Life in the ER or: How I spent last Thursday
July 7, 2008 | 1 Comment
Since I jumped off the cliff in the Bahamas I’ve been in varying amounts of pain. It’s usually centered in the muscles in my back and occasionally in my lower ribs. Sometime last week, maybe Tuesday, the pain started moving up my body. Strange? Yes. By Wednesday evening the pain was centered in the upper-center of my chest, pretty much right where my heart is. Even more strange? Yes. Thursday morning I called my doctor.
The nurse at the doctors office, after hearing the full story, took a minute to confer with the doc, and then came back in a fairly excited state and told me to go to the Emergency Room to get a chest x-ray and any other forms of treatment they might suggest. Not exactly how I had planed on spending my Thursday, but pain in my upper chest didn’t seem normal so I went.
After twenty minutes in triage I was in the radiology room getting the chest x-ray taken care of. While I was waiting for the ER doc to look at the films (yeah, I’ve seen an episode of ER or two) I turned on Wimbledon in my room. At this point a doctor, who wasn’t mine, came in to catch a few points. We talked for a few minutes, not about my predicament, but about tennis: the playing of tennis, the Wimbledon series, you know, really important stuff.
After a little while the doctor came in. I explained the whole story to her and she told me that pain moving around is common in skeletal injuries. Who knew? She shifted her focus to my back and told me the story, hitting the water feet first, pain in the back muscles, etc was indicative of a “compression injury,” possibly even a fracture in the vertebrate. So it was back to radiology for shots of the T-spine and L-spine.
While I was in radiology the x-ray tech was curious as to why I was there, so I told him the story I had now repeated about a million times. He told me that was a good reason to be in the ER and that he’s seen some really bad ones. He then went on to tell me he and his friends used to jump off the intercostal bridges in Fort Lauderdale. For those not familiar with the intercostal bridges in Florida, they are somewhere around 60 feet high. He said it was a lot of fun till he got really hurt one day and decided to stop doing it. I thought what I did was stupid.
About twenty minutes after the x-rays the doctor came back and told me there were no obvious breaks, fractures, or really anything else to worry about. Since it had been around a month since the “incident” there was no risk of any organ injury or anything serious and most likely the pain was from muscle swelling, deep-tissue bruising, or a “slipped disk,” which she said is for lack of a better term. She said the pain will eventually go away and if I do something that hurts my back, not to do it again for awhile. She then prescribed a “muscle relaxant” to take in case it flares up really bad and Motrin doesn’t help. I was then on my way.
When I filled the prescription later that afternoon the pharmacist was concerned at the dosage. Evidently the prescribed 1500 mg at six to eight hour intervals is the highest dosage of that particular medicine the pharmacist had ever seen. After checking her database, she decided to only give me two days worth, or 24 pills. After that whole interchange I’m a little leerily to take them at all — luckily I haven’t had too.
All in all it was probably a good thing I went to the ER to find out there wasn’t anything seriously wrong — after all, the pain had moved to my chest and got me concerned. I might have to get an MRI down the road if the pain doesn’t clear up, but I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it.
Moral of the story: don’t jump off cliffs. Yes, I know you are taught that in kindergarden but I guess I didn’t get the memo. At least it wasn’t a bridge over the intercostal.
I’m a slow reader
July 5, 2008 | 4 Comments
One thing I love about the local library system is that I can check stuff out online and then they send it to me for free. It usually takes a week or two to send the book out, but it’s free so I wait.
A while back I had the library send me Jimmy Buffett’s Where is Joe Merchant?. For reasons I can’t seem to remember I didn’t start reading it until it was due. So I went onto the handy website and renewed it. Perfect. I took the book to the Bahamas and, shortly after horrendously injuring myself, decided to start reading it.
It’s a good book; silly story, even sillier characters, but a good read. The problem is I read slowly. I mean s.l.o.w.l.y. That and I don’t really make time to read, but that can be the topic for another day.
I used to read fast, well faster. Back in college I remember reading The DaVinci Code over the course of a week and Angels and Deamons even quicker. I even read The Client in a 24 hour period because it was due for a law class (which was taught by the teacher mentioned in the article that caused so much controversy).
Anyway, I somehow lost the ability to read quickly. Maybe the internet has destroyed the part of my brain required to do intellectual things like watching the news, reading, and knowing better than jumping off cliffs. Whatever it is, the library is starting to take notice. They’ve told me I cannot renew it again. Evidently three times is too many (yeah, I’ve had it that long, so what?). So I guess I have to read the remaining two hundred pages before the 11th or they send out the Library Police. You’d think that since I’m basically paying for the book anyway through my taxes they’d let me keep it till I’m done. Maybe I can get a discrimination lawsuit out of this. Oh, who am I kidding. It’d take me four years to read the lawyers paperwork.
Mission Tripping in the Bahamas: A Retrospective
June 16, 2008 | 0 Comments
One of the perks of my job is that I get to travel all over the place in service for others. This is the biggest focus of our youth ministry since God has called us to do just that (check out Matthew 25). Last week I was able to travel with our 11th and 12th grade team to Eluthera Island, Bahamas to work with Bahamas Methodist Habitat.
