Thirty-Second Days Proceedings: Fill & Download for Free

The two days prior to the procedure.T minus two days - and you’re on a white diet. No seeds, fruit, or anything with colours. I was unprepared and ate an egg for breakfast. Just an egg, nothing else. On the evening, you start taking the laxatives, which truly make the world fall out of your arse. I was instructed to take mine at 5pm, and was subsequently making return trips to the toilet from midnight. Each time was a photo finish.T minus one day and you have to fast for the whole day, drinking just clear fluids. The best fluids come at night when there is a preparation to drink. You have to drink two litres of the stuff and it is truly putrid. It tastes like hydrochloric acid mixed with lemon juice. And oh boy, within a few hours you are jet washing your toilet with perfectly clear liquid.The day of the procedure, you’re starving and exhausted. The canula goes in and so does the propofol. Suddenly everything is not only ok, but it’s absolutely magical. I got double vision, and was asked to turn onto my side. I got the most overwhelming feeling of unbridled happiness. I had a grin from ear to ear, and the last words I remember hearing were from the nurse saying “you’re enjoying that aren’t you?”.Thirty seconds later, I woke up, still feeling happy. It wasn’t actually thirty seconds, it was an hour (I had an endoscopy at the same time) but it felt like thirty seconds. Having a two year old and a one year old, I can honesty say that this was the best sleep I have had in years.I was put in a nice bright room with huge windows, with the Antiques Roadshow on tv, chatting to a lovely old lady about plants. They brought me a weak cup of tea and a basic sandwich. That was the best food and drink I have had in my life.Half an hour later, the nurse told me my wife and kids had arrived to take me home. I cried, begged and pleaded to let me stay. I could have stayed for two weeks happily. But alas it wasn’t to be. So I went home slightly groggy, no post-op discomfort whatsoever, and proceeded to help change nappies and feed the kids with one eye shut just so I could see straight.The next day, my wife showed me the message I had sent her to let her know that I’m ok. “Hey babe, I’ve had a lovely time, ready when you are”. I have no recollection of sending that.TL;DR, do not worry about the procedure. It’s actually completely pain free and the sedation is wonderful. But the build up and bowel “clear out” preparation leading up is psychological torture.

About a year and a half ago (April 2017), I was at work dealing with a difficult client.She had retained our services to investigate her husband and to find evidence that he was cheating on her.Fairly standard cheating spouse job, we got a few pieces of anecdotal evidence that he had time missing between when he was supposed to be at work and when he was home, late working stories, the whole beautiful cliches are cliche for a reason.Something notable was that he was ALWAYS missing on the Thursday afternoon, roughly 3–6pm.We set up a fairly routine tracking job and followed him back to a residence two suburbs away from his home area (10–12km / 6–7mi), he greets a woman at the door, perfect affectionate greeting shots, and then she leaves.It took several days and another instance of tracking him back to the same residence to piece it together after that. It turned out our target was not cheating on his wife, he was sneaking away to babysit his grandson, child of his otherwise estranged daughter.We came to the debrief with the client, and explained the situation to her.When she heard our findings she was utterly furious, not that her husband was babysitting his grandson, but that he wasn’t cheating on her.She demanded, then pleaded with me to modify my findings to make it look like he was cheating on her. We would later find out that she was his second wife and was seeking to divorce him while maximising her cut of the asset settlement.When I refused point blank to falsify evidence and documents for her, she attacked me, tooth and claw. She went almost immediately after my face with her long nails. The last thing I remember from that day was sharp pain in my face and a wet pop before I blacked out from the pain.The next day, I woke up in hospital to bandages and a doctor explaining to me that they were unable to save my eye. In the course of less than thirty seconds, a woman who could be described as ‘most of the way to Fussy Nonna’ had torn up my face and put her thumbnail through my left eyeball.It may not be a limb in the classical sense, but it is still missed just the same. It is common these days for me to get pirate comments from passing people, typically very young children and older teens.The teens get a stern glare.The young kids get to say they met a pirate on the tram/bus today.EDIT:As there were quite few questions in the comments, I will cover them here.I cannot name the woman in question as she is still going through the court system, however she was charged with several offences including assault causing grievous injury, attempted fraud and resisting arrest.I very happily stood witness in her divorce proceedings on behalf of her husband, though I do not know the outcome of that other than she received very little after damages from the civil suit were resolved.With this kind of injury as with many others, attitude makes all the difference.For me, the turning point was sitting on a train reading a fanfic (I am such a ravenous reader that hard copy books are little more than speed bumps to me), when a couple of young (3–5 year old) children poked their heads over the top of the seat in front of me.I looked up just in time for them to start emoting HARD about having found a pirate.Their mother tried to shush them, but it didn’t matter. I barely even thought before I dropped straight into character and played the pirate for the pair of them for the half hour or so their journey coincided with mine.I have since done so a dozen more times, and it leaves me with a grin that’s hard to wipe off for several hours afterwards every time.The 3 years later update…Well, a year and a half after my original post, and the third anniversary of my injury.I still to this day get notifications and comments on this post, so I thought I would do a little update for any further people who read it.Both criminal and civil courts have now since done their things.In criminal court, she was given a suspended sentence, plus 120 hours of community service. For those who do not know the terminology, a suspended sentence is where an amount of time in jail is assigned, but only if the person in question performs further criminal acts. She was assessed on how much of a danger she was to the community as part of this.In civil court, I sued her for loss of earnings, and medical bills. Punitive damages are not a thing here - civil matters are for justice, not punishment. When it came out that she was divorcing her husband without my testimony (instead, I stood as a character witness for her husband and against her during the proceedings), a lien was placed against the proceeds of her divorce, up to a maximum of 85% of it.I won’t disclose the amount that I received, save that it was enough for me to gain multiple years of university education to improve my skillset and make me theoretically employable outside of a sector where I had been working for 3/4+ of my adult life.I am indeed content with the sentence, though not for reasons most would assume. The reasoning is almost uncharacteristically cold blood for me.This woman was a ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ type. By extracting such a massive toll on her financially, it would have been a crushing blow to her ego. With her only being given a suspended sentence plus community service, she would be denied post-prisoner employment assistance while still having the negative of a criminal background. A heavy blow to her ability to recover financially.I take comfort in knowing that her punishment is so much worse than jail. She will probably spend the rest of her life without the luxury she so greedily sought.On the health end of things, I made the choice to leave the socket open so I could have the option to use a glass eye. I can state now with conviction I hate glass eyes, they are horribly uncomfortable for me to use.Given that I am no longer as active as I once was, I found that both depression and weight gain set in fairly hard. I piled on more than 15kg in these few years. Talking to a psychiatrist helps, but can only help so far. The social contact I get in classes is also a boon, but 90% of the students are now half my age, and it is difficult to connect with them.Finally, I updated that ratty old eyepatch with a series of them made by a wonderful woman from Niagra Falls, much better looking in my opinion. :)

