Since it's getting late, today's randomness will be a quick update and some info on a fantastic charity that the Amazing Egyptian Dude and I are thrilled to be a part of.

First, the update. Ok, so the swelling at the incision site went from the diameter of a thin drinking straw to that of a dill pickle from Friday to Sunday. At one end, a sort of bubble began to appear and that bubble was strategically placed so that it bumped up against the place on my throat where, if I were a man, my adam's apple would be. Needless to say, just the right movement meant that the bubble made it difficult to swallow or breathe properly. By early Sunday evening I just didn't feel well, so I called the advice nurse for, well, some advice. She wanted me to go to the ER to get checked, but I really didn't think the situation warranted an emergency room visit; I mean, I wasn't near death or anything. I just didn't feel well.

As the night progressed, the right side of my throat and ear began to throb. I figured that I probably got some kind of infection while I was in the hospital because that kind of thing happens all the time. First thing Monday morning, I made an appointment to see our primary care physician that afternoon. After a thorough check over, he determined that the swelling was actually a collection of the bloody gunk that had been going into the drain that had been removed on Friday. Ibuprofen every four hours to reduce the swelling should help with that part. As for the throat and ear, I was right -- they are infected. A prescription of Keflex for that, along with advice to get plenty of rest, keep myself hydrated, and to haul my fanny to the ER if my temp reaches 100 degrees. That was yesterday.

This morning, the bubble is nearly gone. The incision is still quite swollen and beginning to harden. The throat and ear are still throbbing, although not nearly as badly today as they were on Sunday night or yesterday. I'm tired and feeling crappy, but I've been worse -- I know I have, but I'm having a hard time remembering when that was, LOL. So I will say it again: for such a small and minor surgery, this one sure is giving me one big a$$ old hard time!

Now, on to something far more interesting!

You may have noticed, under causes, an ad that I placed there a couple of months ago for KIVA. I heard about it on a podcast -- remember my list of educational podcasts? -- and decided to check it out. What is KIVA? It's a micro-loan organization that collects donations / loans from people and then pools them with other loans for poor entrepreneurs in developing countries. The Amazing Egyptian Dude and I made four loans of $25 each a couple of months ago and today, I was thrilled to receive the following in my email inbox:

Hi Ali & Carleen Ibrahim,
We'd like to give you a repayment update on the loans you've made
through Kiva.

A total of $35.41 has been repaid today! As of 2009-08-29, you now have
$35.41 in Kiva Credit in your account.

Click here to re-lend, withdraw or donate these funds! Or you can show
your friends some Kiva Love with a Kiva gift certificate.
https://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=account&_te=ru

Below is the repayment update on your Kiva Portfolio:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fadwa Group in Lebanon (Activity: Agriculture)
You Loaned: $25.00
Newly Repaid: $12.50
Total Repaid So Far: $12.50 (50.00% of your loan)
Repayment Status: Paying back on time
View loan profile at:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=105064&_te=ru
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sawssan in Lebanon (Activity: Grocery Store)
You Loaned: $25.00
Newly Repaid: $6.25
Total Repaid So Far: $6.25 (25.00% of your loan)
Repayment Status: Paying back on time
View loan profile at:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=105265&_te=ru
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Asma Group in Lebanon (Activity: Cattle)
You Loaned: $25.00
Newly Repaid: $12.50
Total Repaid So Far: $12.50 (50.00% of your loan)
Repayment Status: Paying back on time
View loan profile at:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=107492&_te=ru
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abdumalik Soriev in Tajikistan (Activity: Agriculture)
You Loaned: $25.00
Newly Repaid: $4.16
Total Repaid So Far: $4.16 (16.64% of your loan)
Repayment Status: Paying back on time
View loan profile at:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=115555&_te=ru

I haven't said anything about KIVA because I didn't have any personal experience with them other than making the loans; however, now I can toot their horn with full confidence! We are so excited to be able to help others help themselves that we're going to re-loan what has been repaid so far. The original $100 that we loaned (or donated) can be used over and over again to keep helping people, and we really like this idea.

