Tontine Therapy

The trusty old CPAP has its benefits, that is for certain.

A recap:

Among E@L's many deviations is his septum, thanks to his nose's interception of a speeding, suddenly expanding in size and eclipsing the batsmen and the steel pole of the net off which it ricocheted, cricket ball, way back when No1 son was a rising star in the juniors and his own weaknesses in those left-arm round-the-wicket mediums were becoming obvious, slipping to well-bashable slows and he was ignominiously dropped to the 3rds, were no one could bat so it didn't matter that he could no longer bowl (shin splints, rotator cuff). Add precipitous weight gain to that, also thanks to cricket, viz: the copious beers and sausages in wrapped white bread and ingested in a thrice weekly ritual (the game and training) integral to the social aspect of playing in the 3rds, in a 2nd Div district league of a non-descript provincial city in a distant country girt by sea, and you have a person who snores, a person whom someone can easily HATE. E@L has told you all this..

That shattered ethmoidal plate has restricted his air intake capacity too, and he finds it difficult to breathe with sufficient efficiency when right lateral decubitus. Those BreatheRight nasal strips help, but only so much, and they don't prevent his snoring.

Industrial strength snoring, as mentioned. And eventually he developed sleep apnoea as well. It took an inordinate time for E@L to discover this, and its severity, sleeping as he used do back in that land-girt, open-cut mine, alone. No doubt much of the blame for the brain-rot which afflicts his cogitative abilities and his (what was it again?) memory can be directly directed at these frequent near-ischaemic episodes. There was no-one there to prod him, gently or otherwise, out of his semi-comatose state, to rouse him, to shake him, to kick his shin, to stuff a pillow over his face and press, press, press until the snoring stopped.

So E@L snored on: he dropped his soft-palate, stopped breathing for 20secs and, spluttering into state just below consciousness, took a great last gasp in order to breathe again for a few seconds. And the cycle of little-deaths started, and so he grew dumber and dumber and... [fuck, this is starting to sound like a fairy-tale!]

~~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L is using his third CPAP, one especially designed for travelling: it's lighter, smaller, etc... His main machine sits at home, unloved for long periods like this current three week stint in Thailand, and it has a humidifier, which makes it a bit bulky to cart around. The small portable one's base is a bit slippery so he places it (upside down so it doesn't suck in all the bed-bugs) on the bed next to the pillows. The hose he wraps over the pillows and the nasal-plug mask is light and barely noticeable if he keeps his nose-hair and moustache trimmed (hence the hipsterish half-height mo). It is a simple matter to turn off the machine, easily de-nasalify the plugs and trundle off to the toilet...

AIYAH! those bathroom lights. Why so fracking bright!

~~~~~~~~~~~

There are several advantages to sleeping with CPAP.

Well, number one, fucking obviously, is that he can breathe properly and not wake the sleeping hooker(s), nor, in the cheaper places E@L stays, the guy in the next hotel room and his hooker(s). And not choke and effectively cut off the blood supply to his (E@L's, not the guy in the next room) brain by dropping his oxygen saturation to coma level in that apnoeic half-minute.

Second, or third if you count the last sentence which is really a follow on from the number one benefit, he can sleep under the sheets.

Third/corollary to Third/Fourth/whatever: he (or his hooker) can fart while his head is under the sheets because his air supply is coming from the CPAP on the outside! Brilliant!

Fifth (fuck it): E@L has never tried this, but he supposes he could use it as a cunnilingus snorkel if he were that way inclined (to sexually gratify a hooker, pffft!). Carefully clean with an antiseptic wipe after each use.

And sixth, he can sleep on his stomach, face into the Tontine, and not suffocate. Awesome, as he often tosses this way and that as he tries to drop off, and might end up face-down [end UP face DOWN ha!] a few times.

But why (other than the hypothetical cunnilingual point) is E@L under the sheets, you ask. Not just to see if he can Dutch Oven himself faultlessly, but also to hide his alcoholically lucifugous eyes and, by extension (the optic nerves), his brain, from the all those hotel room lights: eerie green and red USB chargers, the red glowing fuse-confirmer of his multi-plug extension cord, the slow blinking fire-detector, the ineluctable glow through curtain which never quite closes off the big city's 24hr bright lights. But all this candle power is never enough to light up the path for his 4am trip to the bathroom and to enable him roughly determine the correction of his direction. And so, on go those retinal blasting lights every time.

But new on the scene is an eyemask, one from Singapore Airlines. Black. From First Class, the time he got that well-overdue upgrade. (Yes you can ask for them anytime, and you get them in business class, but not the black ones - it's like the black Amex, they are only for the high, um, fliers.)

What E@L does now is sleep with both the CPAP and eye-mask on. And, get this, with the blinds open! That way, when his bladder wakes him there is enough ambient light to either wake the AEI-worker for another go with his piss-hardon, or to trundle to the loo and not turn on the lights!

Why didn't he think of this simple life-hack earlier? It's brilliant, amazing, life hacking, he means life-changing. He is even considering sending it to Corey Doctorow so it can go viral on BoingBoing, or even LifeHacker itself.

