Slightly Off the Mark

 Just a few medical thoughts shooting through my mind like a runaway bottle rocket (only the thoughts aren't as exciting). Come to think of it, fireworks were once involved in my medical condition, but never mind.

My annual major sinus infection has arrived, a bit later than usual, possibly as another way to welcome in the New Year. Because I'm having more pain and pressure this time (Naturally--it's the Roaring Pain 20s.), the Doc decided to put me on prednisone.

Despite my previous experience with the stuff.

Well, maybe it'll be different this time. After all, that's what people have been saying about 2022, isn't it?

"It has to be better than 2021!"

Hah. No, it doesn't.

The irony is that last time they gave me prednisone, several years ago, I was struck with one of the typical side effects: severe headache. So, to help my headache, I'm taking a med that gives me headaches.

It could be worse.

Speaking of headaches, the morning I went to pick up the prednisone and my old friends, the antibiotics, we had an ice storm. It wasn't much of an ice storm, but I'm sure my walk to the car was a good preview of how I'll be walking when I'm 90, assuming a sinus infection hasn't killed me by then.

Bad weather, especially when it's cold, tends to give me ... sinus headaches.

Still, a lot of the really bad winter weather this year has been south of us. My humorist friend, Barry Parham, lives in South Carolina, and this year has seen five times the amount of snow we have. I hate snow. The only kind of precipitation I hate more is ... ice.

I survived the trip to pick up my meds (how ironic would it be if I didn't?), and my only near-collision was when I got buzzed by a speed skating competition. Then I came home, read the list of prednisone side-effects, and promptly called in sick on the assumption I'd get them all.

No, of course I didn't call in sick--I don't do that unless I'm running a fever, or missing both legs.(Maybe I would show up if I lost both legs. I've never tried it.) On the subject of showing up, the day before the ice storms I was exposed to someone who the next day tested positive for COVID.

Tell me again how wonderful 2022 is going to be.

It could always be worse.

I thought that would give me a week home to write, but no--unfortunately, I'm fully vaccinated, the person who tested positive just had their booster and is asymptomatic, and I'm just not that good at faking illness. Even my grandmother and the dog are feeling better.

Speaking of the dog, the veterinarian says the med she gave us for Beowulf tastes even worse than prednisone, and that's going some. How the vet knows that, I was afraid to ask.

This explains why we gave up trying to give him the pill in food (the dog, not the vet), and Emily had to resort to force. I mean, on the dog--I took mine voluntarily, and thus have no excuse. Emily correctly informed me that I'm not tough enough to do the job, which involves prying open Beowulf's jaws and shooting the pill in like a basketball. All she had to do was avoid the three-point bite.

(Our high school men's basketball team just won their conference championship, so I'm allowed to make a basketball joke even though I hate basketball.)

So, having left the second full week of the year behind, my impression remains the same as it did after the first week: 2022 sucks.

Unless you're a Central Noble basketball player. Or manufacture medicine.

"At least you didn't get vertigo, fella."

 The other day I sneezed my head off, and I'd like to thank my wife, Emily, for not only retrieving it but helping me get my head on straight.

It was a challenge. I sneezed so hard my head bounced from the living room into the kitchen, where our dog got his hands--um, mouth--on it, thinking it was a new toy. Emily ran after him and got it back, but now I have tooth marks on my forehead and a chewed up ear. The staples I won't complain about--we didn't have thread.

She had to tackle him. It wasn't pretty.

Okay, it's possible I'm exaggerating. Slightly. Certainly my sneezes did startle Beowulf several times, and he'd come running to make sure I was okay. Or possibly he came running to see if I'd overturned a plate of food. It was all because we made a foolish mask error, and two days after we did Emily came down with a bad head cold. When I got it a few days later it was worse, of course, because I'm a man.

You may have heard the term "man flu", but it really was only a cold, and since it wasn't the coronavirus I don't have much room to complain. Just the same, Emily and I agreed that this was "just" a cold the way the Federal government does a "little" overspending. We were down for a week, much of which I don't remember because NyQuil is wonderful.

