Margie off to the emergency room; awaiting surgery

After spending a couple of days in town helping to take care of the little ones, Lavina brought Margie home about this time yesterday afternoon. At first, all seemed good with her. Later, she started to complain about abdominal pains. Then, even bundled up under blankets or standing just inches from the blazing wood stove she felt that she was freezing.

Outside, it was freezing - the temperature wasn't bad, but windchills were down to 40 below, they said on the radio. Inside it was warm, but Margie was shivering and freezing.

I kept saying we should take her to the emergency room but she kept refusing to go, saying this would pass and she would be okay.

Just before 10:00 PM, her suffering struck me as extreme so I told her we were going and that was that.

So off we went to the Emergency room of the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center.

The story gets kind of long and I am in no mood to tell it right now and am even wondering whatever got into me to ever include daily life in my blogging at all, but, to make it short, Margie is now at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. Before they sent her there, the doctor thought her gall bladder might have to be removed even before the night was over, but the the medication they gave her by IV worked.

Now, the doctor in Anchorage thinks she may not need to have her gall bladder removed, but she has some bad gall stones which definitely must to go. So they are evaluating her further to see which route to go - full bladder removal or stones only.

As for me, while I believe I have turned the corner on these shingles, they still do rage and I still need much more sleep than normal and I forgot to take my pain meds to the hospital with me and my jacket too and it hasn't been easy and I damn near froze just walking through the parking lot (I dropped Margie right at the door so she did not have to face the wind) and this is enough for now.

I am getting tired of reporting on these little crisises - and that's what they are - little. They are not big. They are not life-shattering. She will get her surgery and she will be fine and these shingles will pass. So many people I know have been suffering much worse.

Still, as small as they are, bundled together they kind of makes it harder to move on to the next step - especially because all I want to do is to sleep, and one can't accomplish anything when one is asleep.

How long can an iPhone last at -20 F? A "that's so Wasilla" moment

I still had my iPhone when I took this picture Sunday of Kalib back in his house after Rex's birthday. That phone has really become a part of me. My life is wrapped up in that phone. But it would soon disappear.

Look! Look! This guy has an iPhone! Is it mine? It must be! Mister, you better give my iPhone back, right now! 

Oh, wait a minute. I still had my iPhone when I took this picture. I was sitting in the passenger seat of Charlie's little car with Melanie at the wheel and we were stopped at a red light in Anchorage, watching penguins waddle by. This guy had called the head penguin and was telling her to get her birds out of the road, because he had places to go.

The penguins paid him no mind at all, they just continued to waddle by, one by one, until all 5,000 had passed through the light.

I would have taken a picture, but the penguins had posted a "Do Not Photograph the Penguins!" sign. I felt like my First Amendment rights were being violated, but penguins don't care about American law, the US Constitution, or the First Amendment.

They follow penguin law and penguin law only and they were carrying Ak-47's and shoulder-fired rocket launchers just perfect for blasting Charlie's little car right off the road.

I did not photograph the penguins.

This is where the story starts to get tricky. It was Monday afternoon. Thanks to these shingles and the fact that all my immediate work was out of the way, I hadn't done much but still I took my coffee break and went through the drivethrough at Metro.

I had my phone with me. On my way home, I saw this school bus stop on the road, red lights flashing. Naturally, I stopped, too. This dog came walking out to meet the bus. I was certain the dog had come to meet a student debarking from the bus. But the bus just sat there and the dog just stood there, for about one minute. 

Nothing else happened. Finally, the bus left the dog behind and continued on its way without a single student debarking.

Pretty strange.

After I returned home, I came out here to my office and got into my computer. After half-an- hour or so, I became aware that my iPhone was not in my pocket. I searched the area around my desk. It was not there. I searched every single place in the house that I had been. No iPhone. I searched the car. No iPhone. The weather had turned cold and I had been to the woodpile a couple of times, so I searched all around the woodpile.

No phone.

I called my phone in all these places and more. It did not ring. I called it with all the lights turned out, including the flash light. It did not glow.

I just could not find that phone.

Just before I went to bed, I did another outside search. I did not wear gloves. My hands are very cold conditioned and I can man my cameras bare-handed for long periods of time in zero degree F weather but it was well below zero now and pretty soon my fingers went numb.

