Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Best Laid Plans

So there I was, planning all sorts of daily updates on the start of shooting for Falling Skies season two... it would have been GLORIOUS! And I can attest that the first day went great. It was great to see so many familiar faces (cast of course and also crew from season one, but also old friends from Battlestar Galactica) and it felt like a year had passed like nothing.

Then... after day one...

...DISASTER.

For me, not the show. When a tummy ache turned really really nasty, I made the classic 4AM pilgrimage to the nearest E.R. and was in surgery eight hours later. As I write this, I've just been released after seven fun filled days in the G.I. ward. Sporting an incision that makes our creepy skitters look like (find topical reference, Mark, think, man, think!), oh hell, it makes them look pretty.

I could write about the experience, but "day three, it hurts!" and "morphine is my friend!" would be pretty much the sum total of my take away. That, and to remind everyone that if you start feeling really really bad, don't wait or hope it blows over -- get to the Doctor.

I'm just glad it happened in Canada and I can enjoy their free health care... wait? That's just for Canadians?! I have to pay?! NOW it really hurts...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm very sorry you went through that. I've had some nasty tummy aches, but they passed after a few hours. What was the cause?

Watch out for that foreign health care. When I visited Austria in 2003 on a German language program, this one friend in the group was a smoker. My eye kept getting irritated and red and I went to the excellent hospital in Vienna after a week or so of things not getting better; they treated me within a few minutes, were kind and efficient, and gave me a prescription for special eye drops; it turned out being exposed to my friend exhaling cigarette smoke in my eyes was the cause. Anyway, despite the great treatment, my father got a bill for a few thousand dollars.

So, be prepared and pay it off quickly because it'll just grow. I'm glad you had a decent time with Canada's health care system; I've had problems because, it turns out, doctors are condescending, control-freak jerks here, too!

Hope you heal up alright.

Mark Verheiden said...

I had an "incarcerated hernia", which people should google before (not during!) supper. These can cause life threatening problems so I repeat, when you've got a powerful ache in your gulliver (everyone remembers that word from Clockwork Orange, right?) better safe than sorry. But the surgery appears to have gone well (fingers crossed) and I came up with a feature spec idea while lying around in my morphine haze... Lindsay Lohan IS Dirty Harry. (Oops, I just gave it away for free!)

Anonymous said...

I have never seen "A Clockwork Orange"; I remember sitting in my dorm room years ago, listening to a song that I was really enjoying for the first time from a used CD I had just bought; I look over in curiosity to my scummy, cheapskate illegally-downloading, well-off room-mate and he's watching some awful rape scene on his computer from what I find out is "A Clockwork Orange." I'm kind of traumatized and, whenever I listen to that music, I think of that woman getting raped; it's awful. I can't listen to that same music again and give up altogether on the Australian band The Church months later. (This was probably more due to the band not being that good than anything else, but I still want to blame it on the drama of the horror of seeing bits of that movie.) I realize two things from then on.

1. I don't want to see this movie ("Eyes Wide Shut" had been released around the same time and even its premise sounded sleazy and didn't help Kubrick's reputation in my mind.)

2. I had better make sure the conditions are right for the first time I listen to music I aim to love. For that reason, even though it's not that good a record, every time I listen to Pulp's "We Love Life" as well as Morrissey's "Bona Drag", I think of the joyous time of putting up and decorating my parents' Christmas tree. Years later, I also wait over a year to finish my stressful degree before listening to Radiohead's "In Rainbows" in full, which only built up expectations before letting them down. So, this process has been a mixed bag.

I'm glad you're feeling better, though.