I’m betting it’s Skippy, or maybe Scipio. I think she named her character after her cat, and is kinda role-playing the cat. I mean, doesn’t it remind you of Scipio? Kind of taciturn and reserved. A bit aloof.
It was December of 2011, and I was a month away from the end of my service in the Israel Air Force. Which normally means I don’t do shit. However, my colonel’s secretary had a two-week guard duty in the north and got off on the technicality that she didn’t want to do it and had a colonel on he side. So I got to do it instead. It ended up being the coldest and rainiest two weeks of the year.
I was in rehearsals for a play at the time, so two weeks away from the rest of the cast was pretty annoying, too. On New Year’s eve I sent the following text message to the girl who was playing my wife: “The storm clouds are mounting and the rain is starting to fall. It’s a little intimidating sitting in this tiny guard post, a lone lightbulb my only friend in the darkness. So while I’m here, the icy wind whistling through the plywood around me, I want to tell you that you’re the best stage-wife ever.”
Her response to this veritable poem? This imagery worthy of a novel? “Thanks!!” One word. Two exclamation points. That was my New Year’s Eve.
…since this is a bit of an invitation to share our own crappy-Christmas stories…
My mother-in-law left my father-in-law the year before just before Christmas. A year later she committed suicide and her ass-hole former coworker found out first and called me and let me know in the most snarky tone I’ve ever heard..
*mic drops and walks off the stage*
We’ve all come to terms with the whole thing, to the point of I accuse anyone that breaks out the “I banged your Mom last night” of being a necrophiliac. Few things kill that line of insults as fast. …it’s actually kind of fun seeing how fast they shut up.
Oh wow, this reminds me of the time a college classmate died in her sleep right after my best friend from back home passed away, and I found out over MSN messenger from someone who had no idea that I was still jetlagged from my trip to go to the funeral. I mean, yours sounds worse, but it reminded me.
My little (and only) brother was born 3 months premature, with a medical condition known as hydrocephalus. It causes excessive brain fluid to build up and crush the brain against the skull, so in most cases a shunt is implanted that drains the excess fluid into the abdominal cavity where it gets absorbed by the body and eventually flushed out. A properly functioning shunt is one of those things one hardly gives much thought to, like kidneys or a normal heartbeat. But, like those organs, a shunt that’s clogged or failing can really throw things into a major tailspin.
My brother was about 8 at the time, and he and my Dad had already been in an accident several months earlier that left us very nervous but at the time, nothing seemed out of order. What nobody had noticed was that a small piece of tissue had dislodged, and eventually made its way into his shunt intake and clogged it. This happened during Thanksgiving–literally as we were getting ready to serve the turkey–and my brother went from arguing with me over the dinner rolls one minute, to collapsed on the floor vomiting violently with his eyes rolled so far downward, only the whites showed. A hydrocephalic in the throes of shunt failure is a frightening sight to say the least. Imagine the worst concussion you’ve ever had, then multiply that by a hundred.
He died and was revived twice in the ER. He died and revived three more times in the ambulance to the children’s hospital. He had a grand-mal seizure so powerful he flung himself off the gurney and had to be restrained. His veins collapsed. Things looked grim as hell.
It took over a day just to stabilize him enough for emergency surgery.
When he came out of the OR, he was comatose and his heart refused to beat on its own. He was hooked up to an automatic defib machine because his heart refused to stabilize, and there was discussion of moving him to the Terminal Ward of the hospital. It was strange, sitting in a festively decorated waiting room while the doctor talked about my brother in such morbid tones. Mom had to make arrangements on potential organ donations and funeral preparations. We all expected the worst. My Dad tried to keep me occupied but the joy was forced and hollow.
For more than two weeks we all sat, and waited, and worried. Mom lived at that hospital, sleeping in the lounge chair in my brother’s darkened room. The lights had to be kept dim and noise levels kept low or else he would overstimulate and go into seizures. He would drift into wakefulness just long enough to squeeze my Mom’s hand, and then drift away again.