They way I measure my illnesses: I know it's bad when I take a sick day from work. In my job, if I call in sick somebody else has to work the shift, and I don't need any new enemies. At the same time, I've often lectured coworkers that if they might be contagious they should stay the heck home, and either I was contagious or my wife and I take this sharing thing way too far.

A rare photo of me pre-sneeze. The camera was recovered days later, but the photographer remains missing.

If I lose my appetite, I'm on death's doorstep. I did lose a few pounds over that period, but it's not a diet I'd recommend.

Meanwhile I really did have some impressive sneezes, although the only damage they did was crack windows and shatter nerves. The US Geological Survey says the worst of them only registered as a 4.7 in Chicago, which is barely higher than the sound of cell doors slamming on indicted Illinois governors.

Anyway, we got by with the help of chicken noodle soup, vitamin C, and modern pharmaceuticals. Wait. Pharma ... p ... h ... a ...

Um, drugs.

NyQuil is coma-inducing manna from Heaven. Did I mention that? On one day I slept for ten hours straight. But I have the same question about it that I have about Benadryl: Does it really do anything about my symptoms? Or does it make me sleep so deeply I just don't notice them? I don't remember.

Oh, I almost forgot one other indispensable thing: Kleenex.

The guy who invented Kleenex deserved a Noble Prize in Awesome.

The trick is to position so many boxes around the house that you could step from one to another. We had 2.4 boxes of Kleenex per room on average, with fewer in the basement and one by every chair in the living room. Fourteen trees died for our noses, in just one week. Always have plenty of Kleenex.

And NyQuil. Did I mention it's awesome?

A recent photo of my upper respiratory system.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

We've been on a staycation, during which I practiced writing full time. After all, if you have a goal, you should know what that goal entails.

Anyone who's done it will tell you the hard thing about working from home is avoiding distractions. (By the way, we really liked the new series, "Batwoman".) First rule: Turn off the TV, and turn on movie scores and classical music. Other voices, it turns out, interfere with my writing voice.

But before that, we had to get my new medical problems handled, and how often have I said that? As I mentioned before, my routine colonoscopy led to the discovery that I had another massive sinus infection, and also that the top of my head was about to blow off.

My blood pressure was so high that medical professionals who'd been on the job for twenty years would take it, then call in another medical pro: "Here, you try--that can't be right."

It was right. So they put me on two meds, one of which is a diuretic.

By the way, it's very important to understand that there's a big difference between diuretic and diarrhetic--big difference. Although they both involve the bathroom.

What the medication's designed to do is make me pee. A lot. As they ushered me out the door with this med, the nurse told me, "Now, make sure you drink plenty of fluids while you're on this."

Okay. So ... you want me to drink a lot of fluids while I'm on this drug that's designed to get rid of a lot of fluids? Got it.

But never mind. After my diastolic BP dropped thirty points and the little Terminator stopped shooting off his Gatling gun inside my skull, I discovered that I can, indeed, discipline myself enough to work on writing eight hours a day. (And also enough to give up the salt shaker.)

Even accounting for non-writing writing work, such as ... well, this blog ... I managed to add over 10,000 words to my novel-in-progress in a week. And that's good, because it's a mystery story, and keeping at it helps me remember what the heck is going on.

(Respect to writers who joined NaNoWriMo, an effort to write 50,000 words during November. I did it twice, and it was rough.)

At the same time Emily finished her editing work on our newest book, More Slightly Off the Mark, and we just got the first proof copy back. Now we check it for still more problems that need corrected, but it'll be available for Christmas order. It kind of makes me wish more of my weeks went like this.

Except for the Gatling gun part.

I posted this on Instagram the other day, showing that it made for TWO distractions.

Don't forget our upcoming author appearance:

https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2019/11/author-appearance-december-6th-during.html

So, while Emily was scanning photos for the new Albion Fire Department book, I finished up the first draft of Still Slightly Off the Mark: The Prequel.

(Keep in mind that, with first drafts, the title is just a suggestion.)

