Category Archives: Health

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health, Memories

Surgery?

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Lughnasa                        Waxing Harvest Moon

This was a doctor day.  Kate and I went to see a spine surgeon she has seen before.  She leans now toward some surgical intervention since the various palliatives:  drugs, nerve root and facet joint blocks, exercise and stoicism no longer provide sufficient relief.   Surgery is the last option and in the case of matters spinal one usually chosen as such.  Her surgeon is positive about the chances for success, success measured as a substantive reduction in pain, though not cessation.

We stopped at Burger Jones for a delayed lunch.  3200 block of West Lake Street.  If you want a trip back to the late 50’s early 60’s, but updated with booze and choices in shakes and burgers you didn’t have back then, Burger Jones is the place.  Fun.

Long nap.  Just now getting roused for the remainder of the day.

Liberalism and the liberal tradition is much on my mind since  have to write a sermon for the 6th of September.  Reading, reading, reading.   Thinking.  Pondering.  Like that.

Dogs, Health, Woolly Mammoths

My Dog Ate My Remote

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Lughnasa                                 Waning Green Corn Moon

OK.  In previous episodes of the Vega/Rigel saga our heroines have:  escaped multiple times, eaten the recently installed netaphim, chewed up various hoses and their inside beds and, most famously, eaten my wedding ring.  All that, but now they’ve done something serious:  revealed the insides of the dvd player remote.  Yike.  Can you imagine manually inputting every command to your dvd player?  I thought not.  Sigh.

Kate’s back and she’s glad to be back.  It allowed a day to rest and today we’ve begun work on the meal for the Woollies.  I dug potatoes and pulled beets and carrots (three colors–white, purple and orange)  while Kate brined the two free-range chickens I bought yesterday at the grocery store.

While filling the dogs pool (yes, they have one in addition to the water container.), I squatted down to hold the hose, the shortened bit Vega has left me.  Crack, snapple and pop.  Not rice krispies.  Nope.  It was my lower back.  Owee.

Kate is a great resource on how to handle back pain so I have been her apprentice since then.  She also gave me some pain meds that helped, too.  I wanted to go out to the Marsh in Minnetonka to see the opening of Moon’s art show, but I can’t make it.  Moon is Scott Simpson’s 92 year old Cantonese mother-in-law.

I do have to go to the grocery store for the stuff we decided we need for the meal.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health

Eureka!

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Lughnasa                                 Waning Green Corn Moon

Got some sleep.  Feel better this morning.  A busy day ahead.  Groceries, recycling, straw, more weeding.

Kate comes back from Denver today.  I  had a bit of a snit yesterday when she wanted to stay an extra day.  My Woolly meeting is on Monday and she’s a big part of the get ready for it plan.  Also, her birthday is Tuesday–65!–and I have an evening ready for us.  I wanted her back her with me, but felt conflicted because she wanted to stay with Jon.  He had a bad ride home from the hospital.  A moot point as it turns out, since it would have cost around $500 to change the ticket with $150 airline fee, $30 Orbitz and $320 in additional ticket costs.  Not proud of myself over this, but I’m glad she’ll be home today.

Vega or Rigel, remember them?, ate my pocket moleskine diary and a current novel I’m reading, Consider Philebas.  By eat I mean shred and coat with drool.  The diary’s pages are recoverable and Consider Philebas, though badly mauled and wet, contains the pages I’ve not yet read, which is good enough for me.  Just one more of the V&R stories.

Over the last few days I have dutifully filled the large rubber water container we have outside.  And refilled it.  Those big dogs, I thought, drink a lot of water.  Then, shortly after I filled it yesterday morning, I put the hose away, turned around to see Vega curled up in the water container.  She was happy.  Archimedes could have had his eureka moment watching her.  90 pounds of puppy displaces a lot of water.

