Category Archives: Health

Bees, Friends, Health, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

Friends

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Spring                                                  Waxing Flower Moon

The Woollies met last night at Stratford Wood where Bill and Regina live.  The topic of the evening was friendship, requiring time one said, trust another, play yet another.  We evoked our history as a group of men who have given each other time, trust and vulnerability.  We talked about the vessel, the container we have created, a place of safety and love.  We wondered about men and the trajectory of men’s lives that leads away from the easy friendships of youth and into the barren land of male competition and ambition.

One of us spoke of his wonderful physical.  His doctor commended him on lowering his blood pressure through diet alone.  All looked well.  Until the phone call.  Which said his hemoglobin numbers were well below normal.  Since then he’s been endoscoped, colonoscoped and even put on film by a small bowel camera.  No joy.  No explanation.  Only shortness of breath going upstairs and fatigue.  He sees a hematologist this week.  Kate thinks the hematologist will probably take a bone marrow biopsy.

My swollen hand and bruised middle finger got some attention.  We discussed, again, the bees.  Charlie said I should get an epi pin right away.  Kate, who sees a lot of bee stings in urgent care, has a more moderate evaluation.  A localized reaction to multiple stings.  I think she’s right.

Cybermage Bill Schmidt’s brother in Iowa still lives, though in hospice care.  Another brother, Bob, had a near deal with sepsis.  Life is fragile and wonderful, treat with gladness.

Art and Culture, Family, Health

And Then Again

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Spring                                     Awakening Moon

OK.  Turns out I had read the numbers right.  No sudden shower of wealth.  No happy Buddha of good fortune.  Also, no tears.  We have enough, more than most.  We have each other, family, the dogs, our property, our friends, our creative work.  And our Latin.  None of that changes, so the amount of money is just what it is.  Still, that brief interlude when we thought we had an unexpected windfall made us realize that we could absorb any amount of extra cash.  Big surprise there, eh?

In for my 6 month eye exam.  A space invaders day with visual field dots and the clicker.  The machine thought I pressed the button too frequently, but I just followed the tech’s suggestion to press the clicker when I thought I saw something.  My pressures are normal, my nerve unchanged.  Jane West, my eye doc, said, “Someone else might look at this and say its physiologic.”  How’s that?  “That you were just born with unusual nerves.  Still, they’re round and they stay the same from photograph to photograph.”  They took portraits of my retina’s every once in a while.  Physiologic, eh?  Explains a lot.

Home.  Reread my e-mails.  Oops.  Education for an exhibition I’m touring, Until Now.  So, brief nap, back in the car, back into the city.  I spent an hour after the education wandering the museum, looking at the Art Remix objects.  I have a Remix tour on May 6th.

I also checked out two print shows, The Wild Things and Old Testament prints.  These are well worth catching.  Prints are the ephemerals of the museum, their sensitivity to light means their exhibition has limits.  They can’t be exposed to even dull light for very long.  So they come up, like daffodils, hang out for a brief time, then they’re gone, often not to be seen again for years.

Kate went to see the back surgeon today.  He thinks her right hip pain may well respond to a hip replacement.  I hope so.  This has gotten pretty bad, too.  It’s not as bad as it was, but before was really bad.  More tests.  More doctor’s appointments.  Still, perhaps a little hope at the end of the tunnel.

Aging, Cooking, Health

Class A Brenda

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Spring                                        Awakening Moon

Another Brenda Langston class under my belt literally and figuratively.  Literally:  we had a smoothie (it had brown rice in it.), an egg and kale and rice dish.  Breakfast.  Next, for lunch we had a red lentil soup with some whole grain bread.  Dinner was salmon with nutty crust and walleye with sesame seed topping, a leek/broccoli steamed veggies and a brown rice patty on a nori fold.  Tapioca showed up last as dessert.

Brenda was in good form tonight.  The kind of person you’d want to take home to mom and say, Brenda is my friend.  She’s funny, passionate, expert, opinionated in the gentlest of ways.  Her approach is tricky because she has done what zealots always decry; she has discovered the good in many, maybe all cuisines and says the best thing is to quit worrying, start making better choices and enjoy healthy food.  Makes sense to me.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, US History

President Shoots the Moon

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Spring                                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

Moon viewing.  We don’t do it much here, except as a casual thing, a walk outside, look up, oh a nice moon tonight or shine on harvest moon for me and my gal then on to the drive in or what’s on your play list dude? In Japan they take the moon viewing a step further, ok, a whole nighttime stroll longer.  They build moon viewing platforms, have parties, and produce some wonderful art that features the moon.  Tonight the waxing awakening moon hung just above the trees in the west, behind a scrim of clouds, a faint glow surrounding the upturned crescent.  It is a moon to remember.

