THIS IS NOT A BILL

As if to congratulate me for at last finishing the never-ending course of antibiotics, an envelope arrived from the hospital today.
Some poor nearly-well patient must have opened one of these "account summary" letters up and fell dead on the floor from a heart attack and now the lawyers make them print "THIS IS NOT A BILL" in 48 size font in bold across the top.
Let's move on to the summary of patient charges, shall we?
Pharmacy $2,414.85
IV Solutions $187.00
Infusion clinic $414.00
(Must have been doped up. Don't recall attending a clinic?)
Nonsterile supply $81.00
(This must be the guy who wrapped my splint with black crud under his nails..)
Med/Sur supplies sterile $87.00
(That's the cost of soap: $6)
Lab/Chemistry $1,170.00
Lab/Hematology $362.00
Bacteriology/micro. $484.00
DX X-ray $344.00
More lab stuff more thousands
EKG (this was the night I was pre-op a flock of nurses observing my man heart)
Semiprivate $14000.00!

Semiprivate is shorthand for 4 days with only a curtain between me and my "roomie", a woman with no diagnosis and mysterious pain, who after asking me what my name was, told me she could never remember a name like that and was going to call me "T".
Semiprivate means being unable to pee after 3 drip bags of saline drip because your roomie's "hat" - a plastic bucket that goes under the toilet seat so your nurse can monitor your urine - is sitting there blocking the toilet in all its glory.
I have to hand it to the gal, though. She had no problem getting what she wanted. She was buzzing the nurses" station every fifteen minutes.
"Where is my nurse? She NEEDS to give me my medicine!" Not being quite so adept at voicing my needs, I learned a lot from her. When the morphine wasn't working, I foolishly took the slient suffering approach. Only the snuffling and sniffing that went along with the tears wasn't so silent and woke her up. Quick to the nurse-buzzer, she knew just what to do. "Send the nurse! My roomie needs her medicine!"
Semiprivate has its perks.
14k! That's more than we pay in rent for our apartment for the entire year! And they only changed the sheets once! (That was because my roomie clued me in that you have to ask.)
Grand total: $24k

Its insane and I can't help but feel for those without coverage. We need a miracle, people. The train is off the tracks. Has the Catholic church caught up with this mess yet? Who's the patron. Saint of the uninsured?

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Battle of The Bird Songs

This week's Neil Young song is DANGER BIRD.
Gee, its a great song. Yes, its true. It was a great song last month, and the month before that, too. I translated it (using Google, not my rusty German) auf Deutsch for you all.

Danger Vogel, er fliegt allein
Und er fährt der Wind zurück zu seiner Wohnung
Obwohl seine Flügel haben sich zu Stein

See? Okay, pretty sure a verb is missing in that last line, but it's still awesome! Now, that's what I call staying power. I've been thinking, wouldn't it be cool if we could stage a battle between all the epic birds from the songs we love (or don't)?

Surfin' Bird ("Ah bird bird bird, bird is the word") vs. Bob Marley's"Three Little Birds".
(Even with three, sorry Bob, they lose. Everything is gonna be alright. Wocka wocka.)

And on to the road trip division:

Free Bird vs. Danger Bird!
Maybe the winner goes on to battle Ice T's Ghetto Bird.
Not quite as proven, but he's got that inner-city grit.

Side Effect

First off, thank you all for the kind emails and calls wishing me a speedy recovery .

While the recovery is not yet complete, it is moving along in the right direction.
I will be attempting the Catalina channel in just 8 days!

There is, however, a very bizarre side effect that bears mentioning. Since being released from the hospital, I have noticed a very marked increase in my sense of smell. Suddenly everything is turned up and electrified. There are smells out there I never noticed before - especially people's breath! Whereas it was never a problem before, suddenly I find myself needing more distance from people when they are speaking to me.
At first I thought the obvious - could it be pregnancy?

Nope.

Dan suggested it might be a side effect of all the antibiotics and pain meds.

I googled that, but all I could find was a loss of sense of smell as a side effect to medication.

Alice suggested the antibiotics may have cleared up a persistent low-level sinus infection .

Alice is an amazing nurse, but leave it to a medical professional to dismiss it as something so mundane! Sure, my doctor did spend a lot of time looking up my nose last month grumbling about bay water pollutants and polyps, but that's just a coincidence!

While my friends propose somewhat more plausible theories, I don't think we should rule out one last possibility:

I was bit by a radioactive pit bull.
It might seem unlikely, but I know for a fact that the dog is insulin dependent. While doggie-diabetes may not necessarily be a symptom of radioactivity, it's a definite possibility.
It makes sense - if a radioactive spider bite can make a guy shoot webs and crawl up walls, maybe a radioactive dog bite gave me a canine sense of smell!

I haven't tried to chase cats or pee on fire hydrants yet, but what if this is just one of many new super canine powers?
At first glance, I admit it doesn't seem like the most desirable super-power, but hey Spiderman and all his fellow comic superheroes struggled with what at first seemed like embarrassing freakish abilities before figuring out how to use it for the greater good.

There's got to be a way that I, too, can channel my new ability to smell halitosis from afar to fight crime and save humanity.
There's just got to be...

TRAINING OBSTACLES

Since the birth of this blog, I've been nursing along a post entitled "Training Obstacles", featuring the toughest things a regular Jane from the East Bay encounters once she decides to train for a distance swim.

I'm imagined including a picture of Nat looking especially warm and cozy underneath the sheets opposite of a shot of my alarm clock flashing 4:50 am.

There'd have to be a list of all the most notorious bartenders at the Kona Club who make it so damn hard to escape...maybe a few bad cable programs I can't turn off, but now I know why I never managed to write that one up. It was premature.

