AdventureWorld

Of Bondo And Bailing Wire

In a couple of hours I’m going to the hospital to check in for radiologically-guided steroid injections into my knee ..and no, not the testicle-shrinking kind of steroids, the other less popular kind. Blogga, please! I would never take anything that would make me less ballsy.
I’m getting shot up in the hopes that my knee will hold out for some walking safari action while I’m in Botswana. She's gotta have it.
Watching wildlife from an open Land Rover is pretty thrilling but there’s nothing like exploring on foot for super-charging the thrill factor. But of course I’ve got a guide who’s got my back. Actuallly, he’s got my back and a .458 Lott that could drop a charging rhino because, well, a charging rhino is an actual possibility and precisely why we're packing heat. I might be kinda crazy I’m not Crazy enough to wander amongst REAL wildlife all falalala in some fairy fucking bubble as if the bush is just a big ol’ petting zoo.
Annnnnnyways, I’ve been getting so many body parts patched up for this trip I feel like I’m all bondo and bailing wire. I have some zazou!-y new adventure clothes though and that’s what really matters. As Fabulous Gay Friend recently reminded me, looking cute is always more important than feeling good.
It’s The Rule, I think it’s like rule #3.

Stumbling Toward Ecstasy

As if I already didn’t have enough health drama I had to go and get the weirdest virus ever. Or I had a rare type of migraine. The ENT says she thinks it was a virus.
Whatever. All I know for sure is that it hurt like a mofo and made me so dizzy I had to hold onto the wall when I walked down the hallway so I wouldn’t fall down. Yes, really. It was dreadful with a capital D so make that Dreadful.
Walking became an extreme sport. And of course having this virus just happened to coincide with that Big Ass Bioscience Forum (BABIF) so every day I had to stand up in front of a room full of people who were spinning around me like painted ponies on a carousel and hope like hell I didn’t just tip the fuck over. It was so very Not Good.
Talk about stop the world I want to get off. Literally.
I didn’t write about it before because it’s bad enough how much of my life gets taken up with this kinda shit without spending time writing about this kinda shit ..but then again—it is my life, and this blog is like the story of my life so there you have it. Read it and cringe on my behalf.
I told meerkat the mental image of me people get, as evoked by the never-ending health drama posts, must be some beater car chugging down the road with one headlight, bald tires, and a loose muffler  ..with a fender painted with primer and duct tape on the upholstery, of course. Jalopime.
Now I have to do physical therapy 30 minutes a day because even though the (excruciating!) headache and severe spins are gone I’m still totally iffy on my feet. The ENT says my body has to re-learn how to balance—it’s like my sense of balance has to be re-calibrated.
Sense of balance, you better hurry the fuck up because I’m going to be bouncing around in a Land Rover in two weeks. That ought to be interesting.   
I don’t know why The Universe seems so hell bent on deterring me from this trip. However, if my plane crashes the reason will be readily apparent. And The Universe will be able to say I told you so.
I hate know-it-alls.

Icing. Cake. The.

Oh my gods! I have a big-ass bathtub at the Selinda camp!
A nice relaxing biffy-bath after a long day of adventuring. That's my kinda "tent".
Ahhhhh, a soak in a big stone tub surrounded by the sounds of the wild. I get all goosebumpy with delight just imaging it.
I was going to say picture me here! underneath the photo but then I realized I'd be nekkid in that mental picture so never mind.

BABAlooie!

OH. MY. GODS.
It's only four weeks until BABA II! (Big Ass Botswana Adventure) Four weeks is nothing!
Well, actually four weeks is a month, but a month is nothing!
I shall dream of it while I have my knee MRI, an "open" MRI for us claustrophobic types.
I have to go get dressed in metal-free clothing (where's Eileen Fisher when you really need her?) and pick out a CD because they said I could bring one to listen to although I have no idea how I'll be able to hear anything above all that racket; racket as in that like a automotive manufacturing line.
P.S. The Biosciences forum was a great success. I got a lovely thank you note this weekend from the VP who sponsored it.
Also, I named the forum BABIF in honor of peebs.

Who, me?

