diet detection takes precedence…

which is why I’m doing most of my blogging at www.girrlockholmes.wordpress.com

 

I’ll be back with knits and other things shortly.

And in the interim

“Did I wake you?” is a shitty thing to say to someone on the phone at 9:45 in the morning.

So I healed up great from my gallbladder surgery. But some of my problems didn’t go away. So now I’m on an elimination diet. 2 days in. There’s no news worth reporting yet.

And we have a new family member to keep us smiling while we’re abstaining from coffee and other delicious things and doing our schoolwork.

loki’s sweater (and long train ride)

Yesterday, some of the girls from school came by to visit me. Christina and Jaclyn brought their new puppy Loki over. So, knowing of Loki’s imminent arrival, I figured I’d try out my first dog sweater. I found, without too much searching, a great pattern online, Midnight Knitter’s pup sweater. I figured it would be a quick knit and I was right. However, when I asked for Loki’s measurements, I found he was really tiny,and I had to adjust the pattern quite a bit. The sweater was a little long, but otherwise a fairly good fit. A simple roll-up did the trick.

Besides being thoroughly entertained by academic gossip and puppy antics, I learned that sweater + dog = sleepy dog.

Surprising, since Loki rode the train from Harlem to Bushwick and slept the whole way!

or just brooklyn so-so

I just imported a few posts from my lonely live journal. I wasn’t aware that this was possible. They’re now in the March and June archives. It’s fun to read these posts, made before I felt gross all the time. One’s about the last time I thought I might not make it through poor health and one is about a bloody scene that occurred under my bedroom window. I guess I’ve always been New York fabulous.

The holiday rushes

This year we’re having Thanksgiving in Harlem with some of my friends from school. I’m thinking of making the “Impossible Fat-Free Gluten-Free Vegan Cushaw Pie,” probably sans the cutshaw. This is not because of a fear of the squash family. I am well known for making a mean delicata that according to my friend Wes, tastes like cake. Rather, it is poorness and laziness that will probably send me straight to the canned pumpkin. I already have some organic canned pumpkin, and as noted in Susan’s blog, since it’s canned, it might even be cutshaw anyway. Hooray for pumpkin pie! The spread uptown will run the full gamut from actual turkey to vegan fare, so that will be interesting. My friend Christina, who is hosting, is an amazing cook, and also one of the more studious among us, so its always a total shock that she manages to throw together some of the delicous dishes that she does.

I had a good full weekend of houseguest hosting/friend seeing, and managed to fit some knitting and economics reading in as well. I have to find a way to come off of the pain pills completely, as I feel my slightly altered state, although perhaps now amenable for academic pursuits due to tolerance, has made me a lazy and bad hostess. I’m really looking forward to getting through the rest of the half week. I have my make up exam tomorrow, and a half day of work on Tuesday as well as class. Wednesday will be a half day at the office for me, and a full day for Ian – his last day at his advertising job before he begins at the new place. I’m really looking forward to diving into the lit review for my PDR a little more; hopefully finishing it even by the week’s end. Okay, I’m even more looking forward to baking, sleeping in and doing some laundry.

doubling something akin to light pleasure

This is my first Christmas as a real knitter. Suffice to say, its a pretty classic story of how everyone I know is getting knitwear this year.

More details later, after Christmas, I suppose. Fantine came along like a horserace, and then I had to learn how to pick up stitches for the sleeves. This lesson has not gone nearly as well as the crossed stitches lesson, and she currently drapes Seth’s old favorite rocking chair. I’m not giving up; its just that the Christmas gifts are taking up all my alloted knitting time for now. The good news is that French Girl came through yet again with Violette, teaching me cables without telling me it was teaching me cables.

School is looking up. I’m not so far behind in my PDR; had a great meeting with my professor, and she loved my client memo. I’m beginning to have regular meetings with my client and I’m at a good point in my lit review. This is not to say that things are well. After 6 months of vague gall bladder symptoms (you know, the ones listed at the bottom of the webpage as “other symptoms can include”) I had my first attack two nights ago. It was scary.

