Tag Archives: fighting cf

The Cost of Battle

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If I can compare the 20 days in the hospital to anything, it would be 20 days in enemy territory getting shot at and dodging explosions. In the movies, when the lead actor escapes the battlefield there is a moment of personal inventory. What’s bleeding? What’s broken? It’s just good to be alive. That’s the point. To survive no matter what. In the movies everything heals over time.

I’ve been taking inventory the last few days.

Hearing – more lost thanks to the 20 days of tobra. I can’t hear some high pitch sounds in our house like the alarm. The sound is gone to me. My ears play Jingle Bells 24/7. I left for battle and the explosions took their toll. When I returned, some of my hearing stayed at the hospital. Hasta la vista, high pitched sounds.

Lung function down over 20 percent according to the PFT in the hospital. Will it come back? Let’s hope.

O2 levels normal. That’s good news. So far so good.

Low grade fevers and chills. Still hanging on me. 5:00 p.m. rolls around and it’s time for a nap and baby bottle for me. I’m gone. The CF center seems content to let me suffer through them each day. It’s probably my anger talking. I’m still irritated about some of the decisions or delayed decisions of the stay. The CF team is solid though. I know they care. They just have a lot of patients to deal with.

Over 10 pounds shredded thanks to sitting on my ass doing endless IVs and a lack of an appetite for the same bland food every day. The endless fluids they gave me in the hospital masked the weight loss. At least I’m not peeing 20 times a day anymore.

No blood. That’s a good thing. It hasn’t returned yet. If it does, I can’t decide if I’ll go back in the hospital or just hunt down the people who couldn’t get it right after two embolizations. I’ll throw them on a table and cut into their groin and see how much they like it and educate them on the importance of getting it correct the first time.

Aches and pains. I could use a little time on a medieval torture rack being stretched right now. Or tie me between two horses and pull my limbs until my back pops and I get back the two inches in height I probably lost in the hospital. Tell me again why they don’t offer massage therapy in the hospital? I can get all the morphine I want while I’m there, but a little quality time face down with a certified member of the massage community digging her knuckles into my backside is verboten.  That makes no sense.

All in all, I got my ass beat. And that makes me angry because it’s embarrassing to get beat up. Worst of all, CF didn’t do all of the beating. The doctors helped and I did my part with mistakes I made. Hindsight again. I wonder if I can have it removed? Life would be easier if I weren’t tortured by my errors. I should have seen the landmines, been more aggressive about getting the embolization done quickly instead of waiting six days. There were plenty of other errors I made. Where did my courage go while I was there?

Life at 26,000 feet

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I’m not going to live forever. That’s my big revelation for the night. But it’s true. And it has taken me a great deal of time to realize this. I’m not.

I think of my age, 48, cystic fibrosis, and past events. Two collapsed lungs and the small scars on my chest from the chest tubes. A skin cancer removed that left a scar like a bullet hole on my chest because the Vest pulled the stitches apart. A blood clot in my neck that will never go away and required a year’s worth of shots in my stomach to prove its permanence. It too has left a mark on my chest, though this one is different from the penetration scars. Blue veins zig zag to create new pathways for blood flow and look like a map of highways across the USA. So my doctor says, the reason they’re there, not what they look like. What I know is that when I take my shirt off there is a story – not all CF scarring is invisible to the human eye.

And there are the hospitalizations. And the episodes of hemoptysis and bouts of C diff. And my irregular heartbeat and mild pulmonary hypertension. And the fact I’ve reached an age that kills healthy people. Cancer, heart attacks, strokes, bad eggs. You name it.

But I need to live 10 more years, to see my daughter graduate high school. That’s my goal. To see her graduate. That was my mother’s goal, to see me graduate high school. She had it easy thanks to my set of defective genes. But now I have my goal and I look out at 10 years and think that is a long time to go and a hard road to travel. How many hospitalizations will there be? 20? 30? What unexpected events will rock me? How many collapsed lungs and how much hemostysis?

