DWM. Brown eyes, brown hair (what there is of it (I'm not officially bald (yet))). I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth. 6'4" Some people say I'm like a big teddy bear (completely stuffed).
I had two older sisters. When most people talk about having scars from childhood, they mean the wimpy, emotional kind. I have real ones all over my body. One sister put rocks in my pillow and then tried to get me to actually leap into bed. I refused because we weren't supposed to jump on the bed, and that seemed too similar. She kept pushing for me to do it; I kept refusing. She finally got so mad she picked up the pillow and hit me with it. The doctor who stitched up the gash above my eye didn't understand how I got hurt that way in a pillow fight.
Every time I got in trouble in school, it was their fault. Example: when I was in first grade, we had to memorize a poem and then recite it to the class. My sisters 'helped' by making me repeat it word for word after them, then drilling me for hours until I was letter-perfect. The teacher was not impressed when I stood in front of the class and said: "Twinkle, twinkle little bat. How I wonder what you're at. Up above the world so high, like a tea tray in the sky."
They also 'helped' me by teaching me easy to remember rhymes, like "one mouse, two mice, one louse, two lice." That would have been great, but they had to go further, so I also knew "one goose, two geese, one moose, two meese" and "one die, two dice, one tie, two tice."
My vocabulary was expanded when they explained that one word was okay to use because it wasn't a four-letter word -- although it sounded like it began with an 'f' is was actually spelled with a 'ph.'
After having overcome all that --
I don't have a job, per se. I consult/freelance for a number of factories. Mostly it's helping them decide what factors to consider when expanding their capacity, but I'm not above doing a little CAD work or CAM programming. I also write science fiction and fantasy short stories.
My writing has been greatly helped by surgery -- a few years ago they put a bit of bull in me!
It's called a "Bovine Pericardial Heart Valve." I had an aortic aneurysm (I knew I was bleeding internally because I felt all squishy inside). I'd always had a bad valve (it just wasn't bad enough to risk surgery) so they slapped a new one in while they had me open.
Being at the brink of death and having to have an emergency, 14 hour surgery on the 4th of July sounds terribly dramatic and life-changing. It wasn't -- a lot of weird symptoms suddenly appeared (no feeling in one of my cheeks (not one on my face), my legs taking turns going numb, colon issuing an "everybody out now!" riot call, etc.), I went to the ER, I played gin with the EMT as they took me to a larger hospital, a doctor explained I absolutely had to have my aorta repaired within two weeks (he told me that as the nurses were shaving my body and otherwise prepping me for surgery), and for two weeks afterwards, I had a great bunch of nurses who had never heard my jokes!
Highlights:
1) When I was in the recovery room, a mother dragon brought in a fresh kill to feed her young. Watching that felt more real to me than the nurses who kept coming to check on me.
2) They issued me a little red pillow and told me to clutch it tightly to my chest if I felt a sneeze coming on. I thought they were crazy. Two days later, I happened to sneeze. It was the most perfect pain ever. I've been shot and stabbed. I've had root canals, kidney stones, gall stones, and acute pancreatitis. Nothing compares to that sneeze. It was as if every cell in my body exploded in flames. I kept that pillow very, very close after that.
3) The surgeon had good news and disappointing news. Good: my heart has only a few superficial scars from my heart attacks (I had my first one when I was 19). Disappointing: the aneurysm was because of a congenital defect, meaning my decades of drinking, smoking, partying, and fatty foods hadn't had any effect.
Perhaps I should mention I've been dead (as in flatlined) a few times:
I was shot, and although it was nothing more than a thin graze, I managed to lose enough blood that they had to use CPR to revive me.
I was overdosed on morphine in a hospital, and they had to revive me.
They had to stop my heart to do the plumbing job explained above.
Sorry this post is so long -- I know there's no excuse for me, but I do take a lot of explaining!
