Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved this day. Not for any especial personal rituals or remembrances; not for the panoply and splendour of groundhogs. It just made her laugh with its multi-faceted dedications. She said it was the goofiest mash-up of pagan and Christian, antique and modern festivities going.

It is Imbolc – one of the quarter days between the solstices and equinoxes, an occasion to celebrate the waning of winter – not yet the end but certainly a hopeful time, when the ewes are pregnant, some early grass and flowers are poking through the snow, and we seem to have survived another sojourn in the heart of the dark.

And it’s Candlemas – which was put in place by the nascent Christian Church in the British Isles, where they did a lot of conversion by filing the serial numbers off old rites and dieites and declaring them saints. This day in the Church celebrates the return of light and the approach of spring with the blessing of the candles for the coming year. In our childhood, Kage and I both carried candles home from church after after our elementary school classes were marched into church; I don’t know if they still do that, but it was a lovely ceremony. Somehow the little kids never set themselves on fire …

And it’s Groundhog Day! That most American of whacked out prophetic rites, I’ve always thought: theoretically instituted by German colonists to figure out if winter was actually over. I’ve always though that maybe the absence of snow or the sprouting of crops might be more help; or maybe a basic course in horology or astronomy … but no, an entire industry has now grown up around watching to see if a large rodent notices the sun is shining. The fact that it is a money-making spectacle and duly reported on the national news just makes it more intrinsically American, somehow.

It was this weird concatenation of cultures that so amused Kage. It’s old but screwy. It’s one of the more blatant of the British “local gods are really saints” tricks. Despite the careful formality of the groundhog wranglers – who dress in Victorian finery to haul the unfortunate Punxutawney Phil out of his fake tree stump burrow – there’s just a basic corn-dog and beer vulgarity to the entire spectacle. Maybe it’s the image of men in frock coats and top hats clutching an enormous rodent who usually looks like he wishes he was a carnivore …

And Kage was, of course, a firm believer in any excuse for a party. So we usually put it on a bit for February 2nd, toasting the oracular groundhog from our perch here on the edge of the Uttermost West. As Kage said, none of that stuff makes it over the Rockies anyway – our own winter would do as it pleased, no matter what conditions ol’ Phil wished on the East and Midwest. He’s like the Farmers’ Almanac: California is an afterthought, if we get any predictions at all.

That was always fine with us – Phil has a habit lately of cursing the Midwest with winters just shy of overnight glaciation. We’re much better off here, in the land of February roses and orange blossoms.

So I’ll toast the furry prophet with ice cream tonight – Rocky Road, which is the sort of winter he usually prognosticates. But I’ll still light a candle to the retreat of the winter, and thank Brigid in all her faces for her attention to the turn of the seasons.

Time marches on, and it’s much nicer to mark it with flowers and candles and sleepy furry animals than disasters. So here’s to the groundhogs, Dear Readers – light a candle and a blessed Imbolc to you all.

Kage Baker would, I think, be dancing her triumph dance in the living room  today – the dance that accompanied large checks from publishers, and good reviews. She’d declare it a night for victorious Chinese food, and ice cream.

I am officially cancer-free.

Sort of probational: I still have to see my oncologist for regular checkups for a few years. But the Pathology reports show that my recent hysterectomy was successful in evicting all those lethally confused cells from my body. My blood is clear. All graffiti has been scrubbed off the walls of my pelvis. I’m even cleared to drive a little.

The hot wind of a close bullet definitely ruffled my hair, though. When the biopsy was done, my doctor did a thorough D & C – cleared out my uterus to the walls.  Pathology nonetheless found a new polyp from the hysterectomy, complete with cancerous cells. It was small, it was the only bad bit, and now it’s been kicked out on its ass. But that sure was  nastily aggressive stuff: the new polyp grew in the mere 6 weeks between the two surgeries.

For all the good that did it – Ha!

My darling little doctor informed me that they did 50 slides of my discarded tissue, to make sure they found everything. And all of those slides will go to research after this, so I feel quite virtuous about it all. My doctor is very pleased too, especially as she put off her maternity leave to see me though this. I’d have hugged her, but my arms wouldn’t reach around … we shook hands enthusiastically instead.

