Category Archives: Health

Health, The Move

More Getting Ready to Go Stuff. (medical)

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Samain                                                                            Closing Moon

Went to the Nicollet Mall today to see Dr. Corrie Massie, my third internist in the last seven years or so. Charlie Petersen moved to Steamboat Springs with his wife. Tom Davis retired to collect native American pots and otherwise enjoy life. Corrie is a good doc, one I would have been happy to see longer.

Instead, this morning she printed my annual prescription refills so I could carry them a new pharmacy in Colorado. She also explained my stage 3 kidney disease diagnosis. “I get the most questions about that diagnosis of any I put on patient’s charts,” she said. Turns out that with the most normal kidney functions you qualify for stage 1 kidney disease. Stage 2 kidney disease is the domain most folks inhabit most of their life and Stage 3 represents a situation not unusual as we age. “It’s a filter. As the filter gets used, various insults degrade its function. Disease. High blood pressure. NSAID’s.”

As we get older, our kidney function deteriorates. The third phase sell-by date. At some point the universe follows the dictates of my long time ago grocery store boss who always reminded us to “rotate the stock.”

As became my practice when I transferred back to the Nicollet Clinic to start seeing Tom Davis, I went straight to hell from my doctor’s office. Hell’s Kitchen that is. A good breakfast, no matter what time of day.

 

Colorado, Health, The Move, Weather +Climate

Minnesota!

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Samain                                                                               Closing Moon

And the award for first roads driven while snowing goes to… Minnesota! Colorado, at least Conifer, is still blessedly shy of snow which means the fence posts will get in. It won’t last. Conifer gets 90″ of snow compared to Andover’s 45. More snow falls there, but the sun, closer by 8,800 feet, also melts the snow faster and the colds don’t get as intense, at least on south facing surfaces like our driveway. The result is more snow, but less snow cover.

The roads on my way to the eye doc this morning were icy, but plowed. Folks drove sensibly for the most part though there were the occasional frozen minds talking on the phone or even texting. A few also followed too closely for dry pavement. The laws of physics will not be repealed, no matter how confident a driver you are.

Not bad for the first storm, really.

At the front desk, on the way out, I signed a release for my medical records so they can be transferred electronically to the next ophthalmologist  The same will happen when I visit Dr. Massie in a couple of weeks. This is much more convenient and better for me as a patient, too. Thank you, difference engine.

 

 

Health

Rheum

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Fall                                                                                         New (Falling Leaves) Moon

BTW: I originally named this the Leaf Change moon, but saw that the Ojibway call it the Falling Leaves moon. I liked that better.

Kate had an appointment with her rheumatologist this morning. As I often do, I wondered about the rheum part of this word. So, from my favorite online etymology dictionary:

rheum (n.) Look up rheum at Dictionary.com“mucous discharge,” late 14c., from Old French reume “a cold” (13c., ModernYou can’t control the Universe. You are the water, not the rock French rhume), from Latin rheuma, from Greek rheuma “discharge from the body, flux; a stream, current, flood, a flowing,” literally “that which flows,” from rhein “to flow,” from PIE root *sreu- “to flow” (cognates: Sanskrit sravati “flows,” srotah “stream;” Avestan thraotah- “stream, river,” Old Persian rauta “river;” Greek rheos “a flowing, stream,” rhythmos “rhythm,” rhytos “fluid, liquid;” Old Irish sruaim, Irish sruth“stream, river;” Welsh ffrwd “stream;” Old Norse straumr, Old English stream, Old High German strom (second element in maelstrom); Lettish strauma “stream, river;” Lithuanian sraveti “to trickle, ooze;” Old Church Slavonic struja “river,” o-strovu “island,” literally “that which is surrounded by a river;” Polish strumień “brook”).

(this stream really flows if you click on it.)

Notice in there that rhein meant “to flow.” So, if your child wants to grow up to be a rheumatologist, tell them to start paying attention to discharges from the body as well as rivers, streams, floods, even rhythm, anything that flows. If it’s got a good beat, you can code to it. (medical humor)

 

Cooking, Health

A Small Thing

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Lughnasa                                                                               College Moon

Kate’s got some kind of malady that made her want my chicken noodle soup. It’s my signature dish. And the recipe is an old family recipe, maybe. The soup recipe is on the Golden Plump chicken label.

Making it is a small thing. Cut onions (ours) one cup. Cut carrots (ours) one cup. Put in a full clove of garlic cut and smashed (ours). This last is my addition. A cup of celery. Some olive oil. Sautee for five minutes. Then add the chicken and the corn (frozen). Bring to a boil, reduce to simmer and cook for one and a half hours. Remove chicken. Remove skin. Cut chicken meat into small pieces and restore it to the pot with the egg noodles and peas (frozen). Boil for ten minutes. Freezes well and since there are ten cups of water, makes a bunch.