In high school, we had this librarian who all my friends seemed to love. He was young and geeky, but sassy as anything and had no problems tearing into the ‘popular’ kids who only went to the library to cut class. He was the tennis coach, the Magic Club sponsor, and filmed all the school’s events. Naturally, all us younger geeks looked up to him—a fellow nerd who had risen above and now got to scream at and give detentions to the people we most disliked. Great teenager mentality.This librarian (we’ll call him Mr. A) was on very good terms with all of my closest friends, but for some reason he hated my guts. As in, would glare at me openly from across the room and snap something sarcastic or just downright mean anytime I asked a question. I was quiet, shy, a blatant nerd. I’d never so much as turned in a book past its due date. So his animosity shocked me. Naturally, being a spiteful teenager, I grew to hate him as much as he did me. He was like my very own arch nemesis. Maybe it was because I was on the swim team, and we’d surpassed the tennis team as the school’s most successful/winning sport. Maybe he just really hated my emo haircut. But he always made sure to sneer in my direction whenever I dared enter his domain.Anyways, in the library there was this one, odd rule that Mr. A had put into place. No mayonnaise. You could bring your lunch, your breakfast, heck—a full four course meal. But no mayonnaise. If it was visible on a sandwich or anything of the like, he would demand you throw it out. By my senior year, I’d discovered via the ever reliable high school grapevine that his hatred of the condiment stemmed from a drunken bet in college, where he had been dared to eat an entire jar of mayo. Apparently, he’d succeeded. Only to promptly vomit it up everywhere and swear off mayonnaise for the rest of his existence. At first it just made me laugh, but then I got an idea. A wonderful, awful, petty as all fuck idea.I drove to the store and bought the biggest jar of mayonnaise I could find. I dumped it, scrubbed the insides, and then painstakingly refilled it with vanilla pudding—you know, the super gooey, oozy kind. The kind that comes in the single snack packs that doesn’t even have to be refrigerated. It wasn’t the best tasting goop, but it was tolerable enough, and had the exact color and consistency of mayonnaise.The next day, I plopped my smug ass down at the library table that was directly in front of his desk. I pulled out the mayo jar and a big ol’ soup spoon, stared Mr. A dead in the eye, and proceeded to eat straight from it. Massive, oozing, spoonfuls that would probably make even non mayo-phobes gag. His face went white, then red. I could easily make out the veins popping in his temples, could see his throat working to swallow what was most certainly a massive bought of nausea. It took a sold thirty seconds for him to break free from his horrified trance to shriek at the top of his lungs, “GET OUT! GET OUT!”So I took my jug and trudged out of there as slow as a snail on vacation, dripping ‘mayonnaise’ as I went and making as many God awful slurping noises as I could. All the while poor Mr. A looked just about ready to feint. Or at the very least lose his breakfast.He later noticeably cut out my solo from the recording of our orchestra’s spring concert. But damn was it worth it.