The biggest training obstacle I've faced is my neighbor's insulin dependent pit-bull.

If you've been wondering why I haven't been posting lately, the truth is, its hard to type when one hand is punctured and infected, and the other hand has the antibiotic/morphine drip.

Yep, Tawny spent 4 days and 3 nights in the hospital this week.

Special.

But hey, I am out now.

And thanks to the hospital staff and Alice, I escaped without surgery.

(See! I told you, a nurse should be on the crew roster!)

The swim goes on.

Time heals all wounds.

And it damn well better heal mine.

13 days and counting.

DETENTION: The 8.5 Hour Swim

Alice didn't like the Zoo Start and said she was out for piloting the portion west of the Gate. Unfazed, I blamed Discovery Channel induced hysteria and told Elizabeth to buy sea sick pills.

My husband didn't like it either. What, suddenly I am going to start listening to him?

Then the Swim Commissioner said forget about it: Its the Bay or nothing.

Okay, well, I had nothing on that one.

Its like the cashier at the coffee shop told me when he saw how crestfallen I was that they ran out of my favorite cookie: "Best to practice non-attachment". Thanks, kid.
And so it was that poor Cap'n Blue Balls had to rewrite his master plan & his vision remains just that, a vision.
Feeling somewhat castigated, we thought up a course in keeping with the mood:
The Detention Tour.
There are so many lovely detention centers dotting the Bay that are well worth swimming by, if you are only willing to spend the time.
We started our tour from the beach at Aquatic Park.
With me on the A Squad: Jim Bock & Elizabeth Glass
Not two feedings in, we realized I must have forgotten to pack the Motrin. Special.
The longest training swim and I forgot the pain killers!
Impressive.
I also forgot my favorite goggles and my nylon bikini, but managed to steal Alice's goggles and dug up a moth eaten one piece out of my locker.
If not prepared, at least I can claim to be resourceful.
Moving right along...
First Stop: Alcatraz
Once an exceptional swim destination, its long been over run with triathletes and obsessed Bay swimmers alike. Sure its fun, but why the fixation on racking up this particular swim?
Hey, San Q has real live prisoners!
With no time to waste, we headed on towards Tiburon, a right through Raccoon Straights and there on the right, our first stop: Angel Island.
Angel Island boasts not only its status as a former detention center for undesirables; lovely Ayala Cove was also a fumigation center at one time for quarantined immigrants. Fascinating.
The crew told me to swim laps around Ayala Cove while they hit the restroom one at a time.
Three small laps and Elizabeth is back on the dock. She takes the helm, while Jim heads up to the facilities. Three laps. Still no Jim. Five laps. Jees - this guy is constipated or something, hope he's okay?..sixth lap and there he is at the dock, two lattes in hand!!
Apparently, Ayala Cove has come along way in terms of amenities.


View Larger Map

Then it was off to San Quentin. As we came closer, Elizabeth reported that the B Squad was in route from Aquatic Park to take over the second portion of the swim. After some time spent weaving in and out of the start of a sail boat race, Elizabeth hopped in to swim the final leg up to the prison.
The B Squad arrives; Joe Butler and Alice Wong in the relief zodiac.
I swam circles around the two zods watching as they attempted to accomplish several things at once, all without being able to dock.
Elizabeth is hoisting herself up on the zod.
No easy feet when you are wet and the boat is slippery.
The A Squad offloads all their crap into the relief zod to take back with them.
The A Squad briefs the B Squad as to the situation with gas, the course & vessel traffic.
The B Squad transfers their supplies into the Spicer for their leg of the journey.
The B Squad boards the Spicer & the A Squad boards the relief zod.

Insert gratuitous Life Aquatic line here:
"Listen. You may be on 'B' Squad,but you're the 'B' Squad leader."

All this needs to be done with two zodiacs which the current in spinning in circles as they idle and are only being kept together with the grip of the crew.
No one fell in, but it was still pretty amusing to watch.

Once that was done, the two squads parted ways (see ways parting picture) and Alice and Joe took me towards China Camp. I was hoping China Camp was another detention center, but a little online research reveals that it was actually a shrimp fishing community & was settled voluntarily.
Ah well, three is a pretty good days work.
On the way their we swam underneath the very low portion on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.That's another notch for the lip-stick case; a new bridge! How low did we go? Insert video clip here:






The water got swirly and strange on the other side of the bridge.
Likely due to the trolls that live there. If you've never been, its hard to fathom, but Alice took this clip of Bay trolls in action. See them off to the left?





I spent an eternity (that's distance swimmer lingo for the last few hours of your swim) trying to make it back to the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge, but the ebb wasn't much help.






Along the way, a tanker came by - and rather rudely stirred up a surge of freezing water that must have been camped out below the depths since May. It was that cold.
When they told me the tide was reversing directions & had me turn around, I thought I had the time figured for sure! I knew the ebb would start around 3pm, so clearly it must have been around then. Alice was up to some trickery though, because our poor heroine thought she still had an extra two hours to go. Evidence of possible cruelty posted below.

And finally the 8.5 hour swim was over. And so you would think the adventure was over, as well. But the real fun came on the ride back! Joe at the helm took the brunt of the spray as we hit wave after wave.








Luckily, he had on his high performance wicking fleece. Made all the difference, as you can tell in this video.



Finally after lots of tail bone abusing bumps, we made it to the South End dock. I headed straight to the shower to warm up. I timed it carefully, so that I wouldn't have to help out putting the boat away and when I came out Elizabeth was serving up the piping hot Zachary's Deep Dish!


Hooray!!!

A big thank you to the crew:

Jim Bock
Elizabeth Glass
Joe Butler
Alice Wong

also to the best boat hoister ever,
Jonathan Maier.