Category Archives: Health

Health

A Common Thing

Leave a comment

Lugnasa                                               Hiroshima Moon

Into the Midway Doctor’s Building this morning for a surgical consult.  A hernia needs repair.  Not very exotic, not carrying dire warnings, but significant nonetheless.  Hernia’s are common.  Common enough for hernia repair to be the most common surgical procedure in the US.  Who knew?

Dawn Johnson, in her early 40’s, has practiced for 20 years.  She had the brisk, almost brusque, approach Kate says means professional.  We chatted briefly. she examined me (with no wine before hand) and said that, yes, surgery would fix it.  Would I prefer laparoscopy or open?

Faced with a menu of only two choices I chose the one that did not require a general anesthetic.  Open.  Well, there were other reasons, too.  It seemed to fit my situation and it has the additional virtue of being frequently performed, a known quantity.  I’m very conservative when it comes to things medical.  No experiments on this body except as a last ditch effort.  Tried and true, efficacious and low risk.  That’s what I want.

So, on September 28th, I’ll go to Abbott and Kate will drive me home the same day.  Key consideration in the date was the requirement that I not lift anything over 30 pounds for 30 days.  Hive boxes full weigh around 50.  Couldn’t do this surgery until the bee season has calmed down.

 

Dogs, Garden, Health

A Bike, The Orchard, Gertie Wounded

Leave a comment

Summer                                                       Hiroshima Moon

Got a bike and a helmet today.  Ready to ride.  This bike’s a fixie which means it won’t coast, though it has a hub that can switch out so it rides like an old timey Schwinn.  Not expensive, my helmet cost almost as much as the bike.  Wanted another aerobic alternative, something to get me outside for exercise.  This’ll do it.  Bought the bike on line and had a local bike shop assemble it.

Kate and I worked in the orchard today.  One day a week she says where and what she’d like to have me do outside.  Think it’ll be two days this week.  I like to work outside for an hour to an hour and a half, then I’m done.  She likes to work until she’s finished.  Commendable, but not my style.  I parse tasks over time.  Needless to say Kate gets more outdoor work done than I do.

Gertie has wounds again.  This is the third time since she got here and the second time in a month.  We’ve not seen it happen so we can only speculate, though they look like canine bites and tears.  Fortunately pediatrics has a lot in common with veterinary medicine–that is, the patients often can’t talk–so handling doggy trauma at a certain level is well within Kate’s capacity.

I held Gertie while Kate put hydrogen peroxide on and into the punctures.  The punctures went all the way through the dermis to the muscle fascia.  She debreeded, then put an antibiotic ointment under the skin around the wounds.  Then, some bandages that lasted for a bit.

We started her on antibiotics we have here from other doggy misadventures, gave her some rimadyl for the pain and let her sleep in our room.  Where she is right now.

 

Cooking, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Health

A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream

Leave a comment

Summer                                                Hiroshima Moon

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” – Anais Nin

Horticulture.  When we moved in here now 18 years ago, we decided to spend money upfront on landscaping, figuring we could enjoy it over the life of our tenancy rather than putting in as an amenity at the time of a sale.  We hired a landscape architect from Otten Brothers and he put in a basic plan.  Two wild prairie patches on either side of a manicured lawn.  Norway pines, a spruce or two, some amur maples, a genus maple, an oak, some river birch.  Near the house he put on narrow beds planted with shrubs like euonymus, a dwarf lilac, shrub roses, viburnum among others.

A boulder retaining wall in the front shored up a long bed like a peninsula into the green ocean of our yard.  In the back we had them cut a three tiered garden, each tier marked off with boulder retaining walls and divided near the house by steps made of rail-road tie size square lumber.

