cleaning the pipes

Since I have a maid (had to get one with the amount of time I spend traveling - someone has to check in on my house - shut up about the maid already, lots of people have one) I miss cleaning things. Though, it's freeing me up to do what I call "extreme cleaning".

Like this morning, when I woke up at 530 and couldn't go back to sleep. I did what any normal person would do that early in the morning. I removed all the pipes from under my three sinks (two bathroom, one kitchen) and soaked them to clean them. Then I used a bamboo pole that's supposed to be for propping plants up (like anything in my yard is going to grow tall enough to have to be propped up, the average height at death for plants in my yard is 6 inches) and scraped out the in situ pipes. Really gross stuff came out. I have no idea what it was. Probably my rotting hair or something.

Later I did some research and found out that you can dump a box of baking soda, a cup of vinegar, and boiling water down pipes to clean them. So tomorrow I'm buying an industrial size bottle of vinegar and a bunch of boxes of baking soda. You should try it, it's fun. The baking soda and vinegar make a little foaming volcano. Then adding the boiling water makes a huge bubbly mess. It's like a science experiment for adults that also cleans your pipes.

I should mention while doing a search for a natural way to clean my pipes, I discovered that's also a term for masturbating. I always thought it meant pooping. Maybe for people my age it still means pooping, I don't know. And I found like a billion web sites for cleaning pot residue from glass pipes. I found that interesting. Most people I know that smoke pot are slobs.

Chapter 1: Zombie Knee

Here's the first chapter of my book:

Chapter 1 Zombie Knee

Eight Months Earlier

101 Grand Avenue, Capitola, California

It was 4 a.m. I hadn’t slept for three days. The only noise was the sound of the waves sliding into the rocks at the base of the cliff below my apartment, and the strange robotic purr of the CPM (continuous passive movement) machine to which my right leg was strapped.

At that moment I realized I didn’t have to kill myself. I would die from despair.

#

     Three days before I had undergone a seven hour experimental operation on my right leg to rebuild my knee and femur out of cadaver parts. It wasn’t an elective surgery.

Eight years before, in 1992, I had broken my leg, but had somehow failed to notice. I had been a competitive and obsessive runner most of my life and raced in 10Ks until 2000, when my leg started collapsing underneath me. I didn’t think the collapses were a major issue until it happened while I was walking through a cafeteria with a tray full of food. It seemed wasteful to buy an overpriced plate of macaroni and cheese only to have it end up on the floor.

     I thought the cause was overtraining, something I was prone to do. But the diagnosis was much worse and changed my life forever. My leg kept collapsing because the right knuckle of my femur had broken off in an accident in 1992 and, over the years, the jagged remains of the bone had smashed the inside of my knee to pieces, like a broken glass bottle hammering into a filet mignon.

An initial surgery to fix the problem was botched and the surgeon informed me that my knee had to be removed and replaced with a titanium rod. I was too young for a mechanical knee, and there was no way for the doctor to replace the large amount of bone I had lost in my femur, or the lateral meniscus, which he had mistakenly removed in the surgery.

     He told me that the rod would prevent me from bending my leg. And wouldn’t make a cool didgeridoo sound when I walked, as I had imagined when I first heard about it. Unwilling to give up running or walking in stilettos I left that doctor’s office and never saw him again.

Then I embarked on a series of visits to twenty three knee doctors in the Bay area to see if someone had a better idea for my leg. At the start of my quest I had assumed that, since most of the doctors were well known and treated professional athletes, it would be easy to find a surgeon to fix my leg.

     At each visit I would explain my situation, and produced the surgery report, X-rays, and arthroscopic pictures. Then I would ask if there was a solution for my problem that didn’t involve a rod. Every doctor looked at me as if I was asking if it was medically possible to replace my knee with something more interesting, like a Pez candy dispenser.  No one could help me.

     Then I found out that there was a doctor - one of two in the US - doing experimental knee surgeries with cadaver parts. And his practice was in San Francisco. Although I wasn’t excited about the idea of having a zombie knee, and was worried about where the parts might come from, I went to see him. Dead body bits seemed like a better option than having something in my leg that might make me more susceptible to lightning strikes.

     And that’s how I met Dr. Douglas Blatz. At my first appointment he said he couldn’t help me. But then I managed to convince him to try. I’m ashamed to admit I did that by crying like a two year old and then threatening to cut off my leg. At the time he didn’t know that I was lying about owning a bread knife.

     I had assumed that Dr. Blatz had spare body parts stored somewhere that he could use to fix my leg, but that wasn’t the case. He had to order the parts. So I had to wait around for someone to die who matched my bone and tissue profile so my knee could be rebuilt.

