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Are you as sick of "Go To The Doctor, Dammit" stories as I am? Good. Here's another.
Here's my Mom for you: She gets life-altering news an hour before I'm leaving on vacation, and she refuses to tell me. What a pain in the neck. Thinking of me instead of her. How annoying.
About three weeks ago, she went for her first colonoscopy. Routine, preventive, all that fun stuff. It had taken a lot of convincing from several doctors over several years; in fact, it was her gynecologist who finally talked her into it.
But she finally did go. For whatever reason, it hurt like hell, which she has since been told shouldn't happen. Off-putting, for sure. But while poking around and forcing scopes around bends, the doctor found and removed two polyps. One, he said, looked "ugly." But, he said, nothing to worry about yet, and he sent it off for testing.
So an hour before I'm leaving on vacation, the phone rings, and Mom answers, and she starts walking away from me whenever I walk into the room. She ends up outside at one point. But she says it's just from being upset at the doctor about the pain she was in. For whatever reason, I buy it. I go on vacation with my brother.
Of course, as anyone with half a brain should have realized, it turns out the "ugly" polyp is what it sounds like.
The good news is it appeared to be localized and hadn't spread, but she needed surgery anyway to make sure. She and my father sat at the kitchen table that night and "stared at each other," but the next day, she went to meet with a surgeon that had treated her almost 10 years ago for an abscess and for assorted other things in the interim. She adores this guy. And he reassured her very strongly. She got out of that with a ton of confidence, which she passed on to us when we got home Sunday night. The confidence level remained high through the week, to Wednesday, when she had another colonoscopy (this one painless) to mark off the section that had to be removed, on to Thursday morning.
We got to Milford Hospital at 9 a.m. She was prepped by 10. At 10:30, she went in for surgery.
At 1, Dr. Gupta came out to see Dad and me. He'd taken out about eight inches of colon ("Don't worry, she's got plenty") and didn't see any spread at all. A nearby lymph node was clear. The liver looked fine. Everything around the site looked fine. She was stable throughout.
Two hours later, she was upstairs in a regular hospital room, wide awake and, except for the obvious tubes and hospital garb, as if she'd just hopped into bed for a while. She had asked the nurses in the recovery room -- in the recovery room -- to let her get out of bed. By Thursday night, believe it or not, she had gotten out of bed. Mom's insane that way. (In a good way, of course.)
Friday, she was knocked loopy by the morphine and by lack of sleep, but she slept Friday night. Saturday, they took her off of the morphine, and by early afternoon, when we arrived, she was walking down the hallway to the lounge. She was off the oxygen. They had removed the tube that drained her stomach, to keep any fluids out of the bowels. They had switched her to Percocet, but she wasn't taking any -- she wasn't in any pain, believe it or not, 48 hours after surgery.
She had her ups and downs over the next few days, but she kept making progress. She was walking up and down the halls, sitting out in the lounge, sitting up in the big chair in her room. Late Monday night, she had her first bowel movement, a huge step because it meant everything was working down there. She was on a liquid diet Tuesday, back on solids Wednesday. At 1:30 on Wednesday, July 30, she came home.
A half-hour later, her doctor called. All her tests came back clean. She's cancer-free.
A long recovery from the surgery is next, but Mom's a tough ol' broad (as the trying to get out of bed in the recovery room may indicate). This weekend, she's feeling pretty good, getting around the house darn well. And she's healthy. All because her doctor finally insisted on that colonoscopy -- and who knows what would have happened if she'd waited a year, two years, never even gone?
Now, in the immortal words of Lisa and Homer Simpson (7F22), perhaps there is no moral to this story, and it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.
But with modern technology the way it is, it's worth a thought, ain't it?
(Hops off box, carting it off; ponders need for more soap.)
My WHAT'S NEW! page, in case any of you are frequent visitors. I'll point out big changes and highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be).
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The Unofficial New Haven Nighthawks homepage -- some info and nostalgia about a good team that only barely deserved to die. (For logos and more, check out Ralph Slate's Internet Hockey Database.)
My Beast of New Haven memorial, featuring a record book, a by-the-numbers and a timeline on the team that filled the Coliseum -- well, once or twice.
Hockey World Champions, not original in content but an assemblage of facts that needed assemblaging. Lists the champions of hockey's major international tournaments: the Worlds, the World Juniors, the Olympics and the Canada/World Cups.
My Bronx Page with a little about the Fair Northern Borough, which just happens to be where I was born.
The 2001 Van Nest Knights, the Jill Arrington's Bullpen East Division Champions. Whaddaya MEAN you don't know what that is? (We were, incidentally, also the 2002 Jill Arrington's Bullpen CHAMPIONS, but I haven't done up the page yet. Been busy. In part, busy finishing in the second division in the Phil Linz Memorial Harmonica League in 2003.)
My Beavis and Butthead parody page--done in loving imitation. Huh huh.
Check out my New York Rangers page for several original pages, including my Cumulative Ranger Roster.
Listed with the originals because I helped in its creation: The JAM page, about an annual softball game that...aw, check the link out.
A handful of my online clips.
For all your coffee needs, Country Sidekicks (run by my aunt and uncle) has a web presence!
My brother's roommate Eric Lord is a Hershey Bears fan, but what the hell, we'll link to him anyway. He has a Bears history Web site up at a separate site.
Check out the web site of kick-ass R&B group Bump City, featuring on keyboards my old college bud Edward "Tex" Miller.