The rest of our property, all now that is our “backyard”, was part woods and part scrubland covered with black locust trees, thorny and not visually appealing though very good for fence posts.  The first two years after our move I spent cutting down trees, using a commercial wood-chipper to  grind them up and hiring a stump-grinder to come in and rid us of the stumps.  The scrubland became, gradually, a place where we could build a shed, plant a vegetable garden and I dreamed of making it an expanse of prairie, as I had wanted to do with the entire property when we moved. Continue reading A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream →

Family, Health

A Career Finished

Leave a comment

Summer                                             Under the Lily Moon

Kate left for work for the last time tonight.

She’s had a difficult and contentious time with Allina as they have moved more and more into medicine delivered by fiat rather than from an autonomous physician.  There are lots of problems: cook book medicine, coding for maximum revenue, treating the physician as an employee and giving them speed-ups in terms of number of patients per hour to see, pay differentials between the gatekeeper doctors, the primary care providers like pediatricians, internists and family practice and the surgeons/specialists, pay differentials in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s comforting in a way to know that Allina has screwed her on her last night of work.  She just called me and told me she’s the only doc on in after hours care.  There are supposed to be three.  Her last night.

Come on, guys.

Health

36 by 12.31.2012

1 Comment

Summer                                                   Under the Lily Moon

Wore myself out this morning and slept awhile longer than usual during the nap.  Felt good.

I’ve started playing an online game called Superbetter.  I heard about it on the TED hour, a talk given by a woman gamer who had to overcome a severe concussion.  She invented a game, called Superbetter, to help her win back her health.  It’s adaptable to the goal that you have and in my case I’m going for a 36 inch waistline by December 31st, 2012.

I want to feel better about how I look and improve my health.  Want to see all my grandkids.  Finish writing as many novels as I can.  Live here with Kate and be healthy during that time.

In all instances but my extending waist line I have either come to peace with myself or celebrate myself.  Yes, I’ll always suffer fools poorly.  Just gonna be that way.  Yes, I’ll learn new things, keep interesting projects in front of me.  I can say yes to everything about me except this bad eating habit.  So, I’m gonna kick it. Once and for all.  Before I have to.

If you know me, I’d appreciate your support.

Aging, Health, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Yet More Loss

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                              Beltane Moon

Got back from the retreat about 12:30.  Took a shower, rested a bit, then hopped in the car for Moon’s reviewal at Washburn-McCreavy in Bloomington.

The bulk of the mourners were Chinese, the Fong family, but there were friends of Scott and of Yin who, like me, are round eyes.   A bowl of red envelopes, take one please, sat next to cards of hand-written calligraphy and a second bowl of hard candy.  An order of service for the funeral the next day had a color photograph of Moon on the cover.

Moon lay in a casket at the end of the first hall, hands crossed over her chest, fabric work and calligraphy with her.  Next to the coffin a video played, showing pictures from Moon’s life, including one with a curly headed Yin, young and beautiful.

Mourners wore red bands to indicate celebration of Moon’s life, though a few wore black bands to indicate her centenary; while 97 at her death, Chinese custom adds four years, so her age according to Chinese tradition was 101.

There were the usual clots of well-wishers gathered around person they know, wandering from board to board of photographs and watching, again, the video shown in two places in a hall separate from the reviewal room itself.

I spoke to Yin, then to Scott, said we’d talk later and left.

When I got home, I had an e-mail from Warren that his father, Wayne, whom he had put in hospice care only Wednesday, had completed his journey.  Warren’s phrase.  Warren, referencing the end of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, said he thought his Dad might last longer, but “he was in a faster canoe.”

These are times of transition, of change, of loss, of gathering in the lessons of a lifetime and using them for this third, last phase of our own journeys.  We knew it before the retreat and now we have fresh and poignant evidence.

 

Family, GeekWorld, Health

Auntie Biotic

1 Comment

Spring                                                       Beltane Moon

Kate is home and her arm (cellulitis) looks much better.  Still a ways to go both on the antibiotics and healing, but the right direction.  Among the vagaries of strong antibiotic treatment is its kill all nature.  Like Round-up can’t tell the difference between weed and grass, most antibiotics can’t tell the difference between the pathogens and the friendly flora and fauna of your gut.

