Let it shine wherever you go

The joke I would tell is that my parents called in their loyalty cards for the hospital this week. It's not as dire as that. Actually, there's nothing dire about it at all.

My father's doctor recommended implanting some gadget which would, apparently, do some monitoring of his circulatory system. It's a little bit experimental, and I don't promise that I haven't got important details wrong because I was getting this as retold by my father who could only tell me about it while I was rushing around trying to get ready for work. But it seemed to him likely to be a useful thing, possibly for his own regard for health monitoring, possibly as just the advancing of medical science through voluntary informed human trials. (My father's also getting an experimental hearing aid --- just in time, as he's built up an immunity to the old one --- and in the past has been a trial patient for the only psoriasis medication that ever worked for him; that one, of course, never went on the market after trials were done.)

Still, there's something fundamentally weird about just waving to my father, without getting out of bed --- I was sitting up in it doing some class work --- when he says he's off to spend the night at my sister-in-law's so he can make his early-morning surgery appointment better. Apparently you can get really used to the idea of loved ones being cut open. I jest; actually, they put in zippers last time so as to make it all quicker in the future. He had his ``procedure'' --- my father said the nice thing about his heart surgery was it was serious enough to be called an operation, rather than a procedure --- and came through in flying colors. They even gave him the really nice suite for the night, because all the rooms of the quality that his insurance normally paid for were already filled.

They sent him home Friday, with his arm in a sling in order that he not put too much stress on that side of his body. He also figured that'd be good for a couple days of sympathy, too.

Trivia: The French National Assembly declared war on Austria alone in April 1792 --- hoping to divide the allies against it --- with only seven dissenting votes. Source: The Age Of Napoleon, Will and Ariel Durant.

Currently Reading: West Jersey: Under Four Flags, Ralph K Turp. I feel so bad that I almost immediately suspect the book of being gibberish just because it mentions up front how scholarly evidence raises the prospect that Jesus Christ reached England in his wanderings.

PS: The Jagged Kind Of Flat, reaching just a little farther in piecewise constant interpolations.