I love this mountain

How can I even have the nerve to tempt fate and think that I could make it another 10 years with what life and cystic fibrosis have in store for me? I might as well climb Mt. Everest. Which goal has a better chance of happening? Well, obviously, I can’t climb, so I guess that’s an easy one to answer. But just surviving 10 more years is my mountain to climb, my impossible dream. I may not make it past next month with what’s brewing inside my guts right now.

The question I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about lately is how I am going to spend the remaining seconds, minutes and hours I have left. I won’t presume to think that I have days left. I’ve learned how the karma of this disease works. Pride and hope and ego get crushed fast and hard. If I just string some of these seconds together, perhaps I’ll get a day. If I’m lucky.

Tonight, denial no longer protecting me, I realize I’m standing at 26,000 feet above sea level in what climbers call the death zone. It’s one step at a time now. It will be a victory when I wake up tomorrow morning. That’s how I’m going to look at it from this point forward.

What I am thinking at this very moment

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Do you feel lucky, punk?

[adult language]

I just want cystic fibrosis gone, exorcised from my body like an evil spirit, where it would hang in the air and I’d shoot it with the most powerful handgun in the world, the .44 magnum. So says Dirty Harry. And I believe him.

I don’t want to keep looking up medical information when I’m sick, thinking I have a medical degree and can diagnose myself on a web site. Don’t all diseases share most of the same symptoms? How many symptoms can there be?

I have everything – every disease known to man and womankind. The only question is which one is bothering me today. Fuck symptom finder. I have them all damn it.

Why can’t I take a probe like the one you stick in a turkey on Thanksgiving and jab it in my thigh and find out what’s wrong with me? And why do I know that if I gave the probe’s readout or report to two doctors, I would get two completely different diagnoses and they might both be wrong. Where’s the third doctor when you need him? On a golf course somewhere, no doubt, or on his yacht or private jet or on the moon, drinking lunar mohitos. Fuck them all. Scratch that. Fuck the ones who suck. Praise and worship the rest. They’re good people.

That’s what I’m thinking at this very moment.

I hate bacteria

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I know there are good bacteria, like the millions in the probiotics I’ve been swallowing each day, but I hate the bad ones. Especially c-diff, PA and mycobacterium, the latter having worked its way into a new friend’s lungs. Why can’t scientists invent some form of good bacteria to combat them? Probiotics for the lungs? I’d inhale something like that. Instead I need antibiotics and more antibiotics.

The good news, though I’m afraid to write it because the last time I mentioned good health my two-week joy ride with c-diff started, is that today I may have turned the corner with the c-diff. The antibiotics seem to be doing their job finally and the rollercoaster of low-grade fevers, stomach problems, diarrhea, feeling ill and tired, and hot like the Human Torch has subsided.

Whew, doggie. That was something. Bacteria . . . wow. The damage they can do, as all of us know. It won’t be the cockroaches that survive all of us, it will be the cockroach bacteria. These tiny, invisible destroyers of life will survive all, I’m afraid.

The ironic part of my story is that it started thanks to a medication – Nexium. To combat GERD, the stomach doctor prescribed up to 80mg a day, suppressing my stomach acid to the point the c-diff could flourish and take control. Down with the hearburn, up with the c-diff. Right now I have the heartburn of a dragon and feel like I could blow fire and take out a tree or two, though cars would be more fun because they explode. I’m afraid to take anything to reduce the acid in my system that’s helping to kill the c-diff. I’ll live with the heartburn over the c-diff.

Equilibrium, such an elusive dream most days.

I should have known better

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When I was writing last night’s post, I had this gut feeling that if I wrote about good health, CF would rear back and crush me with a blow to the head. And it did. I woke up sweating, which has been happening on and off for over a month, but hadn’t reached the level it did this morning. My stomach was upset but nothing major as far as pain goes. And, I had a bad reaction to yesterday’s allergy shot. I felt like crap and started to panic.

