the one that caused all the problems in the first place. There were three ways to get rid of that stone: (1) put a scope down my throat, (2) put a scope in through the T-tube, or (3) as a last resort, more surgery. Two days later, I had an ERCP (endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography) – this was option 1 above. He couldn't remove the stone, so he put a little cut in the bile duct so that the stone would fall through into my intestine where I would eventually pass it. The next day I had an X-ray, and the technician said that the stone was still there, but Dr. Pace said this wasn't too surprising and that I shouldn't worry about it.

Get Out Of Here

By this point, I was really ready to go home. Dr. Pace had acknowledged this, saying that I had "hospitalitis" and he would try to get me home as soon as he could. He had also mentioned the possibility of going home temporarily – he could give me a "day pass" so I could go home in the morning as long as I was back in the evening. They had been preparing me for discharge as well – the J2 tube was gone, the T-tube was still there but clamped, I no longer had anything up my nose, and even my IV had been removed. I assumed that the one remaining gallstone would have to be gone before I could be discharged, so when the tech told me it was still there, I was quite disappointed. This was April 1st, the day before Good Friday. I figured the X-ray techs would all be gone for the Easter long weekend, so I wouldn't be able to have another one until Tuesday, which meant I wasn't going home until at least then. First thing the next morning, Dr. Pace came into my room with some surprising news. "It seems you have been given some incorrect information", he said. "The stone is gone". In my mind, I jumped up and did some cartwheels around the room. In reality, it was likely nothing much more than a little fist pump and a muttered "Yes!" before Dr. Pace asked the Dumb Question of the Day: "Do you want to go home today?" I decided that "Duh!", although correct, wouldn't be an appropriate answer, so I just said "Sure!" and he went off to begin the discharge paperwork. I called Gail and asked her the second Dumb Question of the Day: "If it's not too much trouble, would you mind coming to the hospital to pick me up?" She was happy enough because she thought I'd gotten a day pass, but when I told her I was being discharged, she almost dropped the phone. She and the boys were in the van within minutes. It was exactly eight weeks after I was admitted.

After getting some prescriptions and arranging for a home care nurse, I got dressed in something other than a hospital gown for the first time in two months. Bending over to put on and tie my shoes was a challenge and I almost asked Gail to do it for me, but I persevered and did it myself. I remember the feeling of walking out the front door of the hospital – it was as if I'd been released from prison. Gail asked if I wanted her to bring the van around so I wouldn't have to climb the four stairs into the parking garage (it had also been two months since I did stairs) but I decided if I could tie my shoes, I could climb four stairs. The van ride home seemed quite bumpy – for the next few weeks, any bump we hit while I was in the van caused discomfort or pain in my belly. But by 2:00pm I was home, and we had my parents, my sister, and Gail's parents over for dinner that night. They probably had barbecued burgers and potato salad and stuff like that for dinner, while I had a small bowl of soup that I couldn't finish. But that night I slept in my own bed, with my family less than 45 minutes away, and it was fabulous.

Coming up next, the series finale: Recovery at home.

Email scam

Gail received an email the other day from a friend of hers. The email said that she had gone to London, England for an impromptu vacation and gotten mugged, and now they needed money to get home, and asked if we could help them out. The email was fairly convincing:

Hey There,

    How you doing? This has had to come in a hurry as it left me in a devastating state...  Myself,<husband's name> and the Kids made a trip to London (United Kingdom) unannounced some days back on vacay, Unfortunately we got mugged at gun point last night! All cash, Credit card and phone got stolen, we are stranded in London, fortunately passport and travel docs was back in my hotel room.  It was a bitter experience and I was hurt on my right hand, but would be fine. I'm sending you this message cos I don't want anyone to panic; I want you to keep it that way for now!

Our return flight leaves tomorrow, but we're having troubles sorting out the hotel bills.. This is embarrassing enough, wondering if you could loan us some dollars to sort out the hotel bills and also take a cab to the airport about ($2000). We have been in contact with the police  and the Embassy here, but they aren't helping issues, We got limited means of getting out of here, Already canceled our cards and made a police report.. We don’t get new card numbers till we get back home! So we really need your help.

You could wire whatever you can spare to my name and hotel address via Western union:

<name>
56 Kentish Town Road
London, NW5 2AA
United Kingdom

Please get back to me with the details once you have made the transfer; would def refund it to you once I arrive! Hopefully in 2 days,  Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause you.

I await your prompt response.

Thank you,
<name>

Gail forwarded it on to me asking if we could help them. I was immediately suspicious (turns out Gail was too, but she didn't say that in her email) and I responded to Gail warning her that this had a bad smell to it. I told her that if she was going to respond, tell her friend to call us collect and send no money until we'd talked to her in person. I asked if her friend ever used the word "vacay" (I don't know anyone who does) or if she'd be likely to say "I await your prompt response". More importantly, is she the kind of person who would take off for England on short notice? Even if she was, would she bring the kids during the first month of school? Gail decided that this was not likely and called her at home. Sure enough, she was there, her email account had been hacked, and she had already had over 40 phone calls from other people. Hopefully nobody got suckered in.

I've seen lots of different email scams and most of them are obviously fake. This one looked relatively legitimate – so much so that while I was immediately suspicious, I didn't dismiss it out of hand like I usually do. Be careful out there.

Hospital: A day in the life

I know I said before that I was done writing about my hospital experience, but I realized since then that I've written about the pancreatitis attack that led to my hospitalization, and the roommates I had while in the hospital, and some numeric totals regarding my stay, but nothing about the hospital experience itself. I recently looked over my blog posts about my visit to the UK last summer, and thought that I should do the same for my hospital stay. Before you run away screaming, don't worry, I won't be going through day by day and there are some details I will be leaving out. Some things, well, you just don't need (or likely want) to know about. There's lots of stuff about my stay that I will likely forget in the near future, so I've written about it here for millions of internet users around the world to enjoy for years to come posterity. It wasn't until after I started writing this article that I realized how much information there was to convey (read: it got really frickin' long), so I've broken it into three parts: pre-surgery (this article), surgery and post-surgery, and recovery at home.

The Button and the Balls

I went into the hospital on February 5, 2010. I've already written about that day, so I won't go into those details again. The next week or so is a blur. Gail suggested I keep a little diary to record changes or problems or questions or whatever since I was in a fog much of the time, and she kept a separate one as well. The first entry in my journal is Feb 11, and most of the first few entries are about painkillers. I remember having to call for the nurse whenever I needed painkiller, and a few times I had to press the nurse call button a few times before she would come. I was in a fair bit of pain at that point, so every minute it took her was an eternity. At one point I got frustrated waiting, so I started writing down the time whenever I pressed the button and the time at which I finally got the shot. When you press the nurse call button, a light goes on above your door in the hallway as well as in the nurses' station, but what I didn't realize at the time was that pressing it again does nothing. Once you've pressed the button, there is no point in pressing it again until it's been cancelled. Sometimes it took 15-20 minutes before the nurse actually arrived, but whether I pressed the button once or fifteen times was irrelevant. Looking over my diary, there were times when I didn't receive the shot of painkiller until 30-45 minutes after first pressing the button. On February 12, I started on long-lasting dilaudid – I'd get one 6 mg pill at 8am and another at 8pm, and that would be it. If I had excessive ("breakthrough") pain I could ask for a shot, but that only happened a few times – other than that, the long-lasting stuff worked really well.