The Denver Olsons have had a rough summer.  Hirschel their 6 year old German Shorthair developed cancer and died.  hirschJon’s surgery has created the kind of upset recovery from any surgery always does.  Next up is Gabe’s surgery to install a port for his prophylactic factor.  That comes on the 27th.  Not to mention that they started back teaching two weeks ago.   A lot for a young family to absorb.  Why I was conflicted.  (pic:  Hirschel)

Family, Health, Memories, Weather +Climate

Fall

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Lughnasa                              Waning Green Corn Moon

Even though summer seems to have arrived, or returned this week, I can already feel social rhythms beginning to change.  Fall has begun to peek up over the calendar.  Ads for school supplies have begun to appear.  I remember getting a  mimeographed sheet (remember mimeographs?) in elementary school of the things we would need:  lined paper, #2 lead pencils, paste, a paint set.  Those are the things that remain in my memory.

They achieved totemic value for me.  These simple items carried the promise of learning, of new areas to explore, a new year away from home and in the company of other kids, at least for most of the day during the week.  Mom and I would go to Danner’s or Murphy’s 5 and 10 cent stores.  To this day I love going into office supply stores.  They bring back that anticipation and wonder.

Many of our vegetables have matured and others are well on their way, the harvest season has begun as the celebration of Lughnasa marks.  The angle of the sun has begun to change and the days have continued to grow shorter since the Summer Solstice.  At the Autumn Equinox we will be halfway between the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice.

Jon and Jen have started their new school years, back with the elementary school kids in Aurora, Colorado.  There’s news in their family, too.  Jon has partial shoulder replacement surgery this Wednesday, still fixing a skiing injury now three years old.

Gabe has had 13 bleeds in the recent past, including a spontaneous bleed on his back and a swollen hand.  In trying to get factor into him he has suffered many sticks.  He has small veins.  He will get an internal port on August 27th so he can  receive factor infusions prophylactically instead of acutely.  This should give him a normal childhood and relieve the anxiety for Jon and Jen.  There is, though, one potential problem.  It is possible the body will develop antibodies against the factor.  That would make things tougher.  A balancing act.

Kate’s going out there on Wednesday and will stay through Saturday.  We go see a neuro-surgeon tomorrow morning, still trying to track down more effective treatments.  She’s done very well with this degenerative disc disease, but it has not been easy.  She’s tough.

Family, Garden, Great Work, Health, permaculture

Dinner Straight From the Plant

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Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

Dinner with vegetables straight from the garden is a treat and can be a surprise.  It was tonight.  We had potatoes, new potatoes-709042potatoes, dug just before cooking.  They had a distinct flavor, a nutty earthy  tone unfamiliar from the long since harvested potatoes typical of both home and restaurant cooking.  This meal included our garlic, our kale and chard, the potatoes garnished with our flat parsley and a bowl of sugar snap peas as an appetizer.

Digging potatoes involved a spading fork to loosen the soil, then searching around under the earth for these lumpy  treasures.  They grow well in the sandy soil here in Andover.

(pic:  potatoes before harvest)

Kate takes off for the Grand Teton’s tomorrow, a CME conference.  BJ is also out there, playing in the Grand Teton music festival as she has for the last several years.  The Tetons have an incredible beauty, the American Alps, a very young mountain range.  She’s back on Wednesday, then we go to see a micro-surgeon who has perfected the technique for cervical vertebrae.  He’ll evaluate Kate’s candidacy for that surgery.

Lots of weeding today and more tomorrow.  A normal task in late July, early August.

Health

Root Canal. The Sequel.

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Beltane                   Waxing Flower Moon

Root canal sequel.  My one month check-up today.

Got in the car and drove 50 minutes south to Bloomington, exited on Pennsylvania and took it to the Penncrest Professional Building.  I got in about 10:10 for a 10 a.m. appointment.  Not bad.

The dental assistant came in, masked and wearing floral pattern scrubs that looked like a designer of motel interiors had found another outlet.  She stuck a plastic gadget in my mouth, had me clamp down.  A whir and a click later I spit out the plastic piece and saw the image pop-up directly on the lap-top screen to my right.  Pretty damned slick.  No film.  No wait.

