A Poker Game, the Winning Dame, the Hands Are Lame

A big weekend for your Uncle Crafty, after a week which did not start off at all well.

One of the members of my erstwhile poker game, Noodles, lost his wife on the evening of April 8. I found out about it the following morning. She lost a battle against cancer and heart disease and left behind a grieving family. She was 52.

I was pleased to see that Noodles' friends rallied around him the way that they did, and if there's ever such a thing as coming back from something like this, he's got the infrastructure around him to do it.

I tagged him with the name Noodles, by the way. It's what we used to call someone who wasn't all there upstairs. One day Josie's sister Cricket insinuated as much to him and I suggested hell, why don't we just call him Noodles and have done with it. It stuck.  A propos of nothing, giving someone a nickname and having it stick is one of my most sublime joys, so I was quite happy.

But moving on to the weekend: I played some poker at the ol' Sportsman's Club. We had 18 runners pitching cards all together. Did really well but didn't cash. I got a monster pile when, holding AA, two people went all in in front of me, and the aces held up. It was the third or fourth round of blinds and I was still putzing around at my original stack size, so I was the beneficiary of a massive triple-up and then some. That, plus some good aggressive big-stack play, let me coast to the final table

But, the blinds got big, the cards went away, I got to a point where I had to take a few chances, make a few steals, and nothing worked. I lost a good chunk when I overplayed a weak ace. Bottom line, I finished 6th, two out of the money.

But that's not the worst of it. The player that took me out, the player who would eventually win it all, the one player in the world who has my number more than any other, was none other than...Very Josie. I was shorty short, holding 10-6 as BB, caught top pair, shoved, got called with a higher 10, and that was the story of me.  GG Crafty.

One funny little thing was that my hands seemed to have betrayed me yesterday. I was fumbling cards, spilling drinks, fucking up shuffles...hell, it got so bad I didn't want to take a piss. I've never had such a clumsy day before.

I wonder if this is what it feels like to be clumsy. I've never been hugely coordinated but I've never been clumsy in the sense of fumble-fingered. I guess I am now. Or maybe - hopefully - this was a one-day anomaly. I reckon time will tell.

Anyway, that was my weekend. It was absolutely grand, even though I didn't cash. Had a lot of laughs, a lot of fun, a lot of good food, and being in that club I secondhanded so much smoke it was like I was smoking myself. Ugh, can you imagine smoking yourself? Gross.

That's it for me. Go see your doctor if you haven't lately.

Anatomy of a Con

You probably know, on one level or another, what I'm going to say, so I'm going to wait until the end to say it.

And at the risk of boring you with an overabundance of self-congratulation, let me just say that this one was perfect. It had a little bit of everything - shocking news, a voyeuristic peek behind the curtain, hints of salacious details, and over all, a con job worthy of the movies. To say nothing, by the way, of a textbook primer on how improvisation works, and why it's so effective when executed well.

The idea was born last year - a year ago today, in fact. I tried to run a weak-ass gag past you, when I announced to the world that my wife of (at the time) 18 years was asking me for a divorce. The more gullible among you were hooked like mackerel - stupid mackerel, it must be said - but most of you saw through the ruse with ease. I decided right then that next year's effort would be epic.

I talked to Josie and we hatched a plan (history does not record who had the basic idea) to have a very public, very ugly fight on our blogs. I rubbed my hands together with eager anticipation. It was a perfect plan. She would say something catty, I would overreact, and the fun would begin.

Well, life does in fact sometimes intrude upon the pulling off of a prank, and 2012 saw both of us remove ourselves from the ranks of the every day blogger. For my part, 2012 was a year of some pretty big changes - I managed to screw my head on straight, bury my dad, and point myself in a better direction, at least until October 2nd, at about 9:30 pm.

So when last week rolled around, and I remembered the plans we made last year, I called Josie and suggested that we run the con, with a few changes. Integral to the new plan was that it would take place in March, when guards were down.

I didn't really know exactly how things were going to go; I just knew that I would mention that Jo and I were estranged and imply that I didn't want to give out details. And then something wonderful and magical happened.

In improvisational comedy, there are a few rules to follow if you want things to go smoothly. One of them is, whatever you take, add something to it. Neither one of us had the faintest idea of what exactly we'd be fighting about when I wrote my post - my lack of detail wasn't just me pretending to be discrete.

But then Josie, taking what she got and adding to it, said that she called the cops on me - an absolutely brilliant detail. I took that and added the fact that she was drunk, and that she had given me a bruise. She took that and added the fact that she should have kicked me in the balls, which implied some kind of untoward behavior. I added some very specific details, like the peach vodka drinks (here's a rule to live by: if you're gonna lie, be specific), and a drunken misunderstanding of contact. Through my feigned anger I was chortling with glee.