So tidily was everything accomplished that I don’t even need chemotherapy. I’ll be seeing my doctor every three months for a while, but I get to keep my hair! And I must admit, I’m pleased about that – I can have the fun of knitting some caps anyway, and I’ll wait for another opportunity to shave my head. One less fraught, I think, so I can get the maximum giggle out of it.

I am also healing with my customary superhuman speed. It’s my one real uncanny skill: I heal fast. It’s why my lymph nodes and assorted pelvic plumbing was obscured by excessive scar tissue, but by God! I hold together!

So Kimberly and I are compiling a list for Chinese food, in order to feast victoriously. This being Los Angeles, there are good Chinese restaurants all over the place – but we have a favourite nearby, the venerable Song Hai Inn. It’s a teeny little narrow dark place, built on one corner of the lot where the original Disney animation shop stood on Hyperion. Kage and I went there often in our young womanhood, to avail ourselves of a truly weird treat: Egg Fu Yung sarnies. On white toast. With bottles of Guiness on the side.

Kage would be glad we’re ordering from them still, I think. Song Hai has survived. And so have I.

Kage Baker: born June 10, 1952. Died January 31, 2010, at 1:15 AM.

I sat up last night and watched the three clocks in sight of my desk all tick past the 1:15 mark. The old brass wind up I keep just for the ticking; and the clock on my computer is there for efficiency. On the wall there is a blue Kit Kat Clock, which Kage gave me for my birthday 3 years ago – rolling eyes and pendulum tail and all, it’s my main clock.

When they had all passed the 1:15 point, I shut things down and went to bed. And slept and slept and slept … I’ve slept through most of today, too. I don’t know if I’m indulging my incision or hiding out, and I don’t really care: right now, sleep is my friend. And it’s such an elusive critter, I’m gonna let it curl up on me for as long as it wants.

Kage always said it was unhealthy to mark death dates. She swore she never did it, either; though I know she never forgot them. She got silent on the anniversaries of mortality. She told me not to memorialize hers, too – I told her the only way she could enforce that was not to die.

“Oh, screw you!” was the not-unexpected reply. “If you do something stupid, I’ll haunt you.”

But she hasn’t. So I must not be doing anything especially dumb yet. Anyway, remembering her death date is not something I can control, anymore than my Kit Kat can help rolling her eyes as her tail wags.

Supposedly, you can look forward to spending a month grieving for every year of your relationship with someone who has died. Even if I date our relationship from the time our collaboration developed – in early adolescence – I’m looking at something like 4 years mourning. Though I’d like to know who calculates this stuff … it’s shows up in all the books and web sites about loss, but there’s no indication of who established the parameters.

Or how. I have visions of some unhappy person getting a monthly phone call from researchers, always asking “Hey, do you feel better yet?” And one day they can’t stand it anymore and lie, just to get rid of the caller. Who then writes his paper, and that particular info nugget gets immortalized and passed around …somebody ought to sic Snopes on this crap.

What a crock. I’m halfway through the projected mourning period now, and I am not down to half the grief I felt that morning two years ago. And I do believe I am angrier than I was then, besides. I think … it’s going to be quite a few more years with me and Miss Kit Kat in the post-midnight hours.

Kage Baker told me, from our teenaged years on, Sleep when you can. It was wise advice – she was all too familiar with how little I did sleep, and therefore was always after me to amend my insomniac ways and learn to nap. She always believed things like that had at least a small component of will power; when I stayed awake for entire weekends, it was because I just wasn’t trying.

Well, but I was trying. To stay awake all weekend … succeeded, too.

When I pointed out that normal people took aspirin when they had head aches, she insisted her own anti-pill stand was a different matter altogether. “Popping pills at every turn isn’t good for you,” she would say primly. “And neither is staying awake until you’re hallucinating giant parakeets and pineapples by the side of the road.”

“It was only the once,” I mumbled. “I should never have told you.”

