I’m home from the hospital and still have no idea why I am so anemic. The endoscopy found nothing which ordinarily would be good news but now we are looking for something so it’s, more or less, bad news. I’ll start worrying about it again on Monday but, tonight Michele and I are going to dinner with some vaccinated friends.
Life is sweet.
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.
Anemia is a condition in which you lack enough healthy red blood cells to carry adequate oxygen to your body’s tissues. Having anemia can make you feel tired and weak. There are many forms of anemia, each with its own cause. Anemia can be temporary or long-term, and it can range from mild to severe. The Mayo Clinic via Google.
I am in Sequoia Hospital – I know, again -and I feel better than I have in months. It now seems that my problem is that I am seriously anemic. That is both the good news and the bad news. The good part of the news is that we – we being a bevy of doctors – now know what is causing my shortness of breath although the anemia is probably more of a fellow traveler, along with a replacement heart valve that is ending its useful life and lungs that are pretty trashed, the bad part is that nobody knows what is causing the anemia, although there are theories. As the various theories are being tested and explored, I got a blood transfusion, iron injections, and heavy-duty Lasix injections to lower my water level.
One theory was that I had an ulcer but that lost favor after testing, another is that my esophagus is chafing against some other, nearby, body part. My gastroenterologist will perform an endoscopy on Friday to explore that theory. Still another theory is that my deteriorating heart valve is the culprit (both Michele and I are in that camp). Meanwhile, I am sitting/lying all day long with a constant parade of doctors, bored enough to watch My Fair Lady on Netflix.
How strange America has become. Cousin Marion in an email from Gascony, France.
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. A statement made Senate Majority Leader McConnell in an interview in the National Journal on Oct. 23, 2010
I’ve had a problem breathing since last summer’s fires with their resultant smoke and the attempted cures have only made it worse. At first, I thought it was my heart because, with a heart valve from a cow – well, remanufactured parts of a cow’s heart sac, actually – everything, from a stubbed toe on up, is a heart problem. My heart is doing fine – considering – so the last couple of weeks have been taken up with fretting about my lungs but various Xrays and CT scans indicate that they are not the problem. I’ve now had both my shots – yeah that! – and had a much bigger reaction with the first shot so I keep trying to blame my shortness of breath and chills on them but that theory has not been as comforting as I had hoped. Meanwhile, the earth has continued to rotate and life goes on.
Except that, in way more cases than should be, life didn’t go on, it ended early. In Washington, some deranged guy drove into a couple of Capitol Police Officers, killing one. In Orange County, California, another deranged guy killed four people, another one killed ten people – this time by a guy of Arab descent – in Boulder Colorado – and still another by a white Christian guy lamenting that he liked sex which he somehow used to justify the killing of six Asian women in Georgia (the head cop said “He had a bad day.”). As the plague winds down – because of Trump’s early push to get a vaccine and Biden’s heavy lifting in actually getting the vaccine delivered – our national love of violence winds back up.
While I am worried about my health, in 42 different states, 42 different republican legislatures are hard at work trying to make voting harder for Black People. I’m sure that this – these? – will end up in court and make a lot of lawyers richer, but, so far, all that has happened is that Major League Baseball has canceled its All-Star game in Georgia. As the Earth continued to rotate, a huge container ship got stuck and unstuck in the Suez Canel and a Republican Congressmember gets caught in an underage sex scandal.
I’ve been emailed the quote at the top of the page, by Minority Leader McConnell, more times than I want to count, usually to try to scare me into sending somebody, or some organization, money or more money. Because, almost every time, the email sender claims – or infers – it was made a week after President Obama had been elected when the economy was in freefall, and it wasn’t, getting the message has annoyed me more than the message itself. My tendency has been to just delete the email, there is enough misinformation floating around so that I don’t need any more clogging up my email queue. Still, I keep thinking about it. I do want to be clear that that Speaker McConnell made this statement in 2010, almost two years after Obama took office, and while McConnell was in full campaign mode. I also want to acknowledge that Majority Speaker McConnell added that, if President Obama does a Clintonian backflip, if he’s willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues, it’s not inappropriate for us to do business with him. Now, after another email, I want to acknowledge that, in my haste to hit delete, I kinda missed the point.
A couple of nights ago, when I saw the quote again, for the first time, McConnell’s audacity took my breath away. For the first time, I saw it in a completely different light. By McConnell saying that the most important thing is to make President Obama a one-term president, McConnell was implying, at the very least, that Obama failing was his main goal. Clearly, having the president fail is not a good thing for the country, but, for McConnell, according to McConnell himself, President Obama failing was a goal higher than the country succeeding.
I knew this, or I thought I knew this but it never hit me like this before. I always thought – believed may be a better word – that the Republicans voted fiscally conservatively because they thought it was better for their wealthy donors. But that’s not true, the opposite is true. The Republicans spent like drunken sailors when both Bush the Younger and Donald Trump were President. Republicans vote against things like a minimum wage because it is a Democratic idea and they know it is good for the country, if they really thought it was bad for the country, paradoxily, they would have voted for it to hurt the Democrats.