Growing the onions and the carrots and the garlic is a small thing, too. These sort of small things are our lives. Yes, there are the grand gestures: winning an election, bringing home a fat paycheck, building a business, designing a house, getting a degree. Yes, there are these. But without the small things, done by someone, there is no body, no energy, no health for the grand gesture. And the small things must be done every single day while the grand gestures occur only occasionally.

So this is a nod to the small things that make our lives.

Dogs, Family, Garden, Health

Fire and Raspberries

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Finished the fire pit repair this morning, spreading mulch over the landscape cloth. The IMAG0751landscape cloth covered the sand that filled the hole. The cobblestones from an old Minneapolis street in front of a former Kenwood mansion are clear of soil. We can now summon fire.

Picked raspberries, too. The golden berries have begun to ripen and they are abundant. Fewer red berries, but they are large and fat, juicy. Most of the garden is in now, a few tomatoes, all the egg plants, some peppers, the third planting of beets and carrots and the leeks are all that remain. When the leeks come in, I’ll my chicken and leek pies which we’ll freeze for over the fallow months dining.

Vega has returned to her tail wagging, bouncy self just as the vet feared when he wrote guarded on the prognosis. We have to keep her from running. She’s supposed to go out on a leash, but we never leash our dogs except for trips to the vet and the kennel. Otherwise they have free roaming rights to our woods. This means  that keeping a dog quiet whose surgical wounds need to heal can be difficult. So far, though, the wound has begun to close.

Kate’s down with a stomach bug I had last week. Used to be she shared all the illnesses she contacted at work with me, now I’ve done it to her.

Aging, Friends, Health, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

How Can We Live Until We Die?

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Lughnasa                                                                    College Moon

After taking a rug into American Rug Laundry in Minneapolis, I drove back through the campus of the University of Minnesota. It was move in day. Trucks with back doors thrown open, mattresses being handled through door-ways.  Clutches of stunned looking freshmen, on campus and on their own, gathered at street lights. Now what?

It felt good to see that moment, relive my own and feel renewed as a cultural ritual continues, looking much the same as when I did it myself back in 1965.

That was the morning. In the late afternoon I drove over to Maple Grove, to Biaggi’s and met Tom Crane, Bill Schmidt and Warren Wolfe for our Woolly first Monday restaurant meal.

Warren closed on the sale of his second house in Minnesota last Friday and was in a celebratory mood. Bill had come from playing cards with friends, happy to be. Tom had an off work weekend beard and spoke of cleaning the garage floor in anticipation of guests soon to arrive.

The ease of our conversation, the common reference points, so many now, was in its fluidity, healing. (not, I should say, from recent pain or anguish, but from the deeper burden of life lived fundamentally alone) Seeing and being seen is the essence of human interaction yet it is so often blurred by wanting something from the other, or anticipating something else. This evening, as so often with the Woollys (though not always), we were with each other, there, at that table.

One profound question arose, how can we live until we die? This dips into the existential reality of bodies going infirm-Warren and I have glaucoma, Tom’s thumb, Frank’s heart and back, Ode’s knee. It also, and I think more profoundly, raises the question of self-hood, of what makes us who we are. What is necessary? Is walking necessary? Sight? The lack of serious, even terminal illness? What is indispensable?

Perhaps a clue came to us in the person of Cheryl, our waitress. When she drove north from Santa Rosa to San Francisco to see her father, she would drive through Gilroy, the garlic capital of the U.S. She wound crank her windows down and enjoy the aroma. Some of her friends thought her eccentric. No, she was Cheryl, taking in what she could as she had the opportunity.

That is, I would guess, a secret to living until we die.

 

Family, Health

911

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Lughnasa                                                              College Moon

911 call. Police. Then fire emergency. Then a fire truck. Finally, the last one to show up. The ambulance. Not often anymore Kate gets to showcase her sang froid during a crisis, but she did it today as the handyman working on the front porch suddenly threw up and became light headed.

Kate brought him something for his stomach and noticed a gray cast to his skin, sweat, too. Running down the diagnostic tree she settled on arrhythmia as most likely. She took his blood pressure with my blood pressure monitor and got very low numbers. That decided her on the 911 call.

He said he wanted to go home. Kate told the emts, hospital. He was taken to the E.R. Later his wife, Pam, called to say he had just gone into surgery for a ruptured appendix. Much better than the other possibilities.

