Posted on 01/02/2004 4:55:51 PM PST by wimpycat
As is evidenced by the title, this is a two-for-one vanity. It just so happened that two needs arose at the same time.
VANITY PART I: PRAYERS NEEDED
My mother will be undergoing a surgical procedure known as a "vitrectomy" (do a google search, and you'll find out more than you wanted to know, believe me!) on her right eye next Tuesday. Her name is Betty, and she is 67 years old, and is a retired RN. She has Type II Diabetes, but has been insulin dependent for the past few years. Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in the U.S., but hopefully this surgery will prevent my mother from being counted among the blind. She's not blind now, but she has various diabetic-related vision problems, the most problematic (and the main reason for this surgery) being a blind spot in the middle of one of her eyes (I believe it is the right eye) that is getting bigger, and her doctor told her that this surgery is "the only thing that might help". We are hoping, at the very least, to stop the deterioration, and at the most, to restore enough vision to her eye so she can indulge in her favorite pastime, reading. Nobody loves to read as much as my mother does, but she can no longer read regular print books, and even with the large print books she has to sort of move her head around to read "around" her blind spots.
We go in for pre-op on Monday, and she's scheduled for surgery on Tuesday morning. We'll be able to take her home the same day, and then she has to go back for a followup on Wednesday. Some vitrectomy patients must endure what is known as "face-down recovery" for 7-14 days post-surgery, but I don't believe my mother will have to do this, thank God! (For those who don't know about face-down recovery, do the google search on vitrectomy. It's too hideous and medieval for me to describe.)
As if that wasn't enough that she's half-blind, she's also half-deaf. About 3 years ago, she went suddenly deaf in her left ear. Over the course of a few months, she got some of her hearing back, but it's distorted (when I talk to her on the phone and she listens with that ear, I sound like Charlie Brown's teacher to her), which means a hearing aid won't help that ear. Plus she's got some hearing loss in her right ear, but that's of the sort that a lot of people get when they're older, and a hearing aid would help that ear.
I'm asking for your prayers and cheerful messages for my mother. She's a very good person, highly intelligent, loves to read and she was always a good nurse. (Everyone's mother ought to be a nurse!) As she has often said, "There are two kinds of women in this world--Marys and Marthas." My mother is a self-described "Martha", and although my foremost prayer is for us to have the strength to accept whatever God's will is, I certainly hope that, especially in this case, God's will and ours are one and the same.
Those of you who know me don't need to be told that I welcome all sincere prayers, be they Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, etc. My folks are not so very Baptist (and my in-laws are not so very Catholic) that we think only our own sort of prayers "count". As a matter of fact, my mother-in-law said a special prayer for my mom recently, on the feast day of St. Lucy, who happens to be the patron saint of those who have eye-trouble, and my mother very much appreciated it.
Please also post any cheerful messages, jokes, or anything of that nature. I'm planning on printing this thread out on Sunday and taking it to my mom and letting her read the messages, or reading them to her after her surgery, to cheer her up and make her laugh. (That's fair warning to any of you who might feel an uncontrollable urge to--oh, I don't know--start blurting out profanities or something--although mildly indecent jokes would probably be OK, as long as they are funny.)
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VANITY PART II: ATTENTION ALL COMPUTER NERDS!
For all you computer geeks and audio whizzes, I have a challenge for you:
Santa brought me a record player for Christmas. That's right, a record player. It's a record player/radio combo, and it has jacks in the back of it so I can hook it up to a receiver.
I also have this computer, a Dell Dimension DIM4400, Pentium(R) 4 CPU, 1.60GHz, 256 MB RAM. It's got Windows XP and Windows Media Player and I also have a cool speaker system set up on it. The only thing I know about them is that they're Cambridge Soundworks, and they are little, but it also has a subwoofer the size of a cinder block.
Looking at my device manager, under "sound, video and game controllers" it says I have the following: "Audio codecs", "Creative SB Live! Value (WDM)", "Creative SB Live! Gameport", "Legacy Audio Drivers", "Legacy Video Capture Devices", "Media Control Devices" and "Video Codecs".
What I want to do is somehow hook up my record player to my computer, and somehow record some LPs onto my computer so I can make CDs out of them. I'm pretty sure it can be done, but I don't know how. Do I need special software? Hardware? I need help!
Santa brought me a record player for Christmas.
My prayers go out to you as well...
My mother had the same thing done.....it's not pretty...there are good odds of retinal leakage. I hope she comes through ok.
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