So if you've got some change to spare, I do hope that you'll take a look at the KIVA ad in the sidebar and check out some of the profiles of the people who are seeking loans through them. Your loan, no matter how small, when pooled with the loans of others, will go a long way toward helping someone to help him or her self.

Random Thought #1

Do you ever have days that start off perfectly fine -- Mary Poppins-like in fact, kind of "practically perfect in every way" -- only to have them go dreadfully wrong only a couple of hours later? Yesterday was like that for me.

I was on the ball and ready to conquer the world starting just after 3:00 a.m. In a couple of hours I managed to answer the business email, sort my personal email for answering later, complete the Monday meme posts, scoop the litterboxes, brush two of the four longhair cats, unload the dishwasher, get a new load of laundry started, and harvest my crops on Farm Town. James Brown's song "I Feel Good" was the anthem of the day. Then a single phone call brought it all crashing down around me.

I wasn't really paying attention to the time, but I think that it was shortly after 9 when Betty's estate attorney called. Evidently, he received a phone call from one of the daughters of Betty's deceased husband because she, after a single visit to Betty in the 8 years that she has lived at the board and care facility, was concerned that I might be mismanaging the trust. I don't think much of anything could have shocked me more than that phone call, but I do know that it's been a very long time since I was as angry as it made me!


This individual has no real relationship with Betty, has not bothered to check up on her except for a phone call last Christmas when she told the caregiver that she would come to visit but never showed up, and now, out of the blue, is "concerned" that her care is not being managed well? Where has this person been all these years? In a neighboring city, certainly not too far away to demonstrate this "concern" by visiting Betty to make sure that she is being well cared for. Last week was the first time in eight -- count them, I said E-I-G-H-T, years that Betty's caregiver ever saw this person! How's that for "concern"?


Random Thought #2

After yesterday's "excitement," I've had a headache that doesn't want to give up the ghost and die. I know it's because the anger is still seething in the pit of my stomach, bubbling to the surface every now and again to remind me how utterly brutal people can be. I can't place the blame for this one on The Brain; nope this misery is my own fault. At least the headache is not one of the Chiari types, so I am left to conclude that this must be the kind of headache that "normal" people get, LOL.


Random Thought #3

Surgery update (yes, Aunt Nola, this is for you): Next Thursday, the 27th, I am scheduled to have the thyroid surgery that should have happened last November but didn't because my pre-op blood work showed an elevated white blood cell count that turned out to be an indicator of the very nasty cold that made itself known on Thanksgiving. I have the pre-op appointment on Monday and barring any WBC issues, I will be AWOL for one day next week. Unless I have a seizure or some other Chiari related complication, the surgery is supposed to be out-patient. I am going to discuss with my doctor the possibility of having it done under a local instead of a general anesthesia as this significantly increases the likelihood that I will get to go home on the same day. Besides, how cool would it be to lie awake on the surgery table while a surgeon slashes a hole in your neck and takes out half of your thyroid gland? Sounds awesome to me!


Random Thought #4

Classes begin next week, and I feel sad. No school for me. I'm retired, remember? No animated discussions about censorship in the public school classroom. No more interesting essays defending the First Amendment as it applies to websites with disgusting content. No more introducing the uninitiated to John Milton's Areopagitica or John Stewart Mill's On Liberty. No more poring over the ALA's list of banned books to see which ones we've read. No more. No more. I'm sad.

And did I mention that I'm pissed off, too?

Random Thought #1

Remember

by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.


Yesterday, the Amazing Egyptian Dude lost a good friend, the Old Fart's Club lost an active participant in its Friday night "class," and most sadly, my friend lost her husband. His death was quite unexpected. Muslims bury the dead within 24 hours whenever possible, but our friend wanted to be buried in Egypt as is quite common among Egyptian ex-pats. A funeral prayer service will be held for him here on Thursday, and the plane with his body will leave for his final resting place in Egypt on Friday.


Random Thought #2

Dolly had a restful night with no seizures. I wish that I could say the same for myself! The inability to stay asleep is exacerbated by the Topamax tinglies which, truth be told, are driving me bonkers this time around. I managed to fall asleep shortly before midnight but shortly after 2, the Topamax tinglies must have invaded my mind because I woke up with a strangely painful left hand only to discover that I had scratched the living daylights out of it while sleeping. Perhaps I'll have the chance to take a nap later on today. . .