So I built up the fire and headed for bed, making a stop at the bathroom to the master bedroom along the way. I could see my breath in there.

The next morning, yesterday, Tuesday the temperature here stood at -20 F (-29c) and it would stay below zero all day. I called my phone. It went straight to voice mail - this meant the battery had died. That meant that I had most likely lost it outside.

But where?

I did a lot of re-searching, both in places I had searched and in places I had not even been before the phone got lost.

Once, if you lost a phone, you lost a phone. Annoying, but no big deal, really. You just replaced it. But now when you lose a phone, you really lose something. Your whole identity gets wrapped up in that phone. There are notes and photos and recorded interviews and aps going here and going there and intimate notes sent back and forth to your wife written when you are separated from her and plenty of personal information.

Losing a phone has become a big deal.

Today, I slept in very late. I have turned the corner toward healing, but I am still battling these nasty, painful, shingles and I still need as much sleep as I can get.

When I got up, I found a note from Caleb. He had found my phone - wedged into a very strange place in the car where I swear I had looked myself. My theory is that the phone froze and so did not ring nor glow when I called - because I called it a few different times from within the car and never did it ring or glow.

But I have it now and life is okay, once again.

Now about the picture: yesterday afternoon I went to Metro one hour earlier than usual. I had not seen Carmen in two weeks, maybe more, because she leaves early these days to pick Branson up from school. So I dropped by a little earlier than normal.

When I pulled into the drivethrough line, there was big pickup truck in front of me, just one space behind the window itself. I could not see a car in front of the truck, so I reasoned that someone in a small car was sitting at the window in front of the truck, which I figured blocked my view of it. It was one of those trucks with a darkened back window, obscuring the occupants from view.

I sat there, waiting in line for several minutes, wondering when the order to the lead car that I could not see because the big truck was sitting between us would be filled and the line could progress.

Just as I was growing so impatient that I was just about ready to jump out and go up and see what was going on, a woman who I had never seen before walked out of the coffee shop, climbed into the truck and drove away. There was no smaller vehicle in front of her. She had just parked her car in the drivethrough line one space back from the window, left it there, went inside, made her order, and took her time.

Boy! This falls into the category of behavior that my daughters call, "That's so Wasilla!" It really isn't indicative of most Wasillans, but we have more than our share. Like all those times that you pull into a crowded parking lot and find someone has parked their big truck at angle across two spaces - sometimes three, if they can figure out how to manage it.

When I pulled to the window, I saw Shoshana and Carmen on the other side. They had wondered why it had been so long since anyone had pulled up to the window.

View images as slides

When rest takes over, conquers all

Yesterday, soon after I got up, I discovered that a new, daunting and totally unexpected task awaited me and I could not rest until I addressed it. Rest was what I needed, the doc said. If I did not get rest, then I would not shake these shingles off. Yet, this task had to be done. So I turned my attention to it and here is what I had to do: open up a document, go a certain page, change a lower-case "i" to a capitol "I," make a pdf of that page and email it.

It took some doing and nearly put me in my grave, but I did change that "i" to "I" I did make a pdf and I did email it.

And that was it. Two minutes work, maybe three. I had no other job pressing me - not one other thing that I needed to do, and the day was still early. To be under no work pressure - what a strange feeling! 

I was under doctor's orders to get rest. I had been given the assurance that if I did not rest, I would not get over these shingles. So, for the rest of the day, my mission would be to rest. Nothing else would matter. Rest, and rest only

But how? How does one rest, especially after such a prolonged stint of not resting?

"I will read," I told myself. But no, I could not read. The weight on my brain was dragging it down below the reading point. Then the answer came to me. I had purchased the photo book, burn.02, weeks ago, but had not yet even removed it from the packaging. It would involve a little bit of reading, too, but not much, as the stories are told in the pictures.

So I got the book, freed it from the packaging, took a seat on the couch, and began to slowly page my way through. The photography, of course, was quite excellent and I was enjoying the experience, but still the weight was heavy on my brain and all the shingles remained in place -- although thanks to the vicodin and the other drugs, the intensity was less and it was more bearable.

