Category Archives: Health

Health, Minnesota, Politics, Weather +Climate

Gentle Politicians, Start Your Engines!

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Lughnasa                                  Waxing Artemis Moon

Still feeling a bit punk, but I can breathe and I did get outside, pulled some weeds.  Much better.

As August hits mid-point, we’re still experiencing high dewpoints and temperature, at least for us. Local meteorologist Paul Douglas compared today’s weather to the Congo. Land of 10,000 weather extremes.

Huh.  Just occurred to me, the land of 10,000 lakes.  When the Chinese say the 10,000 things, they mean the whole universe.  10,000 is a favorite number among Chinese writers and thinkers; as I interpret it, it means more than you can imagine.  My understanding of the reason for selecting 10,000 in our state slogan is that it “sounds like more than 16,000,” the rough count of Minnesota’s lake sized water bodies.  Whoever made the decision was right.

With the completion of the state’s first ever August 10th primary we stand now on the precipice of another silly season, campaign ads clogging the air waves, phone calls to support him or her and mailers in the box.  Kate and I, because we both have the appellation Dr. in certain places, often receive mailings to gauge the feelings of Republicans like us in our district.  I vacillate between pitching them and sending in disinformation.

In some ways the electoral process is politics at its purest, retail politics in which candidates use whatever means they can afford to convince individual voters to fill in the oval for them in November.  In another way the electoral process  is politics at its most foul as candidate use whatever means they can afford to distance themselves from their opponents:  attack ads, push polling, deceptive mailings, outright lies and, the worst of all, in my opinion, pandering.

Let me give you an example of pandering.  Tim Pawlenty entered Minnesota politics as a centrist right Republican.  As he attempts to position himself for a Presidential bid (Yike!), he keeps edging closer to nutty right wing tricorn wearing  Tea-Hee Party folks.

“Gov. Tim Pawlenty has rejected a yearslong effort to update Minnesota’s rules for lakeshore development.

Pawlenty says the revisions overreach, and undermine local control and property rights. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported Friday that he has sent regulators back to the drawing board.”  Fox News (sic) Website.

Quick now.  Who builds oversized lakehomes right up to the edge?  Right, your neighbor on Social Security and all those folks recently tossed off GAMC?  Not hardly.  Folks who receive $40,000,000 severance packages like the naughty CEO of HP, that’s who.

Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Politics

I Sing The Body Electric

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.    “I Sing the Body Electric,” Walt Whitman

Coming to the end of another round of this summer bug, or rather virus, an intracellular interloper replicating at my expense.  Even though I’ve felt decentered, defocused and dis-eased, my body has gone on working, repelling these bad actors and throwing up barriers to their return.

Do you ever think about the daily miracle that is your body?  All the parts of it that have to work in homeostasis, levels of creatinine, thyroid hormones, testosterone, potassium and the gut with its legion of foreign bacteria working to aid our digestion and the lungs stealing oxygen from the atmosphere which has just enough that we can live and the ear which not only helps us hear but keeps us upright and steady; the nervous system wheeling electricity throughout the body turning this on, that off, moving this muscle, contracting the other, moving my fingers for example in the dance learned long ago in Alexandria-Monroe High School typing class; all that blood moving, moving, moving pulsing, delivering oxygen, energy to muscles and organs, pulsing through the heart, that fleshy pump working night and day, year in and year out, an organ we take notice of most often when it begins to fail or flail; not to forget the only organ connected directly to the brain, the eye with the optical nerve taking information back to the occipital lobe where it converts to actual images of what the eye has impressed upon it.  Amazing.

Let me say thank you to whatever long and distant chain has led from the foamy oceans of mother earth’s origins up through the one-celled, the multicelluar, the strange moving ones who finally made land and who went on to be dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and lions and tigers and bears oh my and me, too.  Each of us sit as the particular and current end-point of one line of protoplasm that could,  if we were god-like enough, be traced to its unique origin in, say, a small amoeba-like creature floating at the time in a place that would someday be called Australia.  Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

Having said that what do you think of Mark Dayton?  I confess, I voted for him, in spite of my doubts, because he seemed the best bet to beat Emmer, a strange duck to have representing anybody except say, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin if they constituted the whole of an odd sub-set of Minnesota voters.  We so need a Democratic governor and legislature over the next four years.  Without them budgets will get balanced on the backs of the poor, just witness the cock-up in GAMC that Warren Wolfe has covered so ably in the Star-Tribune.  Without them budgets will get balanced by trading short term gain for long term environmental degradation.  So, if you’re of the Democratic persuasion, give money, knock on doors, help them.  If you’re a Republican, take a really good long look at Emmer.  He’s a weird one and not right for this state.