Hello, Xanax. I took it but it didn’t help with feeling hot and sweating, but did take some of the edge off the anxiety.

I took two allergy tabs. I ate breakfast. Then I started to feel a little better. I forced myself to lift weights this afternoon and felt like I had really good air. In fact, after working out I felt good. Then I ate some carrots and cherries, and 20, 25 minutes later the same cycle started again.

Then during my afternoon treatment, I had some thick blood streaks, which I hope were tied to the workout. Or to the sweating? Do I have an infection after all, somewhere the Cayston didn’t reach? I don’t have a fever, but am hot, sweaty and clammy.

Or is it a reaction to the allergy shot? Is it my stomach? Hormones?

I am amazed that yesterday was so different. I was happy that I’d escaped the hospital, but now I feel like I should check in. I just knew this would happen. I was punished for pride about doing something right.

It’s days like this when I feel like giving up.

Today’s score: Unknown 1, CF 0

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The anger train continues to roll after Saturday’s journey down memory lane of my major medical blunders. And, as that steam engine doesn’t want to return to the station, I thought I’d try to reverse its course with a positive story.

During my last hospitalization five months ago, my CF team told me that I had to quit Cayston because my bacteria were showing intermediate resistance to it. Argh. Cayston? NOOOOOO. The study drug made a giant, positive difference in my life over the past few years. But the team told me to stop it, so I did. They also informed me that I needed two clean samples without any resistance to the drug before restarting it.

I could have sat back and let those tests come naturally in the course of exacerbations, but I didn’t. I requested new samples when I had opportunities, like the  hospitalization for my heart troubles when I argued with the hospital doc who didn’t see the need to collect one, as I wasn’t in for an exacerbation, and another appointment when I wasn’t due for a sputum sample.

I pressed for the tests and with luck got the results I wanted sooner rather than later, which allowed me to restart Cayston.

Now here’s why it paid off for me.

A month ago, I was showing classic signs of an exacerbation with increased coughing and mucus. So,  I restarted Cayston. It was touch and go for the first 10 days with some streaking and not feeling well, but I  turned the corner. And after four weeks, my lung pollution is almost where it is after a hospitalization. Amazing luck. Cayston worked almost as well as IVs and saved me from a trip to hell.

And though this is a simple example, it demonstrates that proactive steps can keep CF at bay – sometimes. Had I sat back and accepted my circumstances and not suggested medical tests when chances presented themselves, I wouldn’t be writing this post – I’d be in the hospital. That’s not to say that CF won’t put me in the hospital tomorrow or next week. As we all know, it can. Still, it’s nice once in a while to escape its clutches by making the right decisions.

Though a small victory in a long war, it still feels good – fleeting – but good.

Breaking up is hard to do

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Last night at the LA Open tennis tournament, guess who sat down in the seat directly in front of me? If your first instinct was to say ex-girlfriend, I wish. Yes, it was an ex – my ex-CF doctor, which opened a flood gate of memories and emotions, most of them bad. What are the odds of this meeting happening? And it being the seat in front of me?

Here’s the backstory.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes managing my CF care as an adult. The greatest was leaving the care of Doctor Tennis at the wrong time. He used to be on the CF Foundation’s accredited center lists, but, for reasons unknown to me, abandoned that path and has since had a private practice as a pulmonary specialist. I stayed with him until I had major hemoptysis on a flight to Germany. I got pissed at him over that and switched to an official CF center, thinking they would take better care of me. Big mistake.

The CF Center I switched to at the time wasn’t, well, very aggressive in treating CF. For example, they used a peak flow for PFTs. Under their care I lost a load of lung function because they were too flexible with my care and I could push them to allow me to use orals when IVs were needed. Whereas, Dr. Tennis did PFTs every time I visited his office, which gave him a better picture of my lung function. He forced me to do IV’s when needed.