“Well, you did, and I remember. So try to get some sleep!”

This was a constant dialogue. In my own defense, I would like to point out that insomnia is not entirely controllable, and that for many years I was one of those people who got by beautifully on 4 hours sleep out of 24. And that Kage never, ever, approved.

She herself maintained her anti-meds stance right up to her last day. I think I only got away with dosing her during her illness because she got so tired. Or maybe she was indulging me. “Bloody Borgia,” she would say when I brought her yet another medicine. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“It’s good for you. Shall I crush it up in liverwurst?”

“Oh, screw you!”

For myself – I spent most of the year awake, I think. Got kind of hard to tell towards the end.

But since then, the narcolepesies have crept up and taken an enormous bite out of my ass. I have a permanent grinning specter latched on to me, seducing me into endless slumbers. I have made up for a life’s worth of sleep debt in one year.

Kage would be immensely amused.

Anyway – I have spent most of today asleep. On the other hand, my body is clearly using the time for accelerated healing; about which I can’t really complain. I have almost no pain – I’ve had cramps worse than the discomfort I have now. I’m no longer worried about my jugular bursting through the side of my neck; the port  has sealed completely. And I clearly have a new scar now, instead of a raw incision.

True, I’ve been mostly asleep for the last 3 days – but that’s all right. I’m clearer every time I wake up. The excitement of coming home kept me going for a few days, but now – now I am really healing. I can do this.

And I can imagine Kage rolling her eyes and muttering, I told you so! She was never one to pass that up.

Kage Baker: the second anniversary of her death will strike in two days time. Whenever it gets quiet in my mind, I can feel the shock wave moving towards me – not as bad as last year, but still a disharmonic in the voice of the world. The last week of January, as I told a good friend earlier today, is not my favourite week of the turning year.

The next day, February 1st, I’ll be off to the doctor’s office to get the final report on my surgery. The pathology lab – which last week yelled at my poor little surgeon for trying to hurry the report along – will have finally, reluctantly yielded my reports. I can find out whether or not all the cancer was evicted, and whether or not I will have to have chemotherapy.

What is almost certain, though, even before I see that report, is that I have won a lottery Kage did not. I’m going to live. I already know that the majority of the cancerous cells were actually apprehended during my biopsy; the larger surgery was mostly backup and precaution. The odds are better than 85% that this particular demon will never trouble me again.

On the one hand, I am relieved and pleased. I have things to do, places to go, and many, many loving people who depend on me for this and that. I don’t want to disappoint anyone, and right now my chances of fulfilling the promise of my days-to-come seems good.

On the other hand … why me? I don’t wonder why I got cancer so much as why I have lived through it so far. Kage had so much to give the world, and was so eager to do it – frail as she was, she marched gaily into the fray and fought to her last breath. And it wasn’t enough.

Me, I just tread grimly on. I’m not the spirit of fire and the Upper Airs that Kage was, but I do seem to be considerably less destructible. It feels unfair to me.

What is bothering me tonight is survivor’s guilt, of course. There is no cure for that; all one can do is continue to move forward and do one’s best to fulfill one’s duty. Which I am doing. I don’t need reassurance or validation – I know I fought as hard as I could for Kage, and am resolutely doing the same now, for me. I can say, with honesty and self-awareness: I am adequate.

It will have to do.

Kage Baker was a dedicated writer, with a will of iron. The only way to be a writer, she said, is to write – every day, regardless of topic, just putting words down in order. Eventually a theme would emerge and momentum would kick in.

A lot of writers say the same thing; but even among the pros, the stubbornness to actually do it is rare. It takes a touch of OCD in your nature, according to Kage, and she gleefully employed what she always claimed was her own when faced with the challenge. She said that considering it a compulsive act, and writing about whatever came into her head – as opposed to the half-written contracted novel sulking on the hard drive – gave the exercise the frisson of wickedness necessary to keep going.

