Category: Misadventures

Buy Books for Bo: an Update

2/6/2014

Me and Bo at Christmas

Bo has been in the animal hospital since last Saturday for two surgeries: one to remove a stomach/intestinal blockage and another to remove the drain inserted into his intestine during the first surgery.

He's doing well, happy and alert, and will hopefully get to come home tonight. Bo might be the most challenging dog we've ever had due to his OCD/Pica issues (see my previous post for more details on his mental disorder), but he's also the most affectionate dog I've ever had.

Bo is seventy-five pounds of cuddle bunny. His favorite thing to do when he's not eating the wood hot tub or a collectible that a cat knocked off a shelf onto the floor is to sit in the hubs' lap. When the hubs comes home from work, Bo wags his entire body. He adores his canine pal, Moxie--it was love at first sight for the two of them.

Bo's medical care costs are now at $3400 and still climbing. So if you'd like to help us help Bo, please buy books. Specifically, MY books.

I have two novels and two short story
collections available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com, Kobo, and many other online retailers (plus Books-A-Million brick & mortar locations as a POD: print on demand). Novels are in print AND eBook; collections are eBook only. My second novel, The Weredog Whisperer is part of a series, but can be read as a stand alone novel.

If you've bought/read all of my books, please consider "sharing" the link to this page on your social media sites and verbally with friends and co-workers who like dogs and/or books. I've set up a fundraising event on Facebook--Buy Books for Bo--that is open to the public.

I also have several copies of Weredog Whisperer and a few Haunted Housewives if you'd like to buy a personalized, signed copy/copies from me. $15 + shipping for one book; $25 + shipping for any two books. Media Mail is $3 or I can ship up to 2 books in one Priority Mail padded flat rate envelope for $6. I accept PayPal. Or cash, if you're local. Cash is good. LOL

Thanks for everyone's support!

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The Importance of Knowing Your Sh*t--Literally

1/24/2014

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The author in the 5th grade. Notice the strong resemblance to Melissa Gilbert from Little House on the Prairie.

Knowing your shit is super important, especially when you have to give an oral report in front of your science teacher and classmates. And when I say knowing your shit, I mean it literally.

Okay, so it's the 6th grade and I was the new kid at Gulf Breeze Middle School. The photo above is me in the 5th grade. Now add braces, acne, longer, stringier hair, a unibrow, and unfortunately, the same dress, something my mother never let me forget, and you'll have a good idea of what I looked like in the 6th grade. I was definitely not on the cool kids list.

Mr. V., my science teacher, loved for us to give oral reports. It saved him from actually having to teach anything. As usual, I picked some animal to study--a ring-tailed lemur, I think. I remember looking up the lemur in a bunch of books at home and the word "feces" kept coming up. I had no idea what feces was.

So I asked my parents. They told me to look it up. I didn't.

MAJOR mistake.

So now it's my turn to give an oral report. I get up in front of the class and start regaling them with all of my newfound knowledge about the ring-tailed lemur and expound on the animal's "feck-ish."

Mr. V. stops me in the middle of my report. "What are you saying? What is feck-ish?"

Oh, boy. Busted.

"I don't know," I say.

"Come here and let me see your report."

Mr. V. always liked to sit in the back of the class between the two prettiest girls during oral reports, which is pretty creepy in retrospect. I handed him my report. He looked it over.

"Fee-cees," he says. "You pronounce it as fee-cees. It means do-do."

The entire class burst out in brays of laughter to my mortal embarrassment. I wanted to shrink to the size of a flea and disappear.

Mr. V. says, "Next time, look up any words you don't know." He doesn't say it kindly. More laughter from the class. If I'd had any cool points, they'd just been taken away.

So the moral of this lesson is always know your different kinds of shit: do-do, poop, crap, feces, poo, poo-poo, ka-ka, crapola, excrement, etc. And for god's sake, know how to pronounce your shit. Never get caught not knowing your shit.

Thank you, and goodnight.

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Dog Perfume Solves Mystery

1/7/2014

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Cara the cocker spaniel squeezed through a small hole one day in our privacy fence that we didn't know about. She gallivanted through town for several hours before I even knew she was gone. And the kicker: she wasn't wearing her collar.

When I discovered she was gone, I jumped in the car and drove around the block in an ever widening radius, looking and calling for her.

No Cara.

When I got home there was a message on the answering machine from our dog groomer (this was back in 2006 before I had a cell phone). They had Cara.

Oh my gosh, how had they found her? Our dog groomer was quite a distance from our house.

The story they told me was simply amazing.

Cara had been found running on Quintard Avenue--the main drag through town and the busiest street. (I almost had heart failure when they told me this--she very easily could have been hit by a car!)

The people who stopped and picked her up noticed that she had been to a dog groomer recently and they recognized the dog perfume our groomer uses. The groomer is actually located pretty close to where Cara was found.

These very nice people took Cara to the groomer and asked if she belonged to one of their clients. The groomer recognized her (also amazing considering how many dogs they groom and that Cara wasn't wearing her collar) and they were able to look up my phone number in their records.