I had an IV for medication the entire time I was hospitalized. (In fact, for a day or two after my surgery, I had so much stuff going into me that I needed two IV poles because all the stuff didn't fit on one.) For the first couple of weeks, I was also on oxygen since there was a large collection of fluid below my lungs (a "pleural effusion") that made it painful to take a deep breath, and so my blood didn't have as much oxygen in it as it should have. They gave me a thing called an incentive spirometer, which consisted of three parallel plastic cylinders, each containing a ball. There was a plastic tube coming out of one of them. I was supposed to put the tube in my mouth and suck in like a straw – if I sucked in hard enough, each of the three balls would rise to the top of its cylinder. When I first got this device I could raise the first ball all the way, and the second one would move a little but the third one didn't budge. The fluid under my lungs gradually went away and as it did, I was able to move the second and third balls, and my oxygen saturation level started to grow again. By February 17th I could raise all three balls to the top and hold them there for half a second, and by about the 20th, I was able to remove the oxygen tubes completely.

The nurses kept asking me when I peed and how much, so I started recording it in my diary. So I have a record of exactly when I went and how much there was for every day for most of February and half of March. No, I'm not going to include that information here, but email me if you're interested. Actually, don't.

Normal

I had a feeding tube that went up my nose, then down my throat and directly to my small intestine, thus bypassing my stomach. Since my stomach was not being used, my pancreas was also idle. The idea here was to allow my pancreas to heal by not using it. It's amazing what you get used to – what you consider "normal". For the next four weeks, I had a tube up my nose 24/7 and that was "normal". When it was time for me to have a shower, I'd ask the nurse to see if the shower was available, and to disconnect me from the feed pump and IV. The tube was still in my nose, but it could be disconnected from the feed pump and had a little valve that could be closed. Then I'd put on my shower slippers (plastic ones, as opposed to my fuzzy slippers which were more comfortable) and make my way to the shower room. The first time I did this, an orderly named Lou, who was the one of the friendliest and most helpful people I met at Grand River, helped me with everything but the actual shower which I could do myself. After that first one, Gail would usually be there to help me, though I think I managed a shower or two on my own by mid-March. The shower room had a single stall and a cabinet with towels, gowns, and pants, plus various soaps and shampoos. After my shower, I'd go back to my room where I'd remove the tape holding the feeding tube to my cheek, shave (all the while holding the feeding tube in one hand so there was no chance it got pulled out), and then call for the nurse to come back and tape the tube to my cheek again and reconnect the feed pump and IV. This whole process took about an hour, and none of it seemed weird to me. At the time, this was what "normal" was.

I went through a bunch of doctors at this point. My first couple were from the ER, and then I was passed off to the gastrointestinal group. This group rotated once a week, so I'd have one doctor for a week, and then on Friday they'd switch and I'd have a new doctor. The doctors were Dr. Ismaili, Dr. Golubov, Dr. Meghji, Dr. Sharma, and Dr. Bissonnette. One of them introduced me to Dr. Pace, who specializes in surgery involving the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder. Dr. Pace eventually became my surgeon. I was also introduced to Dr. Needham-Nethercott, who I believe was head of the ICU. She put me on an "ICU watch" for a while, which meant that they were paying close attention to me (they checked on me every four hours), and if my condition deteriorated in any way they'd have me moved to the ICU immediately. She also said that whenever she hears "pancreatitis" she basically assumes that the patient will be in the ICU for months. I never had to go to the ICU, so I was pretty lucky. I was told that the fact that I was relatively young (40 last summer) and in pretty good physical shape really helped. I have been exercising a couple of times a week for years, and I started running last summer too – who knew that getting lots of exercise could help save your life?

For a while I wasn't allowed anything to eat or drink – not even water. If I was dry I could suck on ice chips, but I had to spit the water out rather than swallowing it. Eventually I was allowed water to drink and then was put on a "clear fluids" diet. This consisted of water, juice (apple, orange, or cranberry), Jell-O (yellow, orange, or red), and coffee or tea (no milk or cream). At lunch and dinner I also got chicken or beef broth and a can of Schweppes ginger ale. I eventually requested no broth (didn't like it) and no ginger ale (the carbonation didn't agree with me). On Valentine's Day, I was given a banana popsicle instead of Jell-O and thought it was the best thing I'd ever tasted. I assumed at the time that this was a Valentine's Day treat, but I got popsicles now and again after that and they were always welcome. There was a fridge that patients could use, so Gail bought some popsicles for me and put them in the freezer, so I could have them whenever I wanted, as long as I had the energy to walk down there to get one. The room with the fridge was maybe 100 feet from my room, but some days it may as well have been five miles away. I stayed on the clear fluids diet until March 9, when I began the "full fluids" diet – still nothing solid, but closer. The first day I had yogurt and Cream of Wheat with milk for breakfast, and cream of chicken soup, yogurt, and chocolate pudding for lunch. For dinner, I had cream of broccoli soup with apple sauce, but I was actually still too full from lunch to eat any dinner. This was a little foreshadowing of how it would be when I came home in early April – my stomach had shrunk so much that when Gail made me 2 scrambled eggs for breakfast one morning, I couldn't finish them. While I was on full fluids, Gail occasionally went down to the Tim Horton's in the lobby and got me some chicken soup, though I had to strain the chunks of vegetables and chicken out first. I was on the full fluids diet for exactly one week. After that was my surgery, and then I was back on ice-chips-but-spit-the-water-out. I went back onto clear fluids a week later, but I didn't have anything solid (i.e. that I could actually chew) until I came home on April 2.

The Routine

A typical day would begin around 6:00am when I would be awakened for my morning shots. A nurse would also draw blood for tests at this time – not every day, but a couple of days a week. I usually tried to go back to sleep until about 7:00-7:30. The nurses worked 12 hour shifts, 7:00 to 7:00, and usually the new nurse would come in by 8:00 to give me my painkiller and if I hadn't met her before, introduce herself. (I'm going to use feminine pronouns for nurses although I did have one male nurse for one shift.) I'd usually have the same nurse for two day shifts followed by two night shifts, so I'd have one nurse, say, Monday and Tuesday during the day, and then Wednesday and Thursday nights. Sometimes they'd switch shifts or whatever but that was usually the schedule. Breakfast would come around 8:00, and Gail would normally arrive between 9:00 and 10:00 after dropping the boys off at school. If my parents or Gail's were staying at our house, she'd sometimes ask them to drop the boys off so she could leave earlier. If Gail had to pick the boys up from school, she'd leave around 3:00. Sometimes she'd come back with the boys for a few hours in the evening, and then leave around 8:00 to get them home to bed.

I need to say a few things about Gail here. The entire two months I was in the hospital, there were only two days that I didn't see her. There were a number of days that she drove in and back twice – and we're talking about a 45-minute drive each way. I only had one procedure done that I can think of that she wasn't there for, and that one was scheduled at 7:30am on a day where nobody else was available to take the kids to school. I think she cried in front of me maybe twice the whole time – hell, I cried in front of her way more often than that. Not that she didn't cry at all, but (I found out later) she made a serious effort not to do it where I could see her. She was essentially a single parent for two months, and came to the hospital just about every day, all the while (mostly) keeping up with her full-time job at EDS. Oh, and she was also chair of the school council and a Beaver leader. She was an absolute rock, and I don't know how I would have gotten through this whole nightmare without her. Sweetheart, I tell you this every day, but it bears repeating ad infinitum: I love you more than you will ever know.