Margie had a nice fire going. The heat felt good - much better than furnace heat or electric or natural gas heat can ever feel. Chicago thought so, too. Normally, if I go to the couch, I either have to scoot her over or she joins me within minutes, but this time she made herself comfy on the floor, where she could soak up the heat.

Jim was maintaining the office by himself and who knew where Pistol was? He tends not to join in the couch napping scrums, because of the animosity that he and Chicago hold for each other.

But about halfway through the book, as I was in the midst of the Arab Spring, as shot by Paolo Pellegrin, chapterm Pistol-Yero came nosing his way towards me.

I put the book down so that I could use my hands to keep Pistol from stepping onto my chest. After a few attempts, he got the idea and settled down onto my legs. Due to the heaviness of the weight on my brain, I did not pick the book back up, but just leaned back into the pillows and dozed off into another strange dream.

And then I rested - a strange rest that at once was both pleasant and troubling... I want to explain but it is too complicated. So, to keep it short and simple, I remained on the couch, in a state of rest both troubled and pleasant, for about three hours. Then I got up for my coffee break, headed to Metro Cafe, and took the long way home, sipping, with the radio on.

It was earlier than I normally go out and instead of All Things Considered, Fresh Air with Terry Gross was on KSKA. The segment was devoted to wounded veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and a soldier who had lost his legs and five buddies to an IED was being interviewed.

As he spoke, I saw a raven, sitting atop a utility pole as another flew by overhead.

Soon, I was passing by the horses, wondering what insults I might have to bear today. "Hey Bill," Black horse shouted. "We hear you got the shingles. We don't care. We don't care at all. It is no big deal. They will soon pass. So we are just going to ignore you, as if there is nothing wrong."

And ignore me they did.

So I drove on. I decided the horses are right. Shingles is no big deal. It hurts like hell for awhile and then it is gone. At the moment, to me, it does seem like a big deal but it isn't. It is a temporary discomfort and nothing more.

When I got home, I found Chicago stretched out on my dreaming couch. I scooted her over, pulled the blanket up over us both and soon fell asleep again. The fire was hotter than it had been before, hotter than I normally like but somehow that heat just felt wonderful to me. I felt as though I never wanted to rise from the couch. I stayed there, Chicago purring at my side for about two hours, until about 6:30, when it was time to get up and take another vicodin. Margie had dinner just about ready, so I stayed up to eat it.

I should note that, except for the book, Margie put the other things on top of the couch to try to keep the cats off the cushions. She does not like the way they crumple the cushions when they lie on top of them.

After dinner, I asked Margie if she wanted to go to Dairy Queen. I expected her to say, "no," because it was very warm and cozy in the house and cold outside and she is not one who likes to venture out needlessly from a warm house into the cold, especially to get ice cream.

"Sure," she said.

So off we went. And here is Miranda, handing me the cone I bought for Margie. I had a banana split. During times of suffering, one must take pleasure where he can find it.

After we got back home, I decided to put this post together. I downloaded the pictures, selected the ones you see here, uploaded them into this blog in draft mode and then stopped, without writing one word. That weight was mighty heavy on my brain. I hadn't done much, but still needed to take a short break. It was about 8:30 PM.

I returned to the couch, adjusted Chicago, pulled the blanket up and then Jim joined us too, settling in on my legs. Again, I slipped into dreamland. Again, the heat from the fire felt wonderful to me. Again, I felt as though I never wanted to open my eyes again, or to ever rise fom the couch.

I stayed put, right on the couch, my blog unfinished, until midnight. By then, it was time to go to bed. Even though I was on my feet, I did not feel that I had fully awakened. I did not want to fully awaken. Having spent so much of the day asleep, I feared that if I did fully awaken, I would not be able to go back to sleep. But I wanted to do one thing only: sleep.

Still, certain things had to be done. The fish needed to be fed and so did the cats. Margie had already cleaned the litter. I had to check email, brush my teeth, etc., take my next vicodin and the other bedtime pills. I decided just to leave the blog unfinished.

So I spent five to ten minutes doing all that I needed to do and then went straight to bed. It was about 12:30 AM now. I feared I might have trouble going to sleep. If I did fall asleep, I felt certain that I would wake up at 2:30 or 3:00 AM, certainly no later than 4:00 and would not be able to go back to sleep.

