Monday, August 14, 2006

No time! No time! No time!

Let’s see… last post over a month ago. What happened?? Or should I ask “Wuz been happenin’??” Let’s see:

Well, first there was nothing to really write about, then we (Half Cleveland) were rehearsing and playing these gigs in NY and NJ(report on these shows published now at www.tinhuey.com).

I stayed in NY for a couple more days to help out Comrade Chris with his shoulder surgery.

Came home, for one day, then headed out for a long weekend to Chicago to celebrate my granddaughter Ellie’s 2nd Berfday.

Came home and prepped for turning our house into a recording studio as friend, engineer/producer Bruce Hensel came up from Florida and along with fellow Half Cleveland… um… ers Bob Ethington and Debbie Smith, with an assist from Black Key Dan Auerbach, recorded most of three new tracks.

Major thanks to equipment contributors Chris Butler, Michael Aylward, David Stevenson, and Roxanne from Audio Technica!!!

Major thanks to Bruce for his truly gifted ears and sensibility, and giving me the opportunity to record in the most comfortable of places.

Major thanks to my Premium rhythm section and smart folk Debbie and Bob for their wonderful playing, encouragement, clearing their calendars for me, and being talented and smart enough that I could trust looking to them for thumbs up and thumbs down.

Oh, and again, major thanks to Dolli for exhuming me from my musical burial ground lo those many years ago, and then Ralph Carney for exhuming Tin Huey.

Which brings us to this weekend… Happy Birthday Dolli!!

All the above while paying bills, and doing stuff for Gold Teleproductions in NY, aka the day job aka my allowance.

So while a profound thought here and there may have come and gone, there’s been no time to really deal.

FRIDAY MORNING I THOUGHT I MIGHT BE DIEING

I kept saying that I needed to record my song Lazy Boy, as I think it’s pretty good and didn’t want to keel over (which happens to men my age with a sort of bothersome frequency) without having something close to a definitive version of it recorded.

So with the exception of ‘keeper’ vocals, maybe a redone loop track more in tune, and a mix, it seems we did so between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning,

So Friday, of course, I wake up at 4-4:30 AM, go pee (a good pee), take a sip of water and roll back into a sweet sleep. Just before 5AM I am pulled out of my slumber by a horrible gripping pain that blooms right where my left kidney is supposed to dwell. This is a bad pain, an absolutely unrelenting pain, something I’ve not experienced in years, and NEVER without a reasonable explanation or warning of any nature.

I hang in like the mensch I am for about 5 minutes, then wake Dolli up to tell her I may be in trouble. I sit on the toilet, I get on my knees, I try to lay down, I stand up and lean. While I go through this, Dolli is looking up my symptoms on Web MD. She tells me I might have cold sweats (which I do, but assume it’s because I’m panicking). She tells me I might throw up (which I do, but assume it’s because I’m panicking). The symptoms apparently are for a kidney stone, something they can’t really do much about, but then again, it’s only a web site.

I try to wait it out and watch it pass, but it doesn’t. It feels like I have a rotting kidney, an impacted bowel and a urinary tract infection all at once. I take a couple little brown pills (that turn your pee orange) for urinary tract stuff and we both begin to dress because, as almost an hour has passed and there’s been no relief, it seems like I should go to the hospital now.

As Dolli gets ready, I take the pups out to do their thing as we know not how long Dolli might be at the hospital with me. As they romp and do their biz, I think two things:

1) So this is it. My time has come and this is the painful ass form it’s taking. How about that?

1a) I look up and, oddly, DON’T pray for help, but simply offer up a thanks for everything, and think...
1b) ... never should have recorded that goddamned song, and

2) There will now be holes and tubes in me, holes that were never before in my body. How depressing is that?

Walking back to the house with the dogs hurt more than I had thus far this fine morning. We wrote a note to producer Bruce, who was staying at the house, took all the phone numbers we’d need, as Dolli crated the pups I removed the house key from my ring to leave for Bruce, then, deciding which car to take (mine), we closed up and left for the hospital.

As we drove I began to notice that I was a little less uncomfortable and wondered, to both Dolli’s and my amusement, if it was like a little kid in a car, the vibrating soothing my infant beast. I also wondered if physically NOT focusing on only one thing was simply helping with pain management.

We stopped and got some gas (of course) at the BP in the valley, then continued on our journey to my sad, sad ER destiny. After driving maybe a mile or so further on Merriman Road, it dawned on me that I seemed to no longer be hurting. As I have been a strong proponent of the theory that humans get themselves into trouble by adapting and assimilating to a fault, I was dubious, so I asked Dolli to pull the car over. I got out, stretched, walked, bent, moved around, and got back in the car with the profound and grateful declaration:

“Let’s go home.”

So we did.

Chapter 2: Chagrin

I alit from the car, as did Dolli, and as we approached the slumbering house it dawned… no key!! Dolli had thought the key on the counter belonged to our house sitter, Stephanie. We had only taken my keys because that was the car we drove. We were locked out. So… the guy that just minutes before was destined to go into shock and die in the waiting room at Akron City Hospital’s Emergency Room got up (euphorically, may I note) on one of those little green plastic lawn tables and, contorting himself, of course, squeezed through the smallish kitchen window, unlocked the back door and took his wife back to bed.

Epilogue:

9AM Dolli gets up and makes an appointment with the Doc for 1:45. Harv gets up, Bruce gets up, we start recording, Harvey telling his newest anecdote to anyone who will listen. My doc tells me it might have been that stone Dolli read about, but it was highly unusual for the episode to last that short a time. Debbie suggested it was the Evelyn Wood method of passing a stone. Maybe a back spasm. Urine samples were taken, things were said, promises made – maybe the stone had moved into my bladder, to be passed at a later date.

“What happens then?”
“You pass it.”
"What do I do when that happens?”
“You pass it.”
“So in other words I scream, try to not faint and pass it, right?”
“I’ll be on call this weekend.”

So I guess there’s been plenty of activity, and I have a vague recollection of profound things striking me in the gaps, but they’re ghosts at the moment. I go to NY on Tuesday, come back Wednesday and think it’s just going to keep going for a while, so it may be a while yet here before another update.

I just got a call from the Doc saying that my urinalysis came out negative. Great. Still... can't wait for 'nothing' to happen to me again, y'know?

1 Comments:

Blogger Mombi said...

I was once witness to a kidney stone incident. The nurse said they can spot it looking at a man in the face--it is the only pain that can bring a man to his knees like *snaps fingers* this.

Apparently the little buggers float and get stuck and when they're stuck you feel the pain. The pain can come back for brief periods and when you pass it it's supposedly like pissing a razor blade, but then it's over.

Do you have to pee in the little sieve?

11:15 PM  

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