Dogs, Health

Carpe Diem

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Summer                                      Waning Grandchildren Moon

Over to Rum River Central Park this morning inspired by Emma.  Her death reminded me life flees behind us as the ancientrail of our lifetime grows longer and longer.  This day is all we ever have, so we cannot allow habitual, customary or rigid behaviors to steal it from us.  I had grown away from my every morning exercise at Rum River Park or, in winter, at the park behind the Rum River branch of the Anoka Library.  I don’t even remember when that transition happened.  When the treadmill and the resistance work came into the house, I imagine.  They are not exclusive of each other, inside workouts and outside.

Here’s one solution I’m trying now.  Three days a week interval training on the treadmill and resistance work alternated with three days of a steady pace outside, either on foot or on snowshoes if we get enough snow.  I used to do the snowshoes every morning in the winter when we had good snow.

The Rum River time this morning was not without problems.  Biting flies, mosquitoes and the variability of the trail all made it less than desirable.  Plus, I’m not in as good as a shape as I was when I did it before.  Bug  juice will solve one of those problems and increased resistance and weight loss the other.  The variability of the trail will become a plus again, as it was in the past, as I get used to it again.

Carpe diem.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Health, Politics

Leviathan

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Summer                             Waxing Grandchildren Moon

I decided to take a month off from Latin tutorials.  Not from Latin, just the every week preparation of a new chapter.  I need to cement my learnings about verb conjugations, pronouns and certain uses of the ablatives and genitive.  Also, I need a break from expectations.

Kate’s up seeing her Physiatrist, a regular check up on pain meds.  She considers Beewin her medical home since her health issues focus on spine deterioration and arthritis, both of which have pain management and physical fitness as key treatment components.

Over the last two weeks I’ve had an ear infection and pink eye.  Good thing this 63 old kid has an in-house pediatrician.  I got expert care for these afflictions of the rug rat set.  Makes me feel young again, but not in a good way.

Have you caught any of the Washington Post’s report on the US counter-terrorist establishment?  It’s a fascinating example of how a genuine problem can breed responses that I’m sure make sense to each person who created each entity.  The whole, probably largely invisible in the–I know it’s way overused, but I’m gonna use it anyway–silos of various bureaucracies, is a Hobbesian Leviathan.  Hard to know whether to be amused, frightened, outraged or complacent.

Family, Health

Uh-oh

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Summer                                        New (Grandchildren) Moon

It’s 10 am.  Do you know where your grandkids are?  I do, they’re upstairs.

Ruth has brought her sombre et sol disposition with her.  When sol, her blond hair dances and her smile, often mischievous, lights up the room.  When sombre, she turns her face away or covers it up with her ever present bunny and pretends no one else is there.  When she first wakes up, like her grandpop, it’s all sombre.  Later, the sun breaks out and she starts to play.

Gabe opens cabinets and investigates those things stored just for him, that is, at his level.  One minute he’s playing sword-handler by juggling food processor blades–yikes–the next he’s taking the microwave popcorn out one bag at a time.  One bag at a time, that is, until he tumbles to the fact that he can get them all out by turning it upside down.  As he often says, Uh-oh.

Gabe, as you may know, has hemophilia.  That means, among many other things, that Jon and Jen have to give him infusions of clotting factor three times a week through a port in his upper left chest.  It’s an elaborate protocol.  First the one who  will do the infusing has to sterilize their hands, then put on sterile gloves and prepare the infusions.  They come pre-measured but they still have to be drawn into a hypodermic plunger.

After that’s done one of them, in this case Jen, holds him and the other, Jon, takes a small needle with a butterfly attachment and inserts it into the port.  Hopefully.  Jen said she went several weeks without missing the port, then a long stretch missing it the first time.  Gabe anticipates the poke and is unhappy, fidgety, but not out of control.

