Category Archives: Health

Health

A New Doctor

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Lughnasa                                                               Honey Moon

“Feels like I’m getting married before the wife is in the ground,” I told Kate at Hell’s Kitchen.  I always eat at Hell’s Kitchen after visits to my primary care doc in the Allina Clinic in the Medical Building in downtown Minneapolis.

(Hell’s Kitchen decor)

Today I had a consultation with Dr. Massie, an establishing care visit they call it.  My previous doctor, Tom Davis, was still working just down the hall, but, as the receptionist said, “You know Dr. Davis will not be with us anymore?”  I did.

Not sure why but I’ve always felt it important to have a primary care doc and get annual physicals; the third phase only reinforces that feeling.  If I don’t have a doctor, one who knows me, I feel uncovered, sort of naked.  So I wanted to find a new doctor even before Tom left the building.  But not much before.  His last day is August 30.

Dr. Massie will be my first woman doctor, except, as Kate pointed out, “The one you’re sleeping with.”  Dr. Massie is quick, easy with information and question answering, and personable.  Also, she’s young.  No retiring on me.  Although, I thought the same about Charlie Petersen and he pulled up stakes and moved to Colorado.  You never know.

 

Health, Our Land and Home

It’s not you

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8/10/2013  Lughnasa                                                 State Fair Moon

Chainsaw man appeared today, cutting whole ash trees into firewood size chunks and moving limbs long distances.  When this gets back on Ancientrails, I’ll show you the Back IMAG0739to the Future safety goggles I bought.  German.

So.  In order.  My physician got sanctioned by the state medical board for over prescribing pain killers.  So, I then went to my next physician who, after a couple of years or so left to become medical director of an hmo.  Found Charlie Petersen, who was my physician for many years until he and his wife moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado to live the horse and skiing life.  He recommended Tom Davis whom I’ve now seen for some years.  From whom I just got a letter saying he’s retiring.  Is it me?  They all say it’s me, not you, but I’m beginning to wonder.  Except for that first guy.

 

Garden, Health

Morning in the Garden

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Summer                                                                     Moon of the Firsts Harvests

Still weary today.  Not sure why unless it’s the torpor I described yesterday, a collecting of tensions released, then a sag.  Maybe.

Out this morning encouraging the reproductively focused like tomatoes and peppers to do their best and the vegetatively focused like cabbage and beets to do their best.  I always have some spray left over so I then continue on to lilies, begonias, clematis, geraniums and hosta, ferns, hyacinths, bugbane.  Doesn’t take long and the results so far look good.  Lots of fruits, roots and few insects.

In the early morning the dew remains on the plants, water rolls off the rubberized sole of my boots, leaking in a bit.  My jeans soak up dew at thigh level when pressing through bushes like the gooseberries to get to other plants.  The rest of me though is dry.  The dewpoint a pleasant 57, the temperature 60.

Garden, Great Work, Health, Our Land and Home, Woolly Mammoths

Lilies, Leeks and Lumber

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Summer                                                       First Harvest Moon

Today, again, harvesting trees.  This time black locust, a thorny tree that grows fast and germinates easily.  In olden days fence posts, foundation posts, anything requiring a sturdy rot-resistant wood were common uses of the black locust.  This tree will get used as firewood for the great Woolly ingathering here on Monday.

Other hardwood trees like oak, in particular, but ash and maple and others as well, require a year or two of drying to get their moisture content below 20%.  Black locust is a low moisture wood even when it’s alive.

In felling this tree my directional cut was at a slight angle and the tree came down on our vegetable garden fence.  But.  Fortuna was with me.  The main branch that hit the fence landed right on top of a fence post, square cedar. It didn’t mind at all.  May have sunk a bit lower in the earth. A slight dent in the gate where a smaller top branch made impact, otherwise, the fence came through fine.  Whew.  Felling trees is art as well as science and I mishandled this one.

Early this morning I sprayed Enthuse, a product to generally spiff plants, give them an energy boost.  That was over all the vegetables and the blooming lilies.  The lilies are my favorite flowers by far and almost all of the varieties that I have I purchased at the North Star lily sale last spring.  These are lilies grown here, hardy for our winters.  Here are pictures of the current state of the gardens and preparations for the Woolly homecoming.

Faith and Spirituality, Health

Good Enough

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Summer                                                            First Harvest Moon

Last time the Woollies gathered at Woodfire Grill we got on the topic of Alzheimers.  Warren said many people, around two years in, gain a sense of peace about it.  “I don’t want to gain peace.” one of us said.  That interchange stayed with me, bouncing around, providing background when I read these two quotes recently.

The first one is from a blog I’ve referenced.  A link to it is on the right and in the quote. The second is from an NYT’s book review.

