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[Nov. 8th, 2009|11:02 pm] |
iiiiit's a downswing. i can't get my head right, i'm flattening out under this incredible crushing feeling of failure and guilt. wake up each morning with failure and guilt in my chest. it's brutal, truth be told. thinking of slinking home to my mother's house to sit on the couch for a while.
i walked home today listening to love & rockets. 'haunted', if you must know. i realized that i've got all these sweet folksy friends and these tough gritty punks, but there's not a lot of people i really identify with in terms of subculture. oh, for a pack of angsty goths right now. of all the things in the world to want for, moping and smoking a cigarette amongst three people sitting on a curb would really, really, really hit the spot. throw in some eyeliner and teased black hair and dangling crosses....all the better.
goth. feelin' it. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|06:59 pm] |
so i'm finally starting to feel good again. it's like a thaw, things are coming slowly, and i've not really got as firm a hold on 'happy' as i'd like, but i'm keeping engagements, going out, starting projects, saving money, cleaning my apartment, cooking lush vegan food and sharing it with friends, working out, walking places just to see what the world looks like, petting my cats, and i've slowly started to write again.
all of these things have been on hold for a year, in a foggy kind of stasis. which makes perfect sense, but it's still a remarkable surprise to realize just how lovely the little things a person does every day are.
i don't even feel like it's all about to come crashing down, either. 26 may well be a good year. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|12:14 pm] |
so i suppose i can admit i'm growing up. i can admit that it's been a fuck of a year, and that my priorities have shifted radically over the course of this previous year.
it's still a bit of a surprise to find that i'm not at all excited about my birthday. in fact, i've caught myself thinking 'if it just passes by and i do nothing, i won't be terribly sorry at all'. this is in direct contrast to my usual stance, which is that i find there to be something about a day during which people shower me with praise, attention, and gifts - something about that which i find deeply reassuring of some long-held assumptions about my own general awesomeness.
but this year i'm flat. i love the rain, but the weather isn't really doing it for me. i'm sitting in my house a lot, blowing my evenings doing dick all, putting myself to sleep at five in the morning after clicking around on the internet and reading a couple chapters of a book. i'm not clearing my desk of the editing contracts i have, and i'm certainly behind on work.
i'm also dizzily in love, and the odd evening spent with carlo just making dinner and talking and having a stellar time certainly highlights the dimness the rest of my life is displaying.
i realize that i'm out of school, and that's a big part of it. i love academia. i love the language of it, the feeling of going to school, and the rare chance to study with someone who is genuinely remarkable, be they professor or fellow student. i miss that a lot. i miss being able to be a brat and show off, to work on things i felt were important, and i really miss the feedback.
i graduated with a joint honours degree in english and creative writing, and a minor in interdisciplinary studies in sexuality. the writing portion of my degree was hugely rewarding, and i have started to realize that it's really what i'd like to be. what i want to do with this space in my life. the trouble is that things have rusted shut a little, as i stopped writing when carlo originally fell seriously ill last december, and i'm only starting to nudge back up against it now.
carlo is a musician, and a disgustingly talented one at that. he lives in the mile-end, which is a part of montreal that is moite-jewish, moite-young french families with artsy inclinations, and moite-hipsters with a heart, if you can make sense of the description. there are a lot of artists, a lot of late night dinners in crowded kitchens around a piano. everyone can play the banjo, the piano, or is a singer. it's folky, it's montreal orchestra/choral 17 person bands with recorders and fisher price pianos, it's a community that feeds carlo and he has a real and meaningful place within.
it's not my scene, but i've grown to appreciate it. i don't play any instruments [ i can plunk out a tune on a piano, i can pick my way around a bass guitar, and i can make the violin in my living room sound very sorry indeed]. i don't sing in front of them, because they're all singers and i'm reluctant to become a fully participating part of that greasy music machine.
that said, i can see carlo being fed by it. he goes over to friends' places, drops in and they play music together. four a.m. someone has found a tuba, and he's out of bed and into someone else's living room where they're all taking turns honking on the thing to see what sounds it makes. each person is in five bands, some famous, some forgettable, but they are supportive, kind, interested and playfully driven.
i've come to really appreciate what is happening in the mile-end. so now, i find myself sitting alone in the evenings when everyone's heading out of town for the great thanksgiving exodus, and i wonder where my writing community is. i suspect it doesn't exist.
writing is hyped as a solitary thing. don't really buy it. yeah, there's plenty of time spent sitting in your gitch in front of a glowing screen, typing with your eyes half shut, plenty of poking at an old typewriter with a cigarette burning into the ashtray, plenty of scribbling in your tiny notebook on the metro. but there's a whole other aspect - having people to drive you on, challenge you and compel you. that's missing right now.
carlo, who i met in a writing class, has more or less chosen music. pistolpress was a good outlet, but it's kind of floating free right now and i'm not doing a great deal of work in my own field.
