isoglossia

*PLEASE NOTE: Irony is used in this post. DO NOT use information here as expert medical advice! See comments.

I have been without my appendix for an entire year now. I really haven’t missed it. In fact, if anyone reading this still has their appendix, I heartily recommend that you contact your health care professional and have the oversight rectified immediately.

At the end of last June I flew from Trieste to Warsaw, where Magda picked me up and we drove on to Toruń. There she had been packing her stuff for the big move to Slovenia. Just the day before we were supposed to get on the road for the long drive south, though, something funny happened in my gut.

If you have your appendix, that means that you have never experienced the joys of acute appendicitis. This is something I recommend avoiding. Go have it removed now, before it’s too late. Is there some reason you’re clinging on to something useless inside you called your “vermiform process”, for chrissake?

I spent Sunday afternoon in an increasingly question-mark-shaped posture, curling myself tighter and tighter around the pain zone (which I now know is called “McBurney’s point“). At times I thrashed. At first I thought it was just terrible indigestion, but as the afternoon wore on I became more and more concerned that it was something serious. The pain combines elements of sharpness, as I imagine a knife in the gut would feel; extreme gastro-intestinal discomfort, the vomit-or shit-my-pants-or-maybe-both feeling of food poisoning; and FIRE. I wished myself unborn. When I couldn’t stand up unassisted, Magda took me to the emergency room. I was slightly relieved when the doctor said that it was my appendix and that it would have to come out “immediately.” When you have acute appendicitis, there’s no time like “immediately.” “Immediately” feels way too late. Believe me. Stop what you’re doing and go have it out.

I woke up with stainless steel staples in my belly and lots of lovely drugs in my blood. Also a distended bladder, which Magda helped me deal with. We still treasure that as an intimate moment. I never loved her more than at that time. And during most of the following days, which I spent in a druggy haze, unable to move my upper body, reading “The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories”. The hospital was quite nice, and the stories were very polite and helpful. Magda visited constantly, ran roughshod over the visiting hours, and lobbied relentlessly to get me released so that we could begin our drive south.

Though the appendectomy was splendid, the healing up of the gaping, pus-y wound was less so. They recommend against driving 1,000 km with fresh staples in your stomach, no matter how far you recline. I couldn’t swim until very late in the summer, what with the staples and the open abdominal wound and all. Now I have an unsightly scar that looks like a miniature ass-crack, but no appendix behind it. They’re overrated. I won’t socialize with people who still have their appendices. I’m trying to get Magda and Adam to have theirs out ASAP. Get rid of yours. Do it now.

Now if I could only do something about these tonsils…

Add to the list of good reasons to go home for lunch:

See your son eat. You will be there to watch your spouse feed a concoction made of beets to your infant son. Observe as he avidly gulps down the ruby-red beetroot smoothie. Congratulate yourself that you are raising a vegetable-loving little boy, not afraid of a little iron and beta-carotene. Then, when you perform the late-afternoon diaper change, you will be marginally less likely to jump to the conclusion that your son has contracted some variety of viral hemorrhagic fever. You can still be alarmed, though, for a split second, by what you see in that bloody diaper.

My brother answers the question orginally posed here. Note the tablesaw injury. Use a push-stick, man!

My brother is named for our late maternal uncle. I am named after our late paternal grandfather. In fact, in my generation all of us are named to honor or remember some forebear. Quite the opposite is true in the next generation; as far as I know, none of my nieces and nephews, or my own son, are named for anyone in particular.*

In response to the latest Adam post, I recently heard from S, an old roommate who is in touch with a mutual acquaintance from our college days, whose name happens to be Adam. I never knew this guy all that well, so it was obviously a joke when S reported that he’d told college Adam that I’d named my son after him. “He glowed when I told him,” S reported, even though it can’t be possible that college Adam could believe such a story. It made me laugh, though, because if there were ever anyone I would go out my way to not name my son after, it would be this guy.

To begin with, his car (a Duster, if I remember correctly), had flames painted on it. Badly. The car was a faded yellow and the flames were monotone brick red. It could’ve been irony, but I really don’t think so. This was a guy whose idea of a good time was spend the afternoon at the illegal dump shooting rats with a pellet gun. He kept stolen bottles of ether –ether– under his bed. I also recall a story about him picking up a local girl with a cleft palate, and later singing the praises of — oh, never mind.

I occasionally hear second-hand that college Adam has gone on to become a fine, upstanding member of the community, and even has a young son of his own. Why not? Who was perfect during their college years? This is not about casting stones, but rather to set the record straight: we did not name our son after ether-sniffin’ rat-blastin’ flame-car-drivin’ Adam.

We named him after Adam WEST.

* This misapprehension is corrected in the comments.

By late June the snow is off all but the highest peaks, and you can walk on them. Prestreljenik is a nice hike to start the summer season off because it’s both easy and hard. Easy because a cable car from the valley floor takes you nine-tenths of the way up, above tree-line and into the interesting views without breaking a sweat. Hard because that last tenth is a vertiginous bit over loose scree, so you get the feeling of having earned the summit views without actually having done most of the work. The cable car exists to serve Slovenia’s highest ski area, Kanin, but also ferries hikers up and down in summer.

I personally wouldn’t do this walk with a six-month old baby even if he can roll over, as the sun is too intense; these pictures are from a hike I took on a pre-Adam June 23rd. But this is supposed to be a photo essay, so I’ll shut up and let the pictures do their job.

The summit cairn, Prestreljenik (2,499 m), looking south. The ridge snaking off from left to right and back again in the middle distance is the border between Slovenia (left-facing slopes) and Italy (right-facing). If you drop your sandwich here, there’s no telling what country it will end up in.

Looking down into Italy.

View down in the other direction: the Kanin ski station with the braided Soča river in deep background.

Riding the Kanin cable car, or žičnica.

 

Above treeline things are extremely dry once the snow melts. Still, there are little bits of greenery and lots of tiny wildflowers. Going out on a limb here, I think we’re looking at dwarf snapdragons (left) and moss campion.

The summit pyramid of Prestreljenik seen from the upper cable car station.

 

Closer looks at the summit cairn. The weather and views can change from moment to moment.

The trail below the summit, with a good drop into Italy, looking toward the southwest. The brittle white limestone (or pearlspar, my geologist uncle tells me), gives the trail, the whole mountain chain, the appearance of being constructed from millions and millions of smashed toilets.

There aren’t a lot of books in English about these mountains. One good little guide is “Walking in the Julian Alps,” put out by Cicerone Press (U.K.); another, entertaining for its outdated information with prices in Yugoslav dinars but otherwise up-to-date enough, is titled simply, “Julian Alps.”

Regular readers already know that I have this thing about standing in open areas and spinning in a slow circle with a camera in my hands. Previous panoramas have included Venice’s Piazzetta San Marco and the Piazza della Reppublica in Trieste, and then there was the collage-like Soča River paste-up more recently. So it was only a matter of time before I got around to doing it in Ljubljana’s small but lovely tourist magnet, Prešernov trg. I wrote about the poet namesake of this square, too, and his place on Slovenian money. You can just make out his statue (with the muse of poetry dangling some mistletoe or catnip over his head) in the center of the right-hand half of the picture. Magda and Adam are hidden in the shadows lower left.

One problem with such projects is that these panoramic views tend to shrink and flatten what are more interesting places than the camera can capture, at least in my hands. Also, to fit these pictures in the text field I have to further shrink them down to a fraction of their former selves. If you’d like to see more detail, you can also go see this picture 2.5 times larger.