I know I left off at this blog with the HIDA scan back in late September or early October. A quick recap, since I’m doing a much better job of documenting this stuff over at myspace than I am here:

Had the HIDA, with no ejection fraction (an injection that can cause a lot of pain.) The radioactive tracer moved from the liver to the gallbladder quite normally; transit from the gallbladder to the small intestines was a different story. When my doctor saw the results, he scheduled me for endoscopic surgery, an ERCP. On the day of consultation with my surgeon, I woke with a pain in my back on the right side as if someone had kicked me as hard as they could. I went to the ER, met my surgeon’s colleague, and found that he had the same name as my recently departed cat, Seth. He became my new surgeon. A week later I had the ERCP. I got to stay in the hospital for a night. Ewww. The pain went away; it was replaced by surgery pain for about five days. The bloating and stomach aches went away too, for about a week, and then we were back to our regular routine. Since the ERCP, I’ve visited the ER one more time, for an echo of the pre-ERCP pain, managing to miss an Econ exam, and then there was the attack just the other night. But I’m marching on.

Urban danger will soon have two bloggers. We’re working out the details now. Instead of one advanced-beginner going on and on about her knitting, we will soon offer you two. For reals.

Hard times are hard to forget

It’s been a bad month. Ian and I lost Seth. I wrote about his passing in a place where my friends visit regularly. Also this month, I went under the knife, and no sooner than I recovered from the surgery pain, everything returned to the way it was before, with bloating and tummy aches. School has taken a backseat to a strained relationship and anger. This means more knitting and more crying and less of pretty much everything else.

and your little cry, it will be drowned in some big city…

I sleep lighter lately and I don't know if this is due to age, the passage of time, medication, physical activity, age, location, age, or the passage of time. I think it might have something to do with age and the passage of time. I am thirty. Since I have been thirty, I often wake up with a start, the sound of a municipal vehicle or a boom car outside my window, or a retail gate closing up for the night. Or gunshots a few blocks away. Or someone yelling up to a tenant of the building beside ours, the one with no buzzer. Sometimes upon waking I cry, but not usually. In fact, the last time I woke up hours before I had planned, I did not cry at all, not even a little bit.

Someone was screaming hysterically for the police to be called yesterday morning when I awoke. It sounded like a woman. It was minutes before 7. From under my sheets and blankets and dreams I managed to slink over to the window, careful to not let all of the borough see my underwear, and I saw nothing. Then, a livery driver (I would know this in just a few seconds when he opened the door of his cab;) his white shirt covered in blood. He was quiet at first, then upon opening the door of his car, “Oh, shit…oh shit…” He came out of the car and began to wrap his hand in a white cloth. He then walked in the other direction. My insides lurched and I went for my cell phone. I tried to wake up Ian; I have a history of calling 911 when asked to and then being the only one hanging around when the police arrive, only to have to let them know that things have apparently gotten better and their services are no longer needed. When I was 18 this got me a lecture and several threats. “What do you think I should do?” Ian wouldn't wake up. “Fuck you,” I told him. But I was already dialing. An alarm goes off inside my phone. I think to myself how odd that is, and I note that it didn't happen the last time I dialed emergency, to let them know there was a refrigerator in the middle of Broad Street that everyone was swerving around. But that was a different city. I told the dispatcher what I heard. I told them what I saw and that I was just sleeping inside my apartment is all, I didn't know anything else, could they please come out to see? “Do you want the police to come and check out the situation?”
“That's what I woke up hearing someone screaming for.”

By the time the police arrived, ten minutes later, they had already called me back. “Is anyone out there now, ma'am?” I looked out my window and saw just the black cab, no one was around. “No.” The driver must have gone to the hospital. He must have gotten ice and a rag to wrap around his arm from the deli around the corner, and then taken off in the other direction to the hospital. I watched the NYPD car pull up, check out the livery cab, and then leave. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up a few hours later, the livery was gone. I have a story about how this event reminds me of my jury duty in Richmond right before I moved away, but its asinine.