essentially this is an open call - no pressure or expectation, but just a mention to those of you who write or even those who would never admit it. send it to me. i'll read it. i'll comment on it. zena, i owe you a critique. nick you're a writer, get over yourself and send me things. all of you. frieda i know you have it in you, and you're just begging for an excuse to get back to it/procrastinate on your phd work. jesse staniforth i know you crawl over livejournal once in a while, you're on the list too. i'll stop naming names, but there are more. if i don't know you and you're reading my journal, and there are a few of you, you're on the list as well.
just send it to me, it'll sit in my inbox for a week, and i'll trade you back a comment or two and a piece of writing. it's easy to create community and momentum, so this is an open call.
hostile [dot] witness [at] gmail. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 13th, 2009|11:56 am] |
the days are fine and good.
carlo took me to nyc last weekend, a trip that we've been putting off for just over a year now. i remember him sitting in the royal vic, wearing latex gloves and two isolation gowns so he could type on the computer, jp drains hanging off of his body, everything all fucked up. he wrote the hotel and switched the reservation for the 5-6th of september, and it seemed impossibly far away then.
as the date got closer and he became sicker, i was sure there was going to have to be another cancellation. these past six or so weeks have been utterly astounding. i hadn't seen him since two days after being released from the hospital, so when i went to toronto to visit last week i was completely unprepared for the sight of him. i actually didn't recognize him and backed away. he seems a foot taller, because he's able to stand up straight. he's pink and white, and has muscle tone, and looks like a normal healthy 26 year old fellow. he's sharp and his eyes are clear and he sounds like himself when he talks. he's brand new. it's fucking incredible.
new york was pretty fucking incredible too, if i might add. we stayed at the algonquin hotel, and slumped around being writerly together. it's a beautiful old building on 44th between 5th and 6th avenue, which was impressive but overwhelmingly tourist-clogged at times.
life is picking back up again and i'm slowly warming to it, slowly accepting that he is well, and that i might be able to just live and choose for myself and do what i please. i wanted to say to him ' i was so sure you were going to die, for so long ', but it seems inappropriate. he hand-carved me a chess set while recovering from his last liver transplant, gifted me with it when i arrived in toronto last week, then beat me at the inaugural game.
montreal is well and good. will came and visited me and i dragged him on a little tour de l'isle on a bixi bike, which seemed like the best way of showing off the city. double dipping aux vivres two nights in a row seemed in order, [hello vegelox, hello smoked coconut blt]. i took him to the pistolpress launch - the future hygenic, the book i worked on as an editor, is finally printed and out.
now i have a pile of manuscripts to read, a binder of soliloquies submissions to jury, a show poster to draw, a secret project to finish working on, and a piercing portfolio to compile for tuesday. i have an interview at a shop in laval for a position as their piercer, which would be pretty fucking alright. anyone need anything pierced before tuesday morning? |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 13th, 2009|02:08 am] |
how strange, these times.
i've worn down the fillings on my back teeth from grinding at night. i'm picking holes in everything i touch - it's going to be a while before i feel like i'm back up above water, but i suppose that's normal. on the other hand, i don't really want to invest too deeply in the idea of emotional recovering. i fear that i would use it as an excuse to lie listless, doing nothing, waiting for betterment, claming i was resting.
i certainly do need to rest, but i also need to grab ahold of the world that seems to be spinning by me.
today i worked in a cafe, typing out SEO garbage on my laptop. i ended up in a conversation with the waitress who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and now bone cancer. she looked fearful while we talked. she sat in a chair, pulling her lips and looking at the ceiling, trying not to cry, aching for me to notice and come over, comfort her. usually i would, but i didn't. i sat in my place and worked, earphones on. we spoke again as i left, but i felt that i'd failed to reach out to her in the way she had hoped, that the overtures of hospital-story-trading had not really given her any comfort, any sense of connectedness.
i came home and cleaned my apartment, listened to crass, watched the sun go down through the ivy that grows over my bedroom window. when it was dark, i biked up to the plateau and met cait. we drank water in her drawing room, her persians lounged on the table, and we made plans for our upcoming book club. we're reading 'the captive of gor' i think. some terrible quasi sci fi erotica novel from the 80's that she found for a dime. we didn't have two copies, so we preteneded it was a wishbone and ripped it in half along the spine. she has the beginning, i have the end. we'll meet in a week and compare impressions. she will ask how it ends, i will ask who all these people are.
we rode our bikes over to the statue of the angel at the foot of the mountain. late, as usual, we arrived to find everyone waiting. a clutch of hipsters, who i'm starting to understand are just today's normal youth. normal kids with healthy bodies and open futures. shitty slang, easily hurt feelings, and for the most part decent senses of humour. i still feel like an interloper, but it's mostly in my head.
