A few days ago, I wrote this haiku:

I have loved the stars
too fondly to be afraid
Of final darkness
and it's been bothering me ever since, it just sounded too... familiar. Because I've heard it, or something very similar to it, somewhere out on the WWW. And I hate to think that I'm plagerizing someone, y'know?

And I looked and I looked and I googled and I even dogpiled, but I couldn't find it. So, anyway, just so you know, at least, the haiku is original, but the idea isn't, it's paraphrased. And now I'm really gonna be pissed if I found out that I myself wrote it and forgot about it, heh.

OK, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Another really long day. Well, a long night, anyway. I had one helluva time sleeping, just got bits and pieces. Someone would come in and check in on me every hour, of course, and they would do vitals every two hours. I was getting pretty good at going kinda back to sleep in about five minutes.

Sleeping was uncomfortable, of course, since my incision hurt a bunch, and even more when I would move wrong, and there was simply no right way to move at all. I wound up usually sleeping on my back with my right arm over my head, or on my right side with my right arm over my head.

But I made it through the night OK, tying the arm down was a good idea, since I do remember trying to raise it up a coupla times and not being able to and then remembering that I wasn't supposed to.

Today's picture is of my incision and below it you can see the bulge of the little machine. There's a lot of edema right now, of course, so it's hard to make it out. My chin is in the upper left of the picture, and my left nipple is in the lower right. Click on the little one if yu've got a hankering to look at a bigger one.

It's quite a bit bigger than a regular pacemaker, about 3X, in fact. Pacemakers are really tiny now.

And now... my incision is really hurting, and I'm gonna take a left-over (un-expired) loritab.

I've been getting all kindsa antibiotics lately too, I had IV stuff four times yesterday and once today, and I'll be on oral cephalaxin for seven days now. They are really concerned about not getting that little machine infected, aren't they? And so am I, come to think of it, that would kill me pretty quickly.

I was downstairs playing the keyboard a little earlier, and I think that I was holding my arm wrong, 'cause it didn't start hurting until then. Maybe that was just a coincidence, though.

There are a number of things that I can't do now that I have a pacemaker, most of them just common-sense stuff, like I shouldn't carry a cell phone in my shirt pocket, which is right on top of the machine. Another thing that I can't do is run a chiain saw. Yep, a gas-powered chain saw has a heavy-duty spark-generating mechanism that would interfer.with the machine. O'yeah, and when I'm talking on a cell phone, I have to use my right ear. No big deal for me, but it would be awkward for a lefty, I suppose.

And OW!

Suddenly, my incision is *really* hurting.

And OW! Suddenly, the damned computer crashed, and I lost a bunch of stuff that I had written here. Dammit!

Karen has returned, and we have an invitation to go out to Applebee's with Kim and Andy, so that's where we're going, and I'll finish this up when we get back, OK?

21:48...
We did have a nice time with Kim and Andy, had a bourbon street steak and it ws excellent, as usual. And my body is hurting all over, so I'm gonna wrap this up and go to bed now.