Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Amazing Things are Happening Here!

I get a lot of questions about Frank’s transplant. I’ve been through it before, so I pretty much have already heard them all.

I’m going to put them here along with answers. This will be a work in progress, so, I’ll add more as they come up. Feel free to check back PRN. Continue Reading…

Today Frank left the CTICU and checked into a hotel. Well, not really, but it was close to one. He’s on the 9th floor Transplant Unit, which is near the McKeen Pavillion, the hotel within the hospital and around the corner is the Windows on the Hudson restaraunt. I looked inside, thinking maybe I’d have lunch there, but it looked like the wait would be too long.

While I was waiting for him to get settled into his room, I sat in a waiting area at the end of the hall. Had it not been a misty rain and foggy, it would have been a spectacular view of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge.

But, a sunny day will come, I’m sure in due time. Things are pretty sunny for Frank anyway. He’s happy to be in a normal room with a bathroom and shower. Only a few tubes left preventing him from using it.

He’s still got a little pain and they’re giving him medicine to manage it. So he’s mostly content to sit and rest most of the time. He does have his laptop set up and is online, so watch for his posts on Facebook and wherever else he hangs out. I’m sure he’s got a lot of fantasy football to catch up on. Priorities, you know. Continue Reading…

One thing about being in an unfamiliar place is there is a lot of anxiety associated with it. We do it to ourselves. We get worked into a tizzy over imagined things when there is no reason.

You hear things and see things in TV about “the big city” in general and New York specifically. But they play on our fears and are mostly unfounded. A couple of people get mugged and a city of eight million gets a bad rap because we focus on that.

One of the things that comes up as an insecurity of mine is finding things – places, services, stuff I need. Just because I don’t know off the top of my head, I get nervous when I need to locate something, anything here. And it’s all unfounded.

For instance, I needed to ship something home. Where do I do that? Anxiety. Relax. Research it. Got online, I found not one, but two UPS stores on a street that I had gone down on the bus that very day. Problem solved. How to choose which one? One of them is at an intersection where I can get off the bus, go to the store, walk around the corner and get on a subway line and ride it one stop the the hospital. It was actually easier than continuing on with the bus to the end and transferring to a second bus.

I’ve just got to learn to go with it. Let it go. Que, sera, sera. Continue Reading…

If you remember me complaining about the packaging of the food in the cafeteria, then this is a followup. I figured out how to deal with multiple items, you just put a food cover over the plate, then you can set another item on top.

Here’s my salad today, on top of the entree. I even laid a bottle of soda on it’s side and had room for Oreos too.

It seems the solution to the ultra-green box is a piece of plastic. Eco-freaks, you win some, you lose some.