Grab Bag

Yesterday was incredible in so many ways.

First, Paris Hilton got married. After several engagements, our girlfriend finally did it. Her mom looked fabulous. That’s all I’ve got on that one.

Next, I had an endoscopy. Anyone who knows me will recall that for the past few years I have complained incessantly about feeling tired. It was finally discovered that I had some wicked anemia from a GI bleed and much later it was finally localized to an ulcer in my stomach. I knew it was an ulcer and not cancer because: still chubby.

Nevertheless the scope was to verify the diagnosis and I was all for it. The biggest reason I was all for it is that I love being attended to on a gurney (think friendly nurses and warm blankets) and also I have an unnatural fondness for propofol (do NOT try it at home). Propofol gives immediate restorative sleep and you wake up cozy and feeling like you just had the best rest of your life. It’s an insomniacs dream come true.

I am quite chatty during surgeries and procedures. I have been known to have entire operating rooms in stitches. There was this one time, a little loopy from the meds, that I accused my surgeon of only caring about me from the elbow down. I tell it like it is, especially on meds.

Yesterday was no different only it had more of a chatting-on-the-subway vibe. The guy who wheeled me into the procedure room asked about the meaning behind my finger tattoo. I said I just thought it was pretty. Well, it turns out that my tattoo is in fact cultural appropriation but instead of being all woke and cranky about it this guy was overjoyed. Foreigners are like that.

He told me that he is from Algeria and Berber women have similar tattoos. The older women tattoo their faces with these meaningful markings.I asked him the meaning and he said he didn’t know; he just knew the symbols were powerful He told me this in a very thick accent and behind his mask it was hard to hear him so I kept sitting up to hear him better and he kept slamming me back down horizontally like an episode of the Three Stooges.

It was a great conversation but I was preparing for my propofol and wanting to zone out a bit. That’s when he left the room to grab his iphone to show me pictures of Berber women with the tattoos. Apparently when I told him that I would look it up on my iphone later he thought I had asked him to get his iphone and find some pictures now, in the endoscopy suite. He was quite nice about it so I had to look. This took about five minutes of scrolling but indeed – the woman have beautiful face tattoos.

The anesthesiologist, gastroenterologist and procedure-nurse burst in with a flurry and the manhandling made me wish Mr. Algiers would come back with his iphone. I don’t want to be inappropriate (ha,ha joke) but when you are having an endoscopy they put a device in your mouth “to protect your teeth” that basically turns you into a sex doll. I can’t be the only one who feels this way. It’s this plastic thing with a hole in the middle and the nurse who strapped it on me had a dom vibe and I didn’t like it one bit but about the time I was wondering where to place my tongue, the propofol saved me.

I woke up dreamy and happy and my nurse Annabella who married a dude she met in St.Marten who is from a country I now forget is trying to get pregnant and we hit it off so when she finally has a baby she’s picking me as her pediatrician. Yay!

Next my gastroenterologist Dr. Shwarma (I am so confused by his name because he sounds like something I order off the menu at my favorite Indian restaurant – so that’s close but probably not his actual name) came in like the cat who swallowed the canary and said without taking a breath: you have a six centimeter bleeding ulcer caused by an enormous hiatal hernia that is rubbing back and forth and I am going to refer you to a thoracic surgeon because this horrendous situation needs fixing.

I teared up. Two plus years of almost fainting at work from the anemia, of not being able to drink coffee without horrible stomach cramps, of thinking that my “heavy drinking” had gotten me into this situation – and actually I had a correctable problem that for some reason had been missed on three endoscopies and two cameras that I fearlessly swallowed. I still want to know the reason it was missed but no one wants to go there and accuse the other doctors and Dr. Indian Chicken is the bomb so now, finally, I landed in capable hands and can move past this. Hooray!

You must have a ride home so my mom got me and we sobered up at Starbucks and I felt unusually starving. I had two apple juice boxes (no idea why but I craved them), a turkey pesto panini and a peanut butter perfect bar. I continued to eat like this all day and ended at 9p.m. with a Wendy’s chocolate frosty. It was insane, but having just been diagnosed with a serious medical condition I ate like it was my last day on earth.

Next my mom drove me to my car so I could go to work. But before my afternoon I was scheduled to sign my loan docs. That’s right. After reams of drama that started this past March (seven months ago) my refi is about to close, God willing. Mika the notary showed up to my office in a mumu. She looked like a queen and her laugh was uproarious, especially for a notary.

She love, love, loved my office. She love, love loved it that I have dogs in my office. She could tell I was an awesome person. She had three dogs but she had adopted them at the same time so when it was time for them to die, they all died at once. She wants more dogs but is trying to hold off so that maybe she can travel.

She has been lonely without her dogs so she started a compost pile and has…….wait for it……..you know what’s coming……..WORMS!!!! We had a good laugh about her pet worms but in all seriousness she now loves worms. Specifically, she loves her worms. Fun fact: did you know that healthy worms jump???? Her worms are very healthy and they jump all over the place. She also told me that if you try to house worms in shitty conditions they’ll climb right out of their enclosures lickity split. She said it’s surprising how fast they run from crummy dirt. I got a lesson on cardboard shredding and lettuce feeding……it takes about an hour to sign documents. Ridiculous too because if I had read every page it would have taken three days.

Last thing we talked about is where she wants to travel. Turns out she’s from Oahu so that’s one of the reasons for the mumu, the fleshy queen body habitus, the familiar broken english, and the crazy laugh. I loved this woman so much I got her number incase my daughter who gardens on Maui needs worm advice. But the worm advice is an excuse. I just like her energy and hope to connect with her sometime in the future, preferably on an island in Hawaii.

Coincidentally, later in the day one of my two families from Algeria came in and confirmed that my finger tattoo is the type that Berber women wear and that it has deep meaning. I asked the mom what the meaning might be and she told me that she has no idea, but it’s very important. Talk about leaving me hanging – twice in one day!

That’s it for yesterday but I have one more story from the day before, Jueves. It’s about the past tense. En Español they really go nuts with the ways things can exist in the past. I looooove my teacher, Ezequiel. He and I Zoom twice a week. He is in Argentina and either zooms me from a loft with a view of a soccer field or a room painted a rust color. He is young and smart as a whip. I, too, am smart as a whip and according to him I “ask good questions.”

Unfortunately or fortunately, he has a firm grasp on how you label parts of speech and I do not. So funnily enough, he is also teaching me English.

In Spanish there are four ways to conjugate things that occur in the past: the perfecto, the indefinido, the imperfecto and the pluscuamperfecto. MMMkay????

Well all hell ensued when we got into this discussion. He used the sentence, “I loved Anna” as an example. Eze spoke of himself as loving her but not loving her anymore, loving her but not divulging whether the love still exists, loving her and still loving her, and loving her in the recent past. I kept yelling, NO!!!! STOP!!!! You’re killing me!!! But he insisted that all of this was necessary to express the particular way he may have loved Anna at some point in the history of time. I told him this must be why the latins have so much passion. I also found it completely unnecessary but he said it is 100 percent vital so I’m going to have to get with the program and “paint my story” as he put it. It’s a refreshing break from Pimsleur who just wants me to order fifteen vanilla conchas from the bakery as my friend Juan exclaims “That’s a lot of pesos.”

I’m going out on a limb to say that when an endoscopy, the signing of mortgage documents and a Spanish lesson bring this much joy – a person must be living one hell of a luck, fun-infused life. That’s me in a nutshell and….

Muchas gracias por reading esto!!!

Dr. Maria