So a lost dog was returned to its owner all because of the doggy perfume she was wearing. I'm tellin' ya, I wish I could make this stuff up. Life really is stranger than fiction.

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This Could Only Happen to Me: a trip to the ER after getting bitten by a rat in the pet store and passing out

12/11/2013

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Words of wisdom: NEVER stick your hand inside the habitat of a mama rat no matter WHAT the pet store people tell you.

My college dorm didn't allow pets, so of course I wanted a pet rat because they were small, quiet, smart, and easy to hide should the resident advisor come around.

The pet store employee told me they had a new litter of baby rats and to go in the back of the store and pick out the ones I wanted. Alone. Unsupervised. Pet Store rule #1: don't leave customers unsupervised in the back of the store.

The baby rats were sooooo cute. There were about ten to twelve of them in a large aquarium with their mama. Since the employee had told me to pick out a pet, I naturally assumed the mother rat was friendly.

Wrongo Bongo.

I reached into that habitat and the mama bit the stink out of my ring finger. I mean, she latched right on and was ready to rumble. The pain was bright like the sun going supernova and I reacted out of instinct and shook the poor rat off my hand like a terrier. I hated to do that to an animal, but dang, her giant rodent teeth were sunk into my finger.

I held up my wounded hand to see how bad the bite was and blood welled up from my knuckle and dripped onto the floor. The sight of the blood woozed me out and next thing I knew I was falling backwards, my left arm whacking several wire cages on the way down and I fell full out, smacking the back of my head on the hard concrete floor.

I came to with the pet store employee leaning over me. "Are you all right? What happened?"

"The rat bit me." My watch had been sliced right off my wrist during the fall.

Now, here was the amazing part. No first aid was administered, no accident report filled out, no discount offered, and me being young and naïve had no idea that I could scare the bejeezus out of the store manager by threatening a law suit over wrongful injury and misadventure in their store. Like a good little Southern girl I paid for my rats and left with a BITE wound and a big BUMP on my skull.

And then my finger swelled up. Like a sausage. Which wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been wearing my class ring. My finger was so big the ring was cutting into my flesh. Off to the ER I went.

These days doctors have to report animal bites of any kind to law enforcement. But this was back in the mid-80s. The ER doc looked at my giant finger. "We're going to have to cut your ring off."

"Just get it OFF! I don't care how you do it." I wouldn't normally talk that way to a doctor, but I was feeling desperate and quite anxious.

He cut the ring off. I still have it. Never got it fixed. It reminds me of what a naïve dumbass I was. And you should have seen the look on everone's face when they read my paperwork.

Reason for Visit: Bitten by rat in pet store.

They probably thought the place was infested by rats or something. It's amazing they didn't call fhe HEALTH DEPARMENT.

I was given antibiotics and sent home with my giant finger, ruined ring and a major life lesson. That knuckle was stiff and swollen for quite some time. It's amazing I didn't get sepsis in the joint. My dad was bitten (accidentally) by one of his dogs once and his hand swelled up and he had to go to the ER for sepsis (a serious bacterial infection).

The name of this post is "This Could Only Happen to Me," but now that I think about it, this could have happened to my sister. A basset hound bit her face when she was three, and when she was seven she got a nail stuck in her foot AND fell on some bleachers and cut her shin open to the BONE. She also fell off a ladder onto the high heel of a SHOE when she was working in a shoe store. So, this seems to be a genetic propensity--weird-ass accidents.

Oh, and then there's my brother who got a stick rammed down his throat and his leg sliced open by barnacles and who coughed so hard one time that he ruptured a lung. And my dad whose arm swelled up from wasp stings.

Lordy, it's amazing we've survived to pass on our genes.

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At Least I Had On Clean Underwear

12/9/2013

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You know how mothers always want you to have on clean underwear in case you're ever in an accident? When I was in the 7th grade, I passed out during an AMBULANCE demonstration, of all things, fell face first and ate the pavement, and then got carted off to the hospital in the very ambulance used in the demonstration. And the first thing my mother said to me in the ER was not "Are you okay," but "Why did you have to wear that today?"

My underwear, though, was clean. She should have been thankful for that.

I was wearing plaid pants, a t-shirt that didn't match, and what we called Hong Kong shoes which were flip flops made out of bamboo. Or maybe faux-bamboo. Also, being that I was a gawky tween, I hadn't washed my hair in several days and it lay lank and stringy on the back of my neck.

My mom was mortified that I'd gone to the hospital this way. Never mind that I'd scraped off half my face in the middle school parking lot or that I'd passed out for no apparent reason during class. Appearance was everything. I was mortified that she was mortified. Why couldn't I have gotten a call from the psychic hotline that morning to alert me to the impending doom that was to be the most embarrassing day of the 7th grade for me? Why, why, why?

Mr. Butler, my marketing teacher, thought an ambulance demonstration would be a cool teaching moment. Why we were studying occupations during a marketing class was beyond me since marketing is about ADVERTISING, but hey, this was 1976.