“In the last month or two, some of that special feeling—my ability to live in the present, my sense that my life is worthwhile even if I can’t accomplish that much, my sense of joy in living—has been diluted, and I’ve wondered why.  Had I slipped back into old patterns, lost the new sense of emotional richness?”   Watching the Lights Go Out  July 6, 2013

“Like Freud, Mr. Grosz is fond of literary allusions, and he’s nimble at excavating the psychological subtext of literary classics. He reads Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” as “a story about an extraordinary psychological transformation.” One of the lessons it teaches, he argues, is that “Scrooge can’t redo his past, nor can he be certain of the future. Waking on Christmas morning, thinking in a new way, he can change his present — change can only take place in the here and now.”   NYT book review of the Examined Life by Stephen Grosz

No, I’m not going to be here now.  Not that.  I’m sensing in these two quotes and in the conversation at the Woollies a profound realization, the one behind the Zen insistence on the now and, I think, these two observations as well.  It’s remarked on most clearly in the first quote.  “my sense…my life is worthwhile even if I can’t accomplish that much…”  There it is.  Right under our nose.

The key to inner peace is not so much living in the present, although that has obvious psychodynamic benefits, but in grasping our true place in the cosmos.  Our achievements do not define us.  Our capacity to do and act does not define us.  Our existence, our very ordinary existence, is sufficient.  Enough.  Adequate.  Good enough.  That’s what the author of the Watching the Lights Go Out discovers, that’s what Grosz suggests when in his reading of the Christmas Carol.  It was not Scrooge’s skills as a money lender and miser that he needed, but the simple acts of human kindness that he could engage in Christmas morning.  He only had to be Scrooge, not a role, bad or good.

And, in the end, if we get to this realization through Zen, knowing ourselves, psychoanalysis or Alzheimer’s, is the quality any different?

 

Aging, Feelings, Friends, Health, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Watching As the Lights Go Out

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Summer                                                                        Solstice Moon

When we gathered last night at the Woodfire Grill, five of us Woollies talked, catching up on family, discussing current events, laughing.  Then, the talk turned serious and deep, as the fly fisherman said, “existential.”

A sister-in-law, a chiropractor, called one of us and told him she was retiring.  “Because,” she said, “I’ve been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.” That brought silence around this table where the youngest was 64 and the oldest 80.  As is his way, this one wondered how to be present to her, not to fix her, but to aid her in her present situation.  How might he stay present to her over time, perhaps learning enough to alert her children, who live far away when things become dire?

I pointed him to a website I recently added here, under the link’s title, Third Phase, called Watching the Lights Go Out.  Here’s this 68 year old retired physician’s description of its purpose:

“In September of 2012 I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This blog is the story of my day-to-day life with this illness and my reflections upon it. We tend to be scared of Alzheimer’s or embarrassed by it. We see it as the end of life rather than a phase of life with all its attendant opportunities for growth, learning, and relationships. We see only the suffering and miss the joy. We experience only the disappearing cognitive abilities and ignore the beautiful things that can appear.”

One of us has an obvious anxiety about this since he has a mother with Alzheimer’s and definitely does not want to place that kind of burden on those who would be his caretakers. What will I do, he asked, if this becomes me?

We turned to the writer who cared for his mother-in-law, Ruby, who tipped over into Alzheimer’s after open-heart surgery.  He has interviewed many Alzheimer’s sufferers and said that after a couple of years of sometimes intense existential dread, there comes a peace with the disease.

“But I don’t want to not care!” said the one of us who was anxious.  “That leaves my caretakers with the burden.”

This conversation continued, all of us trying to put ourselves in the situation of watching the lights go out.  It was not pleasant, but neither was it hopeless, because we had friends around the table.

A primary inflection of this whole conversation was readying ourselves to live into this and other dark realities that loom not far down the stair case of aging.

 

 

Cinema and Television, Garden, Health

Old Movies and Herbs

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Summer                                                            Solstice Moon

Kate and I watched an old Sherlock Holmes movie, Murder by Decree, with a young Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Watson.  Mason yes.  Plummer, unfortunately, no.  Not brooding or angular enough.  Basil Rathbone is better.

While watching we plucked oregano leaves for the dryer.  Kate has already frozen rhubarb and several cups of strawberries.  The harvest is well underway and will continue at one level or another through the latter part of September.

In the aches and pains department:  knee, bad last year, much improved, rarely gives problems.  back, normal now, after a very painful late April and May.  left shoulder, vast improvement, not better, but I can see return to normalcy.  and now, ta dah, just as the left shoulder has begun to heal, the right elbow.  Ouch.  Some form of tendinitis, I’m sure.  It seems as if there is a rhythmic pattern here: knee, back, shoulder, elbow.  A concrete, perhaps a skeletal poem.