we climbed the mountain in the dark, going up the wooden stairs and winding packed earth paths. we finally arrived at the top in a clearing, i was fucking feeling the climb, and very aware that i've spent the past six months sitting on my ass beside various hospital beds. being clean normal kids, fucking picnic blankets were spread out. we lay back and did our best to watch the meteor shower, the perseids making a brave show of things and occasionally streaking visibly despite all of the light pollution.
there were ghost stories, believe it or not. dep wine and talking, knots of kids. around one cait was dragging, so she julie and i walked back down the mountain in the dark. we unchained our bikes and split, cait to the east, julie to the south, and i went west. felt a little epic. i biked home fast, feeling good, taking corners really wide and riding down the centre of the lane. sometimes it feels so good to just ride my bike, i forget that i can simply go do that if i'm bored or anxious or just need to get out of my slimy un-airconditioned apartment. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 11th, 2009|05:27 pm] |
i'm heading out of town for a week, starting saturday. going to goose rocks beach, maine, with my family. i could use some ocean....
shot in the dark, here, but is there anyone who would like my apartment for a week? i live right downtown, i have a queen sized bed and a couch if you'd like to pile people in. wireless internerd, i'm right beside metro guy-concordia, and you can go through all of my weird stuff. i have two charming cats who kind of enjoy being fed once a day, if you're looking for a catch.
leave me a note here if you'd like the space, or if you'd like it for a day or two i can get you some keys. lemme know! aug 15-22. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 4th, 2009|01:31 am] |
it's still hard to articulate my surprise, my relief, my happiness. i know that it's still too early to really let go of the string, but i can feel that absolute buoyancy of hope and promise just above me.
this morning i woke in bed beside carlo, and we dragged ourselves downstairs at ten o'clock. oatmeal and strawberries and coffee, his with a side of insulin, prograf, cell-cept, pantaloc and a handful of other pills. i packed up my bags, and his homecare nurse arrived. she's a quick talking eastern european woman named irina who has taken all of two mornings to completely win carlo's heart. she spent a long time with him yesterday morning, asking him about his transplant, about what it's like to be so young and suddenly looking at death, at micro-managing every aspect of one's life just to scrape by until the next day. big questions, but not common ones asked.
he made lunch, we watched old louis armstrong videos on the television, and then went down the street to the elementary school to bounce his new basketball and shoot for a while. it's beautiful to see him up and moving. he's still fairly fucked up, his belly is stapled side to side and he oozes fluid from the incision at an alarming rate sometimes. he's thin, but his feet are comically [not to mention dangerously] swollen, and his stomach is distorted. he can't really stand up straight, and he's covered in bruises, but he's moving around, and it feels as though this finally might be lifting.
i took the train home, care of his generous mother. wrote for a long while, read a respectable chunk of 'tropic of capricorn', then simply sat with my eyes closed and music in my ears, letting the train rock me for a long while.
home to montreal. my cats are in fine shape, thanks to the long-suffering morgan who got stuck with far more cat-sitting than she signed on for. she came by, and we went down to the PA for some groceries, and then broke into the empty apartment beside mine. we sat on the floor eating hummous and cauliflower, fistfulls of black cherries scored at a scandalously low 2.99/kg. we investigated the place, took abandoned garbage bags and floor cleaner. talked shit and spit cherry pits across the wood floor.
i'm in bed now, it's nearly two a.m. i feel very well indeed. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 1st, 2009|05:00 pm] |
this afternoon carlo walked out of the toronto general hospital, a free man. the specialist came by and said he had a 'perfect liver'.
perfect perfect perfect.
he's got energy. he came home, sat in the backyard with me for a while, then got up and concocted himself a diabetes-appropriate meal. he put music on and concocted a dish, i snipped chives from the garden. we ate in the shade until a wasp chased us inside.
then he asked if i'd like to go down davenport and check out a garage sale he'd noticed while we drove by in the taxi on our way home from the hospital. he sunscreened and put on his over-large straw hat, and we strolled. i genuinely can't remember a time in the previous year or two that he has asked if i'd like to do something, especially anything that involves a walk. he wasn't even wiped out.
we've been out walking for the past hour or so, winding around tree-canopied toronto streets in his italian neighbourhood. poking around at garage sales. he bought me an ornate teacup and saucer. we got rolls and prosciutto at the bakery, tomatoes and plums at the small fruit market. a quart of milk for his mum.
home now, he's listening to music downstairs, making another meal to appease the prednisone hunger. i can't at all believe that he was transplanted the wednesday before last. i'm smiling and soft, exhausted. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 1st, 2009|01:21 am] |
there's a fair chance that carlo might be released tomorrow.
it's hard to really wrap my head around how fast everything is happening, how well he is doing. there are a few concerns. he has developed diabetes, which is troubling. his blood sugar has been sky-high since the surgery, and they simply came into his room two days ago and informed him that he was now a diabetic.