Then my CF Center improved and brought in a great team and I bounced back and forth between them and Dr. Tennis, until a hospitalization made me cut ties with him.

At the hospital Dr. Tennis practices at you need his care and an infectious disease doctor’s care when you’re in for IVs. They’re not really a team, but come together when needed. Unfortunately, I realized that the infectious care doctor, who I knew from visits to her office, really didn’t have a good handle on current CF IV treatments. I questioned her decisions. I thought I was doing it in a way that was pleasant – in a we’re partners in this and I know a lot about CF, too kind of way. However, she was immune to my infectious charm and wit, and broke up with me on day two of IVs.

The day before she came into my room and delivered that blow to the psyche, I had spoken to my wife about breaking up with her after the IVs. But she beat me to the punch. And, as it came on the second day of IVs when I was still mentally fragile, it bothered me (and my wife).

Both Dr. Tennis and another doctor said to me “it’s not you, it’s her,” or something close to that. It was good to know that I wasn’t the evil, crazy patient she made me out to be. Crazy? Well, perhaps, but she doesn’t have CF now does she?

So last night, it was comfortable talking to Dr. Tennis; it was okay. It’s probably been four years. His office never contacted me to see how I was doing like my current center did after three months. (I have a great CF Center now.) However, two interesting things did come up. He asked me if I’d like to participate in a trial of inhaled Cipro he’s starting. Yes. Why isn’t my center doing that? He told me his office would call to arrange it. I’ll believe it when the phone rings.

Then, when leaving the tournament, he mentioned the doctor that broke up with me and a piece of news about her. Oh, great. Thanks for that dart to the forehead. It’s not that I wish bad things for that doctor. I don’t. However, like a short fling with someone who broke up with you, you don’t really want to hear she has a new boyfriend either.

Past memories can be great, or they can bite. With CF it’s hard enough keeping bad memories boxed up without someone cracking them open for you. Next year, I think I’ll watch the tennis tournament on TV, or skip it completely.

Stay well.

Saturday Funhouse: Four inventions I need now

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[Adult language]

I need four, count them, four inventions to make my life with CF easier and more fun.

Spit away

1. Bug-zapper dentist spittoon. This invention would be a combo device to cough phlegm into that would kill it dead. It’s similar to the cuspidor suction attachment at the dentist’s office with the sno-cone paper cup – the one that makes a suction sound of whoosh, there goes the blood from your gums and blue mouthwash, drool puss.

I need one major modification made to it.

Die PA, die!

I need the suction device attached to a bug zapper with sound effects. When I spit mucus into it, I want that lung deposit to burn in a small inferno like a fly at a fourth of July BBQ hitting the bug zapper. And I want sound effects when the bacteria bite the dust. How about two-dozen different screaming sounds to choose from every time the green goo burns to death. AYYYYEEEEEEEEE, it will scream out in its last second of scum life. BACTERIA BE GONE!

That will teach you to live in my lungs, motherfuckers.

Step right up, partner and down a dose of Xopenex

2. The hanging neb holder. Remember the 70’s craze of hanging plants from the ceiling in macramé holders? You may be too young if you don’t. Trust me, it happened. Well, I am tired of holding my nebs in my mouth like a cigar. I want a neb holder that hangs from the ceiling, which will free up my hands for a beer and stick of Big Ralph’s Glazed Buffalo Jerky. I’ll attach my neb, then mosey on up and start my treatment while it hangs in the air. Look ma, no hands.

A bungy cord design may work best, as I’ll be able to move around without fear of my teeth ripping out should I make a sudden wrong move, such as passing out drunk with indigestion.

Hulk must regulate the situation now!

3. I want to look like the Hulk in my Vest. It’s impossible to look cool wearing the Vest, with its two hose attachments protruding like cow teats. Here’s my idea to fix that. Have you ever seen those swimsuits for kids that have the life preserver built into the suit?  They look like muscles. That’s the look I want for my vest.  I want to be able to walk outside and not look like an astronaut that needs to be hooked up to his oxygen tank before shuttle lift-off.