Anyway, back to the routine. Lunch came around 12:30-1:00, and dinner around 6:00. If I was going to have a shower, I usually tried for mid-afternoon, since the shower was usually available then. I usually had a 45-minute nap in the morning and a longer one (60-90 minutes) in the early afternoon. The lengths of the naps was not scheduled or anything, that's just how long they usually lasted. If I had no procedures (ultrasounds, CT scans, stuff like that) scheduled, the rest of the day was spent goofing around on the internet, watching TV, watching movies on my laptop, checking work email (which I read once or twice a week but rarely responded to), or reading. I didn't read much during the first few weeks or so because I couldn't concentrate long enough, but eventually I was able to read more. I read By The Time You Read This by Giles Blunt, Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton, Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi, Extreme Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean, and some of the stories in Just After Sunset by Stephen King. I had a number of visitors over my stay, and a few of them brought me magazines to read. One brought me a puzzle book to keep my mind working as well as an external hard drive filled with TV shows and movies public domain videos copied with the creator's express written permission (thanks John!), another lent me her PSP with some games (thanks Dove!), and another lent me seasons 1 and 2 of Star Trek: Voyager on DVD (thanks Ian!) so I had those to keep me occupied as well. Gail didn't take any vacation time - she brought her laptop to the hospital almost every day and worked. HP was very flexible – I'm sure they knew that Gail wasn't likely putting in her full 40 hours every week, but they also knew why not, and cut her a lot of slack. We paid $20/week each for wireless internet access, but it was worth it so that Gail could be there with me. After dinner was more of the same – internet, movies, TV, books – until bedtime, usually 10:30-11:00. I had the occasional needle through the day (don't remember them all – there was heparin four times a day to prevent blood clots, and another one specifically for the pancreas, though I don't remember the name), and sometimes I had shots at midnight or 3:00am as well.

A535, TV, and PICC

I didn't sleep well for the first week or so, since the painkillers I was getting at that point would only last a few hours. Once I was on the longer-lasting stuff, I could sleep a little longer, but I was getting lots of fluids via IV, so I had to go to the bathroom a couple of times a night. Sleeping for four hours straight was unusually long. By the beginning of March, my back was getting sore from being in bed all the time, so Gail bought me a memory foam pad. This helped immensely. We asked if I could use Rub A535 on my back at bedtime, and we were told that since it wasn't ordered by the doctor, the nurse couldn't give me any, but there was no reason we couldn't put it on ourselves. So Gail brought me some and I put it on, and that helped too.

At one point, my sister suggested that if I was having trouble sleeping, I could ask the doctor for some Ativan, which was a safe drug that would help me sleep. It's not a sleep aid per se, it's used to reduce anxiety, but the net result ends up being better sleep. That evening I asked my nurse about it, but I forgot the name of the drug. I knew it began with 'a' so I started guessing names and eventually came up with Ambien, which I had probably only heard of thanks to online pharmacy spam. The nurse immediately said "I am not giving you Ambien." Since Trudy told me that the drug was pretty much benign (though Wikipedia says it can be addictive), the nurse's strong reaction told me that I had gotten the name wrong. The nurse said that Ambien is an anti-insomnia drug that you can't get in Canada, but a few years before when she was working in the US, she saw patients who had bad reactions to Ambien, causing psychotic episodes. After hearing this, I wholeheartedly agreed with her decision not to give me any. She eventually figured out what drug I actually meant and gave me some. It worked pretty well, and I took it a couple more times over the remainder of my stay.

From what I've read, if we lived in the USA and didn't have insurance, two months in the hospital plus the surgery and medications and medical imaging and all that stuff would have cost many tens of thousands of dollars. Because we live in Canada, all I had to pay for was the TV and phone in my room. Well, that and $40 for the ambulance ride, but my work insurance reimbursed me for that. The phone was about $15/week, but the TV was crazy expensive. It cost about $90/week, which I didn't really realize until late February or early March, at which point I cancelled it. Luckily this happened after the Olympics ended, so I was able to watch a lot of the Games (including all of the men's hockey games involving Team Canada) from my room. There was also a TV in the lounge down the hall, so a couple of times Gail and the boys and I would go down there and watch skiing or snowboarding or something. We watched the first two periods of the gold medal hockey game from there, then Gail and the boys had to go home. I watched the third period and overtime (Sidney Crosby baby!) from my room. The majority of my TV viewing was sports – SportsCentre during breakfast, Olympics, and Leafs games after the Olympics ended (boy, going from watching Team Canada to watching the Leafs was a bit of a letdown). I also watched Star Trek: TNG, Deep Space Nine, or Voyager whenever they were on.

On March 4th, I vomited and my feeding tube got dislodged, so they removed it. A new tube was inserted the next afternoon but after another day I barfed that one up as well. I had had the feeding tube in for almost a month at this point, and my throat was sufficiently sore and irritated that they decided not to put another one in. On the 10th, I had a PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) line put in. This is a very thin tube that went into a vein in my right arm, up my arm to my shoulder, then around below my neck and down almost to my heart. The PICC line was used primarily for TPN (total parenteral nutrition), which means that I was being fed intravenously. The feeding tube had basically been putting stuff equivalent to pre-digested food directly into my small intestine, which would then absorb the nutrients. With the PICC line, they pushed the nutrients directly into my bloodstream. The TPN was a whitish liquid, so it looked like I had a big bag of milk hanging from my IV pole. The PICC line was also useful for drawing blood, so when that needed to be done, they would just disconnect the food tube, flush the line with some saline, then draw the blood out. This was slower than the standard needle method, but didn't require me to get poked like before. It also caused one pretty scary moment. Part of the pancreas's job is to create insulin, so if the part of my pancreas that creates insulin was damaged, I might have ended up diabetic. And not the relatively easy Type 2 treat-it-with-medication diabetes either – this would be full blown Type 1 you-need-multiple-insulin-shots-every-day diabetes. One day, a standard blood test came back with an extremely high glucose value. I don't know the units of measure, but the "normal" sugar values are below 7. Gail (a Type 2 diabetic) has seen her numbers up around 10 or so (before she was on medication), and that's not bad. A high value would be around 16. This value was 33. The nurse told me that this definitely indicated that I was diabetic but before this news could really sink in, they had drawn more blood and done more tests and found that the 33 was an anomaly – probably some of the TPN stuff had gotten mixed with the blood that was extracted from the PICC line. The next few tests showed a blood sugar level of around 8.5. Kinda high but no diabetes.

Shave and a haircut – to bits

In early March, Gail bought a hair trimming kit because my hair was getting a little long and hard to keep clean. We put some towels on the floor of the bathroom and I knelt down over the sink and she gave me a buzz cut. We had a bit of an accident though – she took the trimmer off to do my sideburns, and then realized that she hadn't finished the back yet so she went to do that. After one stroke she said "oops" and then put the trimmer back on. For the next few weeks I had fairly short hair with one rectangle of very short hair at the back. Gail felt pretty bad about it but I thought it was kind of funny. Most of the time I was in bed or sitting facing the door so most people didn't see it, though the occasional nurse asked about it. The rest of the time I just figured one of two things: (1) I wasn't looking my best anyway, and (2) I was walking around a hospital wearing a gown and pushing an IV pole, so people who saw the swipe at the back of my head would think that I had just had brain surgery.

