we move like tigers on vaseline

[freckles_and_doubt]

In the Department Of We Learn Something New Every Day, I can now disassemble and reassemble a collapsible wheelchair, admittedly with much fumbling while my dad quietly laughs at my approximation of mechanical skill, but hey. He knew he hadn't fathered an engineer. Have also learned to take wheelchairs backwards down slopes, which is apparently Article 1 in the Wheelchair Highway Code. I'm sure other articles prohibit me bashing the damned thing into doors and (occasionally) pulling up too late and bashing my dad's feet into the fronts of counters. I'm a good driver. Really. At any rate my dad is now safely ensconced in hospital for a minor op, without any particularly torrid wheelchair traffic accidents. The nice medical people are going to install something I've been referring to as a peg without realising that it's actually a PEG tube, or percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. Eating's a bitch when you can't swallow.

Early-morning hospital jaunts seem to have dislocated my day a tad, I'm feeling a bit random. Randomly, then: maxbarners pointed me to this deliriously happy article about a new form of spider called Heteropoda davidbowie. I have to say, the resemblance is striking: I think it's the spider's eye-makeup.



And, even more randomly: recycling! Has it ever occurred to you that the process of checking plastic bottles for their recycling status is uncannily like sexing kittens? You hold them up in a good light and peer searchingly at their nethers.

Comments

Re: Eeep, pegs!

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Thank you. The procedure is gosh-darned essential, he now can't swallow at all, and has been fed for the last week or so via a naso-gastric tube. Since the liquid food stuff is very sludgy, this is very slow: the PEG tube will speed things up madly. He's much stronger than he was after a week of 'flu and no nutrients because he was too weak to swallow.