This crescent awakening moon will now memorialize for me the day the Democratic party got some balls.  Obama wanted to pass health care reform.  I saw a representative, I don’t know his name, with silver hair, looked about my age, get up and say, “Before we were born, reform of the health care system was begun, just waiting for this day.”

This is not a victory for Democrats, however, it is a victory for the American people, a victory for those who have lived their lives in fear of a cough, a broken leg, a child’s fever.  In this country, which can bail out billionaires and support subsidies to bank robbers, that is, banks that rob, to have 32 million people with no health insurance has been a crime of long standing, a crime that has produced serial deaths over and over with no fear of prosecution.

It is my hope that Republicans will understand that many of the folks who swallow the tea party line are the very people who will wake up some time soon with health insurance, health insurance they have never had. If you don’t believe me, just look at the Gallup map below and consider it with an overlay of the Bush and McCain presidential votes.

Obama has won a victory here, a hard fought victory and he should get his props.  He should also get more credit for calming the Great Recession and ushering in a period of up ticking economic news.  I imagine we will see more such substantive wins for him as his presidency continues.

Hurray for the red, white and blue!

Now a moment on partisan politics and post-partisan politics, the so-called third way.  Yes, our politics have become so polarized that it is difficult to recall the times when it wasn’t.  Yes, there is acrimony and ill will and yes, it does make governance more difficult than it needs to be.  Here’s the thing, though.  In the end it is politics.  This clumsy, broken, dysfunctional process is the way we have chosen, and keep choosing, to mediate our substantive differences.  I read a very compelling argument for changing the system of representation in the Senate where 10% of the states have 90% of the population, but have only a tenth of the votes.  The author of the argument went on to say that fixing this dysfunction was not possible and that we needed to work with the system we have.

It’s not ideal, but there is no system for managing the affairs of human societies that is and ours is better than most.  This vote proves it.

Family, GeekWorld, Health, Humor

Sandwich a Bio-Hazard?

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Imbolc                                        Waning Wild Moon

Those in the health care world, at least the care provider part of it, use medical in a way most of us lay folk don’t.  They ask people they meet, especially spouses like me, if they’re “medical.”  Kate payed me a compliment in this vernacular a few months back by saying, “He probably doesn’t realize how medical you are.”

What does it mean?  In part it means a familiarity with the everyday life of medicine, that is, a life dealing with blood, sputum, questions about constipation or overactive bladders, stitching up wounds or struggling with life or death in a code blue type situation.  I sense, too, that it refers to an acceptance of the brute facts of life.  Illness and trauma happen and they happen to all sorts of people at all sorts of times in their lives.

At some point the news can be bad, “He didn’t make it.” or “You have lung cancer.” kind of bad.  They also know, better than most of us, that death comes in many forms and that it comes to us all.  There is a contradiction here; however, since contemporary medicine sees death as the enemy and procedural medicine as their chief weapons in this apocalyptic struggle.  I use the word apocalyptic here in reference to the universe that dies with each person.

Medical also means going into the refrigerator for something to eat, taking what looks like a sandwich in a ziploc bag and discovering the container says:  Specimen Transport Bag and has the red and black bio-hazard emblem with BIOHAZARD written in bold black letters against the red field.

Being medical does put you in a world different from the day to day, where we consider normality health, enjoy a certain consistency to our routine and find trauma or illness an upsetting deviation.  It’s been a privilege, this past 20 years, to learn about it from the inside.

Family, Health, Weather +Climate, Writing

Frosty Saturday

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Imbolc                              New Moon (Wild)

Outside temp is 11.6 degrees and the dewpoint is around 9.  With them so close together, we have two phenomenon at once: more hoarfrost as the water precipitates out on shrubs, tree limbs, fences, porch rails, then freezes and fog.  Visibility is low here and the same conditions which create hoarfrost makes roads slick.  An odd combination.  We also have what looks like snow, but I think is actually flakes forming near the ground as cool air freezes water vapor.  Fog is a cloud on or near the earth so we could be witnessing outside what usually happens in the skies above us.

After printing out 40,000 words of new novel (redundant), which represents all I’ve written so far, I decided this was a good time to revise, go back, get familiar with its arc again after a week off.  That’s underway now.

It’s also Saturday, grocery day.  I can go any day of the week I want, but my patterning about grocery shopping on Saturday is very strong.  I know it, but don’t change it.

Kate has finished her second week of work.  She has come through them in much better shape than pre-surgery, yet she is not without pain.  Her neck bothered her last night and her hip has grown progressively worse.  She thinks digging the Celica out of the snowbank last week did some damage, so she’s not taking any of this as too bad a sign just yet.  She is visibly better than before, her face less tight at the end of the work day and her movements less stiff.  Still, as she says, she’s rather retire.  Soon.

