What's up?

Almost May, two months and a few days away from John Meis's fabulous Fourth of July party in Urbans, brats and beers, and fellowship among my fellow beer drinking buddies.  I am guessing this is the 50th.

I'm not going to give an estimate of the turnout, but back in the day it was two kegs of beer and then a hat was passed around and we got a large car full of beer just before the liquor stores closed.  Anymore I get a case and a half of beer and when I leave there is still beer.

Well as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying so it goes.  

I remember a time, maybe when the party was at its one keg and a car almost full of package stage and the conversation drifted to conditions and pills.  Geez-a-loo they were all off and running, everybody was talking about all the pills they take and it sounded like listening to the grandparents talking when I was a kid.  I would never be like that.

Well I guess you guys have a similar pill armada.  Got two new ones with the stent, one of which if I forget to take it for awhile I will be dead, and one that I have to take twice a day.  My memory is not too hot but I can easily remember once a day, but twice a day, a little iffy.

I wonder if Beagles has moved into that swinging geezer apartment building.  How many years did you live in The Freehold?  What happened to all your junk?

Too be honest I was scared to take the Aztec route of Old Dog, and the stent sounded somehow, um, safer.  But now I have to get another stent.  They tell me I will be on the table for four hours and will have to stay overnight.  Shit, when the subject of stents came up I thought I would go in in the morning, out in the afternoon and ready to resume all my bad habits.  Now I have to do cardio rehab for maybe three months.  

Speaking of bad habits.  I was down to maybe one cig a day.  But now none at all.  I fantasize about maybe a year down the road if I am all hunky dory.  Maybe having a puff, but probably not.

Well.

So it goes

   

Water, Water, Everywhere but Here

 Y'all might have heard about all the flooding in Northern Michigan, but you'd never know it looking out our window.  Our water table hit a peak about a week ago, and it's been downhill ever since.  Even at the peak it was no wetter than usual for this time of year.  Turns out that the Freehold is not in the same watershed as the Cheboygan River, which is only two miles away as the crow flies.  All the flooding seems to be concentrated along the waterfronts of our major lakes and rivers, and the Great Beaglesonian Swamp is not directly connected to any of them. 

Last I heard, youse guys both seemed to be recovering nicely from your medical problems.  Hope that is still the case.  My wife and I, not so much.  We are on a waiting list for a local assisted living facility.  When I asked the lady how many people were on the list ahead of us, she couldn't say exactly, but that it didn't matter.  It seems that, when a vacancy occurs, the next several people in line are often dead, so we could move up very quickly.  Meanwhile, our daughter has found a geezer friendly apartment complex close by in town.  They have a vacancy right now, and we are going to look at it on Friday.  It's not the same thing as assisted living, but at least it would provide us with a safe haven for this winter. 

April Fool

"It could be worse"

No kidding!  On March 31st the Aztec priests took me to the top of the pyramid, raised their obsidian knives to the heavens and tore out my heart.  Just kidding, just another routine triple-bypass; no drama but I'll have an impressive 9.5 inch scar in the middle of my chest.  Things went so well that they cut me loose on Easter Sunday for my own Resurrection and am doing a recuperation at my sister's home in Niles, a clash of realities but I can deal with it.  No complaints except for the healing part.  And the follow-up appointments, therapy sessions, and paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork.  No need for a cane or walker, nice to be on my feet walking around.

So that's how my month has started; how you guys doing?

It Could Be Worse

 That's what I say every time I start feeling sorry for myself.  Sounds like both of my esteemed colleagues are in worse shape than I am, at least heart wise.  I don't know about my shortness of breath issue.  I always figured that was connected to that bout with rheumatic fever that I had as a kid, but now I'm not so sure.  They said they fixed my heart issue when I was in the hospital last summer, but my breath is still as short as it ever was.  I am sucking on my nebulizer as we speak, and I have purchased a portable oxygen concentrator, but I can't seem to find the time to get into a reliable routine with either one of them.  That's why we are looking into assisted living.  If we could get someone to pick up some of our household chores, it might free us up to spend more time on our health therapy regimes.

Meanwhile, as Red Green used to say, "Remember, I'm pulling for you.  We're all in this together."

The stent

 Common alternative names for urgent care centers include immediate care, convenient care, walk-in clinics, and acute care clinics. These facilities provide prompt, non-life-threatening medical services, often with extended hours and no appointment necessary. 

We have three of them downtown, one for Rush, one for Northwestern and one for UChicago.  It is nice living downtown where we have all of them and the big factory hospital at Northwestern.  

The urgent care I went to was UChicago east on Grand maybe a half mile from my house and I walked it also walked to Northwestern from there.  My only symptom was that pain in my chest and left arm and I never had that pain when I was doing normal stuff.