From the day I got to the hospital, we kept asking when I could go home. When it became clear that I would need to stay in the hospital for a while longer, we started asking if it were possible for me to be transferred to a hospital closer to home, preferably MacMaster or St. Joe's in Hamilton. My doctors could see no reason why not. I have absolutely no complaints about the care I was given at Grand River; we were looking into the transfer purely for convenience. My sister, who is a behavioural therapist, talked to some of her many friends and colleagues in the healthcare industry to find out who I should be seeing in Hamilton. She came up with a doctor at Mac named Dr. Marcaccio, so we gave that name to my doctor. He called Mac and even spoke directly to Dr. Marcaccio, but Mac's policy is that they won't accept patient transfers unless there is a solid medical reason for it. If there was something that they could do for me at Mac that they couldn't do at Grand River, they'd be happy to approve the transfer, but they wouldn't do it just for our convenience. I remember thinking later that I was lucky that this didn't happen when we were in France or the UK or somewhere much further from home than Kitchener. We asked a couple more times but the answer was always the same and we eventually gave up.

In our next exciting episode of the "Hospital" series: surgery and post-surgery.

Friends

Despite the fact that half a billion people are on facebook and millions are on twitter, there are still people who don't like social networking sites and think they're a waste of time. Haters gonna hate. But whenever I hear negative talk about these types of sites, I think about this:

To everyone who came to the hospital to visit me, or called on the phone, sent me an email or facebook message, wrote on my wall, left me a comment, or even just clicked "Like" on my statuses, thank you. My family and I have been through a lot in the past several months, and it sounds corny but knowing I had so many friends out there thinking about me, worrying about me, and praying for me really warmed my heart.

I met with my surgeon this morning, and he told me that we had to "break up". There is no longer any reason for me to visit him, so I have no further appointments scheduled with either him or my family doctor.

This article is quite late – I should have posted it months ago, and for that I sincerely apologize. But thanking everyone like this felt like something that shouldn't be done while I was still recovering. Today is the first day since the attack that I really feel like it's over. I am not 100% back to the way I was before, and the doctor says it's possible I may never get there. But I feel mostly normal, I can play sports, I can beat my eight-year-old son at arm-wrestling (that was not a given a couple of months ago), I have no doctor's appointments scheduled, I have no medication to take, I can eat anything I want, and I've gained back all the weight I lost. In fact, I've gained a little more than I wanted to. Now I'm back to trying to lose a few pounds, which means that things really are back to normal.

I said before that I wasn't going to write about this whole ordeal again, but I've changed my mind. I'm in the process of writing an article describing my experiences in the hospital and during my recovery at home, if only so that everything I remember now gets saved away somewhere before I forget it all.

Thanks again.

Ian McAdam

Last summer, our family travelled to England and Scotland and while in Scotland, we met up with a number of aunt, uncles, and cousins of mine. We spent a great evening with my cousin Ian and his wife Lesley at the racetrack in Hamilton – I wrote about it here (July 11). Last week, Ian passed away suddenly. He was only 45.

Ian was quite a character – charming and very outgoing with lots of personality, but not to the point of being obnoxious. Well, not usually, anyway. We didn't really know each other very well since we lived on different continents our whole lives, but whenever I saw him, he always treated me like we were best friends. I was unaccustomed to this. I grew up in Canada, while all my aunts, uncles, and cousins live in Scotland and England. Whenever I did travel to Scotland or they travelled here, there was always some awkwardness because we were family but didn't really know each other. Ian didn't care about that – we were cousins, and so when we were together, we were going to have a good time. The night we went to the racetrack, I think Ian felt like the host – this was his country and his town (he saw a few friends of his while we were there), and so he was going to make absolutely sure we had a great time. And he succeeded.

We were visiting my Aunt Sandra in the morning when Ian called looking for us. He suggested we go to the racetrack while Aunt Sandra babysat his girls and our boys. When we arrived at the racetrack, there were hundreds of other people there as well, and the lines for food were very long. We were hungry, but we didn't want to wait in the long lines, so we decided we'd get dinner later. We went and got our betting forms and some drinks, since the drink lines were much shorter. Ian and I got beer, Lesley got wine, and Gail just had water. Ian asked if she wanted wine or beer or something else instead but Gail said no because alcohol can affect the medication she takes for her diabetes. Gail has Type 2 diabetes and it's completely controlled by the medication – she doesn't need insulin shots, and she's pretty much free to have whatever food (sugary or not) that she wants. Once Ian heard that Gail was diabetic, he got an idea. He asked what Gail wanted to eat and Gail said that the BBQ pork sandwich sounded pretty good. Ian said "I'll be right back" and dashed off towards the food stand. He returned just a few minutes later with a couple of sandwiches and a couple of orders of fries chips. We asked how he got them so quickly with such a long lineup, and he just said "don't ask". We suspected that he had run up to the front of the line and shouted "I have a diabetic woman who needs food right now!", which was technically true, if a bit misleading – it's not like she was in danger of passing out if she didn't eat right away. Gail and I felt a little guilty eating when others were still waiting in line, but we were pretty hungry and the food was good so the guilt didn't last long.

My mother reminded me of a similar event that happened when Ian came to Canada as a teenager for a visit. We went on a day trip to Niagara Falls. While walking around Clifton Hill, Ian went into a candy shop, mainly because of the pretty girl behind the counter. He talked to her for a little while and managed to talk her into giving him free fudge, but not just a bite or two – he came out of the shop with fudge for all of us.

Ian was a big guy with a big personality and an even bigger heart. From our conversations that night, I know that Ian was very proud of his 20-year-old son Martin and adored his two little girls, Alexis (7) and Zarah (3). As I said we didn't know each other well, and he had only met Gail twice, but there was no question in my mind that Ian would have moved heaven and Earth to help us if we needed it, because we were family and that's all that mattered. I know he holds a special place in my sister's heart as well. He will be very much missed by his Canadian cousins.

And the winner for best soap box dispenser is...

While driving around town the other day, I spotted a local business sporting a new sign: "Your community's award-winning laundromat". I'm curious as to exactly what awards they won. I guess I've been remiss in my attention to the local laundromat awards.

When they "Your community", do they mean Waterdown, or is this Hamilton-wide? When and where was the ceremony? Is this a rent-the-Legion kind of event, or were they down at the Hamilton Convention Centre? Or Copps Coliseum? We get both the Hamilton and local Flamborough papers, and I don't remember mention of it, but maybe I just missed it. Must have happened while I was in hospital. Yeah, that's gotta be it.

I'm sure that Hamilton's A-list celebrities were all there – that would be star of stage and screen Martin Short, hoser Dave Thomas, Ti-Cats owner Bob Young, and sports journalist Stephen Brunt. And the bands Junkhouse and Teenage Head. Waterdown's A list might also have been there, consisting of... ummmm.... well, the guy that played Harold on the Red Green show used to live here, does that count? And I once saw the coach (at the time) of the Tiger-Cats in the local grocery store, but then he got fired and moved back to London.

Anyway, congratulations to Cedars Laundromat on their victory, and I look forward to seeing if they can make it two in a row at next year's Soapie Awards. Probably on pay-per-view.

