Just like a Slattery

another bowl of spinach and edamame and red bell peppers and garbanzos and grape tomatoes.

Doesn’t anybody have any good French feta around here?

Charmin has been running a commercial entreating us all to enjoy the go.

It has cute little bears with toilet paper stuck to their rear ends, which, of course, leads us to think about what we use toilet paper for.

I don’t like to think about bodily functions. Moreover, I don’t like people to think that I have bodily functions.

I miss the days of Mr. Whipple and his polite toilet paper pandering.

Really, it’s a diet, just like any other diet.

Weight Watchers, that is.

As diets go, it’s great and all, but you’re still watching, constantly watching – watching what you eat, watching what you weigh, watching how your pants fit, watching what you put in your cart.

Only two people and my email circle (I think) know about my foray into Weight Watchers Online because I don’t want the rest of the world watching my plate, watching my pants, watching my fork from the table to my mouth and back.

This comes up at the moment because one of my errands this afternoon was to The Container Store to buy lunch containers. Then I stopped by the grocery for my weekly shopping.

I just spent half an hour assembling lunch and breakfast for the week, and snacks too, because I can’t leave room for error. I know exactly how many points each container, er, contains, and when I will consume it.

There were a few vegetables I couldn’t get at the store I was at, and I’m in a little bit of a panic about getting them tomorrow after work, because what if it storms? I won’t feel like stopping, and that will throw off dinners for the whole week, and I will err.

Losing weight takes a long time. It takes longer than gaining it does, for sure. Every time I can’t get something, or I forget something, or there’s a blip in the pattern, it’s a potential setback for me, a pound deferred to next week, or the next week, or the next month, or maybe just…never.

Last night was my first big challenge and it was okay. I had prepared all week for it.

It just seems sometimes like I will never have another spontaneous meal in my life.

Wednesday evening, I was sitting on the couch with my dog, minding my own business, just like I always do, when I got a terrible pain just under and to the left of my right knee.

It hurt like stink.

I took a couple or three Aleve and it didn’t stop, so I took my puppy and went to take a nap (like you do) to see if it would go away. It was so painful that I couldn’t go to sleep.

Now. I am not a person who can’t go to sleep. I once slept through the laser show at Stone Mountain. On the ground. I pride myself on the ability to sleep anywhere, any time, on short notice, and to wake up quickly. So you know it was bad.

Puppy and I got up and fixed some supper, and I put a bag of frozen corn (kernels, not ears) on it and knitted and watched television, thinking that would do it. We eventually shuffled off to bed, where I still was unable to sleep.

It wasn’t any better Thursday morning – in fact, it was worse – so I got dressed and came on to work and called the doctor’s office.

What I thought would happen was that the nurse would tell me to come by in the afternoon and they’d give me an anti-inflammatory.

What did happen was that she called me back right away and told me to stop whatever I was doing and go right to the ER and tell them my doctor said I might have a blood clot. I asked if I could finish what I was working on and she said, “No! Stop messing around and go now. And stop drinking whatever you’re drinking! Just go.”

The lady at the admissions desk asked me what I was there for and I told her I had a pain in my leg. She handed me a clipboard, and I said, “My doctor said to tell you I might have a blood clot.” All of a sudden, I had been relieved of the clipboard and was in a chair, and all I had to do was hand over my drivers license and sign a piece of paper and they figured out the rest without me.

They wheeled me to a room and told me to take off most of my clothes and started sticking electrodes to me and putting in an IV for potential future use, and then I was off through halls and up and down elevators and in and out of secure doors and on an ultrasound table.

I watched red blood go away from my heart and blue blood go back to my heart and listened to it whoosh back and forth.

I asked the tech if it all looked okay and she said she wasn’t allowed to tell me. I told her that if I were going to be bursting into tears, I’d rather do it in the dark with just her than under the fluorescent lights with a bunch of doctors and nurses later, so she did me a solid and told me I wasn’t going to be crying.

She wheeled me back to my room, and a nurse came immediately and hooked a bunch of leads to my electrodes and told me they were going to watch me for an hour.

I would have knitted, but I had that pesky needle in my arm, and I quickly finished my magazine, so I emailed and texted for a while, and then I started getting antsy. I didn’t know why I was being monitored, since I knew I didn’t have a clot.

It turns out I was the only person in the ER who had that piece of information about my stunning lack of clot, since the hospital’s network had gone down and the various departments’ computers weren’t talking to each other.

Plus I’d been there for five hours and was way past wanting lunch and wanting to leave and then I found out my call button didn’t work, so I had to get out of bed to call for a nurse, but the leads aren’t that long, so I had to pull the bed with me.

The nurses were too far away to hear me, so I hollered at a passing doctor, who asked me if I’d fallen out of bed, and I said no, I got out of bed and dragged it over here because my call button doesn’t work. I want to know how they’d feel about taking me off these monitors and getting me some Xrays so I can go home.

Personally, I thought it was kind of snotty of her to say, “How about you just get back in the bed?” and then go tell them I’d fallen, but that’s what she did, because a nurse came in, all worried that I’d lost my mind and patting me on the hand.

