An echocardiogram (echo) is a graphic outline of the heart’s movement. During an echo test, ultrasound (high-frequency sound waves) from a hand-held wand placed on your chest provides pictures of the heart’s valves and chambers and helps the sonographer evaluate the pumping action of the heart. Cleveland Clinic via Google.

Endoscopy is the insertion of a long, thin tube directly into the body to observe an internal organ or tissue in detail. MedicalNewsToday via Google.

Outside, it is Spring, a sort of cold and dry Spring, still, the flowers are blooming and the birds are looking for a good place to nest (which I can’t type without guilt because Michele and I – along with the Woodside Fire District – have been cutting back trees and removing brush, removing the local fauna’s habitat, really, to make our home, our habitat, safer for the upcoming fire season). But, I’m not outside even though, for the first time in, probably, a month I feel good enough to enjoy it. I am still in Sequoia Hospital, feeling better but not great and I still have very little idea what is wrong. Well, why what is wrong is wrong is more accurate. I had an echocardiogram yesterday and that seemed to indicate that my heart valve is not the problem. Today I get an endoscopy and, after that, I can go home. I have been on a liquid diet since Tuesday and they cut off all food at Thursday midnight but, with the alternative being the liquid diet, skipping breakfast is not much of a change. The upside – a huge upside – is that I have lost eighteen pounds – most of it excess water – since Tuesday.

Inside the hospital it is also Spring, I guess, but it is a sort of a never-ending pseudo-Spring, not too warm or too cold. It all has a surreal feel to it. I sleep in my backless – well, not backless, just a perpetually open back – hospital gown which, I read, is a design that is over a hundred years old. My gown has a newish addition of a pocket for a transmitter that is connected to various electrodes stuck to my chest and sends a perpetual EKG to the nurse’s desk across the hall. It also weighs down the front of the gown, exposing my chest and my past heart-surgery scar, which increases both the awkwardness and my discomfort. I sleep in a pair of yellow socks that have no-slip rubberish pads all over them. The pads keep me from slipping on the floor but they also prevent the sheets from comfortably slipping over my feet and I end up sleeping in a mixed pile of polyester sheets and cotton blankets. For some reason, the whole thing has a vaguely camping feel. Maybe it is because I haven’t had a shower or shaved in almost four days.

My doctors – there are three different ones who visit me or call, every day – are all women. I didn’t plan it that way, but I am glad for it. The original model was for male doctors and female nurses in a proper patriarchal hierarchy with the doctors having a slightly godlike detachment but now there are male as well as female nurses and the atmosphere is slightly more congenial. An example for a better future, I hope.

The medical establishment is a little like the military-industrial complex in that there is lots of money to be made which drives innovation and complexity but, under the guise of necessity, there is not much regard for the environment. Almost everything is plastic and deposable except, to be accurate, my daily flatware – of two soup spoons with every liquid meal – is metal. But the bowls are plastic as is my bedside table and all the housings for the electrical gear that surrounds me. Almost everything seems to be disposable from the rubber gloves used only once to the countless disposable needles used on me. Everything comes wrapped in cellophane – well, what used to be cellophane but is probably some other plastic now – to keep it sterile. I am wearing a wrist band – plastic, of course – that has a row of QR codes so that the nurse just scans them to confirm that I am me and the pills I am about to take are for the right person. Interestingly enough, they still ask for my name and date of birth but the question seems to be more to test my cognitive abilities rather than getting information.

On a different subject, today is April 9th, the 156 anniversary of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General U. S. Grant of the United States.

Happy Friday, Happy Spring, Happy Union.