In the years before Kage went pro, she really did write almost every day. Those years date back to before high school … tons of legal pads, reams of typing paper, all written in her insanely bad cursive script. Entire novels were written this way and are now sealed up in boxes (except the ones living on and in my desk …) One of the delights of my teens and 20’s and 30’s was coming home every night to read what she had written that day. It taught Kage the rudiments of her craft. New ideas rose to the surface even as she struggled grimly with obdurate plots, and were stored away thriftily. She mined that hoard for stories for the rest of her life.

I have striven mightily to emulate her in this, and have pretty much succeeded. It’s a rare day now when I don’t write something, and I’ve reached that splendid point where ideas bubble up at all hours – as I fall asleep, as I read, as I edit and write new stuff. It gets confusing sometimes, and I know I haven’t achieved Kage’s effortless flood, but I am achieving much more than I ever thought I could.

However, real life does interfere … I was so excited and happy to come home from the hospital a week ago, that I apparently slightly overdid things. Yesterday I hit a wall, maybe. Maybe my recovery just plateaued for a while. Whatever it was, I suddenly just stopped, and not even my Kindle or a rousing game of Plants Vs. Zombies could hold my attention.

When I realized that the little black cat was complaining because the cursor on the screen – in front of which she likes to sprawl and watch – was unmoving, I knew I had pegged “E”. Nothing was wrong – I was just in need of being horizontal and maybe asleep. I explained this to the little black cat, and she agreed: sometimes you just have to be a flat drowsing object. She curled up with me as soon as I was under the covers, too, thus tenderly making sure I would rest …

So I am resting a bit more, and bouncing around a bit less. I’m much better than I was pre-surgery, but I am still convalescent. Imagine my surprise! It took my black velvet friend to bring this to my attention, and to insist I slow down a little.

Anyway:  in her honor, here is a poem that pretty much sums up yestreday and today. Not mine or Kage’s – it’s from the Gaelic, written long ago when the world was very, very different: but not, apparently, for cats or writers.

Kage Baker expected to leap from her surgical bed restored to health and, like, 25 years of age. I remember cautioning her that this was unrealistic – she replied that as long as she aimed at the impossible, any gain would be good. I think I rolled my eyes.

So what am I doing today? Moping around grumpily because my own recovery has plateaued a bit. I don’t feel better than yestreday – I am still tired and sore – my family does not believe me that I can miraculously suddenly drive. It’s unfair! Sure, I’ve still got a dressing I can’t even change by myself; and yes, I’m giving myself anticoagulant injections every day – but I’m better now, damn it! I wanna go play!

Actually this started last week, when they moved me finally from the cardiology floor to the gynecology floor. I wouldn’t talk to the cardiologists anyway, so there was no need to keep me wired up to the heart monitors anymore. So off I went to the 3rd floor.

Cedars-Sinai has a rather odd system there. The 3rd floor floor holds all the post-surgical gynecological oncology patients – but it also holds the maternity and obstetrics rooms. What it produces is a very weird mix of  visitors: half of them are thrilled and celebratory, the other half are frightened and sad. But all of the patients  are sore and ferocious, hell-bent on forcing our bodies into cooperation with our varying female organ goals. So the halls are full of hobbling ladies in inadequate gowns, scowling with determination and varying degrees of triumph.

It’s like a MASH unit for Amazons.

As soon as I was installed in my new room and the faeries had welcomed me with a triumphant circle dance, the traditional  negotiation war began. Would I walk in the hall Only if they took off the damned heart monitor. Would I please ring for help getting in and out of bed? No, but I’d tell them when I did if they would refrain from alarming my bed. When could I go home? Soon is always the only answer – in a vague soothing voice indicating that Lemura rising was going to happen first. Plus a daily series of impudent queries into the working of my body, which I only answered because I knew they wouldn’t let me go until I proved I could once more function normally.

My record with meals was not exemplary. Why wouldn’t I eat more? Because the food was horrid: even for hospital food. I regret to report that Cedars-Sinai wins no medals for good food. The chopped spinach looked (and tasted) like what you clean off of lawnmower blades, the gelatine was never red, the nutritionist laughed at the idea of bacon. The vegetables were fresh but somehow had no taste. The only way to manage the meat was to assign identity by colour: beef is brown, chicken is yellow, fish is white. Cheese is cold, so you can’t mistake it for sliced turkey.