I was wrong.

I quickly fell back to sleep. With a few, short interruptions, I stayed asleep until just a few minutes before noon - almost 12 hours - and this after spending more than half of the previous day napping!

I got up and took Margie out for a late breakfast. After that, Margie dropped me off at the house, then turned around and drove through falling snow to Anchorage, so she could help Lavina care for the little ones, because Jacob was off doing ski patrol at Alyeska.

I came out here to add words to the photos and complete the blog post I had started last night.

I did not want to do it. All I wanted to do was nap.

But I did it. This post is now up. Next, I will add a few more logs to the fire. Then, if necessary, I will adjust Chicago and lie back down on the couch.

Who knows how long I might sleep? Half-an-hour? Four hours, when my next vicodin is due? All day?

I don't know and I don't care. I will sleep however long my body demands. The doc says I need to rest, my immediate work is all done. I want to plunge these shingles back into dormancy, so I am going to rest.

I just realized - this is a long and boring entry. I could tighten it up, but the weight on my brain is too heavy for that. Couch, here I come!

I dream a strange dream of noise and silence

The closing credits to the movie, Rum Diary, with Johnny Depp, based on the work of Hunter S Thompson, photographed with my iPhone just before Margie and I left the theatre.

Today I had one of the strangest dreams ever. It began close to noon and lasted until about 2:30 pm, although it was interrupted three, maybe four times, by phone calls, but after each call it resumed.

I am trying to remember what time I got up this morning, but it is unclear to me. Was it 7:00? 8:00? 9:00? It was somewhere in that stretch. There was a piece of work that I had to do first thing so I did it, but the whole time I had the feeling that my density was increasing, that I was becoming heavier and heavier and pretty soon my weight would crush the chair beneath me and I would fall to the floor, then through the floor, then into the earth and I would not stop falling until I reached the molten core.

That is the feeling of pure exhaustion, sleepiness, sleep denied.

I had to sleep, so I left my desk, left my office, walked through the near corner of the garage into the living room and then lay down on the couch. It is kind of funny - if I am in my bed, I cannot lie on my back at all. It just aggravates my shingles too much and leaves me no hope of sleep. There is only one position that I can lie on in bed and that is on my right side, tilted towards the front.

The shingles start on the left side of my back, pretty close to my spine, wrap around through my left armpit and across my chest in an ugly, dark-red, mottled, blistered band that seems to range between three and four inches in width and then stops right on my sternum.

I cannot lie on my left side at all. So I hold that one position on my right side, all through the night. I do not sleep through the night, but only in brief periods - but that's good, because before I started taking the drugs I couldn't really sleep at all.

Oddly enough, I can lie on my back on the couch. I think it has something to do with the pillows that I put beneath me and how they position me. It still hurts my back to lie like that, but I can handle it.

So that is what I did. I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. The cats, Jim and Chicago, happily came to join me. Both wanted to step all over my chest until they could find just the right spot to curl up and nap with me, but I refused to let them. I kept picking them up and pushing them down to my legs. Finally, they got the idea. One settled down on my thighs, the other in the gap between my calves.

Then I closed my eyes, fell asleep almost instantly and began to dream. Margie had the TV on - tuned to the news channels. Even as I slept and dreamed, I could hear and was cognisant of every word and sentence that came from the TV. I followed the conversation, but as I did, in my dream I was in the midst of a big crowd in a warm and sunny place and there were green trees and flowers and stores. It was not Alaska. Maybe it was in the tropics somewhere - but it looked American, so maybe not. Florida? Arizona? Puerto Rico? People were talking, people were waving their arms - others were driving cars and motorcycles; airplanes kept flying by, low to the ground, so low that I could see the faces of the pilots.

Dogs ran past, barking.

Many more things were happening.

All this - the conversation, the shouts, the pumping of pistons, the spinning of props, the barking of dogs was taking place in complete silence. I could hear no voices, no engines, no props roaring, no dogs barking. The activity before me was furious and mouths were flapping - in silence, making no sound whatsoever.

Picture a lady with curly red hair tied back with a checkered kerchief, standing two feet away from me, looking right at me, the motion of her mouth, lips and teeth telling me that she was talking loudly but not a sound came from her.