A week before Christmas, my brother’s condition started to deteriorate and he was hooked up to life support. On Christmas Day, he had another grand mal seizure and was rushed to the OR. It turned out the tubing that led to his abdomen was also clogged with calcium deposits. When he came back out he was defibbing every few minutes.
We never even bothered putting up a tree at home. We weren’t allowed to bring a plastic or real tree to the Critical Care Unit, so out of desperation to inject a little cheer and hope, I made a stand-up one out of cardboard with slots of paper ornaments to sit in. Our neighborhood police department dropped off several large bags of donated gifts at our doorstep, so my Dad donned a Santa hat over his biker togs and Biker Santa delivered goodies to the kids in the Cancer, Neuro, and Terminal Wards.
The T-Ward really left him shaken the most. Some of those kids had been abandoned by their parents.
So there we were, surrounded by Holiday festiveness in San Antonio, giving donated presents to kids while we weren’t even sure if we’d be mourning the loss of our own at any moment.
Thankfully, the story does have a happy ending. My brother stabilized shortly before New Year’s Eve and was challenging other kids to wheelchair races in a week. My Mom saved the cardboard tree and it still sits, 30 years later, in our attic. She keeps his EKG ribbon with the portion that showed his heart stabilizing, folded into her pocketbook. It’s faded and crispy now, but it still makes her mist up and quiver at what could have happened. We almost forgot about our own presents, and ended up not opening them up until the end of January. We were just damn happy to be alive, and together.
So, I dunno…this is my entry into My Suckiest Christmas, but in the end, it’s also a happy story so it may not qualify. I don’t give a shit, though. I’m just glad my li’l bro is still around to give me hell. He’s 38 now (yeah, I’m old LOL) and a damn cool dude who’s made me so proud.
Anyways, Merry Axemas to you all, and I hope yours is stress-free and un-sucky. :-)
Game rule one, the bad holiday story has to be uniquely bad for _you_, and not for the people around you. So dead grandma, etc, stories are a big DQ.
Not a Christmas story, but my wife and kids completely forgot my Birthday one year. No gifts, no cards, no “Happy Birthday Dad!”‘s. Nothing. Worst birthday I ever had, except for the other one (September 11th.)
Similarly, my 30th birthday went almost entirely unheralded. I think one co-worker said something, and I had a missed call (and no message) from one family member, and my girlfriend said something, but that was it.
I’m usually pretty laid back about stuff so it wouldn’t have been so hard, except that a good friend of mine (who was also my roommate at the time) who is three weeks older had a great big blowout of a party at our place, with all of our mutual friends there, gifts, fancy funny 30th birthday cake, etc. Pretty big letdown to get NUTHIN three weeks later.
My worst Christmas: on December 26th, 1989, one of my testicles started hurting. My grandmother was visiting that Christmas, and she was at home with us while my parents were both out at a party or something. I was 12, and was not willing to say anything to my grandmother about my man bits, and by the time my parents got home I was vomiting from the pain. We lived in a Small Town at the time, so my parents took me to the Small Town Hospital, where the doctor said that my testicle had torsioned (twisted around in an odd way, I think) and needed surgery to be fixed. They could do it there, but the surigcal facilities at Big Town Hospital were much better, and Big Town was only 30 minutes away, so they transferred me there.
The attending Physician at Big Town Hospital took a look and said the guys at Small Town Hospital didn’t know what they were talking about, and that the testicle would sort itself out. They would keep me in the hospital for observation, but surgery would be an unnecessary waste of time/money.
Fast forward five days, to December 31st. I am still in Big Town Hospital, and not feeling much better. My mom realizes that it is silly to be driving an hour (round trip) each time she visits me in Big Town; Small Town Hospital would be just as good for overseeing my recovery. She asks for me to be transferred back to Small Town Hospital, and off I go.
When I arrive, the Small Town doctor who originally saw me on the 26th takes another look and says something along the lines of “HOLY SHIT” in Afrikaans (he was originally from South Africa) and immediately arranges for emergency surgery (bailing on any New Year’s Eve plans he, another doctor, and some nurses might have had). They operate that night, finding that the torsioned testicle had gone gangrenous. They amputated it immediately, which saved my life; a few more days, or maybe even hours, and the gangrene would have gotten into my bloodstream and there would have been nothing anyone could do to save me.