Dr. Erickson followed her.  With a practiced flick of his wrist he moved the long dangling light over my face, gave it a twist to turn it on and began snapping on a pair of rubber gloves.  How is it?  Good.  Hmmm.  Looks good.  You’re ok.  If there’s any problem, I’m sure your dentist will call me.

That was it.  I had driven almost an hour for less than 5 minutes of surveillance. Worth it, of course, because nothing beats a professional eye and hand, but 2 hours + on the road.  Geez.

On the way there and back I listened to a recorded book.  This time a Clive Cussler thriller titled Plague Ship.  Entertaining.

Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays

Beltane Has Begun

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Beltane                Waxing Flower Moon

As is the case with all Celtic holidays Beltane began at sundown.  Over the years that I have kept the Celtic calendar, now 14 years at least, Beltane signals a real shift from the getting going of spring to the active growth of summer.  Some years that’s more obvious than others and this year the change has been slower than the recent past, yet the emergence of the daffodils, tulips, garlic and the blooming of our magnolia all point toward summer.

Kate’s back from work with new rules for influenza A(H1N1) novel.  They had a sick hallway at the Coon Rapids clinic tonight and they were, again, swamped by persons concerned about the flu.  She said a case has been reported at HCMC.  Tomorrow, however, her attention moves from pandemic to garage sale, the sort of odd shifts we all make between our work and domestic lives.

Family, Health, Politics

Baby Plants, Nuclear Energy, and Influenza A(H1N1)

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Spring                  Waxing Flower Moon

All my baby plants have moved from the nursery into big plant pots.  Now we have to wait until May 15, the average last frost date here, and all these babies can go outside into the garden.

The Minnesota House refused to repeal the moratorium on the construction of new nuclear plants citing waste storage and transportation as primary issues.

Kate’s off to the frontlines of the Swine flu (or, as it will be called from now on:   influenza A(H1N1) pandemic.  This has put some new energy into her practice as she approaches retirement, a real crisis which requires her medical skills.

If the pandemic moves to level 6, there will be a division between sick clinics and well clinics.  Doctors in the sick clinics will have to wear hazmat like protective gear when treating patients who have risk factors for the disease.

Health, Weather +Climate

Kate’s Ready

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Spring            Waxing Flower Moon

Rain.  We had a red alert, a fire danger warning over the weekend, but now we’re soggy.  Soggy is better.

Kate came home with information from the Minnesota Department of Health on how to handle potential swine flu patients.  We’ve had no cases here yet, but the protocols for patients with high indices of suspicion are very clear.  It’s impressive.  The level of detail has been planned some time ago and gets implemented in a reasoned way in response to evidence, not panic.

Kate has a sense of eagerness about it all.  She likes the edgier aspects of medicine:  arrests, lacerations, dealing with a possible pandemic.  I’m glad it’s her doing it and not me.  I’d be edgy myself rather than professional.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health

Two Colorful People Together

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Spring                  Full Seed Moon

Yes, we need no appraisal, we need no appraisal today.  Our bank, Wells Fargo, decided we do not need an appraisal to refinance our loan.  Something about our loan balance, equity and that it would be a roll-over instead of a brand new loan.  OK.  That means we can refinance sometime next week.  A good thing.

The last week and a half, since the root canal, has had dealing with the infected jaw, then one organ after another taking up my mornings.  All important to my long term health, but it has left me tired and with a sense of little accomplished.

This need to accomplish, to achieve continues as a backdrop.  Kate says when she retires she’s ready to rest on her laurels, sit back and reflect on her life.  “We can just be two colorful people together,” she said.  I’m not sure I can give up the hope of something over the horizon, a realization, a book, a political action a defining event for this stage of my life.  If not, I may find the last two decades or so of life a struggle. Or, I suppose, they might be very productive.

Drifting right now.  The melancholy at bay, but not too far away, ready to bring a tear or a heaviness to my now.  Feels empty.