When my neighbor sees me he’ll say: “Hey, UC, you been lifting the heavy iron lately? You’re looking buff, my man.”

I’ll reply: “That’s right puny neighbor dude. I have been lifting cars. And if you park that shitty van in front of my house again, I’ll regulate your ass and your van from here to the moon.”

Boring. Add flames and you'll have fun and an act.

4. And now the act you’ve all been waiting for. I want a flutter that plays music. I spend enough time blowing into the damn thing that it should give me more than just clear lungs – it should give me a career path in entertainment. I want to be able to play every song in the Rolling Stones catalog on it.

Can you imagine me performing on America’s Got Talent?

“And what will you be playing for us tonight, bag-over-your-head-guy?” the judges will ask.

I’ll play Gimme Shelter on the mysterious instrument no one has ever seen.

HOLY COW, what an amazing device and sound, the audience will think. He’s spent hours perfecting his technique. Look at how red his face gets.

The performance will go great until, you guessed it, the flutter makes me start coughing up my lung pollution. Then audience members will turn away in horror and I’ll get three X’s and the hook. The last words from the clean-up crew will be: “I can’t figure out how to get this crap off the stage. Someone bring me a blow torch.”

At the very least, could someone please invent a Flutter that is exciting to use, perhaps one that shoots flames? Please?

I could use it to perform at Venice Beach on weekends, right next to the guy who juggles chainsaws near the cheapo-sunglass stands.

I’ll be called Mr. Flutter Flames. And I’ll have no eyebrows.

Stay well.

Those fleeting moments of feeling well

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Today I read a very good post by Mandi at runsickboyrun.com.

http://runsickboyrun.blogspot.com/2010/07/you-feel-like-what.html

She does some nice detective work figuring out what’s it like to not feel well with CF. For me, she touches upon one of the hardest parts of having cystic fibrosis – just generally feeling under the weather a lot. It would be much easier if I felt great for three or four months after a tune-up. Then, bang, I start feeling bad and in I go for a tune-up. Now that I’m older, the stretches between I.V.s test me to a greater degree and are battles to see how long I can stay well and out of the hospital. And not cough up blood – my favorite CF event.

A few weeks ago, my coughing production quadrupled, which is the sign that I’m getting ready for another tune-up. I know the pattern well by now. It’s when I have days I lack energy, have strange chest pains and SOB, and feel like giving up. It’s made worse by the fact I have grind out work most days. But I hate going in the hospital more, though I sometimes think it would be nice to live there.

As I’ve gotten older, CF is complicated by other aging issues. I don’t know about anyone reading this and their experience, but when I don’t feel well the first place I look is CF – it gets blamed right away, villain that it is. However, it hasn’t been the cause of my health problems every time.

It’s a challenge to get my CF doctor, who is excellent at what he does, to look beyond CF. When I’m in the hospital or at clinic and it feels like I have more than an exacerbation, I have a hard time describing why I don’t feel well and the symptoms. This makes it harder for the doctors to comprehend. They think I’m crazy.

I’m embarrassed to say what illnesses I’ve thought I’ve had in the past. However, I have called a few right, one being a wheat intolerance. I thought it was CF causing the madness, but it was because of my diet and wheat. Once I reduced my wheat intake by 90 percent the symptoms started disappearing. I did rub in the fact at clinic that hell froze over and I was correct for once – lucky guess?

I haven’t been feeling well most days for awhile now, as usual, but I can’t blame wheat this time. It’s something else, and I can’t get it off of my mind.