I was unconscious for two days after the surgery, and stayed in hospital for another week after waking up. Going home after that was still very slow and painful, and when I got home, I discovered that even though I had mostly been fed by IV for two weeks, the food I ate before going into hospital was still hanging around, and I took the biggest and most painful dump of my entire life.
Of course, this also means that I have spent the rest of my life with only one testicle. A few years ago a doctor noticed that my testosterone levels were extremely low, and now I have to use testosterone supplements (which have to be applied to the skin, and kept carefully away from women, children, and pets. Sex can be complicated!)
(Sex with women, I mean. I don’t have sex with children or pets, thank you very much.)
Probably the best thing to come from this is my dad’s story from a few weeks later: my dad worked at an auto parts store, and one day my attending physician from Big Town Hospital comes in to pick up something he had ordered. The part was late, and Big Town doctor gets mad about this and starts raising his voice in complaint. He didn’t recognize my dad, but my dad sure recognized him, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to put up with any bullshit from the man who almost killed his son by reversing a decision made by another doctor. I don’t remember exactly what my dad claims to have said to the doctor, but apparently the doctor left the store very hastily, and never came back. (Store management did not have a problem with losing a customer under the circumstances, either!)
On the plus side: for the two or three years prior to that surgery, I had been getting very aggressive (getting into fist fights over stupid things, even with close friends). That problem kind of went away in the 90s!
So here’s the tl;dr:
The day after Christmas when I was 12, a doctor made a terrible decision and almost killed me. Five days later another doctor saved my life but had to amputate a testicle to do it.
While I’m commenting, I must say that I love this storyline but the existence of Chrissie has sadly crushed my favorite bit of head canon: I have been secretly believing that Bandit was somehow an alt run by the vat-guy running Payet Best. Reviewing Bandit’s first appearance (in which Payet appears to be distracting folks while she robs them) and noticing that she kind of became the new fifth member of the “Big Five” after Payet died gave me some faith in the idea. Chrissie’s existence (and her comments about “The Big Four” last week) make it pretty clear that my head fanon is wrong. A real shame, I would have felt so clever had I been right!
Are we going Four Yorkshiremen here?
Tell me we’re not going Four Yorkshiremen.
Anyway… I don’t have any bad christmas stories because I don’t do christmas. I just lock myself in my room alone on December 25th and don’t talk to anyone. A day of peace… sort of.
BUT I’ve got a “bad birthday story” which to be honest I don’t like thinking about.
That being back when I was 14 … and Gawain… my feline companion since I was 2… was at the vets with severe liver-trouble. Well… long story short… my birthday present was giving the vet permission to euthanize Gawain… who was basically my only friend throughout my childhood.
I haven’t done birthdays since. Just anniversaries of Gawain’s death.
Axemas is always best with a nice helping of the holiday boast
You call that a bad holiday experience? *THIS* is a bad holiday…hey…hey, who’s fucking with my medicine!?
That’s not a bad holiday experience, that’s a spoon!
I see you’ve played bad-holiday-experiencey-spoony before!
Kaye’s speech bubble in panel 1 seems unfinished somehow…
Crappy laptop speakers.
Crappy wlan signal.
Artist in a hurry to finish before his crappy holiday.
;)
Dude, spoilers.
First rule of bad holiday: Don’t talk about bad holiday.
This is a somewhat unfair game of who gets the last brownie. Even if Kaye wins she has no means of getting it.
Who said the reward is brownies?
So they’re celebrating Festivus?
In this game the winner and the loser is the loser and the winner respectively.
Yeah.
Whoever loses, we win.
I’m betting it’s Skippy, or maybe Scipio. I think she named her character after her cat, and is kinda role-playing the cat. I mean, doesn’t it remind you of Scipio? Kind of taciturn and reserved. A bit aloof.
Urg. Replied to the wrong comment. :p
Cat jumps on laptop in 3… 2…
Cat needs a name!