One detail I think sold the whole thing was that I expressed dismay that details were being let out - that instead of being eager to tell the world of our ersatz set-to, I was reluctant to do so.

The only blemish on this prank was the fact that one of you figured it out, however belatedly. The "inch-high private eye" award goes to...........Cranky! She sent me an email basically saying "heyyyy.....wait just a cotton-pickin' minute here," in response to which I basically admitted things and asked for her silence on the matter. Congrats, Crankster, for sussing out the truth. All the rest of you, you can take the hooks out of your mouths now.

And just for the record, Jo and I are fine. The event we alluded to didn't even come close to taking place; in our long association together I've never once gone out drinking with her. She likes an only occasional drink, and I'm not a tippler at all.

Well, that's about it from me. Hope you enjoyed the bread and circus. And now I think it's time to say what you all knew I was going to say: APRIL FOOLS!!

A pretty weak week

First things first: I'm doing ok. My neurologist is tweaking my meds because he thinks that what I'm taking to regulate my cholesterol is making me fatigued and with no stamina. I hope this comes to something; I'm pretty sick of having just no energy.

Secondly, and I don't really want to dwell on this too much, but it appears as if my friendship with Josie, whom you may remember, is over. I won't go into the details but we each said and did some things that we both regret - well, certainly I regret things for my part; I can't speak for her, and really don't want to. Suffice to say that I'm a little hurt, a little angry, and what I'm getting instead of apology or even explanation is attitude and lip.

Part of the Crafty Southpaw 2.0 experiment is getting rid of the complicating and negative elements of my life, and if that means having no more contact with a friendship that was over a decade long, then so be it. I'm sure I'll miss her at some point, but that point has not yet arrived.

In other news, my general practitioner and my neurologist are of two differing opinions on how to best manage my care. Neuro wants a stress test; GP thinks that's not the best use of time or resources. I told neuro that I had a family history of cardiac issues; he seemed to think that all the more reason to have the test. So I have that to dread in the coming week.

In other other news, it seems that the family gums have finally lost the ability to hold most of my teeth, and I'm having yet another batch removed and having an alveoplasty, a scraping of the bone in my jaw to make for better adhesion for a partial plate. I was told to expect pain in no small quantity. Hey, that should match the emotional pain of this fucking Josie thing perfectly.

Not a good week for the kid.

An Open Letter to Memphis Mojo, Who Asked Me How My Rehab Was Going

First of all, thanks for asking. It's nice to know that some people out there still think of me.

To answer your specific question, my rehabilitation is proceeding apace. There were certain things that I can do just as well as I could before the stroke, and there are things that still give me a bit of grief. I still can't play my guitar with any degree of ability, and my penmanship is changed. It hasn't gotten worse, exactly, because it was never good to begin with. But it's a different kind of messy now, and the act of writing is still a little bit unnatural.

My legs are really where I'm finding myself most affected. When I left rehab, the areas where I needed most help were related to balance; walking up and down stairs, showering standing up, and the like were all things that I could technically do but not without some difficulty. My neurologist asked me to walk heel to toe and that was surprisingly difficult as well. Now that's licked but I find my legs stiff and tired almost all the time — both of them in fact. The vacation that I took in December to visit my wife's family put a strain on my legs that I still haven't recovered from. Now whenever I am upright, walking or standing, it's a safe bet that I'm in some sort of discomfort.

I find myself with an overall lack of strength and stamina; if called upon, for example, to move some boxes from hither to yon (my dictation software interpreted that last phrase as "from Hitler to yawn"), I would need to stop and rest way earlier than I would have before.

I tend to look at things philosophically; from a nuts and bolts perspective, I'm in no more discomfort than, say, someone with a chronic bad back. Given the universe of potential outcomes of the stroke, I'll take that any day of the week and twice on Sundays. And, without getting too metaphysical about things, I think that even though calling my recovery from the stroke a "wake-up call" is paying short shrift to the work that I put in and trivializing the whole event, there's something to be said there. I might not wish to admit it, but it really was a wake-up call of one kind or another. I made it a practice to ignore matters of health, and it bit me square in the ass. If I had made a 100% full recovery from this, maybe I would have no reminder of how bad it was before it got better. Maybe I had to lose something for this lesson to sink in to any meaningful extent. Would I have chosen to lose my ability to play the guitar? No. The lesson was a sharp one, I guess; all the better to remember when I feel like not taking my pills in the morning.

