Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 68

Home again!

This morning the docs' dawn patrol looked and poked and said, "Well, would you like to go home today?" About eight hours later, I was comfortably curled into my overstuffed recliner, watching the winter sun play through the backyard magnolia. It's not my favorite tree in the world, since at night it cuts off about a third of the sky. But it is a thing of beauty and purpose, and this time of year, when it glows in the warm sunshine and sways in the southern breeze, I can temporarily forgive its nocturnal obstructionism.

I'm not too comfortable, since after all I have had a bunch of people pulling out my guts and making comments (thinking that I was asleep, the fools!) -- but all things considered, I'm doing great! Gay had me checked out of the joint by lunchtime and we went to our traditional post-VA feeding trough, the Steak & Shake. I had most of a strawberry milkshake and a BLT, both heavenly after hospital fare. They settled pretty well.

The next few days will be a lot of rest and a little oxycodin. Doc says I can eat anything, and will look forward to getting back into the kitchen tomorrow. Little energy for that tonight, but fortunately Lore's Tim dropped by a casserole of his expert mac and cheese. Comfort food.

Weather looks like it will be mostly clear before midnight thunderstorms. So I should be able to peek around with my glorious new 31-mm. eyepiece. Pound for pound, it cost more than a Ferrari. But it will take you farther.

Joe

Solid Food

Solid food today! The doctors advised that I might want to have somebody bring in something real, since the food here is ghastly. So Gay brought me a tuna salad sandwich, absolutely wonderful!

I'm still a very leaky vessel, so not quite ready to walk home. It would be unwise to spend more than an hour out of reach of a bathroom.

A week of this is plenty, though. Enough bed rest, already! I'm dreaming about that big new eyepiece and hoping to be home before Orion gets lost in the trees to our west. And a house full of guitars, slowly easing out of tune. Gay has cleared off the work table in my art room, ready for oils now as well as watercolor and ink.

And the novel. Have to modify my work habits for awhile, since it will be a while before I can bike out ten miles and sit in a coffee house. Maybe I can put a soiled checkerboard tablecloth on the table on the porch and have Gay come out every hour or so to heat up my coffee and ask 
Whatcha doin'?

Joe

Saturday report from Joe

As of Saturday noon, no change. Weaker rather than stronger, not a surprise.
Thanks for everybody's good wishes. Should be out of here in days; less than a week.
Lots of good people coming by to visit, and when I don't have visitors, I do have books. GORKY PARK is turning out a be a good hospital read.
No energy for writing yet. Just walking down the hall and back takes it ou of me. Maybe after The Big Poop I'll be able to walk a bit outside—sunny and seventies.
Joe

PS from Gay: Looks like The Big Poop has started. He began eating a liquid diet and got a real shower today, too.

Another note from Joe

From Gay: Joe was able to write another note. He's feeling much better.
From Joe: What a difference a tube makes, the songwriter said, at least if it's stuck down your nose into your stomach. They pulled it out this morning, a procedure that 's short but has aspects of tooth extraction and tonsillectomy.
Not able to go straight from that improvement to eating and drinking, unfortunately. First my bowels have to "wake up," an interesting figure of speech. Meanwhile I lounge here in relative comfort, just a little bloated and addled.
The abdomen, alas, is a kind of Sleeping Giant. Ugly as hell, asymmetrical, scarred and bruised even though the surgery was laparoscopic. Stuck here until it decides to deflate, which the doctor says will happen with great drama. In the middle of the weekend, of course, when all the MD's are out with their big-game fishing and Parcheesi tournaments.
My culinary universe is defined by the gum sister-in-law Barbara brought me – I had no idea that the stuff came in so many flavors. They are sugar-free "Dessert Delights," in flavors like Strawberry Shortcake, Mint Chocolate Chip, and (my fave) Key Lime Pie.
I'm not unhappy, with teevee and nurses and all, but I really miss Wi-Fi. I'm so used to having it that I feel almost like one of my senses is missing. The nose of the Posthuman camel has been withdrawn from the back of the tent.
If you see anyone I know, tell them I wish they were here instead of me . . .
Joe