on the plus side, there is a chance that it's related to his medication, so he might be able to get rid of it at some point. realistically, right now he is eating a diabetic diet, checking his blood sugar, and injecting himself in the belly with insulin four times a day. it's been a source of worry for him, which is difficult to see.
his liver seems to be doing well. he's still quite swollen, and has cartoonishly giant feet because of all the fluid in his body. his mood is up and down, i get the sense that the experience is just starting to catch up with him now. he's been putting off really recognizing his situation because his position simply didn't afford him that luxury, but now that it seems like recovery might really happen, he is profoundly sad at times.
it's difficult because the man in the bed beside him, an older gentleman who has been struggling for a while, has been tracing an arc downwards. carlo lay in bed listening while, on the other side of a blue curtain, doctors gathered around his neighbour's bed to explain that they had run out of options. this man had a lung transplant 17 years ago, and his kidneys are failing, and the lungs are no longer working properly. he speaks carefully, and though his voice is tired and pained, without malice.
over the past few days we've listen to him decide to go off of his anti-rejection drugs. to stop his medications. he had made the decision to die.
nurses have come in after the shift change, clucking and prodding at him, trying to get him to take his pills, not having been briefed about his choice. this person is trying to hold on to some dignity, to let go of life in a way that is simply sinking down into suffering. this isn't a quick out, and the mechanics of the hospital institution are exposed as teams of doctors come to take him through 'are you sure' questionnaires. nurses ask about family, whether they will come to take him and bring him home to die.
people come to dissuade him. most of the time he sleeps, or lies with his blanket over his head. i remember the young girl in the montreal general who was across from carlo, ages ago. she'd been wheeled back into the room in her bed, iv bags swinging and foreign machinery beeping in her bed with her. she lay very still with her blanket over her face, not crying, but i knew they had just told her she would die. she did, days after carlo was moved to intensive care.
today the old man's family was here. carlo and i ate outside on the lawn. he is tearful, thinking hard about it. i listen to him talk about it, watch him cry and scrub tears away from his face with i.v. bruised hands.
this afternoon his neighbour's bed was made, the man gone. carlo sat at the edge of his bed and dialed his insulin injector. his hands shake like an alcoholics, he keeps missing his fingertip with the lancet when he tests his blood sugar. i watched him pull aside his robe and stab the short needle into his belly, below the traintrack stapled incision.
i'm relieved that things are finally somewhat well, or seem as though they will be. but these organs aren't permanent, and these medications are poisons. there's still so far to go, and i think he is genuinely beginning to crumble. he's so pinned on being let out of the hospital, so sure they're going to release him, so agonized at the thought of spending another day in that place. i need them to let him go. i need him to be well enough to go. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 27th, 2009|11:59 pm] |
things are still good at the hospital. he has been moved out of the ICU, out of the ACU, and all the way onto a regular ward. the clinical nurses from intensive care came down and signed off on him, saying they don't even need to be following him at this point.
he's in excellent spirits, on 80mg of prednisone which is making him insanely hungry and as talkative as a coked-up bar star. he's not in very much pain and has been taken off of his morphine pump, and is now relying exclusively on oxycontin/oxycodone once in the morning and once at night.
today i arrived to find him sitting naked in a chair, pouring fluid from his incision into the bedpan at his feet. it was a gross drippy day, but other than that, problem free. he had another unit of blood yesterday because his hemoglobin is still down, but he is feeling fine. he's absolutely streaming ascites [the fluid his body creates to cushion his injured organs] because the surgeons didn't put in any JP drains. this isn't the worst thing, as the drains were brutal, always painful, and were excruciating to remove as his body eventually grows onto the plastic tubing and removal entails simply snipping the few stitches that hold it in place and then yanking about six inches of tube out.
but still. things are lovely. unimaginably lovely. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 24th, 2009|02:49 am] |
i had whiskey and pancakes for dinner.
that might say it all. when i woke this morning, i was just finished dressing and his mother, sara, tapped on my door. she said she'd called the ICU to check in, and the word was that he was up, off the respirator, talking and drinking water. said that he didn't even remember having a transplant.
i took the train in with her after oatmeal at the kitchen table together. we marched in, and i called into the ICU at reception to see if we were able to come visit. they said we could, and we turned the corner and went down the hallway to intensive care.
he was awake and smiling, waving.
he was fine. he is fine. better than fine, at the moment. he got up and walked around the halls with the nurse. he has bowel sounds, unusual for a patient within 24 hours of a day-long transplant surgery. this meant he was allowed clear fluids, jello and broth. he was hungry. he wasn't in any pain.
he could sit himself up, reach things. his incision wasn't hurting him at all. well, marginally, yes, but nothing like before. he was alert, chatty, friendly and fine. he was better than he was the morning before transplant. he was stoned off his face on morphine, but still perfectly alert.