Of course, there will be changes. For one thing, I'm putting a few pictures into the book. Don't tell Emily, she's up to her arms in pictures for another book, and just might strangle me. That would increase sales, I suppose.

As I was looking over the draft, I also counted chapter lengths. I'm not OCD by any means, much, usually, but I like my chapters to be approximately the same length. There's no particular reason for that; in fact, chapters should be the length they are, along the lines of "start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop".

But in this rough draft, my longest chapter is nineteen pages ... and my shortest is three.

Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

This is a humor book, and I think a humor book chapter should be no longer than, say, the average bathroom break. So I'm thinking of chopping up the longer chapters into short ones, which will probably leave me with around two dozen or so. What do you think? Do you prefer long or short chapters? And does it bother you if they vary greatly in one book?

And how much do you think it annoyed the dog to find himself holding a copy of the original Slightly Off the Mark? I mean, he got his picture on the cover, so who is he to complain?

http://markrhunter.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Mark-R-Hunter/e/B0058CL6OO

I gave the grand-twins a glow-in-the-dark model of the solar system for Christmas, but my daughter tells me the planets won't glow. Now I'm beginning to worry that Bae may have licked the glow material from their surfaces.

But at least he's snuggly.

Tomorrow afternoon we’re going to send out our very first newsletter, which will be way better than the last one. It’s got that major announcement I mentioned, a little humor, a mention of the upcoming author appearance (a second one’s pending, too), and—as promised—a cute dog photo.

So just hop on over to www.markrhunter.com and go to the bottom of the main page, type in your e-mail address (which will absolutely not be shared), and hit subscribe! Well, and then you’ll have a confirmation e-mail. Some people who filled out the signup sheet for the newsletter months ago are just now getting that, because I got lazy … I sure hope they remember who I am.

I’m still floundering my way through this whole self-promotion thing. Eventually the newsletter might also be linked on Facebook or my blog, but I’ve found a lot of people just aren’t seeing things on social media … there’s just too much stuff flying by us, these days.

I’m considering not taking vacations anymore. Too stressful.

I have to go back to work for at least a week before my stress levels fall enough for the stress of work to start getting to me again. Then I start needing a vacation, because the last vacation was too stressful. If Joseph Heller hadn’t already written it, I’d hit the best seller list with my own Catch-22.

Let’s start at the beginning, when we decided to vacation at a place called Turkey Run State Park. It was the vacation that ended up being a turkey.

A few days earlier, as I cleaned my glasses, a temple fell off. The temples are the parts that hang over your ears. Remove one, then try to wear your glasses. Yeah.

Whenever it’s time for new glasses I try to get the same frames, because the only thing worse than wearing glasses is wearing new glasses. And every time, that particular frame is no longer available. Every time. It’s like some kind of sick joke within the frame making business.

But this time, the optometrist office didn’t tell me the frames weren’t available. They told me the frame manufacturer wasn’t available. They’d been bought out. The optometrist was going to try and find some spare parts, which was fine except I was about to drive three and a half hours away.

Here comes the repeating theme of this story, which is that things kept working out even as my stress levels rose. During my last eye exam, my eyesight had hardly changed at all. I slipped the old glasses into the new case, and there they waited for a catastrophe just like this one.

It reminds me of the line from Apollo 13, which went something like, “I think we’ve had our glitch for the mission.” They didn’t stop to consider there might be more than one glitch.

We managed to fit all our camping gear, and the dog, into my beloved 2006 Ford Focus. I probably wouldn’t have used the term “beloved” before, but I really did love that car.

Guess I’m telegraphing the ending.

Wait--I have to sleep outside with you? What did I do?

Let’s go back to the dog, Bae (It’s short for Baewulf, and yes, I know it’s misspelled—don’t tell him). Bae had started his fall shed. He must have been exhausted, growing so much fur. We would open a window, and a tornado of hair would blast past us. It looked like a cloud of smoke, pouring from the car. No wonder he sleeps so much.

Meanwhile, Emily got a sore throat the same night we put a deposit down on a campsite. By the next morning she had a cold so bad I’m still not sure it wasn’t the flu. I bought a case of Kleenex and a barrel of Nyquil, and she laid on the couch and didn’t complain, because she’s not me. We were still going on vacation, she declared, because our deposit was non-refundable.

