Do blood clots count as vacation souvenirs?

I need someone to take my urine. And could you bring some wipes, please?

Ah, the things you hear at dinner time when you're tethered to a blood thinning drip waiting for the clots on your lungs to clear up or do whatever it is clots do when they get medicated.

I can't complain. The guy next to me has the unenviable combo of cancer AND heart disease. He's heading to the Mayo Clinic as soon as doctors think he is ready to roll.

Me, my trouble began, like a lot of people's troubles, with a vacation.

A couple weeks before I noticed a shortness of breath. And though I am not quite the cuddly lard ass I once was, I haven't been doing as much aerobic exercise as I should have been during the past summer.

So I shrugged it off to being slightly out of shape and all that fun stuff that accompanies getting older.

Then I went to Lake Tahoe to visit family. I left Chicago, it was 85 or so. On the way from Reno to the house, it flurried. Once it cleared, my twin niece and nephew wanted me to play with them on their backyard trampoline, quite possibly for the chance to see me fall on my face. And nothing is funnier at 9 than adults being clowns. It's how those Home Alone movies made all that money.

Only thing is, in less than two minutes I was winded, which isn't quite as entertaining as falling down and twisting an ankle.

No big deal, I thought. It's cold. I'm tired. I had beer. And I am a wuss.

Next day, though, the breathing thing is still an issue. Climbing stairs is an ordeal. And if you have ever been among the upper demographics of Lake Tahoe, let's just say the wooden palaces don't exactly meet Americans With Disabilities Standards for accessibility. It's all so mountain, that climbing is part of the culture, even home life.

As I was getting a cold, thanks to the OSHA violation of an office where I work, I thought this was just part of that. And there is Altitude Sickness, which makes some people light headed or breathing like porn stars in heat when they travel to places where the oxygen is thinner than a Hollywood actress. It didn't help that it was winter cold up there at night already. Or that my sister and her husband keep their spacious home at a temperature perfect for serving better wines and beers.

In hindsight, I should have called a doctor out there or gone to an ER. Then again, I am in an HMO. I could have eventually wound up in a Michael Moore movie, I thought.

Besides, it probably was ONLY bronchitis or pneumonia. And I was on a mission, invited to attend a 2-day bash at "Burly Bear's Decadent Den", which sounds like a name for a woodsy gay bar but in reality is a compound of sorts being built in a middle of nowhere by a jovial rich guy from Southern California.

It's 17 miles outside of Truckee, California, off a timberline road, which serves as a cross country and snow mobile trail in winter. Burly Bear's property can only be accessed by a Sno Cat certain times of the year, so the house he is building has a garage big enough to hold what essentially is a modified truck.

The house is going up in Coppins Meadow on a marsh. There is a small cabin the prior owner had. There is no cell phone reception. The satellite phone wasn't working too well either.

This is not Gatsby's kind of rich. Or Puff Daddy's. This is the work of West Coast types who like 70s music a lot and doing outdoor activities that eventually give them all arthritis. I heard The Best of Lynyrd Skynrd and Steve Miller Band four times each they afternoon I was on site.

Either way, it's still one of those "I am doing this because I can" things the wealthy do. Which begs the question. If you had the bucks, what would you do just because you could? Doing good doesn't count in this game. Neither does opening a bed and breakfast. Too much work.

I contemplated like a gold-bellied Buddha as I dazed off on a leather sofa in a propane heated tent, the sun beating down on it on the chilly afternoon. The furniture was brought up from one of the Burly Bear family's recently sold homes. They found migrant workers to help unload it in the middle of nowhere.

My nap gave me time to reflect on the night before, too, Part One of the Bash, a Rat Pack-themed night at the Cal-Neva Resort that Frank Sinatra once ran as his "because I can" kind of place.

We were all supposed to dress up like it was 1957, since the guest of honor was turning 50. I hate playing dress up but obliged, finding some wing tips, a pork pie hat and a gangster style golf shirt. I didn't really mind the look. Better that than say 1977 or 1982. But at least a quarter of the guests didn't oblige. I say, if you agree to go to a dress-up party, you play by the rules. You don't wear a freaking flannel shirt and boot cut jeans, just because you have our boarder dude cred to uphold with your other young friends who should NOT listen to the Grateful Dead again, EVER! Kapish?

I guess I was in a Sinatra mood.

Back to our story. The Cal-Neva resort reminds me of Floyd's, this old bar in the town where I live that gave way to a Chase, Jamba Juice, Chinese restaurant and a US Cellular outlet - at least until any or all of the above are gobbled up by AT& T.

Floyd's, I am sure wanted to be the Cal-Neva of Chicago's Northwest suburbs, back in its glory days, which were past those of of Frank Sinatra, the Kennedy Boys and Marilyn Monroe, but when people of a certain aged still wished those were the days.

That unholy trio is at the mythological core of a tour that was part of the night's festivities, a tour given several times over with slight variations by a guide who could pass for the wispy son of Vincent Price or the brother of Fred Schneider of the B-52s. Remember him? "When you see a big sign on the side of the road...love shack baby."

Well Fred's bro showed us some love shacks, three small cabins near the Lake Tahoe shore which made you realize that celebritries were shrimps 50 some years ago, and that big egos didn't always demand big quarters. We got to visit cabin 5, which apparently was where SInatra slept in a room he insisted be painted orange to match his orange luggage (and I am not making that up, though the guide might have been). The Kennedys took turns using Cabin 4. And they all took turns visiting Cabin 5, which is where Marilyn Monroe and her orbs frequented.