You have won second prize in a beauty contest! Collect $1

Last week was our annual trip to Fern Resort, and this is my annual blog entry about it. Here is last year's entry. The unusual title of this article (rather than "Fern 2010") may make it harder to find, but its meaning will become clear later on. As usual, we went with our friends the Wadsworths, Wildeys, and Marshalls, and everyone had a great time. We're not exactly "set in our ways" quite yet, but there are a number of traditions that we have started to follow at Fern:

• we always meet up with the Wadsworths for lunch at Harvey's on the 400 at the Cookstown Outlet Mall on our way to Fern, and we always eat at Arby's in Orillia on the way home.
• Jeff and I (and usually Jerry) have a Caesar at dinner most nights.
• We always have two tables in the dining room, and we put the kids at one table and the adults at another.
• Gail and Kerri always get pedicures at the spa, though I think they're reconsidering that for next year.
• Jeff and I head over to Mary Lou's at least one night during the week after the kids are in bed (my kids, anyway – his stay up later but sleep in) to play pool and enjoy a couple of Alexander Keith's.
• We always go to see Jamie Williams when he plays. He puts on a fantastic show.
• The boys love to play bingo so we end up playing at least once every day. This year I won twice, Gail and Ryan each won once, and Nicky was very disappointed that he didn't win at all.

One of my goals for this week, given my recent health issues, was to be able to participate in the activities I wanted to without having to tell anyone about said issues. I didn't want to go to the beach volleyball or tennis court and have to leave after five minutes because I couldn't play. With one exception, I was able to do that. I played beach volleyball, water volleyball, tennis a couple of times, golf, "mushball", rode the pedal carts around the forest trails, and swam with Ryan for a little while. The one exception was the climbing wall. Before I started I told the people running it that I had had surgery a few months ago and wasn't sure how strong I was. I managed to make it about 1/3 of the way to the top before I lost confidence in my strength and decided to come back down. Nicky made it to about the same place as me, and Ryan zipped to the top. Both the boys tried (and completed) the "vertical playground", a climbing obstacle course with rope ladders and tires and stuff. I didn't try that one.

On Tuesday night, they had a new thing called Retro Night, which was quite innovative. They went through the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's and played music from each decade. There were group participation events and the winners got special Retro Night money, similar to Canadian Tire money. There were four denominations, each with pictures of a different "icon": $1 (Darth Vader), 75c (Madonna), 50c (Jimi Hendrix), and 25c (Elvis). With the money, you could play various games where you could win more money, or you could buy candy, snacks, or root beer floats (yum – I had two). They had various dance events including the twist and the macarena and all participants got $1. They had a hula hoop event, where anyone who wanted to could try a hula hoop for 30 seconds, and they'd give you $1 just for trying. There were trivia questions and the first person to shout out the answer won $1. There were games like Twister, bean bag toss, and knocking down milk bottles, and you could win money that way too. It was a very neat idea, and lots of fun for everybody.

One of the highlights of the evening, for everyone else anyway, was the a particular contest. The host said that they were looking for three dads to volunteer for a contest, without saying the name of the contest or what it was about. Gail said that it looked like a trivia contest and that I should definitely get up there so I volunteered. Bad move. He announced the name of the contest - they were looking for Mr. Fern 2010, and at that point I wished I'd had a couple more Caesars at dinner. (Jeff came up to me after it was all over and asked "Did you learn anything from all this?" I answered "Yes - don't put your hand up when they ask for volunteers".) We had three tasks to perform and audience applause at the end would decide the winner. The first was a disco dance contest. I went second, and waved over to Ryan and Nicky to join me. Nicky declined but thank god Ryan came up and danced with me or I would have... um... looked silly. Never mind.

The second event was something I'd never seen before. We had to take a mouthful of water then tip our heads back and sing the chorus of Rock 'n Roll All Nite by Kiss. The first guy mainly spit the water all over himself and made some random sounds. I got the hang of it after a few seconds but kept choking on the water. The third guy nailed it - you could understand the words and everything. The third event was an air guitar contest. The first guy did pretty well, then as I took the stage, Gail mimed smashing the guitar a la Pete Townshend, so I did some standard air guitar, played it with my teeth and behind my head, then started smashing it on the floor to great applause. At the end, the crowd voted with their applause and thanks to my friends and family yelling as loud as they could for me, I came in second. The guy that won definitely deserved it though - he did really well at all three events. But for all that public humiliation, I was awarded one Retro Night dollar. Nicky did the macarena in the middle a huge crowd of other people doing the macarena, and he also earned one Retro Night dollar. One of us got seriously ripped off.

Don't you mean "waiter"?

While watching TV the other day, the word "barista" was mentioned. Ryan asked what it meant and I told him it was the person who makes you coffee at Starbucks. His response: "They have a whole word for that?"

Another NLL team failure

The Orlando Titans have announced that they will not be playing in the NLL in 2011. It sounds like they're trying to pull an Arizona Sting and simply sit out for a year, saying they'll be back in 2012. The Sting didn't actually return at all, and no team that has ever left the NLL has come back, so you'll excuse me if I don't hold my breath waiting for the triumphant return of the Titans. It should be noted that I predicted the demise of the Titans back in January.

The streak of not having two consecutive NLL seasons with the same teams continues, now at eighteen seasons. I've talked about this before, back in 2008 when the Chicago Shamrox folded. There's a list in that article of the team changes in the NLL since 1994, and you can add "2010: New York moved to Orlando, San Jose moved to Washington, removed Portland" and now "2011: Removed Orlando" to that list. It seems unbelievable to me that neither prospective owners nor the NLL itself seem to do the necessary market research to determine whether or not a team will be viable in a particular market. Updating the stats from my earlier article, we now have twenty-five teams that have either folded or moved since 1987, compared to eighteen teams in the NHL since 1917.

The dispersal draft was held today, and most of the Titans players were divvied out among the remaining teams. Patrick Merrill and Pat Maddalena were both named free agents by the league, thanks to a little-used NLL rule allowing players to opt out of dispersal drafts as long as they are named "Pat". The big winners, not surprisingly, were the teams that chose early – Colorado picked up goaltender Matt Vinc with the first overall pick and Jarett Park in the second round, while Boston now has the two most recent NLL MVP winners in Casey Powell and Dan Dawson. The Mammoth have been without a real #1 goalie since Gee Nash was let go and effectively retired a couple of years ago, so picking up the reigning Goaltender of the Year is huge for Colorado. Boston was a tough team last year, and grabbing Powell, John Orsen, and Greg Peyser only makes them better.

As for the Rock, they picked up Mike McLellan and Mat MacLeod, two guys I know nothing about. But the depth of my lacrosse knowledge is such that even though I don't know anything about these guys, I can still offer some pieces of brilliant insight:

1. Their initials are both M.M.
2. MacLeod is one of six guys named Matt (or Mat) involved in the dispersal draft.
3. MacLeod is the second player named Mat (with only one 't') to play for the Rock, after Mat Giles.

Hospital by the numbers

After our trips to the UK and France, I posted articles listing some interesting numbers from the trips. My hospital stay was certainly no vacation, but I thought some of the numbers from that whole experience might be interesting as well.