Here’s how my thought process goes most days: Am I taking too much magnesium? Is it the chocolate? Testosterone? Is it my stomach or my heart? They said my heart was okay. Why did I get shoulder pains yesterday and some chest discomfort? What caused the bloating? Why am I getting shortness of breath lately? I’m back on Cayston. Is it not working? My peak flow is good. Pulseox down 1 percent. Is it a panic attack? I don’t feel anxious. How can I describe this to the doctor? Is it time to go to the gun store? Could I be eating something that affects my heart?

And it goes on and on like that for days, weeks, months.

Yes, I am insane.

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Saturday Funhouse – My Ideal Hospital Room

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[Adult language]

My good pal @seanset, http://seanset.posterous.com/, wrote a comment here moaning and groaning about me not writing a Saturday Funhouse for awhile. How the hell did that happen?  Thanks, mate, for reminding me. Here you go. This one’s for you. And yes, I know it’s Sunday Funhouse where you live.

My Ideal Hospital Room

No jumpers, please. The first thing I’d add to my room is a balcony. I’d like fresh air each day without having to gear up with a mask and gloves and endure the fearful looks from people in the elevator (yes, idiot person who moved to the back, as if that will really help, I have the Bubonic plague, but they let me roam the hospital to drive up revenues with fresh patients).

Each morning I want to pop out of bed, I.V in tow, and take three steps to the great outdoors, yelling: Hello, World, I’m still here, ha ha ha ha ha ha, the joke’s on you.

Imagine cooking outside your hospital room. Rocking. How do you like your steak cooked, Fox?

How nice would it be to sit on the balcony in the morning reading while doing treatments? I could wave to my fellow CFers on their balconies. We could have a contest to see who could make the funniest voice with the vest turned to max. Then we could see who could spit farther, which might be the reason they don’t have hospital balconies in the first place. Not exactly the image the hospital wants to promote with a bunch of us sitting in our underwear spitting on the roof or gardens below.

Imagine people driving up to the hospital watching patients on the balconies doing nebs. Might be too much for them to take. Not us, cause we’ve been to places no one should have to go. So there. Roll up your windows when you drive by, people. BTW, I’d hang some laundry on the railing just to give it that old apartment-building look. And I want the BBQ in the picture.

You can’t make me go in there. I don’t take showers in the hospital. I look at that dark, nasty chamber and connect it to the thought of how lazy the cleaning staff can be. You’d need a team of football players to force me in there (or two drunk Victoria’s Secret supermodels). The shower is bacteria heaven.

Let's torch some bacteria, friends.

I read that some gas stations, or petrol stations in England (you’re welcome for that translation, Sean), have self-cleaning bathrooms. Perfect. That’s how I want my hospital bathroom to work. I want to be able to press a button and watch the entire bathroom sprayed down in bleach. Then I want flames to light it up like the “Backdraft” tour at Universal Studios, killing everything the bleach missed.

Finally, I want test swabs done to make sure nothing is living in there that I don’t want living in me. After all of that, I’ll take my shower with confidence. Girls, show me that pose from page 27 again.

Trying living in the Material Girl’s laundry basket: I want a room bigger than Madonna’s smallest walk-in closet. It’s amazing what a difference an extra 20 square-feet makes when it comes to your mood and health, and where you put all of your shoes if you’re a woman. How about designing a CF room that doesn’t make me feel like a caged animal gone mad during two weeks in the hole?

Come on, hospital bed, let’s do the wave. Have you ever awakened covered in sweat because of the plastic hospital mattress? Plastic doesn’t make the best material for temperature control. However, and this is true, when I was 16 I got a waterbed. And it rocked – and rolled. It was AWESOME to sleep on. It had a plastic mattress with temperature control and heated water. That was the trick. In Winter I was warm and cozy and could sleep with only the top sheet of my Spiderman bedding.

Now this is a waterbed fit for a hospital

Now as there are a ton of needles in hospitals, waterbeds may not be the best idea. Can you imagine pressing the “I want my nurse now“ button and saying, “my water bed just popped. Oh, and can you bring in some towels and fresh scrubs because my wife and I are soaking wet.”