Aging, Great Work, Health, Politics

The Year We Make Contact

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Winter                                     Full Moon of Long Nights

Hmmm.  You know you’re getting old when the sequels to movies, one’s you saw when they came out, are now getting passed by the actual dates.

The year we make contact.  Indeed.

What will the next 10 years be like?  On an equally geezerly note the end of this new decade, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, will find me 72 years old.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve known people that were 72 but I wouldn’t let my daughter marry one.  Of course, I don’t have a daughter, so that makes that easy.

My sense, my hope is, that in this coming decade, the teen years of this century, we will come to grips with climate change and in a way that will have a lasting, positive impact.  We won’t have completed the Great Work, the movement to a benign human presence on the earth, but we will have made substantial strides.

Terrorism will decline as a front-burner issue, though it will remain with us, if for no other reason than the continuing disparity between rich and poor countries, disparities exacerbated over the next ten years by the continued growth of India and China.

The Millennium generation will push us further toward a race neutral or race positive world.  It may be that we will develop the strength to see difference as a possibility for enrichment.  Or, maybe not.  I hope the tension begins to move in such a way that the fulcrum tips toward embracing pluralism.

At the end of this decade the grandkids will be ten years older:  Ruthie 13 and Gabe 11.  Yikes.

By the end of this decade I hope Kate and I have got this gardening thing well integrated into our lives.

I hope for, I want a move toward, as one foundation puts, “a more just, verdant and peaceful world.”

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays

A Quiet New Year

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Winter                            Full Moon of Long Nights

We have gained back a few minutes since the Winter Solstice, so the New Year will arrive, as it does every year, with a bit more daylight than the grimmer days of mid-winter.

The neighbors have begun to shoot off fireworks.  They are a restrained lot for the most part, but when they perceive an excuse for celebration:  holiday, birthday, new year, they always bring out the fireworks.

(Methuselah Grove
The Methuselah Grove with the world’s oldest living things. The oldest living tree at 4,723 years, Methuselah, is not identified for its own protection.)

Kate and I have clinked glasses of champagne (her) and Fre (me), wished each other a happy new year and not shot off a single firecracker.  We did watch Jules and Julia, a middling movie in my judgment, though it had some interesting observations about cooking.  We also watched a great Nature program on the rise of the dog.  Apparently a Swedish geneticist has pinpointed eastern Asia as the origin of all dogs.

Kate’s neck has begun to bother her again this week and her left hip is now  worse than it was before the operation.  The back, though, has improved markedly.   A day at a time.

Well, a happy new year to you, whoever you are.  Back at you next year.

Aging, Family, Friends, Great Work, Health, Politics

Gettin’ Ready

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Samhain                              Waxing Wolf Moon

Let the scramble for the unfinished and the not yet purchased begin.  Thanksgiving day is tomorrow.  We decided to purchase a turkey from Williams-Sonoma since we didn’t see ourselves doing the whole meal.  They gave us a call last night to tell us that the turkey will be delivered today.  Reassuring.

We go this morning to Kate’s physical medicine and rehab doc, Dr. Bewin.  He’s her medical home for the issues related to her back.  He’ll evaluate her pain management regimen and discuss the surgical results so far.  He’ll also weigh in on rehab, physical therapy.

Lois, our housecleaner is here today, doing that before holiday buffing up, though frankly with five dogs we don’t maintain an Architectural Digest home under the very best of circumstances, this even though Kate spends many happy hours watching HGTV.

The latest Wired has an article that gives a very gloomy outlook for global warming, using phrases like “we’re toast.”  It goes on to imagine the techno-geek fixes that we’ll come up with to save the day.

Ooohhh…the turkey has come, I think!

Aging, Cooking, Health

Aspects of Our Lives

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Samhain                           New (Wolf) Moon

Kate and I had our business meeting.  It involved the always fun annual chore of signing up for benefits with Allina.  This is probably the last time we’ll need to do it.  Even though it’s an overly complex task, it does have significant repercussions throughout the year, so it pays to do it thoughtfully.

After the meeting we began our first (of what we intend to be continuing) weekly menu planning.  This week I chose a red beet soup and a white bean and winter squash soup.  Kate picked a vegetarian slow cooker recipe and the brisket.  Tomorrow we’ll make a grocery list and I’ll go buy the ingredients, then we’ll cook together for a day or half a day.  The grocery list will include fruits, one serving a meal, and ingredients for tabouli, which we both enjoy.  I’ll make the soups and Kate will cook the meat and slow cooker meals.  We’ll add in salad and fruit along the way.

Kate’s recovery seems to have stalled and I don’t know what to make of it.  I’m glad we have an appointment with Dr. Schwender on Thursday morning.  I’m feeling a need–and so is she–for some reassurance about the healing process and the eventual outcome.

Now, I have to make up for the lost hour of sleep last night while I completed my trip through hell.