 

Nights spent in the hospital during 2010	63
Nights spent in the hospital when my kids were born	2 (one each)
Nights spent in the hospital during the rest of my life (not including my own birth)	0
Number of hospital rooms I spent at least one night in	7 (plus a couple of nights in the ER and one in the TV lounge)
Number of roommates	10
MRIs	1
ECGs	2
Ultrasounds	3-5
X-Rays	5-8
CT scans	10-15 (including three since discharge)
Units of blood received	at least 7
Units of fresh frozen plasma received	at least 13
Number of drains in my body at one time	4
Number of drains total	7
Number of different tubes stuck up my nose	4 (one at a time, thankfully)
Amount of dead tissue and fluid removed from my abdomen during surgery	4 litres
Weight when admitted to hospital	178 lbs
Weight at discharge	151 lbs
Weight two weeks after discharge	141.5 lbs
Number of doctors assigned to me (total)	at least 6
Number of nurses assigned to me (total)	at least 25
Number of nurses who offered me backrubs	1 (but more than once)
Number of backrubs I accepted	0
Number of nurses who asked me to look up cheap flights to Poland (since I'm a "computer guy")	1
Number of nurses who spoke Zulu	1
Number of scheduled daily injections (i.e. needles)	as many as 6
Number of staples holding my incision closed	43
Cost of having a phone in my hospital room	$14.69/week
Cost of having wireless internet in my hospital room	$20.95/week
Cost of having TV in my hospital room (with "premium" channels)	$90.40/week
Cost of having cable TV at home	~$60/month
Watching Sidney Crosby score the gold medal-winning goal for Canada	Priceless

 

This is likely the last thing I will write on my hospital experience. I don't want to turn this blog into a series of "feel sorry for me, I was really sick!" articles, but the fact of the matter is that I was really sick, and sicker than even I realized at the time. I spent more time in the hospital in two months than anyone else I know has in their entire lives, with the exception of one person – and my experience doesn't begin to compare with hers. We now return to our regularly scheduled blog.

Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles

For Father's Day, Gail and the boys got me tickets for a show in Toronto called Rain: A Tribute To The Beatles, which we went to see this past Sunday afternoon. It was partially a gift for Gail as well, since just me and the boys went, so she had a day to herself. Given the events of the past few months, she hasn't had a lot of time to herself, so it was nice to be able to give her a day to do whatever she wanted.

Anyway, I was a little concerned that we were paying quite a bit of money for a concert by a tribute band. Even if the band was really good, $100/ticket is pretty expensive for a concert. I saw a band called 1964 at Ontario Place a bunch of years ago (for free!), and they were pretty good as the early Beatles. But they were basically recreating a Beatles concert from 1964, and so they only played early Beatles stuff. Rain played songs from the entire Beatles catalogue, including many songs that the Beatles never played live. They changed costumes several times, and they had video screens to enhance the whole multimedia experience. It was much more than just a band playing Beatles songs.

The guys in the band kind of resembled the Beatles, though we were in the fourth row of the balcony so we weren't all that close. I did notice that while they had video cameras showing the band, they never had close-ups of any one person. When they changed costumes, they changed hairstyles and facial hair as well. There were a couple of anomalies:

• John Lennon has a full beard on the cover of Abbey Road, but the guy playing John did not have any facial hair while wearing his Abbey Road outfit
• the guy playing Paul McCartney was not left-handed (though I imagine finding a left-handed musician who can play bass, guitar, and piano and sing like McCartney is rather difficult)
• the guy playing Ringo was a decent singer. Obviously he didn't do enough research.

During one costume change break, they played a few TV commercials from the 60's which were quite funny; did you know that Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble smoked Winstons?

The first half of the show consisted of songs from albums up to and including Sgt. Pepper and at least three different outfits for each "Beatle". Ryan was a little disappointed that they did not play "Help!", his favourite Beatles song. The Sgt. Pepper songs were done in full Sgt. Pepper costume, which was very cool. They finished the first half with A Day In The Life, letting that awesome final chord shake the floor for a while before bringing the lights up.

The whole second half consisted of songs the Beatles never performed live, the only exception being "Get Back", which was recorded when the Beatles played live on the roof of Apple Records.  They did a bit of an acoustic set, playing "Girl" and "Mother Nature's Son" (I was waiting for "Blackbird", but no such luck), and shortly thereafter cranked the amps up to eleven to play Revolution. From the Abbey Road medley, the only song they played was "The End" – I would like to have heard "Golden Slumbers" and "Carry That Weight" as well.

Just before the show started, an announcement was made saying that no pre-recorded music was used during the show, but that's not quite true. The band certainly played their instruments, but they made heavy use of the synthesizer for some songs. Parts of Strawberry Fields Forever and the orchestra swells and final chord in A Day In The Life would have been difficult to play live even with a synth, so I suspect there was either some sampling or at least those pieces were pre-recorded. Also, the seriously distorted scream at the beginning of "Revolution" sounded exactly like the one on the recording. The weirdest part was during Eleanor Rigby. The only instruments in this entire song are strings (violins, violas, cellos), none of which were played by anyone on stage. I'm sure they used the synth for this one too, but the weird part was that both "Paul" and "George" appeared to be pretending to play their instruments during the song. Seeing as how there is no bass or guitar in the song, I don't know why they'd be doing this.

The three of us loved the show, and judging by the standing ovation at the end, the majority of the crowd did as well (one exception was the grouch sitting a few seats down from us, who never stood, clapped, sang, or even smiled through the whole show). It wasn't the cheapest concert ever, but the musicians were really good, the music was obviously fantastic, and we really enjoyed ourselves, so it was a great day all around.

Top Ten Funny Song Lyrics

Not necessarily brilliant or insightful, just lyrics that always make me laugh. I left out comedy musicians like Weird Al or Jonathan Coulton (though I always laugh at "one bad-ass fucking fractal"). These are in no particular order.

 

1. Paul McCartney, "Sally"
   When you're away there are grey skies
   And when I'm away there are even more grey skies than the grey skies I told you about before
2. Gin Blossoms, "Cheatin'"
   You can't call it cheatin', cause she reminds me of you
3. ZZ Top, "TV Dinners"
   I like the enchiladas and the teriyaki too
   I even like the chicken if the sauce is not too blue
4. A few self-referential songs, grouped together because they're similar:
   1. Def Leppard, "Me and My Wine"
      You know I'd like to get to know you
      but I ain't got the time, and I'm
      I'm finding it harder and harder
      to make this damn thing rhyme
   2. Alice Cooper, "School's Out"
      Well we got no class
      and we got no principles [principals?]
      and we got no innocence
      we can't even think of a word that rhymes
   3. Primus, "Mr. Know-it-all"
      They call me Mr. Know-it-all
      I am so eloquent
      Perfection is my middle name
      and whatever rhymes with eloquent
5. Led Zeppelin, "Travelling Riverside Blues"
   Squeeze my lemon til the juice runs down my leg
   Squeeze it so hard I'm gonna fall right outta bed...
   I wonder if you know what I'm talkin' 'bout
   The same lyrics are in "The Lemon Song" as well, but the funny part is Robert Plant wondering if we know what he's talkin' 'bout. Right Robert, that's a tough one. I'm not sure I can see through the layers of complicated symbolism there.
6. Tom Petty, "A Mind With A Heart Of Its Own"
   I've been over to your house
   And you've been sometimes to my house
   I've slept in your treehouse
   My middle name is Earl
   (Important note: Tom Petty's middle name is indeed Earl)
7. Autograph, "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend Isn't Me"
   Don't remember any lyrics, I just like the title of this forgettable song from a forgettable band from the mid-80's.
8. Matchbox 20, "Long Day"
   I'm sorry 'bout the attitude I need to give when I'm with you
   But no one else would take this shit from me
9. Dire Straits, "Industrial Disease"
   Two men say they're Jesus
   One of them must be wrong
10. Cake, "Short Skirt/Long Jacket"
    The whole song makes me laugh. It starts off with a guy singing about what kind of girl he wants. He wants "a girl with a mind like a diamond", "is fast and thorough and sharp as a tack", "with a voice that is dark like tinted glass", that kind of thing. Of course, he also wants a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket. Then it gets a little weird. Now he wants a girl "with uninterrupted prosperity, who uses a machete to cut through red tape" and someone who's "touring the facility and picking up slack". And who wouldn't want a girl with "a smooth liquidation" and "good dividends"? Finally he gets really specific:
    At Citibank we will meet accidentally ["Meet accidentally!" yell the backup singers]
    We'll start to talk when she borrows my pen...
    She's changing her name from Kitty to Karen
    She's trading her MG for a white Chrysler LeBaron