Let’s hang in Unknown’s room. I cannot tell you how many times I have come close to going “rock star” on the crappy TV with no good channels and fuzzy reception. I came this close to ripping it off the bracket at Cedars-Sinai once and tossing it out the window. Had I been a rock star, they would have just billed me. If I had done it, I would have been fighting back the cons in the L.A. Jail. So, for us time-share hospital patients, let’s load up the room with the finest entertainment center available.

I want a 52-inch HD, 3D flatscreen with every f***ing channel in the world. That’s right, in the world. I’ll even watch those crazy-ass soap operas from Brazil. I won’t understand what they’re saying, and won’t care because everyone looks tan and pretty.

I should have taken a photo of the remote last time I was in. Here's one that looks and functions just like it.

Don’t forget the sound system. I need to block out anyone yelling “nurse, nurse” from the other room. I want people to think there’s an earthquake and it sounds a lot like the battle scene in Avatar.

Lastly, give me a remote control that selects channels up and down and that doesn’t make me want to inject Drano in my IV because I just passed the channel I wanted and now I have to go through 20 crappy channels to get back to the one I passed. Whew, that’s a mouthful.

To the joker who invented that piece of shit remote, I’m still looking for you and will one day take the reverse gear out of your car. They’ll be no backing up for you after that.

Some of us work for a living. I’ve said this many times – give me a desk and chair. I work when I’m in the hospital. This ain’t no holiday, people. I have a family to feed and insurance to keep. Help me keep it, hospital room designers. That way I can come back and use my insurance again, as opposed to doing my IVs while pushing a shopping cart on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

Design a desk and have it pull out of the wall like a Murphy Bed or something. Get with the program of the digital world we live in – the one that doesn’t go away just because you’re in the hospital.

Here’s one from Fox: Thanks, Unknown, for giving me one, you generous bastard. Fox here. Look, my fox friends, nurses have heard every line you’ll ever come up with. There is nothing you can say with your golden tongue that is going to catch one of these intelligent, caring women. Even though they wear pajamas to work, which is cool, you have zero chance of getting them to change into something more comfortable – they’re already comfortable in their nurse PJ’s and Crocs. So, you have to trick them in a different, more subtle way.

This is what I look like without the bag over my head

The water bed is a great first step. Nurses love water beds and will want to test it. When she gets on, bump up the wave action and wait for the fun to begin. You say: “Look who fell into my arms. Que romantico. My name is Fox, and I come from an exotic land called Brazil. I will kiss you now.”

Second, and this is the bait of all bait, put a stripper pole in your room. Always say it’s for exercise and the docs won’t barf all over the idea. When the doc is gone, the patient will play. No nurse can resist a pole in the room (except the one in Louisiana who’s going to write Unknown a nasty comment for this post).

Now gents,  you have to stay cool and subtle and say it like this: “What’s a little spin around the pole going to hurt? It’s a great way to get over the barf storm Mr. Wilson just coughed up all over his room?” Be encouraging. “There you go. That’s it. I’ll just be sitting here reading on my iPad. You go ahead and get crazy. Oh, yeah. Wait, let me crank the AC/DC on this awesome sound system. That’s it. Did they teach you that in college.” [the rest of Fox’s post was censored because, well, you can only imagine what happened next – out came the beer and dollar bills. Then all hell broke loose when the nurse twins came in. Oh, my, Fox. What am I going to do with you?]

Last words . . .

I’ll be playing the lottery tonight, hoping I win big and can have my hospital build a wing just for us. We’ll party like it’s our last and live the rock star lifestyle with IV’s in our arms, a neb in our mouths and a cold beer in our hand. It will be the hospital of choice for those of us who value partying. Let’s drink shots from our Flutters. What the worst that can happen? We’re in the hospital, damn it. Code Yellow, drunk fox peeing off the balcony again.

Live the high-rise life.