I’d suggest Keyboard Cat, but I think that’s been takennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnvjbfjabv
Murphy.
He *does* look like the Champion of the Fuzzy Peoples… now maybe we know Auraugu’s real-life player?
I’d name the cat after an in-game villain or event. Maybe Scipo’s class or after a villain easily beaten.
Hmmm, how about Cutlass? It’s not Scipo’s weapon choice but still a fun name
It was December of 2011, and I was a month away from the end of my service in the Israel Air Force. Which normally means I don’t do shit. However, my colonel’s secretary had a two-week guard duty in the north and got off on the technicality that she didn’t want to do it and had a colonel on he side. So I got to do it instead. It ended up being the coldest and rainiest two weeks of the year.
I was in rehearsals for a play at the time, so two weeks away from the rest of the cast was pretty annoying, too. On New Year’s eve I sent the following text message to the girl who was playing my wife: “The storm clouds are mounting and the rain is starting to fall. It’s a little intimidating sitting in this tiny guard post, a lone lightbulb my only friend in the darkness. So while I’m here, the icy wind whistling through the plywood around me, I want to tell you that you’re the best stage-wife ever.”
Her response to this veritable poem? This imagery worthy of a novel? “Thanks!!” One word. Two exclamation points. That was my New Year’s Eve.
At least it was a whole word.
“Thx!”
Are they thanking you, or promoting a sound system for movies?
Congratulations -> congrats -> gratz -> gz
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!1
Also, secretaries get guard duty? Badass.
…since this is a bit of an invitation to share our own crappy-Christmas stories…
My mother-in-law left my father-in-law the year before just before Christmas. A year later she committed suicide and her ass-hole former coworker found out first and called me and let me know in the most snarky tone I’ve ever heard..
*mic drops and walks off the stage*
We’ve all come to terms with the whole thing, to the point of I accuse anyone that breaks out the “I banged your Mom last night” of being a necrophiliac. Few things kill that line of insults as fast. …it’s actually kind of fun seeing how fast they shut up.
…one year, not the year. English, thou hast failed me so!
Oh wow, this reminds me of the time a college classmate died in her sleep right after my best friend from back home passed away, and I found out over MSN messenger from someone who had no idea that I was still jetlagged from my trip to go to the funeral. I mean, yours sounds worse, but it reminded me.
Damn. Just…damn, man, that one really wins. I’m so sorry! :-(
My little (and only) brother was born 3 months premature, with a medical condition known as hydrocephalus. It causes excessive brain fluid to build up and crush the brain against the skull, so in most cases a shunt is implanted that drains the excess fluid into the abdominal cavity where it gets absorbed by the body and eventually flushed out. A properly functioning shunt is one of those things one hardly gives much thought to, like kidneys or a normal heartbeat. But, like those organs, a shunt that’s clogged or failing can really throw things into a major tailspin.
My brother was about 8 at the time, and he and my Dad had already been in an accident several months earlier that left us very nervous but at the time, nothing seemed out of order. What nobody had noticed was that a small piece of tissue had dislodged, and eventually made its way into his shunt intake and clogged it. This happened during Thanksgiving–literally as we were getting ready to serve the turkey–and my brother went from arguing with me over the dinner rolls one minute, to collapsed on the floor vomiting violently with his eyes rolled so far downward, only the whites showed. A hydrocephalic in the throes of shunt failure is a frightening sight to say the least. Imagine the worst concussion you’ve ever had, then multiply that by a hundred.
He died and was revived twice in the ER. He died and revived three more times in the ambulance to the children’s hospital. He had a grand-mal seizure so powerful he flung himself off the gurney and had to be restrained. His veins collapsed. Things looked grim as hell.
It took over a day just to stabilize him enough for emergency surgery.
When he came out of the OR, he was comatose and his heart refused to beat on its own. He was hooked up to an automatic defib machine because his heart refused to stabilize, and there was discussion of moving him to the Terminal Ward of the hospital. It was strange, sitting in a festively decorated waiting room while the doctor talked about my brother in such morbid tones. Mom had to make arrangements on potential organ donations and funeral preparations. We all expected the worst. My Dad tried to keep me occupied but the joy was forced and hollow.