The guide claimed that the orbs are still with us, and if you remember Monroe that would be hard to dispute. Of course, since he didn't seem to have any interest in breasts, the orbs to which he referred were those super spooky ghoslty kind like you see on a Scooby Doo episode. Orbs apparently ruin film and even digital images of anyone shooting in Monroe's old haunt.

Thinking back, maybe I got an orb on my lung. I will have to ask the doctors.

Anyway, we also got to visit the tunnel system under the resort, which allowed unnoticed nocturnal visits of all sorts, and a way for mobsters to ditch out if the feds showed up. What a pian in the ass it must be to be a goombah - running like a rat through tunnels, And they had to sit off the catwalk in the theater from which they would make their way to a helipad on the roof (cuz nobody is going to spot a helicopter). And they had to put up with Sinatra and his orange luggage. And help drag drunk, passed out Dean Martin out of an upstairs dressing room on an unhinged door.

Yeah, Fred's brother had some doozies. He saved his most dramatic for last, telling us of a BBC documentary being taped in the resort's theater, where spirits told a psychic in the language of the Washoe Indians, "Whitey, get your pale asses off our sacred land." I took this to mean that someone saw Poltergeist.

If that weren't enough to make you crap your flat front trousers, there was the time an accountant working late one night felt an eerie presence. So he takes a walk to the stage and feels a spirit pass through him, which sounds pretty kinky by CPA standards. Luckily the guy had his cell cam with him and snapped off some photos.

Apparently is wasn't a spirit but a disease of some sort as the guy died a few days later. But Vincent Junior had the photographic evidence to show us, blurry photos of a marshmallowy Sasquatch, who may have been upset after once hearing the night's entertainment, the Dean-aholics, a tribute band featuring a faux Dean Martin who looked nothing like Dean, a Sinatra who looked like the son of the son of Frank Sinatra, Jr. and who sang that many generations out of phase with the music, a Sammy Davis who looked like Nipsey Russell or Huggy Bear, and a woman in a cocktail dress, replete with a giant martini olive on her cleavage.

Still shaking from all of this (or was it that the place is damn drafty and that it snowed), after the tour, a woman notice a black and white photo of cheesy comic Joey Bishop and started telling everyone who would listen (AKA me) the Bishop forced her into her first French kiss. She was in her teens at show in Vegas with her parents. Bishop spotted her, came over to the table and puts his tongue in her mouth. Google photos of Joey Bishop. Now go to the bathroom and vomit.

Keeping with the fright night theme, a guy at the party's bar told of what happened on his drive up from Southern California. He noticed an odd noise coming from his wheel well somewhere near Sacramento, pulled over, checked his tires and learned he and his family drove all the way with just one lug nut holding on one of the tires and the nuts on the others stripped.

Then, in the middle of this tale, he looks at my spangly-dressed sister and goes, "My God! You're beautiful!"

Which brings us back to me napping at the compound. I planned to mill about and collect stories, like frozen butterflies. I met a guy whom I later learned made his multi-millions inventing the glare screen for computers. He was all excited and wanted to bring in in more earth moving equipment, because that's his rich guy "because I can" thing I guessed - and to turn the marsh into a lake.

The caterers were called Twin Peaks. There were dirt bikers and theater people and kids with really shitty long haircuts. A really quiet guy mentioned he just got out of the Marines and had a tour of duty in Iraq. There were theater people who liked the aforementioned 70s music, for which I derided them.

Then the caterers finally got around to serving a myriad course dinner in a propane heated tent. Then it got really fucking cold. I swear because that happens when you try to make your way to the bathroom in the frost-breath air. Those are the words that crystalize the moment.

And I was leaning up against a tree like a wounded puppy when one of the prettiest women at the soiree, one of those wholesome, blonde, big eyed, baby-faced mom types, came up and offered breathing lessons. Mr. Smart Ass here couldn't find anything funny to say. Hyperventilating doesn't lend itself to one-liners, but a sort of vague embarassment.

I drove back to my sister's house, pretty much almost proving my own point about one of the big drawbacks of hanging out at a place where there is no communication available with the outside world. Unless, of course, the guy with the helicopter the next lot over happened to be home.

Anyway, that's when I was pretty much sure this might be more than a really bad cold, maybe even a rare fungus picked up on flights filled with people wearing no socks, flip flops and tank tops, or having no sense of personal space.

The lungs didn't work any better at sea level, as we drove to the Bay Area in a rented RV on Sunday so the kids could spring break with Mom and Dad in Big Sur. I flew home - in West Coast family tradition just getting to the gate in time for boarding (which is really fun when wheezing).

Tuesday I headed to the doctor, got some tests (apparently including one to see how much of The Maury Povich Show you can tolerate while waiting for lab results), and wound up being told not to leave, to check into the health hotel.

I should this print this out, because I've been asked the same questions over and over. It's like they are trying to see if I change my story, that I will break down and confess to smoking 27 packs of cigarettes a day while working behind a desk in a garage.

You'd think they would all have Macs for Docs or some sort of PDA by now and could drill beyond the basics like on the cool med shows, trying to outdo each other like on House or to screw each other like on Grey's Anatomy.

Instead, a woman who said she was my case manager woke me up before 8 a.m. today to ask if I lived independently and if I used a cane. That's all she wanted to know.

I'm hoping she had the wrong room. Do I look that old? Could being single and walking on my own be the keys to understanding my ailment, the cause of blood clots, two for each lung, a set of big new ones, a tiny set of old ones?

Stay tuned.