i can't get over it. i can't wrap my head around it. neither can he. he just said that it was such a relief...that he doesn't even feel like he's had a transplant. he's moving slowly, and his liver functions are still coming back up and his kidneys are still under-performing and his blood pressure and blood sugars are high, but none of this is unexpected right after surgery.
so far so good, and so so good. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 22nd, 2009|09:38 pm] |
today was long and i am a little delirious. last night i tried to sleep, i lay face down, afraid, excited, knotted up with this giddy nausea that just rolled over me. when the alarm went at four a.m. i crawled out of bed, showered, dressed. carlo's mother and i had breakfast together at the table downstairs, she opened a few birthday gifts [he was transplanted on her 54th].
arriving at the hospital at five a.m. after a dark car ride through sleeping toronto streets was soft, quiet, beautiful. the elevators were working and we rode up to the tenth floor uninterrupted. no other passengers at that hour. carlo was asleep in his dark room, his eyebrows creased from slight pain. his mother woke him with her voice as she came in and he struggled up to semi-alertness, drugged on percocet. they'd finally given him something for the pain because with a new liver on the way, they were less concerned with preserving the minimal function of his existing one.
the surgery had been tentatively pushed forward to six a.m., but the hour came and went, the sun rose. carlo mumbled druggy things in his sleep, waking to talk and then going back under, trying to keep one eye open while the other one drooped shut. his mum nodded off in her chair. we kept watch over him, i sat and looked at him for two hours or so. the ekg nurse came. the surgical staff started to appear, peeking at his charts on the computer, asking his nurse questions. finally dr. greig, the same liver transplant surgeon who had picked carlo's name off the board in the ER on sunday, arrived.
he's a tall man with long silver hair that hangs down around his shoulders like a grown out monk's pate - he's completely bald up top. his skin is eerily smooth but he must be in his sixties or so. he was sharp, focused, his hands moving evenly and directly as he came upstairs to talk about the procedure, the potential complications, the risks. carlo, ready as he was ever going to be, nodded and agreed. he signed forms, one for the surgery, one for the blood they would need to transfuse, and one that allowed his old liver to go to medical science. despite our requests, he wasn't allowed to keep a bit of it in a jar. i am heartily disappointed.
in the blue dawn his mother and i packed up his room. i kissed his face. i lay my head down on his shoulder, stretching myself across his hospital bed, and told him i was going to hug him for a while. he agreed, and nodded out against me. the drugs made it difficult to say a meaningful 'i love you', which tugged at a strand of fear.
the surgical orderly came, a calm and careful man who explained everything exhaustively. his nurse and i pulled carlo's pyjama pants off. she unhooked him from his monitors, and pulled out a few extraneous i.v.'s. i slipped a gown over his shoulders and he stood, tottering, and walked to the waiting stretcher, his pump and i.v.'s coming too. his mother and i followed him down the hallway, reminiscing about the last time we did this walk. how frantic it was. how she was in the room signing consent forms that he couldn't because he was intubated, drugged beyond belief. how i was running after the stretcher, watching a burly nurse squeeze the purple plastic bladder that forced air into his lungs, how she pumped out his breaths with her hand and he tried to motion that the tube down his throat was hurting him, the plastic mouthpiece strapped to his face pinching his lips. i was looking over my shoulder, running, worried his mother wouldn't get to say goodbye, that they'd push him through the double doors and out into nothingness and she would be left behind.
this time it was much calmer, much more restrained. an elevator ride to the surgical floor. a kiss goodbye, an 'i love you' in the hallway, and he was wheeled away into the chaos of dark blue scrubs and chattering voices, the noise of early morning surgical staff readying for the day.
his mother and i went up to the waiting room on the third floor, overlooking the atrium. we waited, as per instruction, for an hour until a nurse finally emerged from surgery at nine thirty or so to let us know that he had been anesthitized and they had started to cut. she told us it would take all day, until about five o'clock. a long haul.
nervous waiting gave way to exhaustion. exhaustion to chatting and reading. nick edwards, a friend of carlo's from highschool and a guy i know from montreal, showed up. he's been at the hospital with us the past few days, and is a lovely, caring individual. this is clearly breaking his heart, and i caught him crying subtly a few times.
the minister from his mother's church showed up uninvited, and proceeded to insinuate himself. he's well intentioned, but when he said 'i cleared my afternoon so i could be here with you' it was hard not to just groan. he is oblivious, and wants to talk constantly. he tells story after story about parishioners who have had bad surgeries, post surgery dementia, paralysis, death, the funeral he just came from, the depression and isolation of physically disabled and elderly people, the horror of sickness and operation. he just wouldn't fucking quit. and he couldn't be silenced.
nick and i stole away for a coffee, and we sat out on the benches in the meridian facing the hospital. we talked and laughed and the wind blew and it felt good. i tried to steel him against seeing carlo after the operation, against the shock of seeing someone so vulnerable and open. the sight of tubes running into their mouth, their chest snapping up and down on a machine's schedule. the sight of someone incoherent, in terrible pain.
