There Will Be Blood

Just when you thought I would be talking about cinema, discussing the depressing yet piquant symbolism in what Scott calls a modern masterpiece by PTA that will be studied for years, NO! Oh yes, there will be blood, but that blood would be issuing like old faithful, from my body! i will not only talk post op discoveries, though. i have a few awesome books i just read and need to address. and obama's "gaffe" (do you think the whole nation has somehow upped their vocab by a word?).

But for the now, more post laparotomy adventures. okay, so first of all, pathology came back and everything was benign! yay. no cancer for julie. that's the yay. the not so yay is that I have started bleeding like a sieve. but this isnt the blood that makes men uncomfortable, issuing from, as chelsea handler would say, my pikachu. rather, this was issuing from my incision. it started sunday as far as i can tell and i thought it was just healing fluid (i know, am i a druid?). we found it bizarre and called the on-call doc who said we needed to come in the next day. so went to the doc and saw the PA who competently re-dressed my wound and told me i had a clot working its way out. my PA, by the way is gorgeous. she sort of looks like eliot from scrubs just in case you ever found it unthinkable for a doctor to be all blonde and smart and lovely. (digression: i actually have two very beautiful wellesley friends who became doctors as well, so this should not be so hard to believe, but whatever. i just love scrubs.) we somehow thought that after she did her work, the bleeding would stop or go down. no, it got much much worse. another trip to the doctor was required the next day. the beautiful PA was correct about my blood clot (pool morelike), hanging out in my belly. but clots are not always small...sometimes they are like the hoover dam. i guess sometimes they reabsorb, but this one has decided, for reasons that seemed totally unconcerning to my doctor, to want to seep out. and now that it is doing so, it has to drain entirely or i will be a walking infection. you have no idea how disconcerting it is to have maxi pads soaked every 2 hours with my stomach blood. (yeah, they put maxi pads over wounds to soak up "healing fluid" and blood or whatever after surgery, still not talking about the pikachu. rest easy)

anyway, part of my directive is to engage in this very victorian exercise of heating washcloths 4 times a day and putting them on my lower tummy to release the blood more quickly. i bet picasso's lolita wife did this very thing during her female suffering days before she died of unknown causes. i also read the passage in Mark where the hemmorhaging lady touches Jesus' cloak and stops her sievelike bleeding of 12 years. Where is Jesus' cloak when you need it?

anyway the doc says that i am now to be a "lady of leisure" for the next few weeks. no bending, pulling, lifting--we're talking no laundry, dishes, picking up books off teh floor, etc. and it is driving me a little crazy. as happens often, apparently, i thought i had healed enough in 10 days to take like a 30 minute walk, or go shopping, or whatever. apparently when they said i shoudl walk they meant around the house. and after 10 days maybe walk around the block. but they said walk. and my idea of walking is like 5 miles around lake murray, i thought i was even slacking only doing 40 minutes a day on the greenbelt. the 2 hours of slow walking we did while shopping yesterday at the navy commissary and exchange was like shockingly out of line, apparently. i am now back to doing nothing but bleeding.

okay, health update completed. let's discuss books. i am reading a phenomenal book called Where the Girls Are, provided by the lovely Charity. It is an absolutely hysterical but scathing look at female messages and images in the mass media from the 40s onward. if i were the head of education in america i would make every high schooler read it (God knows it would have been better (more applicable and entertaining) than half the crap we read--Far from the madding crowd, I am talking to you. and carson mccullers.) it has seriously given me insight into my grandmother and mother. and myself, of course. and made me laugh painfully. exposed are the schizophrenic messages sent out in magazines and tv (i.e. the WWII era: support your man; your man is at war so go build an aircraft carrier, you can do anything, Rosie!; your man is back home, get back in the house. working mothers are neglectful and horrible...but do secretly work to make money so you can help the economy by buying things to make all your housework easier, and don't expect to get paid as much as men for it. and smile, overworked basketcase, smile.)

also fabulous reading was Ender's Game. read it in a day. incredibly fun sci fi adventure. excellent for a total mental getaway. will be even more entertaining if you believe that we have never harvested the true potential of child labor in wartime. and if you secretly think video games are real and that you are in fact saving the world when you play them. because you are.

so bitter people cling to guns and religion, barack obama? that is one of the best political quotes in a long time. i can only hope this is his howard dean moment. yeeehooo! crumble crumble. i don't hate barack obama. i just don't trust him. he is like an aaron sorkin movie, you know, inspirational but totally unreal and ineffective. slate did a comparison of his record and hillary's record. he gets less legislation passed. period. i'm sort of amazed so many people have fallen for his shtick. *sigh* i did enjoy the campaign pics of hillary at a local bar in indiana doing shots or crown royal and drinking a pint. bwahahaha. i wonder if roger clinton had anything to do with that appearance.

still bleeding. argh!!