Even though that was way back in 2010, when Barrak Obama was President, and this is 2021 with Joe Biden as President, nothing has changed on the Republican side. Despite the country’s financial health being even more precarious because of Covid-19, the Republicans still don’t want the country to succeed under a Democratic Administration. If President Biden, and the Democrats not succeeding hurts the country, the Republicans seem to be willing to have the country pay that price. It’s not that the Republicans are against helping the country per see – I think – they are just against helping the country if it helps Joe Biden. When the pandemic hit the country, in March of 2020 Donald Trump was President, and Republicans voted, en masse, for the March 2020 Trump Stimulus Bill of Two trillion dollars. At that time, there were 1,382 deaths, nationwide, it was obvious that the economy was close to tanking, and the Republicans – along with all the Democrats – passed a huge relief bill by voice vote because they knew it was a political plus for President Trump who said, at the time, “I signed the single biggest economic relief package in American history. This will deliver urgently needed relief to our nation’s families, workers and businesses, and that’s what this is all about.”
It turns out that “urgently needed relief to our nation’s families, workers and businesses” is not what “this is all about,” this time around. This time around, not one Republican voted for a slightly smaller bill even though the need is still there. Not one. Not one Republican said – or even thought, I guess – “I voted for a relief bill in the Spring because it was needed to counteract the economy tanking and the need is still there so I’ll vote for another one.” Every Republican said, in effect, “I won’t vote for this bill because it will help ‘families, workers and businesses’ and that will help the Democrats.”
That was an attitude that I didn’t want to acknowledge and just thinking about it makes me sad.
The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan. The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning, whilst some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan [sic] and Archie will always be much loved family members. Statement from Buckingham Palace on Prince Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.
It has been a year, almost to the day, since I had lunch with my friend and former business partner, Barbara. It sounded like a good idea when we made the lunch date but it seemed thoughtless once we got there. The place was empty, the windows and doors were all open but, rather than making it seem safer, it just made it seem foolish and risky. At the time, there was one Covid-19 death in neighboring Santa Clara County – that they reported but we now know there were more – and the chances of running into someone that was contagious was real but unlikely.
Three days ago, only one year later, remarkably, I got my second vaccination shot.
As an aside, the former president just put out a press release in a sort of pseudoTweet style – I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn‘t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers! – that is so perfectly Donald Trump; wallowing in self-pity, and whinny, self-serving, exaggeration to the point of parody but that is still slightly true. Trueish, at least. When the experts told him it would take 18 months to two years to get a vaccine, Trump said “cut corners, ignore the rules and regulations, get rid of the safety protocols, just do it fast”. And the drug companies did exactly that and it worked. Something like this is where the cumbersome government bureaucracy gets in the way and Trump had the nerve, or the disposition, at least, to go around it. Of course, distributing the vaccine is exactly where the cumbersome government bureaucracy helps and Trump, in his disdain, did almost nothing, leaving President Biden to pick up the pieces (and the credit). End aside.
I was going to write about R1 Zoning but I keep thinking about Meghan and Harry’s Interview with Ophra. Michele recorded the interview, we both watched it, and now I’m dreaming about them (I must not be alone because I read that more people watched the interview than watched the Golden Globes and The Emmys combined). Still, I haven’t been particularly interested in The Royals, I haven’t seen any of their weddings or funerals but I have watched The Crown so maybe I do have some prejudices.
Watching The Crown, I’ve become convinced that living in the British Monarchy is a nightmare. Everything is controlled by protocols, protocols that have almost nothing to do with reality. When young Prince Charles wanted to get serious about young Camellia, he couldn’t because she wasn’t a virgin. Based on the royal right and expectation of deflowering, I guess. In reality, the Monarchy is almost powerless – Margret Thatcher had to curtsy every time she saw Queen Elizabeth but the Queen couldn’t stop Thatcher from going to war over the Falklands – but still preoccupied with looking powerful. Prince Charles wears a military uniform with a chestful of medals, not medals for doing anything but medals like the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal and the Order of the Bath (my fave is the Queen’s Coronation Medal, awarded when Charles was four-years-old).
Watching the Megan/now exPrince Harry interview, I was taken by how naïve they both seemed. Megan says that she had no idea what she was getting into and exPrince Harry seemed to have no idea that his life was radically different than that of the norm. I walked away thinking that the Royal Family wasn’t particularly racist – maybe the Firm, the quasi-independent bureaucracy that supports and semi-runs the Royals, is but that’s slightly different- but they were elitist assholes. One story on The Crown, which is pro-Royal by the way, revolves around Diana coming for dinner for the first time. Somehow she gets a schedule – whether it was sent to her, given to her, or pinned to the door, I don’t remember – that says something like Cocktails at 5:30, Dinner at 7:00, dress: Evening Dress. What Diana doesn’t know, when she shows up for cocktails dressed to the nines for dinner, is that she will be the only one dressed up. The real schedule is Cocktails at 5:30 to talk about the day’s riding adventures while still dressed in their mud-splattered riding clothes and dinner later. That’s the Royal family Megan walked into and, like a sensible human being, wanted to get away from. Racism feels like just an excuse.