That big-ass Bioscience forum starts tomorrow and I’m not really nervous but it’s been a while since I’ve done something like this. I’m not just facilitating the thing, I’m doing a ton of content—lots of lectures—and that’s the thing I haven’t done in ages.
I was feeling a little twitchy about that, not stage fright really, I was just thinking do these people really want to listen to me that much for the next three days? And then someone who doesn’t even work in my area came wandering into my office just to say hi. And apropos of nothing (I hadn’t even said I was doing this meeting) she said “there’s just something about the way you talk, I could listen to you all day ..I would listen to you read the label off a can of dog food.”
The randomness of the comment combined with the even more randomness of the dog food label delighted me more than the compliment. Because it’s not anything I purposely do with the way I talk, it’s just the way I talk. And I have no idea why people like it so much because I think my voice is odd, but maybe it’s oddly appealing because many people have said the same thing--not the dog food label part, most people say “telephone book”.
But the timing was just so excellent.
The Universe throws me a bone.
Now if it would just throw me that other kinda bone…
Annnnnyways. The other thing people often comment on is my smile and I don’t know WTF that is about either. I used to smile at myself in the mirror to see if I could figure it out but I’d be smiling so unnaturally I mostly looked deranged. And deranged is not even oddly appealing, trust me on this.
One time when I was in the Greater Bumfuck Regional Airport (translated: crop duster landing strip) some guy who looked almost vaguely familiar came up to me and said “Hey, you’re AdventureGirl’s Real Name—I’d recognize that smile anywhere!” I probably hadn’t seen this guy in, oh, TWENTY YEARS.
I didn’t know what to say, and suddenly I became way too aware of my smile and in my self-consciousness it went all unnatural so I just stood there looking deranged. And he just kept waiting for me to say something and I had no idea how to respond to his comment..or who he was.. Meanwhile, my mouth had frozen in that Jokeresque smile so I couldn’t say anything even if I had thought of something to say and/or correctly identified him.
It was a ridiculously long wait and all he got after all that waiting was me yelling over my shoulder “Well, good to see you (whoever the fuck you are) uh.. Ihavetogocatchmyplanebye! as I scampered off down the hallway .. but the hallway was only like ten feet long, there really wasn’t anywhere to scamper, so it was the worst desperate escape ever.
FuckabunchaAdventureBoy just laughed and laughed and did nothing helpful whatsoever.

Oh! Oh! Right Thurr, Right Thurr!

I went to the orthopedic surgeon today to get my bum knee checked out. He was moving it around all over the place and twisting it in all kinda ways saying does that hurt and it was pretty much ok ..until he started up with the poking. The poking is never a good thing.
When he pressed on what I later learned was my meniscus I rose a couple of inches of the table with an OOooooWEEEeeee (Weeeee, not wheeee! Trust me, there was no wheee'ing whatsoever).
He said well I guess I don't have to ask you if that hurt.
Fucking meniscus.
He thinks it's torn but I have to have an MRI first. My insurance denied the MRI twice already--first they said I had to have an ultrasound to prove I had a cyst before they'd approve the MRI. I did that.
Then they said just kidding! and denied it again saying I had to see an orthopedic surgeon first. Okie dokie.
So now I've seen one and he said I have  to have an MRI, so I wonder how the money-grubbing bastards are going to deny it this time. And might I just add--for fucking fuck's fucking sake!
Hhhhhhhmmmm. Somehow this all just seems so familiar.
It's a lot like déjà vu except not at all.
P.S. My doctor was downright adorable so that made it a little less heinous. Also, he used to be an orthopedist for the Denver Broncos. Shout out to my Colorado friends!

Run Flat

Wednesday I had a flat tire ..that wasn't flat. Some kinda weird warning light came on while I was flying down the freeway. I had no idea what the light was actually warning me about because I'd never seen a warning light that looked like that but warning lights are never a good thing.
This one looked like an alien with his arms stretched toward the sky, perhaps he was signaling the MotherShip I thought. But WTF could that possibly be, well, other than utterly absurd.
I got out the manual and it said it meant I had a flat tire. But I didn't.
I was cussing the car for being wrong and issuing false warnings and skeering me to death for no good reason when I saw that I might have something called Run Flat Tires which don't go flat because they have super-sidewalls that hold them up so you can keep driving on them for a while. Run flat, get it?
Hhhhhmmmm, how would I know if I had these because, of course, I had no idea what kind of tires I have other than really expensive.
Aha! It said a Run Flat would have an RSC in a circle on it. I wondered what RSC stood for but I didn't care enough to google it and besides I was still miffed that I had a flat --whether it was literally flat or not it still had to be fixed and I was already sooooo tired and had 5,000,000 other things I was trying to take care of. I wanted to just sit down beside my Run Flat Tire and weep copiously.
But I didn't, of course, I bucked the fuck up and got on with the day--a day that included a really important presentation. It was a very big Big Deal--a proposal for a three day Bioscience strategic forum that would be really hard to explain and would bore the ass off you anyway. (But, thank the gods it went well so at least I'm over that hump, except now I actually have to deliver what I've designed and that's a whole 'nother hump and a half)
Oy. So anyways, I love the wordplay and I thought I feel just like a Run Flat Tire--either way you take it. I look fine on the outside but I'm really out of air and can only hold it together for a few more miles; or, the other way, I've been run completely flat. Either way works.
I thought the same wordplay thing later about "I'm sick and tired of it all"--
sick and tired   of it all; or sick   and tired of it all. But then later I said to myself oh boofuckinghoo, get over yourself.
And I did. And then I played Cagematch! with emz and meerkat.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the doc had to take me off my latest wonder drug because it fucked me over severely with the side-effects (that's the sick and tired part). And the drug was working so well, dammit!
Cold turkey. <------What the hell does that mean anyway?
So now I'm just flaring like a motherfucker and having flat tires.