And I can recall our caravel; a little wicker beetle shell…

I moved to New York with a gaping wound just below my knee from a fall on the gritty sidewalks of the dirty south. It was a hot day in August, I was leaving work, heavy with all the trappings of moving away – gifted coffee makers, a painting, a big container of cat litter, and other things I couldn't leave at my desk. Knowing I'd be heading home with a bounty, I'd skipped the bike that day. The bus was leaving me at the median and I had the nerve to flag it down. I had no idea that in a city where drivers usually slow down just to wag their fingers and shake their fists at those who are so bold, I was actually flagging down a nice man who thought nothing of stopping a full bus on the side of Broad Street and waiting for me to get across. Elated, I started running; cat litter and coffee maker banging against my knees. I had made it to the sidewalk when one of my thrift store mules broke – the strap came clean off the sole – and rather than hitting the ground with a thud, I slid across the dirty sidewalk on my knees. The pain was there, all right, but what held my attention was the bus; also still there. Still waiting. I waved it away with a free hand but it wouldn't move. I don't know how much time it took between the initial wave and the entrance of a mortified, dirty, broken-shoed, bleeding girl on the West bound 6, but it seemed to take at least a minute or two. I was instantly offered a clean washrag by one patient rider, a bandaid (a futile offering for my baseball-sized gouge) by another, and a tube of neosporin by a third. The coffee urn shattered in its paper bag.

Like the wounds we give ourselves as slap-happy children, my leg hurt when I got on the bus, but it really hurt when I got home. I had no idea how to wash all the pebbles and gross bits out, so I slathered the entire tube of neosporin on there and passed out on my bed.

The next night Ian and I took a bus to New York to find an apartment. I had been keeping my leg wrapped up in one form of gauze or bandage or another for the day, and the wound had turned from bright red to all sorts of garish oranges and yellows. I reeled at the idea of walking around three boroughs over the hottest weekend of the year with the thing. I remember the sweat, constant, in the brownstone in Stuyvesant Heights, the flat in East Williamsburg, the tiny box in the Upper East Side, friends apartments in Kensington and on Graham Ave. Yes, we're moving here at the end of the month; no we don't have a dog; uh, sure, we've lived together before; no I don't have a full-time job; no, we've never lived in New York. Oh, this thing? I took a spill. We never made it to the third borough that trip. Alternately, I allowed my leg to air out – never on an apartment appointment, at first never on the train, but that changed.

Back in Richmond after finally finding a place, I worked for a little over a week while Ian made the transition to his New York office from his Richmond one and our apartment was cleaned. My boss and I would sit outside on the balcony and smoke cigarettes in the morning and ponder the future of my leg. Would it have to come off? Is it getting smaller? The wound, not the leg. Does it still hurt? What's that brown part and does it look better than the yellow part? Is it better wrapped up or left to the elements? Yes, its better left to the elements, we decided. This was a lateral decision, made with another one to follow the advice of an ancient pharmacist on campus whose reassurance convinced me that I would actually live through this yet. On his advice I stopped pouring peroxide over it every night, and only applied the antibiotic ointment, and left it unbandaged for all the world to see including the one guy who pulled over on Broad to ask me for a date, only to decide that we should postpone so I could get to a doctor.

I bandaged up for the actual move, with all the banging and lifting and such. It was stuffy in the truck, more so when Seth peed on himself in his brand new carrier, resplended with leopard spots, fifty miles south of Washington DC (although washing him off with wet wipes in the nearest pet rest area will always be a sweet sad memory.)We left at nine that morning. All in all, with the trip and the actual moving in, we were in bed by two.

And then I let the New York air take care of it. I wore short skirts and long pants and we got acquainted with the place and wished we had a loveseat and a coffeemaker and bought cheap household necessities like air conditioners from our neighbors and rode the trains to go to work and school. I no longer had to worry about bleeding on someone elses sheets and as the terrible thing grew smaller and smaller I nearly forgot about it and started sleeping on my left side again. We moved into our Brooklyn home on August 27th and by September 5th, I attended the welcome dinner hosted for all the new graduate students wearing a pinstripe skirt that just barely brushed against the brand new and strangely brown skin that had formed where for three weeks there had been none. There was hair on the brand new skin, hair which I was terrified to shave due to the tenderness of having brand new skin, but all in all, I figured things could have been worse.

I've lived in New York for six months and in this time I've had five colds. Just two weeks after moving here my boyfriend developed cluster headaches that keep him dumbfounded and in bed for days at a time. He also gets a cold a month. We love it here. I have a scar below my knee in the shape of a diamond, still brown, but I can shave there now. Its quite possible that taking the pharmacist's advice about the peroxide did the trick, and not the shiny, northern air.