~~~~~~~~~~

But! (There's always a "but", like when females tell you that they love you, bu-u-ut something about why they hate you as well. "I love you bu-u-ut you fucking snore like a fucking demented animal, getoutofmylifenow!" for example.

Bu-u-ut, the dye in the black eyemask comes off.

Oh NO!

It's not onto E@L's face thankfully but, to the horror of the hotel's laundry (he anticipates), it does silhouettes of itself onto the pillow, like the shadows of evaporated humans on the walls of Hiroshima. You can almost track E@L's nocturnal movements (body movements, not bowel) from its telltale marks. Oh dear.

Ah well, he sighs and admits to his privileged, arrogant, white-mans-burden, post-colonial self, it's a small price to pay for not having to turn on the bathroom lights.

He means it may be tough on the laundry staff, but it's a small price to pay for

E@L

St Patricks Day Gastritis

(best to go to YouTube if you want to see the whole screen of the vid. Then come back - it's an extra hit to my stats. Is this a Tom Lehrer song? Certainly sounds like soemthing he would write.)

~~~~~~~~~~

E@L's intestinal ethanol absorption seems to have resulted in a bout of stomach problems that you probably don't really want to hear much about. But gentle and faithful readers, tough, you're getting the details anyway.

~~~~~~~~~

The effective parts of the day began at 4:40pm at an Irish pub near Boat Quay (working from home again) when the first Guinness was ordered. Due to some confusion thanks to a certain person's (not E@L) impenetrable Aussie accent and ferociously fast delivery - "Twoaneruffpines" - was what E@L heard. Play-back half speed - two and a half pints. Geddit? Sure enough the Singaporean waitress didn't geddit. She looked like a deer in the headlights even when he repeated the order. And, bless her Singlish heart, she placed two half-pints down for the three of us.

Two HALF pints, geddit?

We drank them anyway.

Then we drank the real pints, correctly ordered over the bar eschewing the waitress who might have been a bit miffed that we passed her by, when they arrived. After that lot went down, another pint arrived. When that was finished, another pint was in order (it was the moral thing to do, as one of the Bruce's always says). Perhaps another pint? It would be insulting not to. When three more friends showed up, yet another round of pints for all came through, according to plan. It was then their turn to order a shout in sequence so, sequentially, pint after pint after pint was consumed. There were some french fries involved at some point. As the late comers were several pints behind, we had to allow them order us more pints. Then we ordered some pints for them. It was a merry and generous occasion.

Food. Who needs a curry? E@L fancies a curry. Indian/Punjab place around the corner, up on the flaming roof. Great view, scads of food, bottle of plonk, how's you father. Problems of the world solved - anyone write those down?

Downstairs, where did everybody go? There's just E@L and one of the Bruces (there are many who are Bruce, he contains multitudes) and we're at what used to be a Man U bar. Bruce the Mancunian shakes EVERYBODY'S hands, unless he kisses their cheeks because they're ladies, as the girls all are, bloody lovely ladies too.

Amazingly, hey, this is Singapore, we get a Guinness on the house! What, where? FREE!