[gasp]

Good gods! I almost forgot that Battlestar is back tonight!
Now that I've remembered I'm so excited I can hardly bear it. But I only have to bear it for another 36 minutes so maybe I won't have an aneurysm .
Oh, 34, I had to look up how to spell aneurysm.
Tick frakin' tock.

Dualing Daddies

I never talk about the particulars of my “difficult childhood”—the difficult being doled out by my father. I never felt compelled to tell The World all the gory details of such personal experiences but suffice it to say that back in the day my father made the Great Santini look like a Girl Scout.
When I was little I thought he was Evil but now I think he was just crazy because he hasn’t been even a little bit evil in a long time and I don’t think evilness ever wears off but sometimes crazy does.
I forgave him a long time ago but there’s been feelings I had about that forgiveness that I’ve never quite been able to put to rest. These things are very hard to explain but FuckabunchaAdventureBoy totally got it when I said it to him—I didn’t even have to do much explaining.
One of the things is that forgiving is not the same thing as forgetting and this causes me to have to deal with the duality of having a father who’s been two entirely different fathers to me—one that was a Horror Show, who showed me nothing even vaguely resembling love; and the other a loving father who thinks I hung the moon AND the stars. Duality indeedy.
Sometimes it would do my head in, like it always made Father’s Day a real challenge—not because it brought up bad or sad emotions but because WTF do you do with that duality on the day designated specifically for sugar coated sentiment about dear old dad.
It’s not like Hallmark makes a card that says You used to be an evil bastard but now you’re pretty nice and besides you’re full of remorse and staring down the barrel of your own mortality which makes me feel really sad for you and then it makes me wonder how I can feel so sad for someone who was so mean to me but lucky for you I do or you wouldn’t be getting this lovely card. ♥  
Oddly enough they have nothing like that so I always have to wing it. I just call instead and say something relatively obscure.
Jcube had a great idea one time--he said call on Saturday instead of Sunday and that will take some of the oomph out of the pomp and circumstance. He always knew the exactly right thing to say to me, better than anyone I’ve ever known.
But meanwhile, back at the hacienda, the thing was that this time when I was in Texas the duality was somehow reconciled—no more dueling duality. He was just my father, an old man I love, who was in a lot of pain; a once amazingly-agile-for-an-old-guy who knew that he had really screwed the pooch when he climbed up on that roof. He knows he'll never be that able-bodied ever again. It's a sad truth.
All I thought about was helping him through all of this.
Suddenly it was that simple. Simple is good; simple is a happy thing.

The Big Surprise

I asked my family not to tell my dad that I was flying in so I could surprise him. When The Goose and I walked in this morning the double take he did was hilarious. I said geeze I hope I didn't give you a stroke on top of everything else and we laughed and laughed ..and then I felt bad for cracking him up because it probably hurts like a motherfucker to laugh.
He's recovering well except his hemoglobin is low and they're giving him a transfusion. I met with the hospital's patient adviser to see if he can get into this hospital's in-patient rehab center when he's discharged from acute care. That would be soooo much better than some of the alternatives and that's what he really wants because he's horrified of getting sent to some nursing home pretending to be a rehab center. Seeing to this stuff is one of the big reasons I came.
Gah, I'm so exhausted--hardly any sleep in two nights. I read what I wrote last night at the airport and I was just babbling--worried, exhausted kinda freaky babbling. As opposed to my normal babbling.
I tried to sleep while he was sleeping but a machine kept beeping and beeping and beeping and beeping some more. Oy.