Once the stick is in Jon first flushed the port with saline, the switched to the factor (clotting factor), pushed that out with another saline injection and follows, ironically with a fourth and last infusion of heparin, a blood thinner.  Counter intuitive, at least to me.  But, not if you understand.

You’ve just put clotting factor in the port.  It will clot any blood in or around the port, creating a possible source of a clot breaking off and entering the bloodstream.  Not good.  So, the heparin resolves that problem.

As I said at the beginning of this journey, Gabe couldn’t have gotten a better set of parents.  It’s not a drama, it’s not a why me, it’s a we need to do this so let’s get on with it.  That attitude will transfer to Gabe who will have to manage all this in the future.

Bees, Health

Strummed

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Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

I have a pediatric illness:  an ear infection.  Well, of course, if I have it at 63, it’s not technically a pediatric illness, but my in-house pediatrician recognized it with her very own otoscope. I have a lot more empathy for her young crying patients now.  The damn thing hurts.  And right in your ear!

It’s in my left ear, which is deaf already, so it can’t do any damage to my hearing.  But wow.  When the pressure strums the nerve, it gets your complete attention.

I’d felt off for the last couple of days and the ear ache presented itself this morning, just as the bee guy came and the electrician who restored power to the honey house and the playhouse for Ruth and Gabe.  Kate’s really good with managing pain and illness.  I’m not.  I’m more like a dog; I want to crawl into a kennel and sleep until its over.  Fortunately, it began to drain this afternoon which relieves the pressure.  No strumming after that.  At least for now.

I forgot to mention that Dave Schroeder also said, “You’re not a beekeeper until  you’ve been stung.”  I’m a beekeeper several times over!

This afternoon and evening passed in a haze with pain and narcotics.

Aging, Family, Health, Memories

Oh, Yeah? How’d It Go?

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Summer                                                  Waning Strawberry Moon

We keep our walkin’ around money at the Credit Union, Associated Health Care Workers.  I like credit unions because they’re small and friendly, unlike our mortgage holder, Wells Fargo, who has shafted us time and again.  The credit union knows who we are.  I went in today to pick up our weekly cash and the teller said, “I’m used to having Lynne pick up the money.”  She doesn’t Lynne goes by Kate, but otherwise.  “Yes, she had surgery.”  “Oh, yeah, how did that go?”  “Well.  She’s walking around.”

I grew up in a small town and I value personal interaction with merchants.  It makes me feel known and welcome in a broad, perhaps shallow way; but a wider net of personal connections away from work or friends gives a sense of density to life often, perhaps usually, lost in the city.

The electrician, Jeff, who works on our stuff from time to time was out today.  He lives here in Andover and we talked about bees and hemp while I tried to identify where the fence guys cut the wire to the sheds.  Again, personal.

alexdowntown

In Alexandria, where I lived from age 2 to age 17, most people knew who I was and I knew who they were.  Alexandria had about 5,000 citizens, but the families were much fewer and knowing a family member meant you had some sense of the rest, too.  Yes, it can be suffocating, perhaps more so as an adult, but as a kid, it meant there was no where in town I felt anonymous, a cipher, just a person paying 4 bucks for a latte or buying a new computer.  Neither of which we had of course when I grew up in the 50’s and early 60’s.

You can take the boy out of the small town, but…

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health, Memories, Travel, Weather +Climate

Route 66

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Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

Rain beats down and Rigel whines.  We’ve had a couple of dogs with phobias about thunder.  Tira was the most problematic.  She preferred to climb through open car windows in the garage for some reason.  I still have claw marks on the Celica’s leather interior and the Tundra has scratch marks from a frenzied Tira trying to climb the gate closing off the back from the garage and getting hung up, her paws scraping on the hood and her teeth gripping the license plates.  Rigel is not that bad.  Thank god.

Kate’s tired tonight, her muscles aching from a lot of walking and standing.  She’s pushing it, but it’s good.  The doc said no limits, so the more she works it, the faster her muscle tone will firm up and her stamina increase.  Having the hip replaced takes general anesthetic, deep tissue and bone bruising and swelling, so painful  trauma occurs from a bodily point of view, but from a psychic perspective she can tell already that it feels better, way better.