The class certainly got their teaching moment that day. I passed out face forward--BAM--and the EMTs whisked me onto a stretcher and zoomed me over the Pensacola Bay bridge to Sacred Heart Hospital. I was lucky I didn't break my nose (that would happen later that summer at the beach) or knock out my teeth (that would happen to my cousin while we were all jumping on my bed--in the DARK) or bust my lip on my braces.

Nope, a GIANT scab formed across one cheek and I was introduced to Neosporin (a wonderous ointment.) They never did figure out why I fainted. Probably locked my knees. The whole episode was far more embarrassing than painful. There's nothing like being the center of negative attention, especially in middle school when life is awkward enough.

But hey, at least I had on clean underwear.

The irony? No one even saw my underwear. I didn't have to get undressed or put on a hospital gown.

Oh, the humanity! Ha!

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Flying high: why you should take pain meds when flying post-op even if you think they'll make you barf

12/5/2013

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Seven years ago I flew out to Los Angeles from Alabama to become a partial cyborg.

Okay, maybe not a cyborg per se, but I did have one hip totally replaced with a titanium implant and the other one resurfaced with a--you guessed it--titanium implant, which may not make me a cyborg, but does make going through the metal detector at the airport a super fun and super slow experience. Since I'm still pretty young, airport security personnel always eye me suspiciously when they have to scan me for metal. It's a trade off: I get to walk, run, and dance again, but I have to suffer the perpetual delay in getting scanned, frisked, and patted down every single time I fly.

But I digress.

I lost a ton of blood during the operation to the point where I went into A-Fib which is short for Atrial Fibulation. Essentially my blood pressure bottomed out to zero and there was nothing left in the heart to pump. The surgeon had already left, but a cardiologist was called in and got my heart started again. Kinda like jump-starting a car that has stalled.

As a consequence of the blood loss, I was super nauseated and I couldn't keep anything in my stomach. But the doctors and nurses thought it was the pain meds, so I didn't get any after surgery. Fortunately, I didn't really feel much pain just lying around in the hospital bed. They finally gave me pain meds on the third day post-op when I went into mild shock and started shaking uncontrollably and feeling pretty darn yucky overall. Amazingly, the meds stopped the shaking and the yucky feeling and I was able to eat and keep down solid food.

So, fast forward now to the flight home cross country from Los Angeles to Atlanta. I didn't want to take the risk of having to throw up on a plane. I hate throwing up. HATE it. So on the off chance that the pain meds might make me throw up while several thousand feet in the air, I didn't take any. The hubs had been super thoughtful and booked us front row seats on a plane that was too small for first class. The idea was that I'd be close the restroom and would have more leg room.

Which was great until I started to feel yucky and shake uncontrollably during the final descent. And since there weren't any seats in front of us, the flight attendant had made me stow my purse in the overhead bin. I could hold a fifty pound Stephen King book in my lap the ENTIRE flight, but I couldn't have my little purse containing my MEDS in my lap. Go figure.

And right before the shock set in, we hit some turbulence and the captain put the fasten seat belt sign on. I asked the flight attendant if I could get my purse to take some medication and she said no. I gritted my teeth and hunkered down to get through the rest of the flight. But as soon as we landed, everyone else jumped up in the aisle and the hubs couldn't get to my purse in the overhead bin. Forget trying to appeal to people's empathy. There was no frelling way people were going to wait a single moment longer than they had to.

So more grinning and bearing ensued and I was counting the seconds before the plane cleared and I could get some #&^ %pain meds in my system.

So, the plane is FINALLY empty and I take my meds. I'm feeling REALLY BAD now and it took about half an hour for them to kick in. I hobble off the plane on my crutches, my hips swollen to the point where it looked like I had on a sideways bustle, and look for the wheelchair we had asked for back in Los Angeles.

"Where's the wheelchair?" I ask a flight attendant.

"There's not one?" she says. "I called for three."

I cuss up a storm in my head. Some lousy person took my wheelchair. Who would do such a thing?

So they call for another one. Now remember that only FOUR days before I'd had parts of my bones cut off and replaced with metal. FOUR days. I could use crutches, but not to hobble the ENTIRE length of the Atlanta airport.

So the hubs and I wait for a wheelchair.

And wait. And wait.

And wait some more.

When one finally arrives, one of the arm rests is dented in toward the seat and I just about have to jam my swollen hips into it to sit down. Of course, this jamming is right on my incision sites and hurts like hell and I start crying. The only thing I hate worse than crying in public is throwing up.

The flight attendant who wouldn't let me get my pain meds from the overhead bin said in this sing songy voice, "Oh look, she's crying."

If I hadn't just had major surgery, I would have leapt out of that wheelchair and kicked her sorry ass from there to Sunday. Of course, if I hadn't just had major surgery, I wouldn't have needed pain meds nor a wheelchair. But still...

So the moral of the story is: take your pain meds before you fly even if you think you'll throw up. Or stash your meds in a fake book on your lap.

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Buy Books for Bo: an Update

The Importance of Knowing Your Sh*t--Literally

Dog Perfume Solves Mystery

This Could Only Happen to Me: a trip to the ER after getting bitten by a rat in the pet store and passing out

At Least I Had On Clean Underwear

Flying high: why you should take pain meds when flying post-op even if you think they'll make you barf

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