Anyway, that's how I'm doing. I hope you're doing well, and everyone else in the blog world, you wacky sons of bitches. Thanks for thinking of me.

Calling All Born-Again Christians

First let me point out that I respect your view point and worldview, as I respect everyone's view point and worldview, even though I don't agree with it. But hey, I'm a live and let live guy anyway.

But there's something I've been thinking about lately, and perhaps you can tell me your rationale for this particular quirk of behavior that Christians all seem to share: as a rule, born-again Christians do not drink alcohol. For some reason they think that drinking is a sin. Now I don't understand this, because one of the most famous of the ways that Jesus was said to have shown His divinity was that He turned water into wine. Now, this was at a wedding. They were celebrating a joyous event with wine, and at some point they ran out. They HAD water; they weren't in any danger of dying of dehydration. Wine was not something they had to drink; wine was something they wanted to drink. And Jesus was said to have used His unlimited powers as God's only begotten son to give the attendees at the wedding (and presumably Himself) more wine! If nothing else, this shows both the societal attitudes of the day towards wine, and Jesus' own attitude towards it.

Why, then, has the drinking of alcoholic beverages become such a taboo among the Christian community? It seems like the attitudes against alcohol are ours, no one else's. If you don't want to drink, because you don't think that alcohol is something you want to put into your body, fine. I personally don't drink. One might say I don't do it particularly well. So I don't do it at all. But that is my choice. Do Christians not drink alcoholic beverages because they think somehow it's against Bible teaching? If so I'd love your rationale. You'd be educating me.

Please don't get me wrong: I'm not judging anyone or anything. If you've given your life over to your Savior, great. Mazel Tov. Who am I to say you did anything wrong or stupid? I misspent the better part of my life, and I'm glad I did. But to each his own. I just want to know: why do you guys not drink?

A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

(Looking for Lost Time, the title of a Marcel Proust work)

Most of what I remember from the stroke that I had recently was my single-minded notion that hard work would fix me. I would tell anyone who was interested that I had "laser focus" at the task at hand — that being, rehabbing and getting better. It was really hard work but it was very much worth it, as I could measure my progress every single day. I could always do something that I couldn't do the previous day, which seemed to make the effort worth it. It was satisfying and fulfilling, which I guess is why I remember it most vividly.

But I was listening to Tootsie recounting her remembrances, especially the first couple of days, when things looked so bleak. I was reading Very Josie's blog where she described me as quote "in pain on his right side and can't move his left very much." That's not exaggeration; the first couple of days especially, things were that bad. Seeing me in the ICU, with tubes going in and tubes going out, difficult to understand, my left side in spasm, and loopy on morphine, could not have been easy, especially for my wife, my mother, and my best friend.

More to the point it made me remember just how scared I really was. I mean, for all I knew, this was going to be life from now on. I couldn't dare to imagine a life of normalcy or anything close to it at the time. I was pissing into one tube and being fed through another, hoping that they weren't just switching bottles. And when the morphine allowed me a moment of clarity so that I could assemble my thoughts in a coherent way, all I could think of was how stupid I was to allow myself to be in such poor health that I stroked out at 44. Because it was all my fault. I ignored my skyrocketing blood pressure, I was taking double handfuls of Advil to dull the pain because I refused to go to the dentist, and I thought that giving up sugared soda was all I needed to do to stem the tide of the various garbage that I threw into my body.

I put myself into the situation, and I wouldn't let myself forget. And sometimes that was a little too much to take.

I was really, REALLY scared. And the fact that I had no one to blame but myself meant that I couldn't turn that fright into anger at anyone or anything.

Of course, small signs of progress would eventually come. I remember the day they stopped monitoring my heart. The day that they removed my Foley catheter. When they removed the IV. I never thought I'd be happy to be taken off the morphine drip, but there it is. I still couldn't move worth shit, but I had a guess that was coming. The very worst days were behind me now.

I guess this is what women go through when they have a baby: one hears tales that they "forget" the pain of childbirth so that they can consider a second child with a clear head. I reckon I forgot just how scared I was, how scared my family was, how scared my friends were. But now, in the fullness of time, I remember. Oh dear God do I remember. And now, I wish I could forget.

Missed It by That Much

11 mm.

That's just under half an inch. And apparently that was the difference between me making a full recovery and me blinking my way through life.

I went to see my neurologist today, a very capable, humorous, and accessible man named Dr. Silver. I felt very comfortable in his presence. He examined me, by giving me an abbreviated version of the NIH stroke scale, which I told him I knew all about. He asked me how I knew so much about the diagnostic process, and in response I told him, "I know a thing or two about a thing or two," which is one of my favorite lines. He was warm and funny, and quite thorough. I'm glad he's my neurologist.