As a large symbiotic organism with literally billions of helper one-celled creatures throughout our body, it’s not a good idea to kill the guest-workers.  It would be sort of like throwing all the immigrants in jail (or deporting them) that you need to do the work in agriculture, manufacturing and domestic services.  Oh, wait…

How does the old song go?  You don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone.  The digestive tract needs these wee beasties, needs them bad.  When they get killed off in sufficient quantities, the intestinal tract can get thrown way outta whack.

Now, I’m not sayin’ the cure is worse than the disease, but at certain points in time it can feel like a toss up.  This very problem can cause cancer patients to push away chemo-therapy, concluding that in this case, in spite of a terrible disease, that the cure is worse.

A lot of medicine relies on harsh chemicals, the internal equivalents of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.  It’s popular in some circles to acknowledge this and give a blanket condemnation of Western medicine.  This kind of criticism only makes sense in a world where dying from an infection triggered during gardening seems impossible.  Why impossible?  Because we have the harsh chemicals to combat the even harsher outcomes of untended infection.

Overuse has begun to erode our edge against infections, so we might again have an era when the yearning will be for the time when we could beat stuff back.

Bees, Family, Garden, Health

The Quotidian

Leave a comment

Spring                                                            New Beltane Moon

Kate has taken her still healing cellulitis off to Colorado for a weekend with the grandkids.  Gabe’s fourth birthday is tomorrow.  Her arm looks much better than it did on Monday, swelling much less pronounced and the area of red, heated skin has reduced considerably.  It took four doses of IV antibiotics and the follow-up oral meds to get this infection under control.  No fun at all.

(Gabe and Grandpop, January, 2012)

Meanwhile back at the apiary, I’m going to check the bees tomorrow for larvae, need for syrup and pollen patties.  A few garden chores tomorrow, too, notably digging up the potato patch and amending the soil.  I can’t plant potatoes in the main vegetable garden for a couple more years because the beetles found them last fall.  Too many to pick off and drown in soapy water.

Also, I really need to fix the tire on the Celica, get it started and get the tire repaired or buy a new one.  Then, I’m going to give it away one way or another.  Know anyone that needs a car?  I may have a taker, but I’m not sure.  If not, I’ll pass it on to someone for free.  It has 280,000 miles on it, but it runs well.  We’ve decided to go with one car for financial reasons and it’s the one with the most mileage, so it has to go.

Cinema and Television, Cooking, Family, Health

Kate is Home!

Leave a comment

Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

The home is full again.  Kate got home at 7:00 pm.  Four of us were wagging our tails and I hugged her.  She took off for the doctor yesterday and never came home until just now.

Her arm looks better, not well, but better.  Her spirits are good; though she says she’s “going to play the invalid tomorrow and Thursday.  We’ll see.  She’s not too good in that role.

We had grilled chicken, chard (from last year’s garden) and whole wheat spaghetti with olive oil and butter.  After the meal we both scratched our heads during Tree of Life.

It evoked the era of my childhood so well:  kick the can, swimming, roaming in the fields, running down alleys, getting into mischief.  I pulled back from understanding and went with the flow, the feel of things.  I liked it.  Don’t know that I’d want all the films I see to take that form, but in this case, well done.

Tomorrow.  Some errands.

Family, Health

Ah.

Leave a comment

Spring                                                          Bee Hiving Moon

A much better sounding Kate called a couple of times this AM.  The swelling has begun to recede which means she’s responding to the IV antibiotics.  Which, thank God, means it’s not one of the resistant strains of strep infections.  She will have her fourth IV infusion at 4 pm, then she’ll come home.

She ordered grilled chicken breast and vegetables for dinner tonight.  The chef is on duty.

She has to keep her arm elevated at or above her shoulder, will have oral antibiotics, but, and this is the really important part, she will be able to go to Denver.  She would not have been a happy camper if she had been unable to see Gabe and Ruth (grandkids).

So.  A big whew here.