But that is not helping E@L. The curry, way too much, the Guinness, how bloody many? Can't go on... Free or not, it's just not going to sink. He goes on, tries to at least. Nah, no way: Bruce, I'm off. E@L leaves half a pint of Guinness - well that evens it up for the night, symmetry is good. Like a woman's symmetry, mystery, beauty, like no, not 4FoW, like taxi man take me home...

~~~~~~~~

E@L wakes up at 5am, after maybe 2hrs of blissful rest in the grip of his anti-erotic CPAP machine. No, no-one is next to him. He DID go directly home last night.

But his gut feels like a hand-grenade has gone off inside. Oh St Patrick, help me, he cries. This is wrong. Something is decidedly wrong. In the toilet he pisses, takes a swig from the tap, rinses out the dead rodents, hand-cups half a glass of rehydration but it doesn't go down easy, water - fish fuck in it - and it's back to bed. His belly is hard as a Guinness barrel and about the same, no bigger, size. He is sweating - the air-con was off, that's why. The pillow is drenched, the straps on the CPAP also wet, now coldly damp and repulsive to the touch.

Awakened at 8am with the phone screaming "Spoonman" at him, full volume. It is his alarm, and the scrolling massage reads, allegedly, he can't put his head in a place where he can get it into focus, "Take your fucking tablets". He silences the shaking of the world with a swipe across its Guinness sticky surface. There are several txts from Bruce wanting to know, at 2am, at 3am, at 4am, if he is in Brix or the 4FoWs. Oh St Patrick, save me.

He was in shorts, green shorts, last night, there they are on the computer monitor. They wouldn't have let him into Brix in shorts, it's a classy joint (unless he was with Bruce who would once again have kissed all the female staff and shaken the manager's hand - who would waives the dress restrictions for Bruce and his mate with the other, probably get us a free drink too) with classy hookers.

He feels like shit. Bloated, stretched, tight across the gut, uneasy and sick. Hangover, he reasons, not unexpected. Gut full of Guinness and curry, gonna take a while to get over it. He showers, takes his fucking tablets. Got into his work clothes. Felt sick and distended still. Maybe if he did the bulimia thing - hey no, he's just swallowed $30 of medication, don't want to waste it. But he felt like he would be so much better if he could take this awful pressure away from his stomach. He took off his work-clothes again. He looked down into the toilet bowl. We wondered if this feeling was really in his stomach, like the actual stomach sac, not just the metonymical stomach. He didn't throw up, even with a quick finger-test of his gag reflex.

(It felt like the time when he had eaten bad prawns or something, maybe it was the salmon mousse, that time in Phuket. Bloated, tender, food sitting in his stomach all night, he did throw up then, and through the night felt the tenderness move through his intestine, jejunum, ileum, into the colon, tenderness and unwellness all the way. That took 12 hours or so to work the length of his GIT. Then came the explosive diarrhoea.)

He went out of the bathroom again, lay on his bed. His stomach was tender, it hurt to touch. He pressed it in, here, there, ouch. It was actually sore, tender, like he had been hit, kicked, fallen off the rook of the Indian/Punjab place. After a few presses into the painful spots, he quickly decided to go back the bathroom, he had stirred things up with his prodding. He lent over the toilet and ...

Again ...

Once more ...

Oh St Patrick! ...

~~~~~~~~~~

Mop and bucket to aisle E@L!

~~~~~~~~~~~

His felt way less bloated now, but still unwell, somewhat glazed. Still pain when he prodded, well don't fucking prod you idiot... He went back to bed. He lay for a minute, felt clammy and unhealthy but no longer nauseous, until he had a sensation of urgency from the specific vicinity of his arse. Don't forget me, his arse said. I'm not waiting 12 hours! I have a message for you, and it's coming through Express Post!

Quick, out, Egyptian cotton sheets, 1200tpi!

Just made it to the bathroom, lucky he had cleaned the bowl just before! Who wants to sit on a toilet seat covered in half digested rogan josh, aloo paneer, murgh masala, dahl saag (oooh the dahl saag, so yellow, so runny!) garlic nan and let's not forget those french fries.

WHOOSH!...

WHOOSH!...

WHOOSH!...

OH St Pat - WHOOSH!...

Oh Saint Jesus, he said looking back as he waddled to the shower, it's pure Guinness, gone straight through.

He showered for the second time that morning, cleaned the bowl for the second time that morning. Slowly he moved to the bedroom, pulled out his gym shorts (yes he has gym shorts, cotton ones like tracksuit material - what a struggle to find they were, - try getting anything except polyester in this day and age! Ha good luck. OK, 4th floor at Meritus Mandarin shopping centre, whatever it's called) to protect the sheets (Egyptian, etc) and went back to ... the toilet!

WHOOSH!...

WHOOSH!...

Surely there couldn't be any - WHOOSH!...

Flush, 3rd shower, fuck the towel is saturated - get another one, back to bed.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Later that day, some ginger and lemon tea. Ow, the mere thought of anything in his stomach hurt. The tea hurt. But he felt better with some fluid. Need more rehydration. Some salt replacement - only have Berrocca - that'll have do, in some warm water.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later that day, no whooshes for a while, he had to go to the office (he had emailed in sick, maybe food poisoning) and pick up his laptop for another trip to BKK on Sunday.

Boss-san said to get back to bed and, laughing, you look so skinny!

Ha bloody ha.