back upstairs, the afternoon ticking by. finally at about five thirty, six o'clock, dr. greig came out of surgery and pulled up a chair. he was smiling, and said it was all good news.
all good news.
he said that they'd cut away the old liver, which is a difficult part of the process. a transplanted organ sticks to the body cavity. they have to slice away these adhesions, and address the pockets of infection they found around the organ. that took a good part of the surgery. once the old liver was out, they were able to attach the new one using fresh, unsutured veins. this was because the montreal surgeon had used veins up top, and dr. greig simply used the available connections left below. this is good. he also created a fake bile duct for carlo by diverting a portion of his intestine. essentially it will replace the bile duct and allow bile to drain into carlo's intestine and mix with digesting food, and he will never know the difference. he said this is done in 20% of their liver transplant cases. i'm pleased, because i don't think intestines can get PSC, the disease that damaged his bile ducts in the first place, and that we had just learned might reoccur.
the other good bit was that his kidneys were producing large amounts of urine throughout, which is fantastic, because they had really decreased in functinon and doctors were concerned it might require dialysis and potential transplant somewhere down the line. if his kidneys bounce back, as dr. greig 'bet a dollar they would', that would be such a lovely outcome.
so they closed him up, and sent him to the surgical ICU. we had to wait an hour while they cleaned and transferred him, but we were finally allowed up. the rules are very strict, and you have to call in from a phone in the waiting room and they give you a time to come in. you are allowed ten minutes every hour, and then you have to leave again.
he was swollen, carlo after surgery. the tubes down his throat were less frightening, given that i'd seen them before. his catheter was draining copious amounts of bright yellow urine, which was incredible, considering he's been pissing near-brown/black for the past few months. a tube snaking down his nose was quietly suctioning diluted dark green fluid from somewhere inside of him, and his respirator was popping his chest up and down. he was covered with a sheet, but dr. greig informed us that he does a surgical cut that looks like a peace sign, or a mercedes logo, extending his existing scar up towards his breastbone.
there were catheters in his neck and wires everywhere, tubes and i.v.s and corrugated cord covers and pumping pressure cuffs. the monitor displayed far more readouts than usual, but his stats seemed fairly normal. he was still under the anaesthetic when we saw him, dead out. the late afternoon sun was coming through the window and shining on him so brightly it was a strange thing to see him so still beneath it. a smear of blood arcing up over the pink plastic tape holding the respirator tube in place suggested some of the violence that had taken place, but he was nowhere near as gory and swollen as before.
nick struggled, i saw him pacing, unable to really come in the room, his eyes red and wet. sara talked to the nurse, going into capable mode she was giving the nurse her phone number and other contact information, asking visiting hours, how long they thought he'd be in. his sister stood off to the side smiling either stiffly or dazedly, i don't know her well enough to read her face very well. i didn't quite know what to do. i felt like i should be crying but i wasn't. i held his toes briefly. they were so warm, and he was twitching slightly, i could feel the pulse in his muscles. i was worried he was in pain, conscious of it somehow.
i told him how beautiful he was, how much i loved him, how everything was going to be fine, and we left, our ten minutes up. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 21st, 2009|11:25 pm] |
they found carlo a liver.
he goes into surgery at six a.m. tomorrow. i'm gloriously happy and unwilling to be afraid. the risks are greater. there's a chance it might become unviable over night, or go to someone else in sudden greater need. there are things that can go wrong. but they won't.
he's swollen and sore and his belly is starting to become starred with broken blood vessels from the sudden inflation of fluid. they were going to tap him today, but recanted, saying it was too dangerous. his kidneys are starting to flake out, and they were worried the tap would shock them and cause irreversible damage, as opposed to the state they're in now, which they are likely to bounce back from.
but no matter. he is going to get another liver. i'm getting up at four a.m. with his mother, and we're going down to the hospital. we'll see him through this. it will be another day in the waiting room, like last time. it will be scarier for a number of reasons, but i'll adhere to my old superstition and i'm just not going to tell you about them, thus preventing my fears from being actualized. it is very scientific.
how happy, how lucky, am i.