Random Thought #3

A while back I did a Thursday Thirteen list of Podcasts to Learn By and unless The Brain is completely uncooperative today, Bill Moyer's Journal was on that list. For anyone who is interested in healthcare reform and what all the hoopla is about, you seriously need to take a look at this now twice run episode of the Journal: Wendell Potter on Profits Before Patients. Potter was a Cigna insurance executive who left the company on very good terms, so he has no axe to grind with them. He explains how the for-profit private health insurance companies planned the strategy to prevent health care reform under the Clinton administration and now, to avoid it under Obama's. There's some pretty incredible stuff here, and definitely worth the watch!

For more Wordless Wednesday entries, click here.

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD), and I'm thrilled to participate for the first time. I thought long and hard about what I would write, but I kept coming up with topics that I had already blogged about: why people are kinder to me than others with invisible illnesses, what it's like to experience a seizure, the letter to my brain written out of frustration over an especially active day of seizures, or feeling trapped in the various circles of life. But very early this morning, I decided not to write about me and my disabilites; instead, I chose to write about Uncle Ronnie and "the leg." I hope that you enjoy it.

~*~*~*~*~

My Uncle Ronnie is quite a character. With a quick wit, a story to tell, and an impeccable sense of comedic timing, Uncle Ronnie made the summer trips to my Dad's hometown in Colorado something that I, his eldest niece, looked forward to each year. We never knew what he would say or do, but my sisters and I knew that Uncle Ronnie would somehow, some way make us laugh as if we'd never experienced the joy of laughter before. And as much as I loved laughing with Uncle Ronnie, he has no clue that he is responsible for some of my most cherished childhood memories and for teaching me how to turn a disability into an asset.

I've never known Uncle Ronnie without "the leg"; it's as much a part of him as his goofy sense of humor. Because I was a toddler when it happened, I have no recollection of the event that changed Uncle Ronnie's life, but I believe that a drunk driver hit him as he crossed a street in San Francisco while stationed there when he was in the Navy. He suffered a leg injury that became gangrenous and resulted in the amputation of that leg just above the knee. He learned to walk with the aid of a prosthetic leg, but he preferred to use crutches at home. It wasn't until I became an adult that I learned that the early versions of "the leg" often caused Uncle Ronnie more pain than using it provided him with assistance.

Uncle Ronnie used "the leg" for more than walking. We live in different states and saw him only during the annual family vacation to my dad's hometown in Colorado. Of course, in our excitement to hear Uncle Ronnie's goofy stories like how he had just gotten a perm and didn't want us to mess up his hair (it was about 1/4" long), it was hard for me and my sisters to control ourselves. Once, when my youngest sister was about 4 or 5, she was bouncing up and down on Uncle Ronnie's lap as they were playing around. In a very serious voice, Uncle Ronnie told her that if she didn't sit still, his leg would turn to stone. Because "the leg" had always informed our understanding of "normal" where Uncle Ronnie was concerned, Melody continued to bounce, figuring that it was just another one of his funny stories. Suddenly, Uncle Ronnie stood Melody on the floor and stared at his legs. Gingerly, he touched first one, then the other; he squeezed and rubbed and tapped lightly on each leg as if he were selecting produce from the supermarket. We watched his curious motions with much interest. He grabbed Melody's hand, placed it on the shin of "the leg" and instructed her to knock on it. She looked at him like he had lost his mind, but knock on his leg, she did. And when "the leg" emitted a sound in response to her tapping, Melody's eyes became saucer-like. "See," Uncle Ronnie said, "you didn't sit still like I told you to, and now my leg has turned to stone!"

The three of us learned an important lesson from "the leg" that day -- sometimes acting silly is inappropriate, even with someone as fun and funny as our Uncle Ronnie. We had no understanding of the situation at the time but learned as we got older that the prosthetic leg Uncle Ronnie wore often caused horrific blisters that didn't heal well. Melody's energetic movement caused pain for Uncle Ronnie as "the leg" rubbed against an open blister. Instead of making Melody feel guilty for causing him pain or frightening her about it which might, in turn, make her feel uncomfortable about sitting on his lap, Uncle Ronnie turned his discomfort into a teachable moment on appropriate behavior and the importance of self control.

