Day in the Life of an Idiot

Last night, I tried to kill my phone.

Normally, I attempt drowning, everyone's favorite phone homicide method. Last night, however, I don't even know what I did, though I know that the result was that I SOMEHOW disconnected my phone from its SIM card. Of course, I only discovered this at 11:30 pm, having stumbled in from a late night anime gathering. Suffice to say, after several hours of panic-induced messing around, I thought to call customer service and, FOR ONCE, they actually managed to fix the problem.

What was profoundly stupid is that I probably could have come to this solution a lot sooner had I not decided that my phone was so utterly necessary to my life that it had to be fixed immediately, at MIDNIGHT. I don't know what I thought I was going to miss? A 2 am text? 

The good news is that everything is working again.

I'm fine. We're all fine here. How are you?

I notice that I have failed to keep you all updated on the other exciting developments of my life. One reason I have been lax in updating was actually intentional. Shawn had a cancer scare and we decided not to talk about it until we knew for certain what was going on. SPOILER: She's fine, no cancer. 

Ah, so, the whole story goes like this. I think one of my last blog entries actually blithely mentions "oh, ha,ha, Shawn is in for Yet Another MRI, oh ho hum, such is our life!" Well, a day after that MRI, we got a late night call from Shawn's neurologist. Late night. At home. In a shaky voice, Dr. Li tells Shawn there's "unusual imaging" in the bone of her spine and does she have an ONCOLOGIST she could see? Literally the words no one wants to hear, ever.

As you can imagine, our hearts were in our throats. Ironically, we did have an oncologist already in the vast stable of specialists that Shawn sees, because he is also a hematologist, whom she'd seen while in the hospital in July for her blood clot. By chance, Dr. Perez is one of the directors of the Minnesota Oncology Center, a Yale Graduate, who did one of his residencies at the Mayo. To have actually rolled a natural 20 in this fashion could not have been a better deal for us, because Dr. Perez just looked at Shawn, her history, and the image and said, "How good is your insurance?" When we said, "Hell, at this point, thanks to the hospital visit, everything is free," he smiled and said, "Okay, what I'm going to do is order a PET CT scan of your whole body. This will tell us everything. If there any sign of cancer, anywhere, we will know." Imagine this in a weirdly sexy Antonio Bandares Spanish accent, because as an added bonus Dr. Perez is a super hot immigrant from Barcelona. Also imagine us, two married-to-each-other women, but who are not immune to masculine charm, sitting there getting the "we still don't know what this is" bad news from him, while thinking, "Could you repeat that? Not only is it hard information to absorb because it is scary, you also make it sound really sexy... which is confusing my brain further than is strictly comfortable."

The worst part of this scare was all the waiting for news/waiting for tests.

It's also extremely scary how one is fast tracked the second they think they might find cancer, because we were at the PET CT scan by the beginning of the very next week. Shawn described the experience as weirdly pleasant. They give you a radioactive injection of glucose, but they have to wait an hour for it to settle in any "hot" spots, so Shawn read a book. Then it was no more than twenty minutes in a tube, which she was allowed to take Valium for which... let's just say, afterwards, she was very giggly and had no filters to the point where, when I took her out to lunch, she ran her fingers on the brick facing of a building and told me, "That felt JUST like I expected it to!" Oh-kay, baby.  When I told her she was pretty high, she smiled and lifted four fingers and told me, "I have FIVE more of these."  

So, I mean, there was a fun moment?

Then, we got the call the very next day from a technician who started the call with, "How are you today, Mrs. Rounds?" To which, Shawn instantly said, "I don't know. It's really going to depend on what you're about to tell me." The technician then told Shawn the results of the scan were NEGATIVE. There was no sign of any cancer. ANYWHERE.

We kept our appointment with Dr. Perez for Thursday just to make sure we were really all clear (and besides did I mention he was hot? And had a smoldering accent??? And is actually really funny, too, Shawn made a slip and asked him to continue her SUBscriptions to certain meds and he found this so charming that he repeated it several times.) At any rate, that's the long story of a harrowing two weeks or more of OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT that turned out to be what Dr. Perez hoped it was from the start: basically a birthmark type formation from blood cells (hemangioma?) that can be caused from trauma, like say, decades of a bad back.

Now that the panic is over, Shawn has been able to read the rest of the MRI report and wants to go back to Dr. Li and say, "Okay, but when were you going to tell me I had mild scoliosis? Or degenerative lumbar compression?"

Meanwhile, Mason got strong armed by his coach into going to a debate tournament last weekend. He's on the debate team and has gone to a few Friday night sessions, but he normally works on Saturday morning/afternoon and so hasn't wanted to set the team up for the default losses he'd get by not showing up for the second day of a tournament. But, the debate coach was like, "Mason, I can't require this, but could you please???" and so he took one day off work to go to the Regional Champs Tournament last weekend. Debate is usually a team sport, you usually have a partner for each session. Mason is a weird kid because he actually PREFERS to run what they call "maverick," which means he goes without a partner and does the whole argument, cross examination, and ending statement alone... usually against TWO others, who then have the advantage of tag-teaming him.