Chris Kuhn, a physical therapist who had treated me since the first knee surgery, worked many long hours during the eight month wait for a donor to prepare me for my zombie knee surgery. He kept my spirits up during the grueling therapy sessions by inventing fun games, like one where he would throw a ball at my head while I stood on a wobble board. “Next time try to catch it with your hands instead of your face,” he would coach. He knew damn well I would never catch it.

     Dr. Blatz warned me that the surgery would be extremely painful, that it would likely fail, that I would never run again and that I would have to wear a brace on my leg for the rest of my life. He stressed to me that I would not be able to run again and that I would be limited in what physical activities I could do for the rest of my life.

I didn’t listen. I thought that if I had managed to run on a broken leg for eight years I could do anything.

     #

As the weeks past I became more stressed out that Dr. Blatz would never find donor parts. And even with therapy the constant sharp pain in my knee failed to improve even as the scars from my first surgery healed. Because I have an allergy to pain medication, the only thing I could do was ice my knee and take copious amounts of aspirin, one week consuming 200 of them. I vomited blood any time I ate spicy food or didn’t eat for a few hours.

The pain affected my job as well. I was moved out of my position as an engineer at work because it required me to be mobile. I was forced into a program management role that didn’t require any physical exertion beyond typing.

I couldn’t run, I saw my new job as a demotion, and I was scared about having an experimental surgery. My partner, whom I had been with for about a year, did not understand what was happening to me. The worst medical problem he experienced was having his wisdom teeth removed by the US Army. Our relationship started to fall apart.

I made things worse. Instead of trying to talk about my pain and anxiety, I pretended I was fine. I didn’t give my partner or anyone at work a chance to help because I didn’t want people to think I was weak or a whiner. I shut everyone out and decided to handle the pain alone.

The day the donor parts were found I felt relieved. Finally, I thought, I’ll get the zombie knee surgery over and then things would go back to normal.

#

Three days after the surgery, my knee resembled a rotting cantaloupe. It felt as if someone was jack hammering into the side of my leg. My femur coursed with an electrical sensation that ran through the bone into my thigh. Every time the CPM forced my knee to bend 20 degrees it sounded like someone slowly stepping on a box of Wheat Chex.

     Since I had the surgery over the Thanksgiving holiday, the few friends I had made during my short time as a resident in Capitola were all with their families and friends, eating turkey. My partner’s company had just received a new round of financing from investors and he had to leave for an emergency business trip the day after I got home from the hospital. Having had no idea how bad the surgery was going to be, and not wanting to force them to fly during the worst travel week of the year, I had told my family on the East Coast that I would be fine after the surgery.

The break in my femur

The bone plug

The cadaver meniscus

But now I was trapped in my apartment, I was out of ice for the ice machine, and the only pain medication I could take that I wasn’t allergic to, Tylenol, had no effect. I had been given localized morphine after my surgery and though it had worn off after 24 hours, I was still vomiting from an allergic reaction to it and had broken out in a rash that went from my scalp down to my abdomen.

I had wanted to take some Benedryl for the rash but it was in the upstairs bathroom, and I couldn’t negotiate the narrow stair case to get to it with my crutches. I was in a soft cast that went from my ankle to my hip, with two huge metal gears sticking out on either side of my knee to keep it from bending. Walking any distance beyond the bathroom down the hall was too painful as I had to hold my leg slightly up and in front of me to keep it from touching the ground.

Exhausted, it never occurred to me to call someone for help.

     The pain affected the rest of my body. My heart felt like it was trying to bounce off of my lungs and out of my body. My right hip cramped. My toes, covered in a substance leaking out of my knee that looked like baby shampoo, had swollen to cartoon proportions. It seemed that someone had set off a fire alarm in my brain and then evacuated without turning it off.

The day after my surgery

#

In military strategy it is advisable to attack your adversary in the early hours of the morning because that’s when people are the most vulnerable. This strategy is borne out by scientific studies that show as the night gets darker, before the sun rises, people are slower to respond to the world around them, and their decision making abilities deteriorate.

At 4:15 a.m., three days after my surgery, I decided I was going to kill myself. The thought of enduring even 10 more minutes of the pain was unbearable. I had spent the past two days trying to figure out what to do, analyzing the situation from every angle as if it were an engineering problem. The issues seemed insurmountable. I couldn’t take drugs, Tylenol wasn’t helping, I was out of ice, and I couldn’t leave my apartment. I thought no one could help me.

There seemed to be only one solution. The only way to stop the pain was to stop everything.