"The leg," and Uncle Ronnie's attitude toward its role in his life, has helped me to deal better with my own disabilities. I can't recall ever hearing Uncle Ronnie complain about the pain or his disability. What I remember best is him taking us fishing, more often without "the leg" than with it; I remember sharing feasts of grilled rainbow trout fresh from our catch of the day. I remember rubbing his head in a deliberate attempt at messing up his newly permed hair. I remember coming home from school one day and finding "the leg" resting on a pillow and neatly tucked under the covers in the middle of my bed. I remember a man who hasn't let his disability define or confine him.

And on the days when it seems like the endless parade of headaches, seizures, drop attacks, dizziness, double-vision, or any of the other things that make up the Chiari cornucopia will push me over the edge, I need only to picture "the leg" in my bed to put it all into the proper perspective.

Thanks, Uncle Ronnie, you've taught me well.

The nation has been abuzz for the past several days in the wake of the release of memos that discuss torture, also called "enhanced interrogation techniques," from members of the Bush administration. While pundits on the right have expressed outrage over the documents' entrance into the public sphere, pundits on the left have escalated the debate over whether or not the people and agencies involved in the behavior outlined in them deserve further investigation and possible prosecution. One side contends that waterboarding, a torture technique with a long history (see the woodcut from 1556 on the right), at least as practiced by agents of the United States, does not constitute torture. It is, they argue, a legal "enhanced interrogation technique." The opposition recalls that in

• 1949, the U.S. brought charges of war crimes against Yukio Asano, a Japanese soldier, for waterboarding a U.S. civilian, and
  
• that when the Khmer Rouge used the same technique on its own people, the United States considered it a method of torture, or
  
• that an American soldier was court-martialed following the Washington Post's publication of a photo depicting his supervision of the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier, and
• that as recently as 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker and three of his deputies were tried, convicted, and sentenced to four years in prison for using an "enhanced interrogation technique" to extract "confessions" from prisoners.

Perhaps a definition of torture can clear up the confusion between the two sides' positions.

On February 4, 1985, The United Nations Convention Against Torture established the definition for torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions" (I.1.1.). Under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, the United States of America became a signatory to the Convention on April 18, 1988. Considering that those on the right hold former President Reagan in such high regard, they should have no problem accepting a definition for which he applied his, and the nation's, stamp of approval. One might expect the opposition to the U.S. approved definition of the term to come from the left, but it hasn't. Much like former President Clinton's now infamous remark that "that depends on what your definition of is is," a question of semantics in which the right found a great deal of humor and hypocrisy, waterboarding as a method of torture or an "enhanced interrogation technique" has been reduced to little more than an issue of word choice.

But while the pundits in Washington, on both the right and the left, argue over a definition, the practice of torture in its many forms has taken a toll on members of our military. To wit, U.S. Soldier Killed Herself -- After Refusing to Take Part in Torture. What makes this young girl's story so tragic to me is that her action is the ultimate sacrifice made in defense of her beliefs. It's not that she was a Mormon girl who gave up her life rather than do something she felt was wrong that makes her death so tragic -- I don't think that her religion has anything at all to do with it; the tragedy for me is that this young warrior couldn't convince her fellow soldiers that what they were doing was wrong and failing to do that, she could think of no other way out of her ethical dilemma. In her case, and the cases of others like her, suicide is not the ultimate act of a coward; instead, it becomes the ultimate act of bravery, as these soldiers kill themselves to avoid becoming like the enemy while their fellow soldiers see nothing wrong in emulating enemy behavior. And that is just plain sad irrespective of the side of the political spectrum on which you sit.

I have been waiting for this event ever since I found it on Diary of a Goldfish several months ago. On May 1, 2009, bloggers, both disabled and abled, from around the world will share their experiences, thoughts, and observations on disability discrimination. The goal is to "raise awareness of inequality, promote equality and celebrate the progress we've made."

So if you live with a disability or love someone with a disability, please consider joining us in blogging about it on May 1st. The banner in the sidebar has a link to the Goldfish's blog with the rules and details.