Wednesday's Whine: Why I Don't Like Hospitals

Roger took me to the ER at 4:00 AM Saturday morning. I had a horrific sudden onset headache that would not quit. It lasted for several hours, finally compelling me to seek assistance and answers. There was no one in the waiting room, so we were taken in right away. The nurse immediately attempted to put in an IV. You can see her handy work in the above photo. I didn't mind, and I actually didn't feel a thing. I hadn't taken any of the pain meds they offered, so I was completely sidetracked by the relentless and intense pain in the back of my head. What did this fumbling around with my arm matter to me? It didn't. They wheeled me down an empty corridor for a CT scan because I presented with symptoms that could have been an aneurysm. The scan found nothing and is 90% reliable. They wanted to do a spinal tap, which I refused. I still don't know what caused this major painful event in my brain, but I am waiting for an appointment with a neurologist, to whom I was referred by my GP on Monday.



Health matters are a very bizarre detour from the routines of regular life. I don't really like them. And look what they did to my arm!!!

chemo sabe

i wrote the following intending to post it the first day of no more chemo. then, in my mentally impaired state, it sounded awful to me. i'm glad i saved it. looks ok now. that's my left thumb up above. see the ridges? i think each ridge and valley corresponds to a two week cycle of chemo. not sure if the ridge or the valley is chemo.
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well it's over except for some recovery time. i have depended upon the kindness of my wonderful and wonderfully competent robin, our loving daughters, our families, our neighbors, and our far flung internet pals. thank you all for your good wishes for my recovery and support during surgery and chemo.

coping with the whole process of cancer treatment, indeed all serious illnesses, is sometimes more difficult for the caregiver than the patient. i have the anecdotal evidence of two friends who were caregivers for their spouses, and of course robin and me. the most difficult "side effect" of my chemo for robin was my mental impairment, which for me was the most invisible, though i did have an odd stuffy feeling in my head at times.

i know that i escaped the more severe reactions to chemotherapy. i did not have any real pain. no hair loss. no gross or extreme gastric upset. no blisters on hands or feet. i still have slightly deranged digestive system. i get a burning sensation in my throat at odd times. my fingernails and toenails are very dry and brittle and one thumb has a painful crack that hasn't healed for more than three months. my fingers feel strange. my eyes are dry and sometimes burn.

i look forward to better health. that's my story and i'm sticking to it.

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that's it. not bad for chemo-brain.

i am recovering fairly well. much more energy. still stupid now and then. thumb crack healed but skin still dry. fingernails still odd. i'm happy to be done.

quoting james brown... "i feel good!"

Something Else Was On My Mind

I had a post planned about our walks in the Arcata Marsh, an incredibly interesting place even in summer, which is not the optimum season for birdwatching. We're still seeing some new species (to us) there, while enjoying being immersed in the ambiance of our new surroundings. We also appreciate the innovative water treatment aspects of this sanctuary. A perfect melding of beauty and smarts. Okay, I admit to calling some of the bodies of water "poo-poo ponds," but that doesn't make me love it any less.

I will definitely revisit this subject soon (maybe Monday), but I just have to write about an email that Roger and I received Thursday morning. A friend of ours wrote to say that she had had a heart attack over the weekend. She wrote at length about what she had been experiencing on Saturday and Sunday, and how she had misinterpreted the increasing pain as gastric reflux disease. The details of her experience are both alarming and familiar. We all have aches and pains that we dismiss, mischaracterize, or worse-- ignore. She ended up in the emergency room on Monday, and had surgery to put stents into two of her FOUR blocked arteries. She will be having additional surgery next month on the other two arteries.
She reminded us how important it is to take our bodies seriously, to listen when we experience pain, to pay attention to the details. You know I could go on a soapbox here and write about how important it is to have universal health care, how we postpone treatment because of cost, how preventative care should be an absolute basic human right. But that's not the point of this post. The point is to remind you to listen to your body. It gives you information all the time, and your life will very well depend upon it. So, what test have you put off lately? Come on, have it done.

Even in a marsh as beautiful as the Arcata Marsh on a sunny day, and seeing this lovely ctenucha rubroscapus for the first time, I just couldn't stop thinking about it.

Sights and Sorrows

We've been distracted by beauty and pain. Stunning sights of sleeping sea otters and stories of rage and murder. We were supposed to be on the road today, Sunday, heading south in our rented 2007 dark red Malibu (such a nice car, alan) for Thanksgiving, but Roger has been sick for days and days, in bed--in pain. It's so unlike him to yield to pain like this, he's been known to have a root canal on a very vital tooth without novocaine. Roger's tough. This pain has laid him low. All I can say is that we've been to Urgent Care and the pharmacy, and there will very likely be a colonoscopy in the near future. Need I say more? Probably not. We are worried but mostly about the unknown, of course.

