Star finger

Yesterday night I built two stand for my studio monitors, also known as speakers. Except these speakers are used in recording situations to reproduce sound in an incredibly accurate way for proper mixing. But that's beside the point...

As I was building the stands (with the help of my beautiful wife) the cordless drill I was using to drive the screws into the wood slipped my normally steady grasp. The drill bit, in the shape of a Phillps head screwdriver, make a jagged, star-shape puncture wound in my left index finger. For a quick second I thought, "Who is this Phillip guy anyway, and how did he get the honor of having a screwdriver named after him? "The new fleshy decoration on my finger is a little disconcerting, but instantly captures my attention each time I glance at my hand (which I do way more often than you might expect.)

After pulling the cold, grey metal bit from my finger, blood began to flow forth, as you might expect. My wife, bless her heart, was troubled and began to head upstairs to get something to clean and dress the wound. I, damn my heart, was filled with Rossian rage and told her not to bother. Quite sternly. Despite her entreaties to tend to the cut, I stubbornly proceeded to bleed all over the wood as I finished the stand's construction. I see two positives in this -- one, it was only cheap pressboard onto which I left my sanguine mark and two, now I don't have to paint the stands. Well, one of them.

Free at last!

Happy to report that the doctor finally got back to me and that, yes indeedy, I am hantavirus free. Unhappy to report that it only took the guy nearly a week to let me know the lab results. I think I'll sue for unnecessary emotional harm caused by his lack of promptness. I mean, it's not like he didn't have the results last Thursday (he did) and I didn't call to specifically ask him to get back to me ASAP (I did).

Oh well, it's status quo with this doctor to get back to me aeons after the fact.

Just last month I was sick in bed (with what turned out to be food poisoning) and called him asking him if the medication he'd just prescribed the day before might be causing my violent sickness. But does he call me back to let me know if I need to get my stomach pumped? Oh no. FIVE DAYS LATER he leaves me a message telling me to stop taking the medication for a while and see if that fixes anything. Modern medicine at its best. Brilliant.

The worst was when I went in for a cholesterol test in 2002, only to have the doctor tell me TWO YEARS LATER in 2004, when I returned for an unrelated physical that, "Oh, by the way, those tests we did in 2002 showed you have really high cholesterol." Would have been a nice to know that before I lived another 730 days on cheeseburgers, french fries and pizza. Thanks doc.

Of Mice and Men

As to the URL: I was cleaning out this lady's garage for her Saturday (an act of Christian kindess) and got hit in the face with a pasty cloud of dust, which I'm pretty sure was mingled with rodent feces. Two days later, I started feeling "flu-like symptoms." Being the son of a notorious hypochondriac, I wondered if I might have contracted the deadly hantavirus, which leaves 4 in 10 dead.

Related to ebola, hanta (as its friends call it) does its dirty work when humans inhale the aerosolized fecal matter of infected rodents. Pleasant. Now, I didn't do much inhaling, but as sure as Mickey Mouse is enduring an endless puberty, I got me an eyeful of mouse poop. Of course, as any good scientist will tell you, correlation (my flu-like symptoms) is not causation (rat turd in the eye), but, yes, I was spooked.

I went to the doctor for a blood test this morning, and I will find out within the next two days if, in fact, this a hantavirus-free site. Furthermore, I have never wanted a cold so badly. I figure I was just helping somebody out, so God's got to count that for something ...

I don't want to blog

But I can't help myself.