One of the things he did was show me the CAT scans associated with my stroke. He pointed out where the bleed took place, which was more like in the exact middle of my brain at the very top of the brainstem, instead of towards more of the back of the neck, where I thought it was. The bleed was 11 mm in size. But that's not the 11 mm that I was talking about earlier.

You see, if the bleed was just a little bit bigger, say 22 mm instead of 11 mm, it would've encroached upon an area of my brain that is associated with "locked-in" syndrome. 11 mm — .43 of an inch – separated my more or less full recovery and disaster.

I have to say, that rattled me pretty good. He told me quite matter-of-factly that if the bleed was 11 mm posterior to where it was, I wouldn't be in the office today. I'd be were I would always be, in a hospital bed, there to stay for the rest of my life.

Locked in syndrome, by the way, is when you're completely paralyzed, completely unresponsive in every way, with the only thing you can do of your own free will is blink. There is a famous book and movie about it, both titled "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," where somebody with locked in syndrome dictated an entire book to his caregiver who, letter by letter, would go through the alphabet and the guy would blink when the right letter was gotten to. That redefines "painstaking."

I knew I was lucky, even though I put a lot of hard work in to facilitate my recovery, that I had a chance to do so, instead of sustaining permanent damage. But I had no idea how close I came to a nightmare existence of complete musculoskeletal unresponsiveness. I can't even imagine a more or less intact brain inside a body that offered no ability to express itself. I really don't know how long my will to live would have sustained me, and most of my effort would have been taken up with me painstakingly blinking a request to end my life. Instead of glibly trading bon mots with the doctor, I could have been, to use a cynical expression, a potato.

That gave new meaning to the term "perspective."

I also learned some things about the nature of hemorrhagic stroke. Before, I had counted myself lucky that my stroke was the result of the bleed as opposed to that of a blood clot. As it turns out, though, you're better off getting an ischemic stroke than a hemorrhagic one, because doctors can give you medicine that dissolves a blood clot almost instantaneously — but they can't do squat for a bleed. Best they can do is hope that the pressure caused by the bleed closes the blood vessel before any significant damage is done, and then try and work with what is left. Funny little sideline – if they think you have a blood clot when you really have a bleeder and they give you the anti-clot drug, it will just keep the open blood vessel bleeding and you will end up with a good case of death. That's why, even though time is such a factor, they got to give you a CAT scan before they give you the drug.

But the visit wasn't all jarring news. For example, in response to my request, and after he examined me ("you're giving me the NIH stroke scale! How quaint."), He pronounced me fit to drive, and authorized same. Yay! A quick call to AAA to have them inflate a tire that has gone flat, and I'll be back to being a menace on the road. I can't wait.

I had to walk from the front entrance of the hospital to the doctor's office, a distance of approximately 275 miles, after which funny enough I found my gait to be markedly improved. It seemed a lot more natural, without me having to think about it. And navigating my way to the parking lot where the car was involved a lot of curbs, rough surfaces, inclines and declines, and just to round things out, a set of stairs – all of which I navigated completely naturally without any troubles. Hosanna in the highest. Don't get me wrong: my career as an international ballet star is over. But I can get from point A to point B without having to worry about taking a digger into a mud puddle.

I got some encouraging news about my overall recovery. My doctor indicated that the window for me to recover coordination that I have lost is far from closed, and that I had the better part of a year to improve my condition. It's time I have no intention of wasting.

This NIH stroke scale that I keep talking about, by the way, is a standardized series of tests to determine consciousness, cognition, limb control, speech clarity, and sensation. Each individual test is scored with your aggregate score representing roughly how severe your stroke is. The lower the score, the better. Someone who had a major stroke, for example, who was severely aphasic (aphasia is roughly defined as the inability speak properly or to comprehend speech), paralyzed on both sides of the body, and unable to feel stimuli such as a pin prick might score as high as 25 on the stroke scale. Me, I scored an eight, which was pretty damn low.

I bring this up because one of the questions I asked the doctor was, was he surprised at the degree to which I made a more or less full recovery. He told me no; my low stroke scale score was a decent predictor of my ability to get back what I had lost, though he was glad that I put in the work and got the job done.

Well, you now probably know more about strokes than you ever cared to, but I hope it's at least interesting. If you've nodded off by now it might be an indicator that YOU need a stroke scale test. Can you tell me what month it is? Do you know where you are right now? Hello? Hello?

Thanks for paying attention. Go see a doctor if you haven't done so recently.