In fierce loyalty, I relink to the Connecticut Post, my current source of income.
For any other hockey, the place to go is Carole Sussman's Hockey Media Links. There's not much that she avoids.
The Columbia Daily Spectator, my Alma Mater.
The San Francisco Chronicle, featuring in the archives the columns of the late, great Herb Caen. If you've never read any of Herb's stuff, you're doing him and yourself a disservice.
Dave Barry's Columns at the Miami Herald's web site.
A story from 1990 (back in the day, indeed) about the birth of The National Sports Daily, late and lamented.
Ralph Slate's Internet Hockey Database may be the greatest site on the Internet. Complete player stats from major and minor pro leagues, logos, hockey-card listings -- just phenomenal.
Baseball-reference.com, with complete major league statistics, various SABRmetric-type things, player comparisons, and other nifty items.
For scores and news, my two places to go: CNNSI and ESPN. They have their strengths and weaknesses. But CNNSI has the tiebreaker: their Transactions Page is updated throughout the day.
Mets By The Numbers, a site I admire a great deal. It assembles uniform number data for every Met player, coach and manager.
My New York Rangers page -- Remember when so many people were jumping around chanting "We Got the Cup"? Doesn't it seem like another 54 years? Anyway, one highlight you'll find within is a tribute to the 1985-86 Rangers, who got halfway to the Cup although they deserved to have been halfway through great golf courses...
The rankings are out of date, but the rules are as valid today as ever: The Bush League Factor tells you just how bush your favorite hockey team's logo is. Easily translatable to other sports. By Daniel Rhodes.
Andrew M. Greenstein's NHL Uniforms is an amazing survey of sweaters from Day 1 of the league through modern day, "from the Montreal Wanderers to the Minnesota Wild." He claims to have a representation of every sweater design ever worn in league play. I'm not gonna tell him he's wrong. He now has a companion site for the WHA.
Whowins.com, which examines the statistics of Best-of-7 series in the three sports that use them -- tendencies of teams that win the first game, odds of coming back from 3-2 down, that kind of thing. Great stuff.
My Columbia Fencing page, the fruits of my labor...and my trips across the nation with the fencing team.
A general hockey page of links, with links to pages that include the NHL's and the NHLPA's pages
My baseball page, which is nothing more than links to more links, really. A couple of team sites, local and otherwise.
A link to the web page of what has always been my favorite basketball team (sorry, Alma Mater)--the Fordham Basketball homepage. But now, I'm not so sure... See, the only coach I've ever known, Nick Macarchuk, left for Stony Brook in the summer of 1999. So I might have to jump to the Seawolves... Nah, probably not, but it's sad for the moment...
The National Basketball Players Association has the NBA CBA on its site.
Yes, that NBA salary cap is disgusting. Just clarifying it takes 573K on Larry Coon's excellent NBA Salary Cap FAQ.
Some explanation of the crazy economics behind the NFL salary cap is available from askthecommish.com 's senior editor Al Lackner.
David Grabiner set a lot of people straight with his Frequently Asked Questions About the 1994 Baseball Strike. Now, he's back with Frequently Asked Questions About the Baseball Labor Negotiations of 2002.
Allan Sniffen's Musicradio 77 WABC Tribute Page, in honor of the greatest Top 40 station ever, complete with plenty of jingles, airchecks, stories, and pictures.
Musically related pages, some links to pages about (or at least vaguely pertaining to) some of my favorite bands.
Various Top 40 Radio links -- Including the above WABC page, and other historical data about the glory days of radio.
Jeff Miller has provided lots of information about the early days of radio on his site.
RadioStation.com has license info for radio stations across the country on a searchable database.
We love Futurama!!!! Nothing ticks us off more in this space than the shoddy treatment Futurama got from Fox. Got Futurama is beyond solid.
The ER Page used to be the domain of Scott Hollifield and now is that of several people. It's gone down a little bit (along with the show -- is it me, or does every plotline now seem to correspond to a better one on Buffy?), but still valuable.
The Simpsons Archive, at the clever name of ''snpp.com.''
Some early maps of New York City:
The annoyingly addictive Miniputt.
The annoyingly more-addictive Speed Marbles.
Remember Infocom's classic text-based games, like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Now, get the answers you need to solve the puzzles in those games you haven't played for years at Peter Scheyen's Invisiclues site, which compiles all those invisible-ink answer books. It's a branch of his Infocom tribute site, which includes a FAQ, several walkthroughs and articles, and links to download the original Zork trilogy.
One of those Infocom games, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is online at douglasadams.com, the book's late writer's official Web site. My buddy Mike Forster and I obsessed over this game on the Apple IIc in the mid 1980s.
My top ten ways to improve golf as a spectator sport
Audette, a really bad song parody that just sort of had to be written.
United Features Syndicate's comics page, featuring several of my favorite comics including Peanuts (still one of my two must-reads, though sadly in repeats forever more -- RIP, Mr. Schulz), Dilbert, Rose is Rose and Jump Start.
CBS's home page, which includes some interesting Letterman links.
My Random Stuff Page, wherein I attempt to move some random stuff out to the world. Anybody need an Associated Press Style Manual?
The Official Hopkins homepage, currently sparse but still devoted to my high school!
A note on the name: Why it's the "Boring Homepage"
people -- most of them me -- have gone where you have gone since December 19, 2000, when the damn counters reset. Thanks to the more than 2,700 people -- most of them me -- who came here before that...
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