Day 470: 4/15/14

Today is April 15, 2014, abbreviated in the United States as 4/15/14.

Points I’d like to make about 4/15/14:

• It’s tax day.  Tax day can make me (and — apparently — many, many, many other people) feel nervous, anxious, pressured, worried, concerned, and otherwise stressed.
• It’s the one-year anniversary date of the Boston Marathon bombings (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for some posts related to that traumatizing event).
• It’s a numeric palindrome (the same when read forward and backwards), in the midst of nine other such dates (starting with 4/10/14 and ending with 4/19/14).
• It’s the day I can tell my readers this: the cultures they took in the Emergency Room on Saturday show no evidence of endocarditis, which is very good news.

What else do I want to tell you in this post?

Let’s go to the iPhone for recent photos, shall we?

I was just about to show you a photo from yesterday, when somebody walked in:

That’s Theresa. She was here to take some of my blood.  I’ve met Theresa before: in the middle of the night, last night.

Some Theresa quotes from this morning:

• “I’ve got to show you how to fight back,” when noticing a large bruise from a previous needle stick on my arm.
• “This may sound mean, but I don’t care what people say to me,” when I said it might be nicer if she had a job where people were glad to see her.
• “I don’t take things personally,” explaining how she dealt with people getting angry at her, calling her names, or exhibiting other behaviors she considered understandable in “people who are sick.”
• “You’ll have to let me know if I make it to America’s Top Model,”  as she was leaving, in reference to my putting her photo in this blog today. As she was on her way out, Theresa removed her mask, so I could see her America’s Top Model smile.

So where was I, before interrupted by Theresa?  Duh!  Posting recent photos from my iPhone:

That was yesterday’s shower. As usual, because the shower was new, it took me a moment to figure it out.

That was a meal from yesterday. A little better than the one appearing in yesterday’s post, don’t you agree?

That’s Johny, taking an echocardiogram in my room last night.  Some things I want to point out about that:

• We both agreed it was unusual for somebody to have an echocardiogram taken in their room.
• Johny told me, during this test, that my blood cultures showed no evidence of endocarditis.
• Johny listened, really well, to stories I told him about previous echocardiograms I’ve had, starting in the early 1980’s, where a team of people spent all night trying to figure out my heart, one of them telling me, “We’re looking for your aorta. We know you have one, but we can’t find it.”
• Johny explained the unusual spelling of his name like so: “I lost one ‘n’ on the way” between Jordan and the U.S.

At one point during the echocardiogram, Johny said, “You look really familiar.” I was about to tell him I hear that a lot, when Johny asked, “Didn’t  Dr. Estes bring you into a meeting the other day?”

Regular readers of this blog might remember this photo from Day 452: Random Shots, of said meeting:

I then assumed Johny had already shown up in this blog, without a mask.

Nope.

It turns out Johny is the one person I missed when I took that previous shot. He pointed out  where he was sitting in the meeting: to the left, outside the frame.

I’m glad Johny reappeared in my life, so he could appear in my blog (where he definitely belongs).

Thanks to Theresa, to Johny, to others I’ve seen lately whom I know are kind (even though I can’t see their facial expressions), to the people of Boston, and to you — of course! — for visiting me in the hospital today.