For more than two weeks we all sat, and waited, and worried. Mom lived at that hospital, sleeping in the lounge chair in my brother’s darkened room. The lights had to be kept dim and noise levels kept low or else he would overstimulate and go into seizures. He would drift into wakefulness just long enough to squeeze my Mom’s hand, and then drift away again.
A week before Christmas, my brother’s condition started to deteriorate and he was hooked up to life support. On Christmas Day, he had another grand mal seizure and was rushed to the OR. It turned out the tubing that led to his abdomen was also clogged with calcium deposits. When he came back out he was defibbing every few minutes.
We never even bothered putting up a tree at home. We weren’t allowed to bring a plastic or real tree to the Critical Care Unit, so out of desperation to inject a little cheer and hope, I made a stand-up one out of cardboard with slots of paper ornaments to sit in. Our neighborhood police department dropped off several large bags of donated gifts at our doorstep, so my Dad donned a Santa hat over his biker togs and Biker Santa delivered goodies to the kids in the Cancer, Neuro, and Terminal Wards.
The T-Ward really left him shaken the most. Some of those kids had been abandoned by their parents.
So there we were, surrounded by Holiday festiveness in San Antonio, giving donated presents to kids while we weren’t even sure if we’d be mourning the loss of our own at any moment.
Thankfully, the story does have a happy ending. My brother stabilized shortly before New Year’s Eve and was challenging other kids to wheelchair races in a week. My Mom saved the cardboard tree and it still sits, 30 years later, in our attic. She keeps his EKG ribbon with the portion that showed his heart stabilizing, folded into her pocketbook. It’s faded and crispy now, but it still makes her mist up and quiver at what could have happened. We almost forgot about our own presents, and ended up not opening them up until the end of January. We were just damn happy to be alive, and together.
So, I dunno…this is my entry into My Suckiest Christmas, but in the end, it’s also a happy story so it may not qualify. I don’t give a shit, though. I’m just glad my li’l bro is still around to give me hell. He’s 38 now (yeah, I’m old LOL) and a damn cool dude who’s made me so proud.
Anyways, Merry Axemas to you all, and I hope yours is stress-free and un-sucky. :-)
Damn. I didn’t realize I was writing a novel. You can delete it if you want. :-)
*tears up*
Thank you for sharing.
Damn, I think you win this contest without also losing. Impressive. And thanks so much for sharing!
Game rule one, the bad holiday story has to be uniquely bad for _you_, and not for the people around you. So dead grandma, etc, stories are a big DQ.
Not a Christmas story, but my wife and kids completely forgot my Birthday one year. No gifts, no cards, no “Happy Birthday Dad!”‘s. Nothing. Worst birthday I ever had, except for the other one (September 11th.)
Huh. Yeah. Thanks for that.
Note, I wrote that post before you updated your story, Denita, not as a response to it. I’m not that much of a nerf-herder. Peace.
Similarly, my 30th birthday went almost entirely unheralded. I think one co-worker said something, and I had a missed call (and no message) from one family member, and my girlfriend said something, but that was it.
I’m usually pretty laid back about stuff so it wouldn’t have been so hard, except that a good friend of mine (who was also my roommate at the time) who is three weeks older had a great big blowout of a party at our place, with all of our mutual friends there, gifts, fancy funny 30th birthday cake, etc. Pretty big letdown to get NUTHIN three weeks later.
Are we not Gamers?! My new battle-cry for sure.
My worst Christmas: on December 26th, 1989, one of my testicles started hurting. My grandmother was visiting that Christmas, and she was at home with us while my parents were both out at a party or something. I was 12, and was not willing to say anything to my grandmother about my man bits, and by the time my parents got home I was vomiting from the pain. We lived in a Small Town at the time, so my parents took me to the Small Town Hospital, where the doctor said that my testicle had torsioned (twisted around in an odd way, I think) and needed surgery to be fixed. They could do it there, but the surigcal facilities at Big Town Hospital were much better, and Big Town was only 30 minutes away, so they transferred me there.