This is why you need visitors in the hospital – to bring you real food. Kage used to smuggle in pizza; Kimberly brought me Jack In The Box food. As long as I succeeded in going to the bathroom and didn’t break out in food rashes, the nurses were willing to turn a blind eye. It’s the usual compromise with patients almost ready to go home.

When I was just upon point of escaping, though, a complication arose. All I had still stuck in my by this time was the surgical drain and the neck port, and I was nagging to get those out ASAP. Then the culture from my pre-surgical urine sample grew out … I had managed to become infected with something weird and unexpected, and would be confined to have antibiotics pumped into me. But this was where they finally got to use the neck port, which was evidently thrilling for all concerned (except me).

So for the last three days I got hooked up to another pump every 12 hours, with pale green Vancomycin dripping into my jugular. In between times I paced around my room; when I got tired, I read the Silmarillion on my Kindle. Quite frankly, it was boring, Dear Readers – boring to live through, boring to report. This part of recovery always is.

And then you come home and for a day or two you are fizzing with energy, just because you are home! And then about … now, the excitement of once more wearing your own underwear wears off and you crash a bit. and that’s where I am now – mean, stiff, sore, and suddenly with enough energy to be a wretch about it.

But, hey, this too shall pass. And I can finally get red Jello. And real cheese! And the only reminder left of my neck port is the two little red holes left in my neck …

Kage Baker was often asked – as all writers are – where she got her ideas. Her personal impulse was always to say, “Why the hell should I tell you?” However, in the interests of public relations, she would fall back on an old science fiction writers’ joke and tell inquiring minds that she got them from a Post Office box in New Jersey.

She herself stole the line from Roger Zelazney, though I’ve seen it attributed to half a dozen writers. Only once or twice do I recall someone actually asking for the address …

Our old friend Tom Westlake, overhearing this question once, asked in response: “Where do you not get ideas?” And his answer is, of course, right. Also the best I’ve ever heard, and Kage used it often after that. Not all writers sample the world round them for ideas, but most do – the world is simply an unending parade of beauties, horrors, weirdnesses and wisdoms and white elephants all crying out to be immortalized in deathless prose. All you have to do is pay attention and remember what you see.

To this end, Kage was a shameless people-watcher. So am I. It’s not only a thriving source of images and ideas, it’s vastly entertaining. Crowds of all sorts are endless founts of fun; sojourns in airports, bus terminals, waiting rooms and grocery stores become field expeditions. Hospitals are big on the list, too – very weird things happen there. Half the inhabitants are off their heads, and half of what’s left are busy to the point of insanity. And that’s just the staff …

By last Wednesday, I was awake and clear-headed – in fact, I was approaching paranoia from the other side of lucidity, as the Lasix Incident had left me mighty worried. I was walking around – bent like a pretzel and clinging to my IV stand, but on my feet, by God! And once you manage that, they stop watching you quite so closely … But when you are the patient, you can just lie low and observe, and speculate. I don’t know why they even bother with the television sets in rooms; the floor show is far superior. Welcome, my friends, to the Show That Never Ends …

I’d already noted that my cardiologists moved in a pack and grinned All. The. Time. This turned out not to be an artifact of drugs: they really did. It was like a pack of mind-melded hyenas, or one of those jellyfish commensal lifeforms that are actually a lot of individuals welded together into a hive organism. (Yeah, those are really real, right here on Earth.) By Wednesday we were no longer on speaking terms, but they still came to the door of my room and peeked in a few times a day. It was easy to imagine the warm tides of the ward outside washing around shared transparent bodies under the white coats …

Then there were my faerie girls. Delightful youngsters (who had recently been handling my internal organs, but hey – they were children!) they were clearly by this time in the ascendent. They were already planning my move to the gynecology floor, and swept through my room in a cloud of glitter and laughter several times a day. Who could resist seeing the soap bubble wings on their shoulders in these circumstances?