It's not the humidity, it's the Heat

So LeBron James is joining the Miami Heat next year with his buddies Dwayne Dewayne Dywane Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. A lot of people have gone completely apeshit over his decision to leave Cleveland for South Beach, which I don't quite get. The Cavaliers negotiated a contract with James which allowed him to become an unrestricted free agent after the 2009-2010 season. Having fulfilled his contract he earned the right to become an UFA, and by playing as well as he did he earned the privilege of choosing where he wanted to play next year. I can't blame James for making the decision he did, especially after Wade re-signed and Bosh announced he was heading to Miami as well. It's not like he asked for a trade or asked the Cavs to let him out of his contract or something. Do Cavs fans have a right to be disappointed about LeBron's decision? Absolutely, just as Raptors fans are disappointed about Bosh leaving. But I don't get the hatred and talk of "disloyalty". Players just don't play their entire careers with one team anymore, so expecting LeBron to is just not realistic.

What I can blame him for is the ridiculous way he announced his decision. Seriously LeBron, you needed a one hour special on prime time TV to say "Miami"? Chris Bosh announced his decision with a two-word tweet. I do have to say that I did watch part of the special - up until LeBron announced where he was going. I did feel almost guilty about watching it though like watching a train wreck.

Adding to the whole circus, Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert wrote an open letter to Cavaliers fans lambasting James, calling his decision to leave Cleveland "cowardly betrayal" and a "shocking act of disloyalty". This letter might be the most childish and least professional thing I've ever seen in pro sports. However narcissistic and self-promotional the TV special was, Gilbert added a level of immaturity to this whole episode that wasn't there before. Don't forget, Shaquille O'Neal plays for the Cavaliers now (or did last year, anyway). Shaq was drafted by Orlando, won Rookie of the Year with them, and led them to the finals (though they didn't win), and then left as a free agent. Sound familiar? Cavs management didn't seem too concerned with his lack of loyalty when they traded for him.

I don't watch a lot of basketball on TV (the occasional Raptors game and the Finals are about it), but if the Heat play in Cleveland next season, I might check that one out.

Ryan tells it like it is

Nicky is in a summer camp this week called Fossil Hunters, run by a private school up on Hamilton Mountain. On the way home today, I asked him what they had done today, and he said that they made a fossil. Being the amusing father that I am, I asked him "Did you find a dinosaur, bury him in sand, then wait a hundred million years and dig him up again?" Nicky said that this is not, in fact, what they did but laughed at the idea, while telling me that they couldn't do it that way because we'd be dead in a hundred million years. Thanks for that bit of insight, Captain Obvious.

Anyway, as my children often do, they took the idea of burying a dinosaur and ran with it. The conversation went something like this:

Nicky: Maybe we could bury something...
Ryan: Yeah! And then we'd tell our kids where it is, and they'd tell their kids...
Nicky: Yeah! And after a hundred million years, they could dig it up and have a fossil!
Ryan: Yeah! That'd be cool.
Me: What happens if one of our descendants doesn't have kids?
<pause>
Ryan: Then we're screwed.

Oh Canada! Ribfest

Waterdown held its first annual Oh Canada! Ribfest this past weekend. There were six "ribbers" selling not only ribs but chicken and pulled pork, and each one sold bottles of their custom BBQ sauce as well. Some had other sides like beans, cole slaw, and corn bread. There were other places selling Bloomin' Onions and Spiral Spuds, as well as pitas, roasted yams, corn-on-the-cob, and your standard nachos, burgers, dogs, and fries. And don't forget the ice cream and mini-donuts. And the beer! They had beer and coolers from a local micro-brewery, Nickel Brook. I tried the Green Apple Pilsner on Thursday, which tasted kind of like beer mixed with apple cider. Doesn't really sound that good, but I liked it. It's kind of like Corona for me - I wouldn't buy a case of it, but once in a while, on a hot summer day (like today), it's very nice. On Sunday, I tried their regular pilsner, which I wasn't too thrilled with. But I also tried their draft root beer, which was very different from regular A&W or Barq's root beer – almost had a black liquorice taste to it. That stuff was good, and surprisingly Gail, who likes neither black liquorice nor root beer, liked it too.

Besides the food, there was a stage where kids from local dance schools showed their talent, a bunch of local bands played, and at night on Thursday, they dropped down a huge screen and showed How To Train Your Dragon. There was a little midway with kids rides, and a bunch of local vendors set up booths as well. On Canada Day, they had a mountie present for a "Citizenship Court", as a number of local people became brand new Canadian citizens. Nothing says Canada like a mountie in full uniform, except maybe a mountie in full uniform on a horse. Holding a Tim Horton's cup.

The ribfest was held at Memorial Park in Waterdown, which is about 1½ km from our house, so we walked there and back – three times. (Well, two times. We drove on Sunday when it was 35° outside.) We went for lunch on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. There were ballots for voting on the ribbers, and we wanted to be informed voters, so we made sure we tried them all before voting. Plus the ribs were so good, we just had to keep going back. Good thing dental floss is cheap – I've gone through an awful lot of it in the past few days.

There were six ribbers showcasing their wares, and you could vote in each of two categories: ribs and sauce. The ribbers were:

Fire Island – Ribs: pretty good. Sauce: excellent. The sauce was more smoky and had a bit more of a bite than the others. All four of us chose this as our favourite sauce. We had BBQ sauce on the ribs, but we had a sample of their honey-garlic sauce as well (zingy!), and it was so good that we bought a bottle.

Boss Hog – Ribs: Awesome. Sauce: sweet. The meat just fell off the bones, and even the ribs near the end of the rack weren't dry at all. My vote for best ribs, and Nicky's too.

Silver Bullet – Ribs: Very good. Sauce: tangy. Gail's favourite ribs.

Camp 31 – Ribs: Very good. Sauce: tangy. Similar to Silver Bullet. [Warning: web site plays music.]

Bone Daddy – Ribs: Awesome. Sauce: excellent. For me, these guys had the second-best ribs and the second-best sauce. Ryan's vote for best ribs.