The attending Physician at Big Town Hospital took a look and said the guys at Small Town Hospital didn’t know what they were talking about, and that the testicle would sort itself out. They would keep me in the hospital for observation, but surgery would be an unnecessary waste of time/money.
Fast forward five days, to December 31st. I am still in Big Town Hospital, and not feeling much better. My mom realizes that it is silly to be driving an hour (round trip) each time she visits me in Big Town; Small Town Hospital would be just as good for overseeing my recovery. She asks for me to be transferred back to Small Town Hospital, and off I go.
When I arrive, the Small Town doctor who originally saw me on the 26th takes another look and says something along the lines of “HOLY SHIT” in Afrikaans (he was originally from South Africa) and immediately arranges for emergency surgery (bailing on any New Year’s Eve plans he, another doctor, and some nurses might have had). They operate that night, finding that the torsioned testicle had gone gangrenous. They amputated it immediately, which saved my life; a few more days, or maybe even hours, and the gangrene would have gotten into my bloodstream and there would have been nothing anyone could do to save me.
I was unconscious for two days after the surgery, and stayed in hospital for another week after waking up. Going home after that was still very slow and painful, and when I got home, I discovered that even though I had mostly been fed by IV for two weeks, the food I ate before going into hospital was still hanging around, and I took the biggest and most painful dump of my entire life.
Of course, this also means that I have spent the rest of my life with only one testicle. A few years ago a doctor noticed that my testosterone levels were extremely low, and now I have to use testosterone supplements (which have to be applied to the skin, and kept carefully away from women, children, and pets. Sex can be complicated!)
(Sex with women, I mean. I don’t have sex with children or pets, thank you very much.)
Probably the best thing to come from this is my dad’s story from a few weeks later: my dad worked at an auto parts store, and one day my attending physician from Big Town Hospital comes in to pick up something he had ordered. The part was late, and Big Town doctor gets mad about this and starts raising his voice in complaint. He didn’t recognize my dad, but my dad sure recognized him, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to put up with any bullshit from the man who almost killed his son by reversing a decision made by another doctor. I don’t remember exactly what my dad claims to have said to the doctor, but apparently the doctor left the store very hastily, and never came back. (Store management did not have a problem with losing a customer under the circumstances, either!)
On the plus side: for the two or three years prior to that surgery, I had been getting very aggressive (getting into fist fights over stupid things, even with close friends). That problem kind of went away in the 90s!
So here’s the tl;dr:
The day after Christmas when I was 12, a doctor made a terrible decision and almost killed me. Five days later another doctor saved my life but had to amputate a testicle to do it.
As nobody has commented on this yet:
Wow. This would easily crush every shitty Christmas I had yet.
Thanks for saying so! I figured I had a big winner for this contest, but you can never be sure how others will view your experiences…
While I’m commenting, I must say that I love this storyline but the existence of Chrissie has sadly crushed my favorite bit of head canon: I have been secretly believing that Bandit was somehow an alt run by the vat-guy running Payet Best. Reviewing Bandit’s first appearance (in which Payet appears to be distracting folks while she robs them) and noticing that she kind of became the new fifth member of the “Big Five” after Payet died gave me some faith in the idea. Chrissie’s existence (and her comments about “The Big Four” last week) make it pretty clear that my head fanon is wrong. A real shame, I would have felt so clever had I been right!
Personally, I think it’s pretty obvious that Chrissie is Best’s alt.
Ok, I’m going to go with that. All hope is not yet lost!
Are we going Four Yorkshiremen here?
Tell me we’re not going Four Yorkshiremen.
Anyway… I don’t have any bad christmas stories because I don’t do christmas. I just lock myself in my room alone on December 25th and don’t talk to anyone. A day of peace… sort of.
BUT I’ve got a “bad birthday story” which to be honest I don’t like thinking about.
That being back when I was 14 … and Gawain… my feline companion since I was 2… was at the vets with severe liver-trouble. Well… long story short… my birthday present was giving the vet permission to euthanize Gawain… who was basically my only friend throughout my childhood.
I haven’t done birthdays since. Just anniversaries of Gawain’s death.