When he showed up on Friday he was not only maverick, as expected, but also, by chance, the only student from the Washington team who could make it. He didn't think much of it, because people have conflicts and his coach Maddy, figured a couple other folks would show in the junior division on Saturday. Nope. Mason was the sole--and I mean ONLY--Washington Tech debate team member for the tournament.

And he won.

The WHOLE thing. 

Thanks to JUST Mason, the Washington Debate team are JV  Division of the UDL Regional Champ victors. His trophy goes in the hall of trophies because he won it for the school, for the entire team.... by himself.


(Picture: Mason looking rightfully pleased with himself whilst holding a golden trophy)

I mean, I tell you this story because I'm insanely proud of him, but also because it's an insane story. I can't imagine how the other teams felt, given that they had literally every advantage over him.... including simply HAVING teammates.

So that's some of the insanity around here. I have other things to report, which I will save for another episode, which I will hopefully enter tomorrow. I've got my observations to report about having seen Terry Garey a few more times and also a rundown of my experiences at anime night.  

 Okay, wow, I forgot to post anything for a week. Gomenasai. My bad.

I did have some stories I wanted to recount, too. First of all, I worked at Shoreview Library on Saint Patrick's Day proper, last Sunday. For some reason I thought that the library opened at 10 am, and, as I was scheduled for 11 am - 3 pm, I waltzed in the door (using my beep-y lanyard thingie) and promptly set off the alarm. As it happened, my colleagues were coming in right behind me and so someone was able to put in the code to turn off the blaring. But, that was... interesting, as we say here in Minnesota.

I've always wondered what would happen if I just randomly tried to go into a library after hours with my official employee badge door opener.  Now I know!

I ended up working at Shoreview again on Monday night, which was fine. I continue to like library work and it gave me an opportunity to discover Polar Bear Love, a ridiculous manga about cross-species love. 

I spent a lot of the rest of the week playing taxi for Mason. He has been volunteering as a debate coach and there were two big tournaments at the U (Anderson Hall, West Bank) this week.  He ended up taking the light rail home last night, because his matches went late and I had Wyrdsmiths--which I couldn't skip as they were reading the apocalypse short story of mine which is due April 1. Speaking of which, that's all revised. I need to look over it several more times before I send it off, but I feel really quite good about it. I took some risks and i think they paid off. We'll see. 

Today is Friday, and so I hung out with naomikritzer and pegkerr at the coffeeshop and talked politics and water in the basement and all that sort of stuff.

And... now I can't remember what else I wanted to report, so I guess I'll close now with a promise to be better in the future.

 Today I'm going to be ferrying Mason and one of his fellow debate judges over to a school in Minneapolis. That should be fun, she says with a bit of a sigh. I'm actually looking forward to meeting the other judge (these are high schoolers who are judging middle school debaters) as he's someone Mason talks about a lot.  I hope he lives up to his nerd reputation.  :-)  

To be fair, I have otherwise shirked a lot of the driving duties that other friends of mine seem to have had with their kids.  No endless soccer practices or any of that sort of stuff.

Yesterday, I stopped by the Roseville Library to return a few books and pick up the Princess Jellyfish volume that came in for me.  I haven't had many calls about subbing and, as I know my boss is set to retire soon, i had a worried thought that maybe I'd missed a retirement party or an email about whoever is taking over.  So I stuck my head into the branch manager's office and he waved me in.  I didn't miss anything, apparently as part of training the new person in, my boss had been delayed getting hours out to other people.  But, while I was there, the branch manager offered to pay me for an hour if I would sign off on my performance reviews.

Before working at Ramsey County Library, I used to DREAD performance reviews.  Let's be honest, I was writing a novel while sitting at that receptionist desk. How stellar are my reviews going to be? I also never really cared all that much about where I was working, so long as it had the kind of office culture where I could get away with long lunches and working on my novel. I am normally NOT the employee you ever want to hire for anything.

Except, for some reason, my library work. I think it helps that I love libraries and always have.  

I honestly think it also helps that I'm a sub, so the stakes are always kind of low (for me.) I mean, I do legitimately love the work, but if there's an annoying co-worker or restrictive policy, I just don't interact with either for very long, you know?  The annoying co-worker? I see them once a month, tops.  That policy? How often am I ever going to have to deal with it, compared to how often full-time people do, you know?  Plus, people are happy to see me, too, because I'm often coming in with only an hour's notice because someone's car failed to start in the cold or their child fell ill or whatever, you know?  So, I'm always appreciated, too.

The point is, I now get performance reviews that say things like, "Lyda is a joy to work with" and aren't sarcastic.  It's really amazing.  

Plus, the branch manager and I ended up just shooting the breeze about the writing life and such afterwards. I like the kinds of people who chose to work at libraries too. They're almost always nerdy and arty and liberal and cool.