We’ll just eat the cost, I told her. Your health is more important.

She swept aside a two-foot drift of dog fur and gave me a glare that actually made me retreat into the next room. “I’ll pack the car,” I told her. She really hates wasting money.

The strange thing about this whole story is that we had a wonderful time, whenever we weren’t miserable. We’ve compromised on our camping style: She gave up the two-man pup tent and hard ground, and I gave up the giant camper with a generator and satellite TV. The important thing is the inflatable air mattress. We had a nice site, a roaring fire, and S’mores. We had some great hiking trails that traversed rivers, suspension bridges, and canyons. Yes, there are canyons in Indiana.

We had leash laws.

This was one of the less scenic areas!

See, in a state park there are rules, and one is that you keep your pets on a leash. The lady with the dog on the trail either wasn’t holding the leash tightly enough, or was letting her dog roam, and drag the leash behind it. It saw our dog, Bae. It wanted Bae.

It wanted Bae for dinner.

I found myself quite literally in the middle of a dogfight. To our dog’s credit, he went on the defensive. However, Emily was there. When there might be a danger to Emily, “defensive” becomes a snarling, clawing, biting, 90-pound whirlwind of kick-ass. There’s no reason I can think of why my attempts to drag him away didn’t result in major blood loss.

Which brings us back to our “all’s well that ends well” theme. No injuries. The lady dragged her dog away and apologized profusely, and once Emily knew Bae was unharmed she restrained herself from going after the lady.

There was also no injury half an hour later when a much friendlier dog came running after Bae, wanting only to make friends but not realizing our dog had just been traumatized.

Leashes, people. It’s a thing.

We lasted about a day and a half. Emily was still sick, the dog was stressed, and that was it. We decided we’d come back the next week and spend a few more days there, because Turkey Run State Park was really a wonderful place.

All we needed was transportation.

Next: The “Trip” Back

S'Mores, people.

The day after my sinus surgery, I woke up to find a dog lying on my chest. “Are you worried about me?” I rasped out.

“Not exactly,” Bae replied.

I hadn’t actually expected a reply.

“Dude, we need to talk about finances. Will paying for this surgery take money from the kibble line item on the family budget?”

“Not to worry. The insurance covers most of it, and we can make payments on the rest.” I was hurting and bleeding, but I felt it necessary to pet the dog because his nose was about six inches from mine, and he was lying on my spleen.

“The rest? You know, I have wheat allergies; I need special food.”

“Welcome to the allergy family.”

“This is Christmas shopping season, dude—you should be promoting your book sales, not laying there with your face all swollen up.”

“I always kind of hoped they’d sell themselves.”

“What? Are you on drugs?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

Bae sniffed my face. “Yeah, I smell them, now. Vicodin, and some kind of anti-nausea medication. Look, you gotta get out there, man … there aren’t enough mice in the house to keep me fed, and that rabbit always stays just outside the reach of my line. I tried to do some promotional posts for you, but these paws aren’t made for typing.”

“Ah, that explains the delivery of eighteen pizzas, and the lady from Romania who finds my profile intriguing.”

“Sorry about that. But you need help: You keep publishing in different genres, so how are you going to build author branding?”

“But that’s the beauty of it: If people want to buy books for themselves or for Christmas presents, they can get it all on www.markrhunter.com: humor, romantic comedy, short stories, non-fiction, young adult, history—it’s all there. I’m your one stop shop for book buying.”

“Well, they’d better buy more, or I might start eating grass in the back yard … and you know what that means.”

“One sicko in the house is enough. Look, word of mouth words great, here: Why don’t you tell your friends about me during your midnight barking?”

“Dude, my friends can’t read.”

“Story of my life.”

“You’re dreaming this whole thing, anyway. I blame the drugs.”

And that’s when I woke up.

But I woke up with the dog on my chest. “Were you just speaking to me?” I asked.

Bae didn’t say anything. But he looked hungry.

What? I'm just checking up on him.