Category Archives: Health

911

August 29, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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

August 13, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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

August 10, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

Fast. 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 and 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

July 1, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Most Heat Moon

Selling used exercise equipment. Over the last six to nine months I’ve revised my workout routine 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 good 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.

Family, Feelings, Health, Politics

A Dull, Gray Day

June 25, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer New (Most Heat) Moon

It is what my Aunt Roberta would have called a dull, grey day. For my Aunt Roberta, Aunt Barbara and Aunt Marjorie most days were dull and grey. All three had a bipolar diagnosis. Aunt Barbara remained hospitalized for most of her life. Aunt Roberta was in and out of the state hospital as she got older and after her divorce from Uncle Ray. Aunt Marjorie starved herself to death after a career as a dietitian and a life long reputation as the family’s best cook by far.

(where the grocery store used to be in Aunt Roberta’s tiny community of Arlington, Indiana)

This is the set up for my vasectomy story which I’ve recounted briefly here before. It was 1973 and the feminist movement had begun to flow through academic institutions like the wave at a baseball game. When it hit United Theological Seminary, where I was a second year student, I was already committed to women’s liberation. (And, yes, I know I still carry my sexist upbringing with me and make my slips.)

This was also before I went through treatment at Hazelden’s outpatient program so drinking was still part of my life, as were the exaggerated mood changes that go with it. As a result, I wondered then about my own sanity, though after treatment it was clear the mood changes were chemically enhanced.

Being sexually active (this was still the 60’s culturally) and aware of the imbalance between women’s responsibility for contraception and men’s tendency to exploit it, I began to consider a vasectomy.

What made the decision sensible to me, even though 26, single and childless, was the history of bipolar illness in my mother’s family. I saw then and see in the same way now no need to pass those kind of genes along in the collective pool. Neither did I have then nor do I have now any need to reproduce my self, the selfish gene be damned. It was then that I committed myself to adoption if I ever wanted a family, though having a family felt unlikely at the time.

My decision was made without consulting any one else. It was my responsibility and I would see to it. A clinic on Rice Street in St. Paul found time on their schedule and I went in around 4 o’clock on a spring afternoon. The procedure is simple and was so in my case save for too little anesthetic as we began. Which a quick indrawn breath and a wince remedied.

Since that time 41 years ago, I have been functionally infertile. I’ve never regretted the decision though I did try to have it reversed in my mid-30’s. My second wife wanted a child of her own. The reversal failed and we reverted to the adoption plan which had been my preference since 1973.

(I put this in for our dogs.)

It’s not something I think about very often though it does come up. It surfaces usually when I recall the agony of my three aunts, how much I cared about them and how little the family’s love could do to quiet their inner life.

Family, Health

Jon

June 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Summer Moon

Boy. Medicine. Trying to come to grips with Jon’s possible pulmonary hypertension. This is not a diagnosis you want. Even with advances, and they have been considerable, the fate of those with the disease have, to use Jon’s phrase, shortened horizons.

Just finished reading a 2006 article replete with medical shorthand, acronyms and formulas. I finally got it. This is a disease of the circulatory system of the lungs. Due to a variety of initial causes (and they are important in prognosis, but not diagnosis) the blood vessels in the lung become compromised, requiring increased pressure to push blood through them for its necessary oxygenation. The right ventricle of the heart pushes blood into the lung after it has been deoxygenated in its journey through the body. To produce the pressure required to pump the blood through the compromised lung circulatory system the right ventricle has to work harder (pump harder).

Due to the lung’s normally highly efficient circulatory system, the right ventricle has evolved a thinner wall than the left ventricle which pushes oxygenated blood through the body which requires greater pressure. As a result, when a diseased lung forces the thinner walled right ventricle to push harder, it eventually widens under the pressure, which makes its pumping less efficient, which makes it work even harder, which increases the dilation until the left ventricle becomes involved as the widened right impinges on it. This process defines the phrase vicious cycle. Then, at some point, the heart itself cannot produce enough pressure to effectively circulate the blood and heart failure ensues.

Treatment regimens are complex, only a few aimed at the actual problem, the circulatory system of the lungs, and all of those drastic. The advanced therapies (I don’t understand this use of the term.) are all symptomatic, that is, they reduce the load on the right ventricle by dilating blood vessels and improving circulation within the lungs, for example, but they don’t go to the problem itself and therefore ultimately prove inadequate.

So much about survival depends on etiology and we don’t know that in Jon’s case. Yet. Nor do we know to a medical certainty that he has the disease. An echocardiogram on July 1st will provide more information though catheterization of the right ventricle to determine it’s health is the final diagnostic step.

We’ll proceed as a family, figuring out what we can do for each other.

Health, Weather +Climate

Spring Holds Out For a Better Contract

May 12, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

Great line from Paul Huttner at MPR’s Updraft blog: The season formerly known as spring… The plants in our vegetable garden really want to grow. I can tell. But the temperatures aren’t giving them much of a chance.

While at the Woolly retreat this weekend, the transplants from Seed Saver’s Exchange will probably come. The timing is right; or, at least the timing should be right. But, we may have to shelter the plants awhile until the soil warms up a bit more.

Did my workout this evening, at least the high intensity aerobic part, and my back has calmed down. I’m glad this isn’t a week or week + long event.

Family, Health

Aside May 12, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

A combination of back pain, percocet and melancholy has dulled the mind. It’s like thick gray wool packed in at the temples, crowding thought, squeezing it into channels too narrow. Concepts and ideas get clogged, adhere to each other, don’t come apart, so writing is more like picking cotton than fly fishing in a cold running stream. And, my fingers tremble a bit, unable to collect the bolls of thought, at least ones that might go together.

Hell might be such a state permanently in place, where the ideas and the concepts, the feelings are there, somewhere, but so difficult to access, to string together. It erodes the sense of self, makes character a matter of chance acquisition rather than moral choice.

This morning the gray wool packing has diminished, though the mixed metaphors here may not show it. The back’s better, though still stiff and painful. I can’t imagine Kate’s life where a certain amount of this pain never leaves her. The pain distracts me, at times it’s all I have energy for; yet, I know it will pass. For her, it is resident.

Health, Politics, US History

Flare For the Obvious

May 6, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

File under duh:

BOSTON — The death rate in Massachusetts dropped significantly after it adopted mandatory health care coverage in 2006, a study released Monday found, offering evidence that the country’s first experiment with universal coverage — and the model for crucial parts of President Obama’s health care law — has saved lives, health economists say.

Family, Friends, Health, Woolly Mammoths

Significant People Update

April 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Update on the unusual spate of hospitalizations I noted a couple of weeks ago.

Woollies recovering: Tom, thumb. Frank, back. Bill’s good after his day of needles and scans. Granddaughter Ruth who smashed her foot under a teeter-totter, mending.

Today is Grandson Gabe’s 6th birthday. He’s an earthday kid. We’re going to see him for his birthday party which is this Saturday. I’m looking forward to traveling with Kate.