Aging, Health, Third Phase, Travel

The Shoulder

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Beltane                                                                                            Solstice Moon

Finished my p.t. visits for the shoulder.  When asked at this point what he thought caused this pain, “Rust.  Or, dry rot.” David Poulter said.  In this case some form of cervical impingement and possibly a rotator cuff tear.  On the likelihood of its return.  “If you keep up the resistance work, you’ll minimize it.”  But.  Since it is rust, the probability is that something, if not the exact same thing will happen again.  Hopefully not for awhile.

David also said that I had gotten in three weeks the amount of improvement it takes most folks to get in three months.  That made me feel good because it speaks well of my body’s continuing capacity to heal itself.  The key in this case apparently is steady work.  Which I’ve been doing.  I don’t like pain, but am willing to endure it to put it behind me.

David is an interesting guy.  His brother lives in Brittany and the time trials for the Tour de France are in Mont St. Michel this year, so he’s packing up and moving to Brittany for four months. He’s 54, born in Lancastershire, moved to Australia, then New Zealand and eighteen years ago to the U.S.  His sport is cycling so he’s going to ride the 35 miles to the time trials and generally hang out as a cyclist, a Brit who speaks bon francais, but who has a desire to become fluent.

Of course, Brittany is that oddity, the Celtic part of France, speaking a native tongue closest to Cornish.  David told me that Great Britain comes from the island, Britain, plus the little Britain, Brittany.  Further, that the French/English animosity comes from the Roman, then the Saxon, then the French invasions which pushed the native Britons (the Celts) into the peripheral countries of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, the Isle of Mann and Brittany.

(Brittany in dark blue.)

 

Health

Shoulder Pain: The Continuing Story

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Beltane                                                                                    Solstice Moon

My shoulder started hurting, bad, sometime in January, late.  Since I had just had an episode of patella-femoral syndrome, knee pain, that I had fought off with rest, I decided to try the same with the shoulder pain.  I stopped my resistance work, then took off for D.C. to see the pre-Raphaelite exhibit.  By the time I got back the acute phase of the pain had ended.  I went back to my regular workouts.

Still, there were lingering problems.  I couldn’t lift a grocery bag from below my waist up on to the counter.  At night, sometimes before sleep, pain localized in my bicep would be so intense I had trouble getting to sleep.  Though I always did.  Putting on a jacket hurt as did flipping the duvet up to get it straightened out after a nap or in the morning.

None of this was enough to cause me a lot of discomfort and most of the time I forgot about it, something I couldn’t do while it was acute.  Still, it was there and when it did appear it made me feel just a little less than I wanted to be.  At some point, too, when I did bicep curls and chest presses, my left bicep would weaken and stop working.  I didn’t want to stop my workouts for this minor of a problem so I just stayed away from the exercises that bugged my arm.

I was, in other words, glad to start physical therapy.  I waited a while to get the therapist my orthopedist had recommended.  It was good choice; David is quick and reassuring.  Over the last two weeks I’ve done the exercises, simple things.  At first mostly stretching.  Last week David added some strengthening exercises.

I no longer have the pain before I go to sleep though I sometimes wake up to some pain.  In general the arm is much less sensitive, though I still have some problem putting on a coat or flipping the duvet, but it is much reduced.  I’ve been able to return to the bicep curls and the chest presses.

It amazes me that this regular series of very small interventions can have such a significant effect.  And what I like best?  It’s non-invasive and non-chemical.

 

 

 

Garden, Health

Garden and Exercise

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Beltane                                                                           Early Growth Moon

The garden is well underway.  Beets, onions, chard, kale, carrots, cucumbers, sugar snap peas, tomatoes, peppers, leeks, egg plants and garlic all in various growth stages.  The garlic crop may be my weakest in several years.

Kate and I will transplant this morning.  We’re going to move hosta, hemerocallis and bleeding hearts to a mounded area near our fire pit.  Javier got the area prepared on Memorial Day and moved the fire pit into the center of the ring that Mark built.  He’ll fill the fire pit and the ring with a material that will be fireproof and weed proof.

Putting in some shade plants will give the area a more landscaped feel.  My goal is to have it ready for a visit by the grandkids sometime in July and for the Woolly meeting also that month.

The exercises I got from my physical therapist have already eased up the pain in my biceps.  My posture, which both Lervick (orthopedist) and Poulter (physical therapist) said tilted to the left, has changed, too.

The intensity workouts I’ve been doing work, too.  That’s the one minute of aerobics at the most flat-out I can stand, getting my body into the anaerobic range, followed by a set of resistance work while the heart rate goes down below 110, then another minute of aerobics, and repeat until 4 high intensity aerobic intervals and 4 resistance sets are done.