I like to keep my door closed. But of course it snaps open all day and night with nurses on errands. The upside to this is one’s own private blackout show, as vignettes come and go in the doorway:

Click, and a scowling nurse is framed there. Someone behind her yells, “No, no! The prostheses cabinet!’ And she’s gone, leaving me wondering what’s escaped or is attacking or just hiding in the supplies. And do you really need a whole cabinet of prostheses?

Click, and a nurse is posed there – leaning on one shoulder, one arm akimbo, like Lily Marlene on her lamp post; had that lady ever worn scrubs with little zebras and giraffes romping on them. We stare at one another (I am very hard to weird out.) and finally she asks throatily: “How was your lunch?” “Fine,” say I cautiously, and she shrugs and is gone. I am left wondering what she’s been smoking, or if I’ve just narrowly avoided being offered some unspeakable personal service.

Click, and it’s faeries. Click, and it’s lunch. Click, and it’s the phlebotomist, who is perfectly prepared to poke yet another hole in my arm until I tell her how the hydra-port in my neck is supposed to work. She’s never seen one like it, but proves amenable to instruction, I must wonder why anyone is listening to me.

There are mysterious whistles, beeps, horns, bells and occasional shouting – one can just lie there and wonder what  is being fought out in the hall. It usually sounds more energetic than the desperate bedside battles one expects in a hospital, and more numerous of combatants, too. I drift off imagining multi-dimensional Trauma Units with portals in the walls, and aliens visiting their caseworkers from the Federal Building over in Westwood.

Click. And thank all the gods, it’s Kimberly – she’s smuggled me in a Breakfast Jack, hot and greasy, and my entire gastro-intestinal system sits up and sings Hallelujah!

Outside the shift changes, and I tell Kim to watch for the shorter of my nurses; I’m pretty sure she’s a reptiloid, and she’s wearing the cutest earrings, besides …

The Show That Never Ends, man.

Kage Baker always claimed she was a sissy when it came to pain. I was never sure what she thought the rest of the world was experiencing, because in reality she was positively stoic. The measure of coping with pain is, after all, not how much you feel – but how you react. She was always loathe to admit she was in pain at all, or to take pain killers of any sort. “I’ll just wait until it goes away,” she would say gallantly, gripping her chair arms until they splintered. “I don’t like to give in.”  Man, was that an understatement.

Me, I think I have a pretty realistic grasp of my own fortitude: I prefer to keep pain to low levels so I’m not devoting all my strength to fighting it. Maintenance is easier than carpet-bombing your consciousness at intervals – don’t let the pain get the upper hand to begin with, and life will be so much more manageable!

I was therefore very happy to awaken at last in my hospital room – restored to something approaching sanity and free of random aquaria – with a nice morphine pump plugged into the IV in my arm. Not the multi-purpose job in my neck, mind you; but who cared as long as it was plugged in somewhere? The whole point of the pump is that the patient can self-administer a small dose at need; the pump is on a timer, so you can’t exceed the dose or use it more than twice an hour, and it really makes for a smoother, more pain-free and yet occasionally lucid experience.

So the first 18 hours were amazingly cool. The pain was controllable, my mind was clear, my doctor and I were both pleased.  The food was no worse than expected, though I was sad to see they were using wimpy fruit gels rather than good old bouncy red rubber hospital Jello. Then, the next morning …

I don’t know if it’s a standard technique, but my doctors tended to arrive in groups. Tuesday dawn, a group of charming, chirpy young women descended upon me. They were all bright and fresh and enthusiastic; they were my redoubtable surgeon’s backup crew, and were frighteningly efficient and terrifyingly young. They swept in and out chattering like finches, and I could hear them giggling away across the floor as they left. It was like a flock of faeries coming to visit every time they appeared – a bit alarming, but basically enchanting.

