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Ask me anything. - http://formspring.me/AaronDN

Another Post-Due Update

Dear Friends and Family,
As the title says, I am far overdue for giving you all another group update. My apologies.

I am at home for this semester, waiting on my final and biggest back surgery. My back has been worse recently so much of my time since coming home on Christmass break has been spent down and in bed, rather than active as you know I like to be or doing the work I have. I get along with that well enough, though.

As some of you know, I was originally going to have my back surgery back at the end of January. January 26th. It was postponed the week before that date, however. Among my eccentric health problems, I have some blood work issues. Since the middle of high school, I have had low blood counts across board (red, white, platelets, and hemoglobin). My surgeon was looking over my file and took note of these numbers again, though they have been stable, and wanted to be sure I was safe and stable for surgery.

I was sent to hematology for a number of in-depth tests and a full blood panel. (And I have an interesting story or two about the bone marrow biopsy that I was supposed to not remember and the confusion I caused.)

With the blood tests all come back, my hematologist and scoliosis surgeon conferred. I am healthy enough for the surgery. So, surgery was rescheduled a week or two ago. I will now being having it a week from this Tuesday, on March 9th.

I will precede the surgery by a few days with an large infusion of immunoglobulin, antibodies – a five hour sit while the immunoglobulin gets into my veins. And I will be given a treatment immediately before surgery to limit bleeding. I will most likely go to the hospital very early the morning of the 9th. (The exact time waits on a day-before phone call received from the hospital.)

The surgery is a major one (and very interesting). The operating room is reserved for, I believe, seven hours. The surgery is expected to take about six hours. The surgeon will open a straight line incision down my back. With very careful monitoring of my vitals and my spinal cord, my spine is straightened about as much as can be done safely. (I was told they usually correct the curve at least 50%, which with my nearly 60° curve will be significant – and should make me a couple of inches taller.) Then surface bone from my spine will be grafted to fuse vertebrae T1 through L2, essentially the length of my ribcage, and rod systems will be put on either side of my spine to stabilize.

I should be able to get back on my feet just under a week after surgery. And I should be back to fairly normal in about a month.

Please keep me in your prayers.
Thank you.

pax,
--Aaron N.

O, Mankato.

I recently have done a some genealogical research, and today I made another fascinating discovery. I already knew that my family on my father's side, through many families and generations, has had a tendency for time around Chicago, my birth-place. Well, now it turns out that before that they were Minnesotan.

Ancestors on my father's side were some of early residents of Mankato, MN, where I go to college. Christian Wilhelm Budde, from Germany, and Anna Marie Wolf, from France, were immigratants, originally to Illinois around 1840. They moved to Mankato in the 1870s, where they stayed until they died - Anna Marie in 1911 and Christian Wilhelm in 1931. Their children were all born in the USA and lived their whole lives, birth to death, in and around Mankato.

pax.

Hey Look I Can Write About My Dreams, or, 214 Days Later, or, Nod To Stormman, or, The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish An Entire Civilization...

Hello. My name is Aaron Nemoyer, and this is attempt number one.

I just awoke of one of the strangest of dreams.

I fell asleep on the couch blue. There was leading time in, but that I do not remember.

A squirrel came to deliver a message and at personal risk to give me warning. (What could a squirrel symbolize?) Then I woke up. The party was over. As I stepped away, I noticed I was walking on a carpet of grass, then, in time by a moment, avoided stepping on a dead squirrel curled around the base of a slender fragile lily. It was the squirrel from the night before. I was politely sorry to see that he had died but for some reason unbothered by it. I touched the body with the toe of my black wingtip, and he awoke. He paused, unsure, but then he was a different suirrel than he had been while dead or the night before. He darted up a reasonable sugar maple, preferring it to an oak. I only watched him as far as seeing that he was going away. Then I noticed -- I think they had been there already -- a skin and three tails of a squirrel laying at the ground around my feet.

The wall of the night was a close hedge, though the ceiling, which I did not ever see, was still the same. Noticing The squirrel tails, opened the door in it to morning. I stepped through and shed the shallow exterior portion of who I had been and changed it for the same person but a different mood.

The setting around me and for the rest of the dream was one I knew. I associated it with lake Forest. A small house from a club and organization and college from another dream, years ago. The location had undefined significance for me.

It was too early to enter. A girl greeted me with a silent, cool, friendly nod by the house's outside, along a a steep sloping hill side and wire fence. What I assumed a dog was with her. Then it was more. When looked at, the dog grey and brown lion. I appear on the opposite, downhill side of the fence. I challanged the girl as to the nature of her dog, and after the verbal exchange, she was a lion too, tawny. Then the original lion showed me what it was capable of as a snake, a great ape, and other forms. I grabbed it at the last, though, and willed it into being a mouse and put him in my pocket. I tried different forms, but decided a mouse the most convenient. The girl disappeared, but then I found I was holding two shapeshifters held by my will as mice.

(They had been together - perhaps - greeters, guardians, or gatekeepers. Gog and Magog. Simultaneously the mysterious characters of Jewish and Islamic myth and tradition, the barbarian people against whom the Gates of Alexandria were built, and the giants guardians of London.)

I tried the door of the house. The first was open but with one bolted and latched behind it. Then the mice were different characters. Perhaps only natural mice. They escaped from me.

I went into the building. The difference seemed to be that the time before I had opened the door only to try it. This time I opened the door to go in, and the second locked door no longer existed.

I was interrogated, lightly. Then the interrogation had, apparently, never happened. And I was welcomed by old friends of when I dreamed the location the first times, though I remembered none of their names, welcomed back as one of their own.

I became full, without having had anything to eat.

I became drunk, or as I have had thoroughly drunk described to me, farther than I have been in waking life, despite the lack of any alcohol in real life or in my dream.

I went into the bathroom let out all I had not had to drink. As soon as I shut the door, the shower, which had not been running, was no longer running but had been. A girl was in the shower, but the curtain was closed all along. She put on a bra, and then stepped out fully clothed and dry. Had a brief conversational exchange with me. Then stepped out. I left the bathroom, a bit frightened in even my dream by how surreal it seemed to be.

The house was full of people. A party, almost a continuation of the one that had happened before the start of my dream's timeframe.

I recall thinking that I wanted to visit Lake Forest. Thinking that, I tried to remember how I had gotten there, plane or train or taxi or drove or driven or with friends. I think it was the last, but with it, I remembered that I had actually arrived at that place in general, the dream, by falling asleep. While I had been lucid at a couple points of my dream, I became completely so. Being aware that I was asleep and dreaming woke me up.

The dream slowly faded out. I tried to sit next to a friend, but couldn't or was told not to. The unspoken reason was because I was waking.

I woke up.

For a few minutes afterwards, still despite the lack of alcohol in dream or in life, I still felt drunk, completely plastered, and slightly hungover.

Super Bowl XLIV (aka. XLI's revenge)

Most of you know me as a minimal football fan. If you know me at all, though, you know how much a Chicagoan I am. Well, that latter being the case and with perhaps a bit of Al Capone taste for retribuation in my blood, Super Bowl XLIV was exciting for me. I have no reserve about admitting it.

In 2007, Indianapolis' bastard team the Colts won Super Bowl XLI in Miami. They beat my favorite team, my Chicago Bears.

This year, the Super Bowl returned to Miami. The Colts too returned. The New Orleans Saints, a team I have had very high respect for in the years since hurricane Katrina, gave them a run and finished them up on a 74-yard interception return.

Ah. Revenge is sweet.