I am home!

I have arrived home after a 24 stay at Riverside Methodist Hospital, that was at once supreme, and only spoiled by the bland liquid diet and my "roommate" - a man from Southern Ohio who was in great pain and irrationally stupid.

The operation went according to the book. I could hear Donna, Felix, TBJ, Norma, Mr. Peenee and Mr. Bluehaunt all chanting "Where is my man, where is my baby?" during my operation!  Thanks to you it was a success - and a helluva caberet perfomance as well.


And my surgeon - a fascinating man named Oscar who looked good and therefore felt good -  not only took good care of me, BUT he also snagged me one of the gallstones so I can add it to my collection of family memoribilia!  When I tell that stone was so big that they had to break the mother to get out of me with the laproscope, I am just busting my buttoms with pride! I am as proud a mama of that stone as the woman who gave birth to the 20 pound baby in Mexico last year.

And the nurses were fantastic - they really were grand.  However the food was miserable.  Chicken boullion, orange "jell" snacks, "italian Ice" (notice that I left off the capital "I" as not to offend my Italain friends) , apple juice, grape juice and orange jucie and all of it "bland".  However this morning jest before I was discharged they sent up this sweet little faux omlete and I thought it it was the greatest feast a man could get.

All in all, it was pleasant expirience, given how Mr. Gallbladder had treated me a month ago today.  And I am lucky.  Of all the things that could have gone wrong, this was a walk in the park.

But back to the man in the bed beside me.  I'll call him Cletus.  Cletus had problems - the likes of which none of us could comprehend.  Children when I tell you by the third cry from help that he emmitted because he could not find his teeth, to the prayer calls he was getting from his home church in Racoon Spleen, Ohio to his wife and her loud ass talking on the cell phone, you can not imagine the suffering held by me as I stayed silent through the whole ordeal!   Not once did I tell Cletus to pipe down.  Nor did I say to him shut up.  I suffered in silence as if to take some of his pain from him.  And Cletus' problem.  "He got," his charming wife Donna Mae told me, "either gout, or what they call 'spinal stoneohsis'.  And where is that nurse with his pain meds?"

What was I to do?  I knew the poor man did not have "the gout", and I knew better to than to correct her by pointing out that its "spinal stenosis" - that is was I, not her oxycontin addicted Cletus, who had the stones.  What could I do? 

I did what I could, I offered her one of gaggingly sweet Italian ice's and said, just after she gota spoon of the pineapple ice in her mouth "I understand.  And just where is that nurse, she needs to measure my urine output in that jug."