(After a few days of their giggling briskness, though, I did begin to worry a little. They were so bubbly, so active, so giggly: and we were training them all to use knives … )

Shortly afterwards, a quartet of cardiologists also arrived – due to my gimpy heart, I was initially on the cardio floor instead of gynecology. They were all grinning broadly: as I was to discover, they never stopped. After a while, a constantly grinning cardiologist begins to get on your nerves. And they and the faeries never came around in less than groups of three or four, as if there were a turf war going on …  Anyway, they informed me that today would be an exciting day! I would be up and walking! They were very interested in my heart!

No problem – I was ready to walk; hospitals get you out of bed early and soon these days, and it’s a good idea. I was grateful when they disconnected my catheter (makes walking sooo much easier!) and only mildly alarmed when they disconnected my morphine pump as well. I mean, if I can eat gelatin I can swallow a pill – and I was plumbed for IVs galore.

Then they gave me a triple does of Lasix.

Now, I take Lasix daily, a small dose – it’s a diuretic, meant to prevent excess fluids from building up. A triple dose, though, hit my system like, like – well, you know when the Ents break the dam at one side of Isengard and the river pours in? Like that. So, less than 24 hours post-surgery, I was off the catheter, off the morphine pump, and compelled to get out of bed to pee every 30 minutes.

I really cannot properly describe the accompanying sensations. Tuesday was an escalating nightmare. My personal plan had been to walk to the bathroom once or twice that first day – not 2 or 3 dozen times. Plus, the nurses don’t always come as quickly as you need them to, if you need help getting up – and I have a horror of wetting the bed. So I quickly learned to manage the trick on my own, which made the nurses cranky (though not as cranky as I already was).

I traduced cardiologists in general, and mine in specific. I explained I was categorically refusing to take another dose of Lasix for as long as I was there. I clocked my permissible doses of painkillers like any desperate addict, and insisted on them all – since I was having to climb in and out of bed up to 6 times between doses, I don’t think it was especially drug-seeking activity to want my meds on time. And no, I didn’t want to “try” a Motrin 300 when I also had an order for IV Dilaudid – give me what works, damn it, and wean me off it when I don’t need it anymore!

I honestly don’t think my puppet-headed cardiologists meant to cause me pain or trouble. They simply didn’t think about the fact that I was fresh from abdominal surgery at all. They just decided to try out a few new things on my heart, and see how I did. The Lasix certainly did reduce my fluids … and the process left no doubt that my kidneys had come back on line. My adrenals, too. And, if you’re into phrenology, I suspect my organ of rage was in a pretty excited state as well.

Frankly, I wasn’t a good patient Tuesday. I got out of bed on my own so often, they put a warning bracelet on me – bright yellow, it read “Danger of Falling” and was evidently meant to shame me into staying put. But it fell off during one of my abseils out of bed, and anyway – I have no shame. So my night nurse programmed my bed so a klaxon would shriek when my weight shifted on arising; though by the time he also figured out the programming to turn the sucker off, it was nearly Wednesday and I wasn’t getting up much more than every 2 hours anyway.

Sp Tuesday was ghastly. But by Wednesday dawn, I’d actually managed to sleep for about three hours before the morning fairies arrived, giggling in a minor chord and with their wings shining like cellophane in the overhead lights. They assured me they would get me out of Cardiology and over to their floor as soon as possible. “It’s much more fun!” they cried, all patting me reassuringly, and swept off in a cloud of chirps and laughter.

Faeries are weird. But good people.

The cardiologists never even quite came into my room – they hovered in the doorway, grinning like fools, as I informed their spokesperson I had not had a pleasant night, was not happy, was not taking any more Lasix. Still grinning and nodding, they assured me they had all the information they needed now (what, that I’m a mean old bitch?) and thankfully went away.

Far too exciting a first day after surgery, lemme tell ya, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker had her tonsils removed on the same day and in the same hospital where I was having my gall bladder removed. I was thinking about that as I went under anesthesia last Monday … The double bill was an accident – her tonsils had been slated for the chop for months, and we had her post-surgical recovery all planned out. Then my gall bladder went south unexpectedly, and we ended up simultaneously disabled.