The old neighbors whose family had the house next door for probably as long as Roger's family has had this house, sold their place a year or so ago. The new owner, a real estate mogul-tycoon had the place gutted and is erecting something that seems slightly larger than the original footprint. A lot of wrangling with the zoning and coastal commissions. I write about this because the former owners were fantastic gardeners and loved to feed the birds. I noticed their old birdbath had filled with a bit of drizzly rain water the other day. A few birds were enjoying a bath in the stingy puddle. So, I went over and poured some nice clean water into the bath. The next day we were treated to this: a Townsend's Warbler bathing and looking happy as ever.
It made me a bit nervous to pour that water into our neighbor's birdbath because we had just heard a story about feuding neighbors that ended so badly, two people dead, and a 72 year old man in prison facing a death penalty case. The story has special significance for Roger and me because the husband of the dead couple, shot to death in their front yard, was Roger's oldest friend's law partner. He had been shot by his next door neighbor, with whom and he and his wife had been feuding for years, over an easement. An easement. It's the kind of thing that just makes you scratch your head and wonder, how did they let it get to this? I've been reading some of the newspapers articles covering this horrific crime, and it just seems to have come down to insanely bad neighbors and long-held grudges. After hearing a story like that, what was I doing going over to the neighbor's front yard, pouring water into the birdbath? Being a good neighbor? Well really, I rationalized, nobody actually lives in the house yet. It doesn't have any fixtures or even mud on the sheetrock. I assumed nobody even notices that the birdbath is there, with all the construction going on.
Our walks have been limited, as you probably guessed, so I am entertaining myself with the neighborhood birds and trying to stay out of trouble. Our last walk was on Wednesday when Roger, my twin brother, and I hiked around in one of the local redwood forests. It is always a revelatory experience to walk among the coastal giants. The day before we had been to Elkhorn Slough and seen beautiful shorebirds, tentatively identified as Curlews and Godwits. We saw families of Harbor Seals curled up sleeping. But it's the Brown Pelican in breeding plumage that knocked me out. That, and the Sea Otters floating about in their peaceful slumber, struck us as truly incredible sights.

We may leave for points south on Monday. We'll see how Roger responds to the medication. It's a foggy Sunday. So thick, I can't even see the neighbor's birdbath. It's probably better that way.

Heart Movies Heart Sounds

Here's Roger filling out paperwork before the echocardiogram. We like the mix of high and low tech devices.
this is being written just after returning from the hospital on thursday (while eating lunch):

i had blood taken last week and the results are good. low cholesterol. low psa. (the prostate cancer indicator). the vascular screening i had a week ago, a sonogram of various arteries, indicated all is ok. i.e. no aneurysms. today i had an echocardiagram, which is another sonogram, this time of my heart itself, to see if my high bp has damaged my heart. high bp sometimes causes valve wear and/or thickening of the heart muscle itself. the results (a gigabyte of data, according to the sonographer) were transmitted over the intertubes from the hospital here to the doctor elsewhere who will read the recording and then fax his interpretation to my doctor, whose nurse will call me on the phone to give me the news.

robin came along with me today, as she did for the previous test also. (good for my morale) this time she brought the camera. as the monitor showed a live action picture of my heart beating, actually of the valves opening and closing, she took little movies of the action. with sound.

so now i wait for the vast machinery of communication to cough up an opinion on the health of my heart. we hope to have an update here before we post this tonight. (Nope, no update.)
I did accompany Roger to the hospital for his echocardiogram. It was quite an experience to both see and hear his heart beating in his chest. The sonographer, who was incredibly kind to let me take photos, started each session by explaining where she was looking. She'd say, "There's your aorta... your mitral valve... the colors show the blood flow." I started taking still shots, like the one above, but realized I could probably capture the whole thing on video.

I found it thrilling to record this image of Roger's heart beating, to be able to watch the movement, the way the valves opened and closed. The sonographer measured points on the screen, then would click something and there would suddenly be color. She explained that the different colors represent the different speeds and directions of blood flow in the heart.

Then she clicked something else and we could hear Roger's heart working. The room filled with the sound, like from inside a submarine, from deep under water. Rhythmic, not mechanical, but regular and fluid. Astonishing. It was a sound I wished I could tune into anytime, just to listen - just to verify.

Outrageous Self-Indulgence

I've been feeling quiet and downright sorry for myself. Boohoo, I want my pretty brown skin back. I know what the future holds for me, a few years of crazy discoloration, like the opposite of vitiligo. Damn. Nothing makes me feel worse though, than people analyzing my diet, my behavior, my stress levels to see what I've been doing to make this happen to me AGAIN. It's the wine, the wheat, the caffeine, the spicy food. It's my attitude, my sadness, my my my. I've been reading Susan Sontag's Illness as a Metaphor, just to see why some illnesses get tagged as personal failures. All I know is that I haven't changed. I've always been this high-strung, quiet, reclusive woman with a bad sad attitude. Every now and then my immune system kicks into overdrive and kicks my sorry butt for months at a time. Sometimes there are no known identifiable causes, but I'm leaning towards an opportunistic virus.
Are you bored with this story line? I know I am, but I can't seem to take my eyes off myself. Me me me. What's really awful about this is there's nothing to say. Boring.

Roger and I weeded the front yard on Monday. A thin reed of non-native sawgrass, absurdly planted by our predecessors, whipped across my face and left a nice sharp bloody line from my nose to the tip of my chin. Damn. I ran over to Roger and said, "Do you think they call sawgrass sawgrass because it can really cut you? Look at this." We actually had a pretty good laugh about it. Compared to everything else, being whipped by sawgrass is nothing.
I went into the house to clean up a bit and devour some gluten-free rice crackers dipped into delicious dairy-free hummus. I sat at the table looking out the window, camera at hand, thinking about everything-- our atheism, their god, selling our house, moving to Oregon, growing old, making decisions about where we should live based on where it would be best to die-- when a crow decided it should take a look inside the Tree Swallow nest box in case there was a morsel there it would like to devour: A baby tree swallow, or an egg waiting to be one, no bad attitude, bad diet, or bad behaviors.

This is everything. No lie.