A note from Joe

From Gay: Joe wrote a bit about his experience, below. He's actually feeling a bit better and the doc thinks he'll be even better tomorrow. We'll see.
From Joe: I had Gay bring this computer to the hospital, so I could write a couple of lines.
Not so much pain, as such, but new vistas in discomfort and inconvenience. Having your life completely defined and delimited by bladder and bowels – without even the compensation of food and drink. I can sometimes suck on an ice cube, but not to excess (seriously!) and get all my water intravenously. All at the sufferance of long-suffering nurses.
The problem is an ileus. It's a digestive Catch-22. I'm not taking in any solid food, but the problem won't be resolved until there is some solid waste. The stomach keeps producing secretions, which are sucked up through my nose tube. The suction has to stop periodically so medicine can be taken orally, and when it stops I bloat up like a tick. (Never thought I'd come to prefer injections over pills!) Ultimately enough solid waste will appear as a byproduct of this activity, so we can move on to Step n-1, which is a diet of clear liquids and gels.. Step n is Food, after which I Step out.
Tree pollen season has started, so the situation is made more interesting by the nose tube being a pollen nexus, so my head is a mass of unreachable itches.
It just don't get much better than this.
No actual writing and no high-octane reading, either. Brain is too drug –fuzzy. Short-term memory shot and reasoning pretty basic. Like, I can follow Sopranos but find Gorky Park a real challenge. Gay brings me watercolor and astronomy magazines, so I can pretend to have a life in those directions.
Shouldn't complain. But I can whine.
Joe

Operation Haldeman

No food today, of course. It's not even noon and I'm already hungry. The sandhill cranes are migrating, hooting as they fly in formation overhead. They're saying "Yum! Wasn't that a good frog in that last field?"

Ah ha. That's an approach. Whenever I start to feel hungry I should visualize eating a live frog. Ew.

(Can't really complain, because I can have all the calories I want, in clear liquid form. So I've had several cups of strong coffee heavily sweetened with honey, and am now sipping on an alcohol-free glass of white "wine." Will zap some beef bullion for lunch and follow with a Popsicle. My stomach growls but I growl back.) This is a picnic compared to "nothing by mouth" all day, which I was allowed to enjoy last year.

This time tomorrow I should be coming out of surgery. Well, I don't actually know. They'll call sometime this afternoon with a surgery schedule update. I'm supposed to be there at 0600, which is fine with me but not so fine with Gay, who would rather sleep until the clock showed double digits.

The FedEx guy just delivered my Valentine's Day present, the Nagler 31-mm. eyepiece. It's a true monster – the size of a baby's head, weighing more than two pounds. The ultimate wide-field eyepiece. Of course it's cloudy out. Fog forecast tonight, but I might get a look at the sky.

Of course I'm concerned about tomorrow's surgery, not being an idiot, but it's a pretty common operation and I'm in good health. Thanks for all your good wishes. I'll be back in touch soon.

Joe

reassurance is where you find it

I noted in a letter yesterday to Judith Clute that in my recreational reading I was alternating between Helen Vendler's Dickinson (about Emily, of course) and Scott Donaldson's Fitzgerald & Hemingway. I'm also dipping into the Dickinson part of Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets.

Judith knows about my creeping medical anxiety and answered "Hope your books on Dickinson and also Fitzgerald and Hemingway are still good for what you crave right now." I hadn't thought in those terms, but yes, I guess it's something I obscurely crave. This is what I answered her –

I hadn't thought about it, Judith, until you pointed it out, but maybe I'm reading these books about American writers' lives for reassurance of some kind. I'm really better off than any of them. And have already lived longer.

Dickinson had only a handful of poems published. She wrote them up neatly into booklets and stitched them together and hid them away. If a relative hadn't found them after her death, she'd be unknown.