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 21st, 2009|12:40 am] |
i'm just so damn sad. i've just seen so much suffering taken on by one person who is innately good, kind, patient.
he's in pain. there's talk of kidney failure, of the liver failure he's experiencing. he is allowed one tylenol. one. even that was a stretch given how poorly his liver is functioning.
the fluid they're pumping in his arm to address his dehydration isn't going to his body, it's going straight to his belly. he looks nine months pregnant. the scar that runs across him is shiny, pink, wet-looking from being so taxed by the swollen belly. doctors can feel the tip of his spleen through his skin, his organs are pushing around, swelling, floating in the fluid his body is producing at an insane pace, trying to cushion the liver that's dying inside of him.
all day was arranging pillows, pulling i.v. strands and heart monitor cords out of the way, pulling up blankets, raising foam cups of ice water to his lips, bendy straws, hospital smells. he's in bad shape and he knows it. he needs a transplant.
they might 'tap' him tomorrow. it's exactly what it sounds like. he's scared because they will likely do it while he's awake. that said, it will provide him some fucking relief. pain pain pain pain pain on pain.
his friends came, family came. my sister even came. the halls on the transplant acute care unit are choked with people, other people's families. talk in the halls is bad. people are dying all around us, old men are sobbing against the wide window that looks out over university street and the briefcase-swinging business crowd below. kids are crying in the elevators. everyone's wiping cheeks, take-out coffee in one hand, the other scrubbing off tears.
why the fuck don't we have an opt-out organ donor program. why isn't 'yes, please help others' the automatic option and 'no, put me and all my parts in the ground to rot' the one you have to sign a special card for. |
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| it's starting again. |
[Jul. 19th, 2009|05:37 pm] |
at nine a.m. today carlo threw up two litres of blood in the bathtub.
i heard him go into the bathroom, heard him retch. he called my name. i asked if he was puking. he gulped a yes. i asked if it was blood. yes again. i opened the door, phone in hand. the tub was a half inch deep with blood and gore. clots. i called the ambulance as he heaved again.
on the line with 911 i found him pyjama pants. he sat on the toilet and i undressed in the hallway, tearing on clothes. the firemen arrived first. i heard the sirens wailing somewhere over near dovercourt, in the distance. carlo, pale and ... i can't place the look on his face. somewhere between familiarity and fear.
i raced downstairs and let the firemen in. three men tramped up the stairs, they have a paramedic in their crew and were closer than the ambulance. they crowded the bathroom, carlo's pale face in the middle as he answered their questions. i raced through the house gathering his pills, which we would need in order to tell hospital staff exact dosages. i found him a soft t-shirt. his slippers. i let the paramedics in and explained everything. they took him downstairs somehow. i opened the door and they were unfolding the stretcher. i remember locking the door, carlo sitting in the driveway on the rolling bed, an orange blanket over him, ambulance doors swinging open.
i got in the front seat of the ambulance, talked the paramedics into taking him to the general and not the loathful western. i listened to carlo talk in the back, listened to the paramedic keep him awake and communicating. i spoke with the driver, explained the liver transplant, the previous esophagial bleeds.
front seat in an ambulance at nine on a sunday morning slows the world down. the sirens are very soft when they're above you, and everyone freezes, looks, goes still mid-step, mid-turn. cars drift out of the way, cyclists slip through the spaces and off to the side. you can see the streets, people stop walking and watch, then look away, superstitious.
we arrived at the general and he spent about 15 minutes in the hallway. much hair stroking. a little chatter. i filled out the dosages and frequency of his prescriptions, i checked him in at the desk, i took the bill for the ambulance ride and folded it away.
we were moved to a room in emergency and a brusque eastern european nurse in purple scrubs took over. she was not terribly competent, and spent so long stabbing and driving at his arms trying to start i.v. lines. she explained, as she wiggled the needle and the blood stopped flowing down the latex tubing into the test tube she was trying to collect in, that the veins in liver patients often simply shatter, roll away, break. she used the word break 'ah, that one's broken now, see? they break'. carlo wincing the whole time as she shook the needle in his hand, his inner arm.
another nurse delicately extracted the blood collection kit from the other nurse's hands and drew three vials with very little difficulty. a team of doctors appeared, headed by a man named dr. grieg, a silver haired man who is very kind, and cares for his little flock of white coated residents like lambs. he's the head of liver transplant surgery, i believe, and had actually been in the e.r. visiting another patient and seen carlo's name on the board and come over to see what was happening.
he took things into his own hands, which was immensely reassuring. he elevated carlo's status to '2', meaning he's higher on the transplant list, which is something. his residents came in, including dr. perkins, a beautiful woman with a soft clear voice who is now following him. carlo answered as many questions as possible, and they went out to make phone calls to transplant, to GI to organize a scope, etc.
carlo got sleepier, asked that i recline his bed. i sat by him, stroking his hair and chattering nonsense. i caught on that something was wrong, he turned his head and burped a little. i grabbed a basin and sat him back up, and it was on again. gouts of bright red blood. litres of it slipping out of his lips. no respite, just huge heaves of blood and gelatinous dark blood clots, mouthful-sized, slapping down into the paper bowl. i held my hand on his back, i switched the basin when he had a break between heaves.
they had been deciding whether they would give him blood or not, but that sorted it quickly. blood came, and they hooked him up, thankfully. carlo opened his eyes and demanded that they give him only 'celebrity blood', which was sortof amazing.
blood. go give some. no seriously. it's a little magnificent.