She told me later she remembered waking up in recovery to hear the nurses talking about this perfectly dreadful surgery that had gone wrong next door, where some lady’s gall bladder pulled all sorts of tricks, leaped out of her belly and chased the surgical team around,  and then the lady coded … and Kage thought to herself, “I bet that’s Kathleen.”

She was right, too. (Though I deny my gall bladder attacked the surgeon.) And I don’t think Kage was even surprised. I am incapable of doing these things normally or quietly. Though at least my heart didn’t stop this time – and that is quite an accomplishment, considering the battered condition of my heart these days. But I pulled through with no especial personal difficulties; although the same could not be said of my surgeon. I was apparently something of a challenge.

I had, at least, warned her that my abdomen was a mess of scars. I’ve had several prior surgeries, and I scar like organic gaffer’s tape. Sure enough, little Dr. Rimel couldn’t find my lymph nodes for the scar tissue accreted like flowstone on the walls of my abdominal cavity. Nor could she find my right ureter, likewise buried in scars; she found the kidney it’s attached to, but (according to Kimberly) it rather resembled a fat pumpkin these days rather than the classic kidney bean shape. She was interested in the kidney because my last urine sample, just before surgery, looked a little funny …

Still, she found all the really pertinent organs and evicted their traitorous asses with no problem. And everything looked good – no lurking alien bases, no unexpected new tumours, no wildly inflated organs. We’re still waiting for the last pathology reports, but so far- it looks good. It looks clean. I appear to have won!

Of course, there was the issue of all that obscuring scar tissue. So they sent me off for post-surgical MRIs and X-rays; wherein it was discovered that my ureter and lymph nodes really are there, just covered in scar tissue. And they work! Even my fat ugly lumpy kidney works, to everyone’s astonishment – it wasn’t supposed to still be functional after a lifetime of trying to fail, but it does!

However, the suspicious urine sample turned out to be due to a crypto-infection from a weird bug not normally seen in bladders (Naturally. This is me.) and which can only be cured by an intravenous antibiotic: Vancomycin, which sounds like a cheap Balkan politico. And so before they stapled me shut they installed a central line IV. In my jugular.

It’s never a relaxing sign, waking up from surgery to find your doctor has sewn equipment into your neck. You start worrying about the Borg, and stuff. Especially since, when I came to in recovery, I was convinced that my head was encased in a glass box. In fact, in – an aquarium!

Cedars-Sinai was trying to assimilate me.

I could see the metal frame, and the little ports for air hoses and plastic divers and submarines and such; I could peer out the front glass panel, but I couldn’t make anyone hear me. It was very disturbing. I tried calling for help, and Kimberly was right there making soothing sounds – but I couldn’t seem to make her realize I wanted out of the damned aquarium. Luckily, I slipped away again pretty quickly.

This was, of course, because I did not have an aquarium welded to my head. I woke up wearing a perfectly ordinary oxygen mask. It only covered my nose and mouth, and Kimberly said she could see my lips move perfectly clearly. Unfortunately, what she could see my lips doing was yelling, “Help!” Poor girl … she assumed I needed more painkillers (I did) and she agitated until they gave me more meds and I slipped peacefully away.

Always bring a fierce relative to recovery with you. Even if you’re off your head, they will know what is best for you.

The aquarium was gone when I woke up in my room, which was an enormous relief. However, I had a port in my neck – a hydra-head of lumens, all jingling next to my ear and ready for IV lines and blood draws … it was inordinately grotesque. My assistant surgeon had somehow though it would be more convenient than a port in my arm. Kage had a Pik line in her arm: I’d found it very easy to work with. The thing on my neck was not, in my opinion, an improvement … but, you know, once they start sewing the appliances to you, it’s pretty much a  done deal for a while.

I would ultimately wear the port for a week, in order to successfully defeat the cryptid enterovirus. It was like having a corn-rowed octopus glued under my ear. It rattled.

But I had successfully gotten through surgery, and the outlook was good! Kimberly was on guard beside me, and I was safely awake and had a lovely morphine pump to play with. All was well.

More adventures tomorrow, Dear Readers: why cardiologists are dangerous. Also, flocks of faeries round my bed.