I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around the room. How was I going to do it? I glanced over at the ocean, 40 feet below the cliff where my apartment building sat. At the bottom of the cliff were many large rocks.

In the short time I had lived in that apartment at least one tourist had died on the cliff, walking too close to the edge of it. The grass appeared solid but, underneath, was unstable. I’ll jump off the cliff, I decided, and began the slow process of un-strapping my leg from the CPM.

I got myself to the side of the bed, reached for my crutches, and then realized I couldn’t get to the cliff. My apartment was on the second story of the apartment building, and I couldn’t negotiate the steps down to the cliff with the soft cast. There was a service elevator, which I had taken up after my surgery, but it required a key that was kept in the manager’s office. On the first floor.

Cursing, I looked around the room again. In the dark I could see a balloon arrangement sent by my office. It had been decimated by Prickley, my feral cat. During my first day home after surgery she hid somewhere upstairs, terrified of me, the CPM, and the balloons. But by the early morning hours of the second day, she was emboldened enough to sneak down stairs. Sensing the balloons, which were drooping from helium loss, were sleeping, she crept up on the kitchen counter and then dived into the middle of the arrangement, popping the balloons.

The thin ribbons tied to the balloons would not be strong enough to strangle myself with, I determined. I had 20 Tylenol, but given the amount of them I was taking a day, I knew that would do nothing.

I thought about the kitchen. I didn’t have any sharp knives or small electrical appliances to electrocute myself with because I didn’t cook. I considered electrocuting myself with the CPM, but it was too big to carry and too big to fit into the kitchen sink, the only receptacle I could get to that could be filled with water. I didn’t have poison, razors, or even a lighter.

I had nothing.

      I started to cry. Through my tears I could see the waves picking up in the ocean. It was now 4:30. In another hour the surfers would be showing up at the punch bowl, a local surfing area below my balcony. I was filled with hatred for them. They would be walking leisurely down the beach with their boards, floating out in the water, and then having breakfast on the boardwalk at Zelda’s before carrying on with their lives. They would be driving cars, working, going to the gym, eating pizza at Pizza My Heart, hanging out in the evening with their partners, talking and laughing. I would be lying alone in bed, doing nothing, unable to leave the confines of my apartment because of my leg.

     Then I noticed something. Just a few feet off shore, a school of dolphins was swimming in the surf. There were at least 30 of them, maybe more, fins bobbing in and out of the water as they played in the rolling waves. At that moment the sun appeared, a faint yellow line on the edge of the ocean, gradually rising and making the dolphin fins glow.

     That’s what I’ll do, I thought to myself.

     I’ll swim.

#

    

February 2001 email sent to family and friends

As I have been getting a lot of inquiries concerning my progress in physical therapy, I thought I would provide an in-depth look at my experiences working with Chris Kuhn at the MORE clinic, located inside the Club One gym.

      December 6

My first day of physical therapy. The session starts with a few wimpy exercises and then I'm wired up to a machine that shoots electrical currents through my knee. This is called "muscle stim", which is synonymous with "electrical torture that your HMO covers". Chris's assistant tells me that muscle stim is the part of therapy most people like.

      I assume this remark is made to me to see how dumb and gullible blondes are.

      December 15

While riding the stationary bike at Club One Fitness center I accidentally knock my crutches over. They bounce when they hit the floor and are way too far away for me to reach. Doppelganger of John Gotti comes to my aid. Oh great, he's going to think we are friends now.

      December 18

I start work on a machine called "the shuttle". You lay on your back with your knees bent at a 90 degree angle and put your feet up on a board that is perpendicular to the floor. You then push off to extend you legs fully. The resistance of the machine is controlled by rubber bands. I am only doing 3 rubber bands. Everyone else is doing at least four. Chris announces loudly that I am only allowed to do three rubber bands.

      Oh the humiliation.

      Then a guy who hurt himself wind surfing (based on his physical appearance I was surprised to find out he had hurt himself exercising) decides to talk to me while I am trying to shuttle with my three wimpy rubber bands. He asks if I hurt my knee, which is still swollen to more than twice the size it should be. Um, yeah!

      December 20

John Gotti and I are the only ones in the gym. Because of all the Christmas lights the floor is strewn with power cords. Maybe it's all a plot to kill me when I fall due to a crutching navigational error. Gotti comes over and gives me some tips on riding the bike because he knows I can't run away.

      Chris is on vacation this week so I distract the substitute therapist in an attempt to read what Chris has been writing about me. His handwriting sucks so I can't read my file, although I notice he has drawn a very unflattering picture of my knee. It isn't THAT fat.