Anyway I went in Monday morning for my stent and everything went pretty smooth.  One bad moment was when one of the docs dropped in just before surgery and told me that the operation is successful 9 times out of 10, like this was good news, that I only had a one in ten chance of never getting off the gurney?  Chatz had told me my odds were more like 99.99%.  I asked my primary doc about this later, and she kind of laughed and said that what he was talking about was that about ten percent don't follow the rules afterwards and those are the people who didn't make it.

The operation took a couple hours but it was like a colostomy where you are half in the bag and time passes easily.  Then they put me in the recovery room and told me that I would have to stay there six hours to make sure that my groin where they put the balloon in did not start leaking, or spurting, or whatever.

But that was ok because I was assured that I would be going home right away after it was done.  But then with about an hour to go the nurses discovered what they thought was a leak in my groin.  They couldn't figure it out and the clock was running and maybe I would have to stay overnight.  But then a friendly doc dropped by and said, "Oh that?  That's nothing."  And I got to go home and see my cat.

I guess I could be pissed at those nurses for keeping me there because they could not figure out that it was nothing.  But you know, it could have been.  Northwestern, they treat you like a piece of meat, but do a pretty good job of making sure you get home alive.

I will still have another stent put in in about a month, but it should go easier, I think.  Anyway it's a month away.

And I got more pills to take.  And the doc stressed that if I don't take them every day I will die.  I tend to be forgetful so now my bathroom is adorned with post it notes to remind me.

The other thing is something called Cardiac Rehab which I will go into in the next post.

Heartbreakers

It's starting to look like there are peculiar cardiac issues arising at The Institute.  Last year Mr. Beagles had some blockage blasted away in lieu of stents and very soon Uncle Ken will get stents of his own.  Kind of nice living so close to a world-class medical facility, isn't it?  But the term "urgent care" facility is new to me; how does that work?  I had Mr. Google look it up for me but it looks like those facilities are unevenly distributed with a couple near the ivory towers of Marina City.  Did you walk there or take a cab and was the trip to the ER via ambulance?  None of my business, just curious how these situations get handled.

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I'm in the middle of a coronary adventure of my own with a couple of "procedures" in the near future.  Couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, very scary, gasping for air.  Took some aspirin, dialed 911, got dressed, packed minimal necessities and waited but not long.  No sirens; the responders were in ninja stealth mode and they wheeled me out with some oxygen.  Quick trip to what used to be Swedish Covenant Hospital two miles away and their ER pit crew went to work.  Lot of action for a while they wired me up with monitoring sensors, IV hook ups, a little nitroglycerine pill under the tongue but still could barely breathe so they slapped a  high pressure oxygen gadget on my face and I settled down a bit.  Definitely a heart attack, or so they say (I believe it), and indications of internal bleeding of unknown origin or just severe anemia.  A baffler to be sure, or in medical parlance, "idiopathic."  Anyhow, tests were in order and I ended up spending a week there; not as bad as I thought and the food was more than tolerable.  Had an angiogram, the one that goes through the right arm, which indicated serious blockage with the coronary arteries, too clogged for blasting or stents.  Time to make reservations at the Triple Bypass Resort.  Got my first colonoscopy too, with some not-so-good news.  Not to be an alarmist but there's something that's got to come out, rhymes with "dancer."  Could be worse; it's small and not spreading but the heart stuff has to come first.  So 2026 is turning out to be the Year of the Long Knives for The Old Dog.

In retrospect there are things that I should have paid more attention to, and didn't.  Any shortness of breath I attributed to a previous diagnosis of mild emphysema, weakness in my legs due to lack of exercise, that sort of thing.  It could be one of those "guy things" where you only seek medical attention at the very last moment and I just squeaked by.  Whew!  That was close!  No complaints about the hospital stay; I felt like I was treated like a king.  Solid information from the nurses and doctors as I picked their brains, nothing held back, no waffling, and I took copious notes.  So I feel fine, maybe better than fine, as I deal with a new reality.  And the beat goes on...

 

The Medical Bureaucracy

 I had a little run in with those people last summer.  Turned out I didn't need a stint, they just shocked the shit out of me to make my heart beat like it was supposed to.  They said I would be okay after that, but I needed to take a blood thinner to prevent clots.  The druggist cautioned me that if I experienced gastrointestinal bleeding, I should go to the emergency room immediately.  Since I have experienced gastrointestinal bleeding in the past from taking blood thinners, but have never experienced clots, I decided not to take those pills.  I subsequently experienced the bleeding anyway, but I never did experience clots.   

Sometimes I wonder if their left hands know what their right hands are doing, but they must or they wouldn't be allowed to practice medicine.  Would they?  I think that they mostly mean well and are well qualified, but that doesn't mean you should give them your blind unconditional trust.  You have to ask questions and advocate for yourself, just to be on the safe side.