Hawgs Gone Wild – Ribs: not bad. Sauce: sweet. The ribs were OK, but kind of dry. Their corn bread was very good and we got two big pieces for $1 (or more accurately, we got eight big pieces for $4). We had the ribs on Thursday, but went back on Sunday for more corn bread. [Warning: web site contains no information whatsoever. Interestingly, it was designed by the same people who did the Camp 31 site. Hmmm...]

The ribfest had its own web site, which could have used some more work – lots of typos and spelling errors. Also, when some pages contain things like "check back later to find out more information" or "we will have a list of events here" during the event, you know the web site people haven't been keeping up. There's a list of the ribbers, but it's not up-to-date either – two of the ones listed on the web site aren't there, and Camp 31 and Hawgs Gone Wild aren't listed at all. But if my biggest complaint about an event is that their web site isn't up to snuff, that's not too bad.

Big kudos and many thanks to the Rotary Club and all the volunteers for all their hard work! This event was not only a lot of fun for our family, but great for our community, and we hope to see it return next year and for many years in the future. Gail volunteered on Saturday night for a few hours, and next year we're all planning on volunteering for various shifts. Unfortunately, it's likely to be at Joe Sams park next year, which is much bigger than Memorial Park but further north. It's not walkable from the Waterdown core, so parking will be a much bigger issue. Perhaps there will be shuttle busses available from "downtown" up to the park. They couldn't get a license to have fireworks at Memorial Park but they should be able to at Joe Sam's, so hopefully there will be fireworks next year. I'm already looking forward to it!

The Ole Ball Game

I was watching a Jays game a few nights ago, and they mentioned Roy Halladay's 8-6 record, as well as both Shawn Marcum and Ricky Romero, both of whom pitched very well at the beginning of the season but got no run support and therefore have fewer wins than they really deserve. I already knew this (as do all baseball fans), but it became clear to me once again that wins and losses are a rather meaningless stat for pitchers. It seems to me that a pitcher is not out there to help his team win, he is out there to help his team not lose. There's a subtle but important difference there. To win a baseball game, you have to score more runs than the other team, and (ignoring the occasional NL miracle of a pitcher hitting) the pitcher can't help do that. All he can do is try to minimize the number of runs the other team gets. Short of throwing a perfect game and hitting a home run, a pitcher cannot win a game by himself. But he sure can lose one.

How many times have you seen a pitcher throw a complete game with no walks, a handful of hits, give up one or two runs, and lose because his team scored nothing? Happens all the time. Hell, there have been pitchers who have thrown no-hitters and lost the game. And yet who, according to the pitching stats, is responsible for the loss? The pitcher – the only guy on the team who did his job.

It's even more interesting when you consider relief pitchers, particularly closers. I remember a year when Tom Henke had a great season but finished with an 0-6 record, and some baseball journalist said that this wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded because wins, for a closer, are generally a bad thing. This seemed incomprehensible to me until he explained: closers generally come into the game when their team is already winning. To get credit for a win, the pitcher would have to allow the other team to tie the game (or go ahead), and still be the pitcher of record when his team comes back to win it later. This means that to get the win, you have to screw up your save opportunity. But if wins are bad for closers, how do you explain Henke's 1989 season, where he went 8-3? Using this logic, 8 wins for a closer should be terrible but he had a 1.92 ERA and 20 saves, which ain't bad. And Mariano Rivera, arguably the best closer in the history of the game, has had W-L records over .500 in 10 of his 15 complete seasons including two seasons with 7 wins and one with 8. Once again, we see that wins are meaningless.

There are other pitcher stats that don't necessarily indicate the skill level of the pitcher – ERA for one. If you have Tony Fernandez and Roberto Alomar as your middle infield, you're going to have a lower ERA (and possibly more wins!) than if you have just average defensive players there. If you have a catcher that throws out 95% of runners attempting to steal a base, you can concentrate more on the batter and less on the speedy guy on first because you know he's less likely to run, and if he does your catcher will take care of him.

Similarly, RBIs are meaningless for hitters, because they depend greatly on who's hitting ahead of you. If you're the team's cleanup hitter and the #3 hitter is having a bad season, you're likely going to see your RBI total drop – not because you are having a bad season, but because someone else is. Or say the guy hitting in front of you last year was a great base stealer, but the guy hitting in front of you this year isn't. Even if his OBP is about the same, you're likely going to have a drop in RBIs as well, since the new guy will still be on first when the old guy would have been on second. Unless the new guy doesn't have to steal bases because he gets more extra-base hits than the old guy, then you might get more RBIs. Unless a lot of those extra base hits are home runs, and then you might get less.

I suppose these types of things are the reasons they come up with new stats like OPS, WHIP, and ERA+, in the hopes of measuring a players skill level while attempting to filter out external influences. There is even an Adjusted OPS, which takes into account the park that the player plays his home games in, as does ERA+. Pretty soon you're going to need a degree in statistics to be able to understand all these things.

Professor Nicky teaches Fluid Dynamics 101

We bought a rain barrel about a month ago, and my father-in-law installed it for us. There's a short hose that comes out of the bottom of the barrel so that you can use it to water the garden, but I was never able to get the hose to work. I'd take the nozzle end out of the clamp and open it, but no water came out. I've done this at least four or five times over the last month before I told Gail the other day that there was something wrong with the barrel.

This morning I was talking to my father-in-law on the phone, and mentioned this hose problem to him. He suggested that maybe there was some kind of cap that should have been removed before the hose was attached, so I might have to remove the hose and see what's there. Nicky happened to be playing Wii in the next room while I was on the phone, and heard the conversation (well, my end of it, anyway). Once I was off the phone, he told me that he's been able to get the hose to work, but he had to hold the nozzle end of the hose lower than the level of the water in the barrel, otherwise the water would have to travel upwards.

I quite literally smacked myself in the head. Of course the water won't go upwards unless something's pushing it, and there's no pump inside the barrel to push it. Thank goodness I had an eight-year-old around to help me with this, or I'd have been out there pulling the barrel apart.

Spammers is so stupid

Pictures from Toronto

I don't usually make a post that's just a link to another article, but here is a collection of fantastic photographs taken in downtown Toronto yesterday during the protests. There are some pictures of the peaceful protestors, and then there are some of the idiots in black with masks from an "anarchist group" (a contradiction in terms) who were just there to smash and burn stuff. If you really believe in something so strongly that you think violence and vandalism (arguably terrorism) is the way to solve it, at least have the balls to show your face while you do it. Otherwise you're just another coward.

As seen on twitter: "Nothing says "courage of your convictions" like wearing a mask and changing your clothes after committing acts of arson & vandalism."

I especially like the one in front of Foot Locker, with the anarchist guy doing the Safety Dance.

Define "fun"

We took the boys to see Toy Story 3 tonight (mini review: lots of fun! Shrek people take notice: this is how you make a really good sequel), and on the way to the theatre, for no particular reason, Gail and I decided to keep our destination secret. Nicky kept asking where we were going and when we wouldn't tell him, he finally asked "are we going somewhere fun?" In my best "I-can't-believe-you-asked-that" voice, I said "Fun? Of course it's somewhere fun! We always go to fun places! When have we ever taken you anywhere that wasn't fun?" With almost no hesitation, he said "The hospital?"

I had to give him that one. Nicky 1, Daddy 0.