~~~~~~~~~~~

On the way home, he dropped in to see his GP and told her the story (a precise of this) and she shook her head,: alcoholic not a virus, not food poisoning. Looks 100% like St Patrick's Day gastritis to me, she smiled grimly.

Double the dose of Omeprazole, zero dose of alcohol. A month on the wagon would be good, please stop with the binges. Last time was Rugby 7s in Hong Kong, she recalled. (That one resulted in a gastroscopy!) Just take it easy, take it steady. I know you don't drink much most of the times (E@L blushes, the lies he has told).

E@L, look after yourself, we all love you. No, she didn't say that, but shit, wouldn't it be nice - she IS gorgeous.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

That was yesterday. E@L continues his unwellness today, the tenderness, the pain whenever food goes in and the stomach is asked to do something destructively sulphuric. He missed two invitations tonight - for teppanyaki at Chjimes, for something spicy at Arab St.

Cannot eat, he replied to both txts. Cannot drink, cannot come.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Still, he will go to Thailand tomorrow, has already packed in fact. He have to be in Intensive Care before he'd miss a trip there.

Managed some Vegemite on toast for dinner, carbs, fat (butter) and that hit of VitB and salt! How can you go wrong with that?

After midnight. Time for some more lemon and ginger tea. Remind me to get a fresh packet.

E@L

Trouble Up Mill

You can't stay in Thailand for too long (or E@L can't) without a tad of tummy trouble. Over the last several weeks in Bangkok, things have been... hand, outspread, waggles ... variable in the lower reaches of E@L's - what shall we call it? - of his GI-tract. Can't say what causes this issue most times, but every few days, sure enough...

And this has consequences, and not only for the housekeeping staff. Too much strain on the venous system in that area can result in... the need for certain medical preparations that might or might not have the letter H in them. We are sure you know the symptoms, so there's no need to elaborate. With such pathological conditions one has to be careful with the grade of sandpaper they provide in the toilets of the cheaper hotels. This hotel is OK (freaking near on Bht500/night, what!). Though certainly not the hospital he was visiting today. A hospital with toilet paper? What were you thinking? Next you'll be expecting soap, or asking for something clean to dry your hands on. Foolish person.

One has to be prepared. So one bring one's own (one's hotel's own) toilet paper and one finds some appropriate moist towelettes, such as one's usual baby-bum cleaners. Something soft, cool and pampering to staunch the flow of blood. Oops, and I promised I wasn't going to go into details.

~~~~~~~~~~

"Hmm, that pickled vegetable on my boiled pork and rice had a sour taste", E@L thinks. Too late, he had swallowed one small bit before he notices, but he pushes the remainder away as hordes of hospital personal, visitors and patients, some curious, some indifferent, weave around his chair in the heat of the old car-park that is now a clothing and food market, and a restaurant...

~~~~~~~~~~

After work that night, E@L stands up from the shabu-shabu table. There is still some tofu and a "rugby ball" of minced fish paste left in the soup-pot. Whatever, he thinks, I'm stuffed. And a gurgle of bowel-gas moves across his mid-stomach. Those pickles, he thinks. And as he stands, the rear of his braces (he's wearing braces of late - something to do with the Hip/Waist Ratio and gravity) snags on something and pops. The elastic flies up behind and hits him on the scone. Reaching around he grabs at the dangling band and finds that the leather strap between the two buckles has given away. He holds the end of his braces and sees the torn leather and the single intact buckle. The other one is still on the rear of his trousers. Useless.

He sighs.

He undoes the free buckle at the back and the buckles at the front and stuffs the braces into his bag. His trousers start to slide down, duh. With his bag in one hand he sticks his other hand into a pocket and tries to maintain some vertical force against this clownish behaviour of his trousers. His colleague sort of smiles, in that amused look of embarrassment that Thais have mastered. They move out of the MK restaurant and E@L fells something else going wrong in the internal parts (the GI-tract, remember) of his pants department - "Trouble up mill", he thinks - his bowels give a twinge of cramp and another gurgle.

"I just wann buy some breakfast," says Nit. "For my daughter tomollow." They are in a bakery part of the supermarket area (near the restaurant) on their way out to the car-park. She starts picking up various soft bready things. E@L thinks he is OK, he can last until Nit drops him at the hotel. Putting his bag down while Nit chooses dough, he pulls his trousers up over the lower bulge of his belly and they feel a bit tight there, but no, immediately they slide down a little bit. He can't take his hand out of his pocket or they will fall down. Another gurgle. Is this urgent? sometimes you can't be certain until it's too late.