      December 21

In an attempt to improve my knee-bending flexibility the substitute therapist tries to bend my knee past 90 degrees. He keeps talking as I pass out and then regain consciousness. He's from the deep south so he doesn't notice any lag in the conversation.

      Also, he accidentally reveals the secret of muscle stim - the more hydrated you are the more conducive your body is to electricity. I decide to go on a water strike immediately.

      3 January

My knee cap is finally visible again. I have moved up to 4 rubber bands and I am on my way to being crutch-less. I have found it is important to use my crutches in situations where a) Chris can see me and where b) there are dishes to be done or dinners to be cooked. The kitchen is a VERY unsafe place for crutches, except for the cabinet where the lemon cookies are.

      12 January

I receive a note from Pacific Gas and Electric that if I don't lay off the muscle stim machines California is going to experience a power crisis caused by my knee absorbing all the electricity in the state. Also, I finally get to start using the balance board, which will rebuild the stabilizer muscles in my leg while at the same time make me look like a flailing idiot.

      15 January

After listening to Chris' numerous complaints about my foot socks (which always fall off in therapy) I am forced to go shopping to buy socks that cover my ankles. My partner seems a bit suspicious and voices his opinion that I actually wanted to buy new socks. He doesn't understand that last time I made Chris mad he punished me by inventing a "therapeutic" exercise involving me walking backwards on the treadmill in the gym. I know I'm blond but did 5 people REALLY have to come up and tell me I was walking the wrong way?

      22 January

Chris makes me stand on this white half circle foam thing (it looks like an upside down speed bump) to practice balancing. Then he hands me a ball and says I have to throw it at the wall and catch it while still balancing. He recommends throwing it close to my face to make it easier to catch. I sense a trick. I wait until he walks away to try it.

The first time I miss the ball and it almost lands on the face of a woman stretching three feet away from me. The second time it hits me in the face. I'm wondering if I should stop making fun of Chris for being a soccer player. His other, nicer, patients don't seem to be doing the same kinds of life-threatening exercises I am.

      29 January

I have a minor set back in my knee flexibility when I decide to do my bending exercise for one hour instead of the recommended two seconds. Surprisingly, this makes my knee LESS flexible. Something to do with over-exertion apparently. To attempt a recovery I promise Chris I will take a whole week off of doing anything around the house. In addition I buy some new shoes just in case the ones that I currently own are contributing to the problem. I deny that I bought them because I am obsessed with shoes. It’s okay to own seven pairs of running shoes, even if you can’t run.

      5 February

A weekend of drinking seems to have improved the condition of my knee tremendously. I have reached the twelve week mark of my therapy, which means Chris can really start, as he says, "cranking" on my knee. It's all downhill from here I guess!

Prologue - the latest

Here's the latest prologue to my book. Comments are welcome...

Prologue

     29 July 2001, Somewhere in the San Francisco Bay

 “I think when Dr. Blatz recommended you take up swimming, he meant in the pool.” The words of my physical therapist Chris Kuhn came back to me as I struggled to stay afloat in the three foot chop.

     My goggles were fogged. I tried to clear them, but was so hypothermic I couldn’t move my fingers. I was wearing a 3mm wet suit which did nothing to keep me warm in the 65ºF water. I couldn’t feel my feet. I assumed they were still attached to me though I hadn’t seen them since I had jumped off the ferry at Alcatraz Island. A thick fog moved in, making it impossible to see the shore of San Francisco or Alcatraz Island.

     That’s when I realized I was lost.

     Swells rose around me like large shark fins, smacking me in the face and sometimes flipping me over onto my back. Waves crashed on top of me and pushed me down into the murky brown water. The strong current I was caught in carried me closer and closer to the Bay Bridge. As the seconds passed I realized that I would soon be swept out into the open ocean.

If that happened, the chances I would be rescued were miniscule. I doubted a boat would be able to find me, even though I was wearing a hideously bright yellow swim cap that didn’t match the rest of my swimming outfit.

     My predicament had not been covered in any of the training films I had watched a few months before. It made sense to me now why people had told me I was crazy when I said I was learning to swim using internet videos instead of a coach. And why they thought it was a mistake to make my open water swimming debut swimming in a race from Alcatraz to San Francisco.

     I didn’t want to drown in the diesel, sewage, and kelp infested waters of the Bay. I had to keep swimming.

     But which way should I go?

     I thought of a quote from the movie Himalaya: “When two paths open before you, always take the hardest one.”  The tide wanted me to surrender. It was counting on killing me by taking me out into the no man’s land beyond the bridge.

      I chose, and began to swim against the current.

dead roses?

