nicholasf

Best moment tonight, playing a cash game with the Melb Poker champion, who I’ve played across and have known to respect for years. He wins many tournaments, is a gentleman of the table and everyone holds him in high regard.

We’d gone head to head in a few hands. And I hadn’t backed down. I played patiently tonight, during a run of cold cards, for over six hours. My $300 buy in was, at one stage, reduced to $100. I’d brought it up to $700 and was facing a clever English guy who had been hitting brilliant cards all night.

He watched me take pocket kings into a set on the flop, the English guy and I raising into each other pre-flop, flop, and turn, until I took $300 from the hand despite four diamonds showing on the board.

‘I so knew you had a set of kings on the flop’, he remarked. 

‘What, I played the flop too slow?’ 

He stared at me. An older man who knows more about the game that I play to appease boredom than I do. Then he answered, with a touch of contempt and camaraderie:

‘I’m not going to tell you what you did wrong.’

And I grinned and said ‘O, ok’. I sat at the table and worked out what he might have known, then I realised that I could play tournaments if I wanted to. 

When your life does appear to you, rarely, it is because you can predict a majority of moments where the principles have suddenly become obvious. Then you go back to forgetting them again.

The worst part about knowing character is wishing it to behave otherwise than it will; this act is probably called ‘love’. 

I went to the hospital and had my drain removed today. (That’s a Penrose Drain, to help me recover from a sigmoid bowel resection due to diverticulilitis, if anyone hasn’t been keeping up with this tumblr before now …)

The doctors have been puzzled as to why I’ve had so much output from it, which has generally been about 20 mls of gunk a day. Typically this output vanishes about 2 weeks after surgery. It’s been constant two and a half months for me.

There was only ambiguity to act upon with my decision for it to be taken out. If I sound blase it’s because I’ve thought every possibility through as to why I might still have it; have sought second opinions, talked it over with a terrific nurse who visits each week, read up about it, etc.. Every doctor I’ve met has had a different opinion, there’s no certitude. Finally I opted with those proposing to remove it, with the idea my body should recover through its own processes. If there are further complications there’s a 5% chance I may need another surgery. Or something along those lines - I’m beginning to think that this stage of medical diagnosis is very hit and miss. The risk is that the gunk output will keep occurring and become trapped inside of my body, which will trigger another infection. On the other hand, leaving the drain in for so long is not a healthy strategy at all, and was producing no result. Among other things it may have had  led to a long term hole forming in my stomach, so removing it now means there’s a chance for it to heal. And there was the idea that after such an unsuccessful strategy, the proposed solution might have been the problem and that the drain itself might be causing the output.

So out they dragged it - two and a half months of difficulty, awkwardness, and pain, and still almost a metre’s length of ribbon tubing - from my intestines, in a sharp, pulling sensation. I now have a 50 cent hole in my stomach (I may post a photograph later). 

Quite strange to have it removed with so much uncertainty, after 2.5 months of waiting. O well, it’s a gamble of sorts, I suppose. Ideally, in 3 weeks, my stomach will have healed itself and I’ll be returning to normalcy. If not, I’ll be in hospital, and the symptoms will have become aggravated enough for the doctors to work out what to do.