E@L sees a toilet sign. He'd better go, risk whatever scene from Saw IV is hidden behind the door, just to be on the safe side. In the bag, below where his braces are, he has a toilet roll from his hotel and the sachet of those new moist wipes he had hurriedly bought yesterday at the Boots in Paragon. ("Yes, they OK for heemarrhoys," the Pharmacist had said, as she gave E@L quite a strange look. "What's your problem, lady?" thinks E@L. That fact that she now is aware of his is neither here nor up there.)

He tells Nit that he is off the hawng nam for a minute, just a minute, while she waits in the queue with some things like a small bread-rolls only with saveloys poking out the ends. How can anyone eat something so disgusting? thinks E@L.

'Next Toilet 3rd Floor' says a sign next to the toilet door. The MK restaurant and the bakery are in the basement of Robinsons Department Store, so as one expect, the toilet actually appears clean and tidy. Across from the urinals, there are three cubicles. The larger one on the left, which must be for disabled, is occupied. The one the right has a sign, A4 paper stuck on to the door with two pieces of clear Scotch tape - "Out Of Order" scribbled in English, and "Please Use Toilet on 3 Floor". Disabled, thinks E@L. There is another sign. This one is on the laminate of the partition between the door of the right cubicle and the door to the middle cubicle. This is also a piece of A4 paper. It is stuck on with two pieces of Scotch tape and it also reads "Out Of Order". E@L wonders why they would put two signs up for the one broken toilet.

The door to the middle cubicle is open. The floor is dry. The bowl look clean. The seat-lid is down. There is a flip-lid bucket for crap-soiled toilet paper, but - well, duh! - there is no toilet paper.

E@L kicks the seat-lid up with a shoe-toe and the water in the bowl appears of normal depth and clean. Gurgle... Spasm... Uh-oh! Lucky he didn't wait to get to the hotel... E@L quickly closes and snibs the door as he swings around, put his bag safe on the door-hook, allows his trousers to fall, tugs down his new Marks and Spencer cotton and lycra briefs (they had no shorts, he prefer the shorts) and...

HOLY CRAAAAAaaaAAAAAPP.

Pain. Discomfort. More pain. Saw V. Sore *. Whew. Teeth-marks.

Most of the damage can be mopped up with his roll of toilet paper, but he needs those moist wipes. He reaches up to his bag on the back of the door, fossicks, and takes out the blue sachet. He hadn't noticed before, but there is a green cartoon alligator on the front of the sachet. Huh? Whatever. He peels back the cover and removes a towelette. Over the obvious odours in the room, comes something else. It's a sweet scent. Playful, young. What is it? He tries to place it. It smells sort of... purple. Bubble-gum. E@L has bubble-gum flavored, he means scented toilet wipes. Sigh. Whatever. They work as well as any...

And no he couldn't taste ... get the full bubble-gum experience.

E@L rises and pulls up his underwear and trousers. He flushes the toilet. Water pours down and everything, ugh, spins around and around. And the "water" level rises and rises... Oh no! E@L quickly drops the lid and, as he struggles to hold up his pants, he takes down his bag, he open the door and tries his escape... and notices two half torn pieces of Scotch tape on the cubicle door.

(No, fortunately, the toilet did not overflow!)

~~~~~~~~~~~

When E@L finds Nit, she is nibbling a piece of her daughter's bread rolls that she has pinched off. She asks if he would prefer to take the sky-Train. Nononono, says E@L. Ok then, would be it OK if she drops E@L off on this side of the road and he climbs up the foot-bridge? Nonononono, says E@L.

E@L is still holding his pants up with one hand in his pocket (it all looks very suspect), he is standing in a bakery, he is wincing with four hundred types of pain, and he is trying to convince Nit to do whatever it takes to get him right to the hotel front door in her car; he doesn't want to walk anywhere, dammit he *can't* walk - his pants will fall down and he'll shit himself, doesn't she understand this?!

Then, I kid you not, E@L gets a txt from Mercer - "I have had an epiphany. The universe is the most elaborate Rube Goldberg machine ever constructed." E@L txts back the abbreviated version of the above debacle. "That's exactly what I mean! That's how the universe operates!" replies Mercer.

Sigh. Don't you hate it when Americans are right? It's so ... unexpected...



E@L