These are my peace roses. There's white mold looking stuff in the dirt. Some of the stems are still green but there's no leaves on the plant.

Are these roses dead?

go to church and bow to the canadian

I don't know what got into me today. I swear I am still suffering from getting put to sleep for my surgery...btw, Jeffy, this entry contains a brief story about my latest cooking escapade. I know you hate it when I write about cooking, and since you pissed me off last night, I decided that was going to be part of my entry today.

So today I had to buy wine, go to home depot, and get groceries. Wine shopping I love. The guys at my shop know me, and I just walk around while one guy pushes my cart and the other one fetches me bottles to look at. Then they carry everything out to my car. It's like I do nothing but somehow I end up with a case of wine. Nice.

Then I went to home depot to get this black flexible pipe gutter stuff that you use to drain water from the gutter to your yard. No one was at home depot because it was kind of early this morning (I forgot about daylight savings time today - my wine store, btw, opens at 8 am on Sunday - is it just me or does that seem disturbing?) so all the orange apron people were mobbing me to see if I needed help.

hose roller thing

black pipe stuff

Anyway, I found this guy to help me with the pipe gutter stuff. I had a cart, with a hose roller holder thing in it, and that's it. The guy looked in my cart and said "oh, so I see you have a big painting job planned!" I was like, um, what? Then he started giving me painting tips. Not sure why he would think I was doing some painting when I just had a thing to store my monster 100 foot hose in an organized way. Crackhead.

Then I found the sections of pipe I needed and tried to take them out of the bin thing where they are stored. The guy was like "NO! DON'T TOUCH THAT!" I thought maybe the pipes were there for display purposes only. Then he points to a sign that says "see associate for assistance". Right. The fuckwit who thinks I'm going to paint with my hose storing thing is more qualified than I to pull a piece of pipe off the shelf.

The dude started trying to stuff the pipe in my cart, and actually hit himself in the face with it a few times before I said "look, I'll just carry it". So I'm walking along with this stupid wobbly piping and the guy says "you look weird, people are going to laugh at you". So I said "I'll just tell them my boyfriend is out of town" meaning, that I have to buy stuff at home depot instead of my boyfriend. He obviously was thinking of something else (pipe as penis, maybe?) because he said "you need to go to church".

Then I decided, since I have a can of tomato paste that I had to open for my soup, to find a recipe to use the rest of the tomato paste so I don't waste food. I see that as kind of an advanced cooking skill, and I was pretty proud of myself for flipping through my jewish sicilian cookbook til I found some spaghetti sauce I could make that required tomato paste. I wrote up my ingredients and headed to the store.

I have to admit, I feel pretty cool when I'm at the grocery buying raw ingredients. I used to just buy cookies and cokes. Now people will look in my cart and say "oh, you're making vegetable soup" or "oh, you're making beef stew" and they think I can cook. I don't know why I like that, but I do. And today I was standing in front of the garlic with this japanese guy and we were talking about how the garlic looked a little shit (I actually didn't notice the garlic looked bad because I think it all looks the same - anyway, I need to download some pictures of good garlic) and that guy probably walked away thinking I knew what I was talking about.

Anyway, at the safeway in my neighborhood they always have someone in the parking lot asking you to sign a petition for the stupidest things. If you refuse they heckle you as you walk to your car. So I had been plotting my whole shopping trip what I was going to do to get past this crazy lady standing out there with her petition to oust a school board member for teaching evolution. At first I thought I would pretend to be british or russian. But as I was practicing my accent while shopping (all the crazies in five points shop there so I was not the only one talking to myself) I realized the petition person would know I was faking. So when I walked out and was accosted by the crazy petition lady I said "I'm canadian, eh. I don't live here, eh. So I don't think I can sign your petition, eh."

Seriously, this lady bowed in my direction, like I was the fucking queen of england or something. Then she spread her arms wide and said (really loudly, which was embarrassing) "WELCOME! WELCOME TO OUR COUNTRY! I am SO glad you came to visit the United States! I hope you have a wonderful time!" Then she bowed again. Uh, okay. Like, I didn't say I was from the middle east or something. Canada is just next door.



Cooking tip: Do not put pepperoni in your blender.

Oops, have to go check the onions I was supposed to be browning but I started writing and forgot about them...

I hate Jeffy

I called my friend Jeffy last night (he almost had heart failure since I never call anyone, except for my friend Neil and my dad) and he told me it looks like not only is HIS book going to be published before MINE, but also he has a potential celebrity who wants to work on his book.

Hey Jeffy, why not invite me to be a writer (or your ghost writer) and let's make it a threesome. Hee.

I'll be the fluffy beaver.