 

 

Commentary on the news, Family, Feelings, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Cloud Blocking The Sun

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

A word about depression. I’ve experienced melancholy and perhaps one bout of true depression, back in 1975 after my first divorce, but I know the real deal when I see it. As I think I’ve written here before, three of my aunts were manic-depressive. One aunt spent the bulk of her life in a mental hospital, another was in and out and the other starved herself to death. It’s a subtle beast, depression, not at all like the usual presentation of the slump shouldered, gloom faced lump in a chair.

No, the depressed person can push right up against life, engaging in work and social life, perhaps with less energy, but that’s often not noticeable. A mix of obligation, habit and denial can even make a depressed person seem normal, even to those closest to them. Robin Williams worked hard, it said in the paper today, in spite of his depression. This suggests that yesterday might have been different, worse than the other episodes of addiction and depression he suffered, but that may not be true.

This might be the time when the impulsive met the depressive, the time when, just for a terrible moment, the idea of death outweighed the struggle for life. It could be that had someone accidentally interrupted this moment he could still be working today. This is not at all blaming someone else, rather I’m pointing to the deadly consequence of entertaining, even for a moment, the notion of self-extinction.

Yes, existentialists, and I count myself among them, see suicide as a possible affirmative choice in a meaningless world. If life has become unbearable, for whatever reason, the decision to end it needs to be taken seriously, not discounted or abjured. And perhaps especially because I feel this way I’m sensitive to the effects of a momentary mood, a flight of dark fantasy, that may have irrevocable results. These moods are not the same as an existential choice, being overtaken by a feeling of worthlessness or dead-endedness is not a choice; rather, these are situations of capture when the self becomes hostage and even victim to psychic weather.

Moods, as the weather systems of the psyche, have great power and in our interior world we often mistake weather for climate. That is, we take the mood as indicative of a general state of existence, when it is really a thunder shower or a cloud blocking the sun.

We humans, and our lives, are so fragile, so vulnerable.

Anoka County, Dogs, Health, Our Land and Home

Flash

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Lughnasa                                                               Lughnasa Moon

IMAG0486Fast. That’s how life can change. I wired a large fallen branch to the bottom of the fence along our southern property line. The last three points of escape were along the northern fence line so Rigel has begun a systematic (well, sort of) testing of the containment.

While going downhill along the path next to the fence line, the stretch you can see here,  my foot struck a small stump and I fell forward. As gravity reached up to grab me, my body took over, putting my right arm out to cushion the fall. But as I fell, I remembered, in a flash, the sort of things that happen to older folks when they fall. This was not the kind of fall I took as a child or even a younger man. No, it had a brief, but strong undercurrent of dread attached.

That said, the effects of the fall were unremarkable. My right shoulder ached, a bit of soreness in the right lower back, but no broken bones. No head injuries. The wire snips IMAG0491and the coil of wire, now mostly gone since I had just used it on the fourth fence strengthening of this latest episode, flew out of my hands and I had to find them.

When I went through the business with my left shoulder a year or so ago, the orthopedist remarked on how strong my bones were. Guess so.

(I took this photograph to illustrate the size of the grapevine, but it shows the coil nearing its end. This is before the latest patch.)

This is not a cautionary tale. It is, rather, a reminder that change can come at us fast and hard. It is also a reminder that resilience may be one of our most underrated virtues. I’m seeing that word a lot these days in situations psychological and climatological. It’s a good one. It is not how hard you fall, but how you bounce that counts.

Health, The Move

Stuff We’re Leaving Behind

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Summer                                                                     Most Heat Moon

Selling used exercise equipment. Over the last six to nine months I’ve revised my workout IMAG0286routine using P90X resistance and high intensity aerobics. This new combination, which I prefer over everything else I’ve done, takes 3 sessions of about an hour a week. My Landice treadmill, free weights, a bench and a pull-up bar are all I need. The multi-exercise Vectra 1850 and the Parabody legpress don’t fit in any more, are heavy and there is no reason to move them.

But. Exercise trends have changed since 2004 when I bought the Vectra with money from my dad’s estate, moving more in the direction I’ve taken myself. That reduces the market for Vectra like equipment to almost zero. Plus it’s big. So, I’ll try to use it for barter with one of the workers we hire over the coming months.

The Parabody is an excellent and functional apparatus, too. 2nd Wind exercise may buy or deal for both of them. Still, these are instances, as you might imagine, where the retail price and the wholesale price diverge quite a bit. Kate has the right attitude. We’ve had IMAG0289good use from both machines. I used the Vectra daily for many years and used it a lot right after my Achilles surgery for rehab. The leg press likewise. It’s only recently they’ve been supplanted by my free weight work. When you add in ten years of use, the elimination of expensive gym memberships and travel time to and from a gym, we’ve more than gotten our value out of them.

This is just part of the process of decluttering and reordering our lives.