As her jaws worked, what I heard was Rick Perry, saying "oops!" I could hear, understand and follow everything that was coming from the TV. Perry, Herman Cain, Romney, the recent horrors at Penn State and a whole lot of serious nonsence being debated by left-wingers and right-wingers, with a moderate or two thrown in for the heck of it.

And then the phone would ring and I would want to ignore it but there were critical matters pending, so I would take the phone and someone would say I should donate money here and someone else asked for John and I told him he had the wrong number, there is no John here and he said are you sure and then someone called wanting to use some of my pictures in something - and each time I fell back to sleep at practically the moment I put the phone down. The dream resumed as if it had never stopped and once again I was perfectly following the dialogue from the TV as the cats napped happily upon my legs.

Then a call came about a completely unexpected matter that absolutely had to be dealt with immediately and so I disrupted the cats, staggered into my office to my computer, talking on the phone, trying to grasp the pertinent details and then I opened the appropriate software and began to type and calculate but kept making mistakes and a task which should have taken maybe ten minutes at most took me about half-an-hour.

Had that not happened, I think perhaps I would have lay on the couch dreaming a silent dream as I followed everything that was actually happening around me for another two, three, four, six, ten, hours or so.

Maybe it was the Vicodin. 

This is what pushed me into a state of such exhaustion and stress that I wound up getting shingles. Not by itself, mind you. It has been a long chain of events beginning in early summer or maybe late spring, perhaps even winter or earlier, including the completion of the Kivgiq Uiñiq that so closely preceded this one, including my almost sleepless eight or nine days in New York, death here and there, and a few other events that I will not bother to detail, but in the end it was the 12, 16, 20, 30, 40 hour days that I repeatedly put in over the past couple of weeks in order to finish this thing.

But you know what? If you moved me back two weeks in time but kept the memory of these shingles and how painful they are alive and vivid in my mind and then said, "You are stressing yourself too much. Go ahead, push it aside for awhile. Because if you don't you are going to get shingles and you are going to think for awhile that you are at death's door and then even when you find out you are not going to die you will still have to bear this miserable pain of shingles for at least two weeks, maybe more. Push it aside and rest." I would not push it aside. I would do just what I did, even knowing the pain that was coming.

That is what I would have done and I would be suffering just as badly now as I am, but not as badly as I would be were it not for Vicodin.

This is just a proof copy. It is at the printers and will be there for awhile so it is not yet available to be read. But it's coming.

It's got some huge flaws in it.

It is a work of love.

Love is the only way I know how to work. It is good to get money when it comes, and it may not come again for quite awhile now, but money has never motivated me.

Love, and love only. That is my motivation.

To those who do not understand I cannot explain it. To those who do, I need not explain.

I am going to go to bed now. At 4:00 AM, I can take another Vicodin.

Don't worry. I will not become another Dr. House.

My shingles proves to be pretty tough on the good black cat, Jim

As you might suspect, I have a lot I want to write about right now and I sat down at this computer planning to do just that.

Now that Jim is on the screen, I realize that for the moment I am just too done in to write it all, so I am not going to even try.

Instead, I will write a tiny bit about Jim.

This whole process has been damn hard on him.

He likes to jump on my lap, walk across my shoulders, my keyboard and then settle down on my torso with his paws on my chest. And I can't let him. It hurts too bad.

Jim is a very good cat - there is none better - but he is not a healer cat in the way Thunder Paws was. If Paws were alive, he would want to be with me, too. But he would know not to walk across my shoulders, or put his paws on my chest. He would know the places where I hurt and he would not touch those places.

But he would touch where I did not hurt, and he would apply his healing powers.

I know this will sound nonsense to many, but that's the kind of cat Thunder Paws was.

He was a healer cat.

And a thinking cat.

Jim is a buddy cat, a fun cat to hang out with but he will walk across my shingles.

He does not understand why I won't let him; why I keep evicting him from the room, or pushing him away if I have collapsed on my back on the couch.

This has been very hard on Jim.

He is not a healer cat and he does manage to make contact and that contact hurts, yet, somehow, his presence makes the pain easier to bear. Even if he hurts me sometimes, he will help me heal faster.

Jim - my good black cat.

How lucky I am to have a buddy like that.

Buddy Jim.