So I disconnected all my leads to see how long it would take them to notice I’d flatlined.

The Xray man finally came, but by then I was beside myself with boredom and thirst, and boy could he tell it.

He asked me about the electrodes sticking to the side rails, and I told him I’d pulled them off and stuck them there, since I DID NOT HAVE A BLOOD CLOT.

This seemed to be news to him, and he relayed it to the doctor, who came in pretty quicklike with prescriptions for what’s really wrong with me, which turns out to be just a touch of osteoarthritis and a small tear of some description.

So there you go. I’m not dying. Yet.

We take the paper here at work.

The newspaper delivery man used to bring it straight up to the office and place it on the counter, barking out, “NoozePAYpuh!” before he walked back out.

His name was Joe. I liked him. He was out for several days one time and I worried so much that I called down to the loading docks at the paper and asked where he was. When I found out he was off for a few days because his mama died, I sent flowers.

I’ve never laid eyes on the new paper person and thus have no such attachment to him or her. All I know is that that person brings our paper and leaves it on the security desk downstairs.

Before I go any further with this, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am quite fond of the daytime security man here. However, he does not inspire in me any great feelings of security, being as how he’s not armed and he’ll let anybody in the building who wants to come in.

He will also let just anybody thumb through our paper before we pick it up.

Friends, I don’t like a pre-read paper. Because I don’t like a pre-read paper, if I buy a Sunday paper, if I happen to have guests in my home, I buy them one, too, just so we can all have a fresh newspaper to read.

The other day I came in and had to wait for my paper, of all things, because a gentleman was standing there reading it. I was very nice about it and all, but seriously? Who makes the person whose name is on the label wait for her own paper?

This morning I came in and slowed down at the desk to pick up the paper and the security man said, “Oh, let me just finish reading this and I’ll put it back together.”

Fortunately I had giant sunglasses on so he couldn’t see my eyebrows ascend into my hairline. I might should just start wearing them all the time.

Henry Granju, if you don’t know, was the beloved son of Katie Granju, who I do not know (personally), but who is a close friend of a friend of mine.

Henry was just 18, and was, by all accounts, a wonderful young man, kind and loving and smart and funny. I have seen photos of him, and he was handsome. He had a twinkle in his eye, and in nearly all of his photos, there was a smile playing about his mouth.

I have read words that he wrote, and he was a good writer – whimsical and clever and creative, and he had good grammar and a broad vocabulary.

He was a musician, with a guitar in his hand or strapped ‘cross his back nearly all the time.

Henry was also a drug addict.

Last April 27, his mother received a phone call that changed her world and that of those she loves. Henry had been brought by ambulance to the hospital and was near death, having suffered an overdose of methadone and been, apparently, beaten.

I say “apparently” because the Knoxville County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t seem to think that matters. Because Henry was a drug addict.

I don’t know all the facts, because I wasn’t there. But I know what I’ve read over the nearly year since it’s happened, and I have come to believe some things based on the time line that Katie has constructed from the copious information that she herself has had to root around and find.

Katie, you understand, is not an investigator or a detective or a police officer. Katie is a mother and a writer.

Katie has spent nearly the last year investigating the case because Henry was “an unattractive victim.”

On April 25th, Henry was involved in a drug deal gone bad and was beaten up. He didn’t get the living shit beat out of him that day, though, and he wasn’t dying of an overdose then.

That didn’t happen until the next day when two older “friends” came to the “rescue” with an enormous dose of methadone that they got from God only knows where and gave it to him.

Then they came back and picked him up in a van and took him to their trailer. At that time he showed no signs of physical injury.

By the next morning, his “friends” were freaking out because Henry was blue and vomiting and unresponsive and they didn’t want to call for help. They only did so under threat of a friend of Henry’s calling the police.

From what I have read (and my reading comprehension is well above average), I believe that if Henry Granju had not entered his “friends'” van, Henry Granju would be alive today.

When Henry arrived at the hospital, he had clearly been badly beaten and was bleeding from his ears. He continued to bleed for weeks.

Henry told his mother that his “friends” had promised him some things and compelled him do some rather unsavory things with gentlemen for money and drugs.

Katie Granju reported this information about her son, hard as it was to do, to the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, and offered two phones containing hundreds of corroborating text messages to them, and they declined to take the phones or interview Henry while he was still able to communicate.

Because Henry was an unattractive victim.

I call bullshit.

Henry Granju was a son, a brother, a friend, a grandson, a nephew, a beloved child, all before he was ever an addict.

I believe that had Henry Granju not entered that van, he would be alive today.

I do not believe in conspiracy theories, but I think someone at KCSO or the Knox County DA’s office is dirty and is being protected. Otherwise, I simply cannot understand why when a young man is given a lethal overdose and is beaten to death, no matter who he is, it’s not investigated.

Katie Granju is seeking justice for her son. But that’s not all she’s seeking. Knoxville is a hotbed of drug activity, and apparently child prostitution. Katie Granju is seeking to keep them from “hurting other kids,” one of the last things her dying son asked her for.

It will soon be a year since Katie got that awful phone call. I hope to see significant progress in this case before then.

Henry’s story is long and painful, but please take time to read it.