Fitzgerald flared like a comet, early fame and wealth, and then burned out, with the help of a lunatic wife, and was slowly working toward a mature and thoughtful novel when a life of excess finally killed him, at 48.

Hemingway's talent burned out by the age of 40, and he consumed himself in a tragicomic display for twenty years of decay in the limelight.

In comparison, I guess I'm sort of an ordinary working artist, with ups and downs but a slow steady output of respectable work, well enough known to make a living, and content to wait for posterity to forget or reward me. I survived early fame and (I hope) haven't completely surrendered to respectability.

Joe

Something for (and from) my grill friend

Yesterday, Valentine's Day, was our "other" anniversary; we met at a Valentine's Day dance in 1961.

Since this was the 50th anniversary, the golden one, I of course set out to find a golden heart piece of jewelry. Predictably, it was almost all high-schooly stuff, a 14-carat gold heart with I WUV U scraped onto it by a robot pantograph. I did manage finally to find a heart-shaped necklace with gold underneath a few modest diamonds.

I know what Gay got me, though it hasn't come yet – an equally expensive gift made of glass rather than diamonds. The Ultima Thule of low-power wide-field telescope eyepieces, the 31-mm Nagler Type 5, a "space-walk" eyepiece with an 82-degree field, flat to the edge. It will be great on the 9.25", and when I'm well enough to haul out the 12" again, it should be a miracle-maker.

Went out on an anniversary bike ride and came back with a couple of modest filets mignon to put on the grill. They were absolutely perfect. Grilled them to about medium rare and served them with potatoes and fresh artichokes. Weird ice cream for dessert, a Ben & Jerry's mixture with broken-up candy bars.

Then we went to see an interesting movie, Casino Jack, a biopic about the powerful lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Kevin Spacey does a kind of postmodern Shakespearean turn on this sleazy Republican power broker – so confidently in charge of his life and so much a helpless chip bobbing in the currents of history. Well, he may have changed history, for the part he played in keeping the Bushes in power.


Going into surgery Thursday to re-attach the large intestine to the ileum. Not trivial but not particularly perilous. A few weeks of discomfort afterwards, but I shouldn't be in the hospital more than a week.

Joe

a musical interlude

I'm probably the last person in Known Space to hear this joke, but I liked it:

C, E flat, and G walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve minors here." So E flat leaves, and C and G have a fifth between them.

(Barbara Haldeman sent it to me. It was on the "Making Light" blog.)

lunar observing

The past two nights have had good clear skies, and I took advantage of the more or less quarter-moon to do some lunar observing. The 9.25" Celestron is a good tool for the target, coupled with good eyepieces, and mine are pretty good. My main one is a fat TeleVue 12-mm, about the size and weight of a standard hand grenade. Then a modest TeleVue 7-mm and the clever 3-to-6-mm TeleVue, with click stops at 3, 4, 5, and 6.

In terms of power, the 12mm gives me 196X, the 7mm, 336X. That's normally as much magnification as the atmosphere can handle. But the air's been clear and steady the past two nights, and I delighted in clicking the little one from 392X through 470X and 588X to a ridiculous 783X. The best telescope in the best air will start to break down around 1000X, and the usual theoretical limit is fifty power per inch of aperture, which would be 462X for me. Indeed, my best view was the 5-mm. view at 470X. And it was gorgeous.

Magnification doesn't do any good with a shaky mount, and although my iOptron has its shortcomings, once it settles down it's like a rock. The slow-motion controls are silk-smooth, and drifting along at 462X is like a close approach, five hundred miles above the lunar surface. The subtle details of the rubble-strewn landscape are endlessly fascinating.

I don't really have the patience or the velocity to be a good lunar artist (the appearance changes sometimes minute-by-minute under high power), but I do enjoy sketching anything. Here are pictures of the crater Copernicus on two consecutive nights. On the 12th, the sun was at a low enough angle to reveal a lot of shadow detail. On the 13th, 28 hours later, it's getting close to local noon, and the details are washed out. Hope I'll be able to take another look tonight.

Joe