BMH is located in the James Cistern settlement in Central Eluthera and is home to around 300 of the 12,000 Elutheran residents. My team of 22 were split into three groups and spread out around Central Eluthera to work on different projects. My group stayed at the camp to build and install hurricane shutters there. My team of ten built 26 shutters for thirteen windows and were able to install them on five windows before the week ran out.
While the work that we did is important, BMH stresses community involvement as an equal part of the work experience. Each afternoon after a long day of work we were taken to a different beach in the area to cool off and talk to locals and tourists alike. This gave us the opportunity to see the beauty of the area while relaxing after a day’s work. My favorite of the beaches we visited was Rainbow Bay. It was about as picturesque a place as you can imagine. In the evenings we participated in different community-building events including a three hour long sixth grade graduation ceremony at the James Cistern Primary School.
One interesting experience to note is the morning I almost died. Myself and a few others were given the opportunity to go cliff diving at a remote spot near Rainbow Bay. The cliff was a beautiful 45 foot tall coral-limestore face on the Atlantic side of the island. The problem came when I blacked out upon entering the water. Those watching said I entered the water fine so I don’t really know what happened, perhaps my knees were forced into my chest. After about four or five seconds of being out I woke up completely disoriented and hearing nothing but the crashing waves. A second or so later I realized I was in the Bahamas and in the ocean and I needed to start swimming. It was about then I noticed everyone I was with was yelling at me to see if I was alright. While I was alive and well I was in a lot of pain and really seemed to tweak my back, which is still pretty sore. Needless to say I wont be jumping off anymore cliffs anytime soon.
All in all it was a great trip which showed me just how blessed I am to be able to travel to a place like that to do work for those that need it. The organization is wonderful and I’d recommend them to anyone planning a mission trip or voluntourism vacation. The next step is to continue the mission here in town and to remember the blessings God has provided me.
Summertime… and the living’s easy!
May 27, 2008 | 0 Comments
Yesterday was Memorial Day and while it’s a day where we take time out to remember those who have given their life in service of this country, it also is a day that signifies the start of summer — unofficially of course. When I was in school Memorial Day meant that school was already out and the three month vacation had begun. Now it means that the summer mission trip season is getting ready to hit full steam. This summer I’m mixing in a nice bit of personal vacation as well, which will be nice.
The first such vacation took place during the holiday weekend. It started with a screening of Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was awesome. Our idiot water moved about a slow as a elephant who was glued to the ground and caused us to get to the theater right at showtime — which meant seats so close to the screen you couldn’t see the whole thing at once. Despite that fact, the movie was a lot of fun and well worth anyones money.
From there it was off to Atlanta for two baseball games featuring the Braves take on the Diamondbacks. The DBacks took the first but the Memorial Day game was all Braves. It was great. I’ll be going back for July 4th to see the Braves go head to head with the Astros. Nothing quite says Memorial Day weekend like Braves baseball and Indiana Jones!
On another note, since updating the design here my little blog has been featured at the illustrious CSS Drive design gallery as well as We Love WP, which showcases WordPress designs. It’s pretty cool to be showcased on the same sites I use for inspiration.
Also, as noted in the comments section on my last post, I am going to try and rework the original Corked into a public release and put it out under Creative Commons licensing. Things are about to get really busy, so I can’t say exactly when, but it is on my to-do list.
You know how in grade school when you were taught the hamburger method of writing, where the top bun was an intro paragraph, the meat was your descriptive paragraphs, and the bottom bun was your conclusion? Well, consider this hamburger bottom bun-less because I got nothing.
AT&T is My Friend
April 14, 2008 | 0 Comments
Over the last few months my text messaging activity has been increasing. Being a youth minister, text messaging is a primary method of communication with students. It’s also very expensive when you double your text messaging allotment for the month.
That’s right, I almost hit the 400 text mark for the month of March. Since the AT&T iPhone plan is some special plan (even though it’s really just an unlimited data plan with a fancy iPhone name) you can’t make changes to it through the online account system — I couldn’t even find out how much the text messaging levels were for iPhone plans. So today I called the handy 611 line to talk to customer service.
The girl (she sounded young and bubbly but was more than likely a 56 year old Indian man given corporate call center locations) told me that my current iPhone plan, at $20 a month, allows 200 text messages and that the next step up is the $30 iPhone plan which comes with 1500 text messages a month. Seems like a huge jump, going from 200 to 1500, but I figured it was better than paying the $20 in overage charges so she upped my plan. Then she did something completely unexpected.
Before I go on, let me say that I find it rather odd, given my almost decade-long relationship with BellSouth Cingular AT&T Wireless, that it’s reputation among gadget blogs and the greater internet population is a negative one. Gizmodo doesn’t run an AT&T story without some reference to the “evil empire” or the AT&T Deathstar. I’ve had nothing but good experiences with AT&T over the years and the girl in the call center somewhere over the rainbow was about to reaffirm that.
She waived my overage charges citing a “Customer Credit” because of my long and good-standing relationship with the company. My monthly bill closed yesterday and hadn’t officially posted yet, so she said she’d call back next week to confirm the credit and wave any additional charges. So instead of paying an additional $20+ this month I’ll instead pay an additional $10 a month for the rest of my life and in turn, text the hell out of my phone. So if you know me, look out, cause there will be texts.
But I digress. It’s not every day that a big corporation does something nice that they really don’t have to do without even being asked. So, long story short, AT&T is my friend.