We had our money meeting, discussing the coming of the kids and grandkids next week.  Makes me think of the trips my family used to take from Alexandria, Indiana to Oklahoma City.  Route 66 covered most of the territory, taking us, I remember, right through downtown St. Louis, a bit fearsome for small town folks.  Mom would go in to the motels, inspect their rooms and give them a passing grade or tell us to get back in the car.

Along the way the barns had signs for Meramec Caverns.  Don’t believe I ever saw them.  Sort of the Wall Drug equivalent on Route 66.

There were games involving license plates, 20 questions, word finds and generally gazing out the window as the Illinois, then Missouri landscape rolled by.  I still enjoy that part of traveling, sitting by the window, watching the scenery.  One of the reason I like train travel.

Aging, Family, Health, Memories

Changing Time

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Summer                                         Waning Strawberry Moon

Now that Kate will be home for at least  two months, I’m shifting my going to bed and waking up time.  Got up this morning at 7am and plan to keep that up with a bedtime of around 11:00pm.  This gives me more good hours in the morning, plus it allows me to use the cool of the day for garden work.

Kate’s walking on her own, with a good gate.  She’s so happy, I can see her float as she walks.  It makes me feel good, too.

I went to a CVS pharmacy this morning to pick up a few things we needed.  I don’t go there often;  the combination of heat and dew point with the familiar but still not often experience lay out made me feel, for just a moment, that I had entered a Long’s pharmacy.  Long’s is familiar to those who travel to Hawai’i because its everywhere and carries a lot of stuff tourists need desperately, or feel like they do.  It was a good memory, happy it popped up.

Well.  Went looking for a Longs photo and discovered that, guess what, CVS bought out Longs.  Sigh.

Back to continue house cleaning, garden work for the upcoming July guests.  Not stuff I like, but, hey, it needs to be done.  At least once a year.

Aging, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Humanities, Hydroponics, Minnesota, permaculture, Politics, US History

You Say You Want A Revolution? Yep.

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Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

It’s been done, I know.  Still, I’d like to put in a call for a 2nd American revolution.  Oh, ok, I don’t care what number it is.  I’ll settle for another American revolution.

My American revolution has a bit of  Norman Rockwell, a touch of Helen and Scott Nearing, more than a dab of Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills, some Benjamin Franklin, the spirit of pioneers and native Americans alike when they relied upon on this seemingly limitless land for food and space.  There’s a Victory Garden or two in there as well, plus generations of smart women who canned, dried, jellied, smoked and pickled all sorts of produce and meat.  This New American Revolution demands no marches, no banners, no barricades, no guns and no repression.  And you can dance all you want.

What is it?  It is a revolution of and for and with the land.  It is a revolution that takes the wisdom of a 7th generation Iroquois medicine man who said:  “We two-leggeds are so fragile that we must pray and care for all the four leggeds, the winged ones, those who swim in the waters and the plants that grow.  Only in their survival lies the possibility of ours.”

What is it?  It is a revolution of and for and by the human spirit.  It is a revolution that insists, but gently, that we each put our hand and our back to something that feral nature can alter.   It could be a garden.  It could be a deer hunt.  It could be a potted plant outside where the changing seasons affect its growth and life.  It could be a regular hike in a park, through all the changes of the seasons, seeing how winter’s quiet fallow time gives ways to springs wild, wet exuberance, the color palette changing from grays, rusts and white to greens, yellows, blues, reds the whole riot.

What is it?  In its fullest realization this revolution would see each person responsible for at least some of their own food, food they grow or catch or kill.  In its fullest realization each person would use whatever land they share with the future in such a way as to increase its natural capital, using the land in such a way that it improves with age and gains in its capacity to support human, animal and plant life.

What is it?  In its fullest realization this revolution would find each person closer, much closer to the source of their electricity, their transportation and its fuel, their work and their family.  In its fullest realization this revolution would shut down the coal-fired generating plants, shutter the nuclear generating plants and have maximum and optimum use of wind, geothermal, hydro, solar and biomass generation. In its fullest realization each person would eat food that had traveled only short distances to their table, the shorter the better, the best being from backyard or front yard garden to the table.

What is it?  Well, we have a ways to go yet.  Perhaps a long ways, but if we want our descendants to have a chance to enjoy the same wonders in this land that we have known, we will have to change.  We will have to change radically.  We need, as I suggested, another American revolution.