they moved him upstairs, purple-scrubs nurse taking control of the i.v. pole to everyone's dismay. i carried the medical cooler that held the bags of blood he was yet to receive. we were quite the procession, going down the hallway. the transport nurse and purple nurse with the i.v. pole, a flying formation of residents behind me talking levels and white blood cell counts and scopes and tests, me in the middle with the cooler of other people's blood, and carlo holding his own i.v. tubing [to prevent purple nurse from yanking them all out of his arm when she didn't quite get the i.v. pole around the corners at the same speed as his stretcher was moving]. i wish i'd had a camera, because there were points where all you could see of him as we went down hallways that were half-lit, abandoned stretchers and equipment everywhere...all you could see of him was his raised fist clutching i.v. tubes, his arm straight up and visible over all of the shoulders of people wearing scrubs and white coats.
upstairs to the transplant ACU, a few doors down from the room he was in post-surgery here. [i'm visiting toronto right now, if this has confused anyone...]. they set him up in a bed, and strapped on more i.v.s to give him blood, plasma, drugs, saline solution. the GI people came up and scoped him and we had to leave, his parents having finally arrived about 15 minutes after they moved him upstairs. they were out of town for the night at a b&b, and i'd left them some frightening phone messages.
the scope went well enough, when we came back into the room he was unconscious, drugged to fuck. they said they'd found four varices and banded them, and that they were no longer bleeding. good news. i talked to the GI resident as the nurse emptied the suction unit. about a litre and a half of blood in there, possibly more. another nurse attached a third bag of donated blood.
carlo is yellow. when he's bone pale from blood loss he glows neon yellow, it's startling. his sister arrived and his mum has just taken me back to the house so i can shower and she can eat. carlo was drugged, propped upright, his eyes rolling around. sleeping deeply then waking suddenly, his arms encumbered with tape and i.v. plugs and tubing, his movements slow and strained.
this is where we are now.
i'm going to stop making these entries private, i'm not sure why they were in the first place, the only people who know about this journal are those on my friends list. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 31st, 2009|02:21 pm] |
carlo was released today!
his enzymes are "beautiful". he's been set free. his mother dropped me off on their way out of town. he's wearing clothes. he's beautiful. he's going home. |
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| STORYTIME. MHM. |
[Dec. 31st, 2008|01:18 pm] |
So I Heard PETA Treats Women Like Meat
My girlfriend puts lipstick on rabbits at the Huntington Life Sciences labs down Industrial Way. I stay at home, and staple my thumb putting together zines for the Animal Liberation Front. Chelsea rubs that red paste made of whale fat, crushed bug carmine, and petrochemicals onto the cleft lips and spitty teeth of bunnies. I’m home with the photocopier toner up my forearms, ALF propaganda spread out on the living room floor, trying to format and print off that picture of the little baby primate hugging on the metal mommy doll. I’m home and I’ve got a yeast infection that I’ve been trying to kill off with garlic and Soygurt, and acidophilous caplets I boosted from the health food store in the mall. It’s eleven a.m. and Chelsea’s scratching notes on her clipboard, giving bunny number 454 a scratch behind the ears and tipping his head back so she can check for signs of swelling or irritation.
( yep, more. ) |
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| iiiiiiit's a story. |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|03:00 am] |
for anyone who wants to put the time in and champ it - i know reading these things on livejournal is miserable, but i always appreciate your comments. so:
Hometown
The baby trees have all gone to fishbones. It’s a grim city this time of year for most folks but I like the promise of fat snow coming in like parachutists over the city. And I like the pink that goes into the sky when it’s like this, and the quiet that comes over the place. I have got a route I trace to keep fit – brain fit and body fit. My radius is twelve block square.
I trace my square which runs up the slope of the hill and back around the main street then down through all of the alleys behind the residentials. The black lamps bend over this street and the snow is climbing up their stems. Things are very quiet and I appreciate that. Two fourty four a.m. is a good time. People out at this hour are specific and they move from one place to the other using their most secret paths. I check footprints. I never learned tracking and here it's all car treads down the middle of white roads and boot prints down white sidewalks so really things are clear and I don't know if there's much I could learn.
( onwards onwards onwards....... ) |
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| i made a children's poem |
[Oct. 16th, 2008|11:14 am] |
i post this for the small but noble Liliane, and also to inform you all of what a big softie baby i am inside, apparently.
Coat-Button Moon
High up above us
In the dyed cotton night
A Coat-Button moon
drifts into sight,
Lazily brushing
The dark fingers of trees.
A little girl watches
And what does she see?
The Coat-Button moon
Set pale, round, and high,
In a greatcoat of darkness
With us closed inside.
Nose up to the glass,
She dreamily gazes
As the bright button gleams
Down over the mazes
Of alleys and houses,
Streetlights and rooftops,
Chimneys and tom cats
Parked cars and closed shops.
The little girl pads
Back to her warm bed
With the Coat-Button moon
Sewn fast, overhead. |
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