All posts by Steve Stern

Hanging Out In Limbo

Japan, Science

I am getting a new aorta valve this Wednesday. Well, that’s accurate but a little misleading. I already have a replacement aorta valve, but it is starting to wear out. Rather than opening me up and taking the old – replacement – valve out, the doctors are going to leave it in place and insert a new valve into the old one in an operation called a Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (although, as I understand it, they don’t replace the valve as much as insert the new valve inside my trusty old Edwards Lifesciences valve). This is all done from outside my body by fishing the new valve parts up from my groin through one of my arteries or veins and attaching it to the old valve from the other artery (or vein).

I go into the hospital at 5:45 and go through about an hour and a half of prep in the prep room and then another hour of prep in the surgery room, and the procedure itself will take about an hour. I should be awake by noon and leave the hospital Thursday or Friday. My regular cardiologist will be in the room as well as another surgeon – who operated on me when I had a pseudo-aneurism in 2007 – in case something goes wrong and they have to open me up. It should be easy and relatively painless but I am still sort of freaked out about it.

The shortness of the procedure—and, for that matter, even calling it a procedure—camouflages the truth that this is a big deal—for me, at least, and, I hope, for the surgeon—and lots of things can go wrong. Still, going wrong is unusual, and lots more can go right, and I am planning on that.

A Couple of Weeks After A Sweet Spring Day

Japan

To start with, the biggest thing in our lives during the last couple of weeks, Michele has bacterial pneumonia. Well, she had it for about the last three weeks, but she is now on the mend. Even as an observer, I can tell you bacterial pneumonia sucks. It started as if it were the flu and then just continued to get worse. When we still thought it was the flu, Michele suggested I go to Richard and Tracy’s weekend home at Point Reyes Station without her to see Tracy’s parents, Arlene and Al Grubbs.

I agreed, and the payoff for the cold and wet winter was my drive through Marin’s acid-green hills. The payoff for the drive was a lunch of delicious pizza made by Richard and Tracy in their wood-burning oven and seeing Arlene and Al.

I had brought my camera and watching, through the viewfinder, Courtney and Arlene play Bocci Ball with Richard and Gina, I felt like I was watching a photo shoot for Vanity Fair, or, maybe, Fashionable Country Living. The grass was so green, and the background of the Point Reyes Hills was picture-perfect. For me, it was a perfect sweet spring day.

Remembering Ed Dieden

Camping, Nevada, Religion, What's a man?

Last week, Michele and I went to a Life Celebration for our friend Ed Dieden. It was eye-opening, almost shocking, how much he gave to the world. He was a former Marine officer who had been badly wounded in Vietnam, which left him with a lifelong crab-like gait and a desire to help other people. I’ve read variations of Once a Marine, Always a Marine everywhere, and, in Ed’s case, it came out in his volunteer work. To quote from A Celebration of the Life of Ed Dieden, Ed was a mentor to addicts and incarcerated men. He was a Stephen Minister. He volunteered with the Alisha Ann Burn Foundation…and the list goes on, and on, ending with Him helping establish the first Vetreans Court in Alameda County. One item towards the bottom of the list was that he volunteered at Stand Down, weekend retreats for service members, veterans, and their families, where I had the good fortune to join him.

That’s not where I met Ed, however. I first met Ed Dieden in 2006, or 7, while I was developing a moderate-income infill project in Union City. I was looking for somebody to handle the construction side of it, and my banker, Bob Mazza, who, it turned out, was our banker, introduced us. It was a perfect fit.

The Union City project was my last before I retired, and I think it was Ed’s last project, as well. We were both left with a time hole to fill and quickly bonded over politics, photography, especially photos of graffiti, and wilderness camping, which was just driving out into the desert to see where we ended up. Once, we went to Los Vegas for a Marine Reunion, stopping three times to camp on the way there and twice on the way back (I was along only for the drive, not the Reunion part).

We met once a week for lunch or to take photographs, meeting in the middle until Ed moved from Oakland to Benicia. He had Parkinson’s disease, and it became increasingly harder for him to drive. We saw each other less frequently and then not at all. Like an old soldier—no offense meant—Ed just faded from my life.

Ed Dieden was the kind of guy who always brought out the best in people. After a day or a weekend with him, I always felt better about myself. He was a true Mensch. He was all that a man should be. I’ll greatly miss Ed; I hope he is resting in Peace with the God he so loved.

Turtles All The Way Down

Japan

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!” Stephen Hawking in the intro to A Brief History of Time.

Today was a beautiful Spring Day, warm under a clear blue sky. It seems like the long, cold, rainy winter is ending.

Both my email and my blog disappeared last week at about the time Michele left for Mexico, although there is no connection between the two. I know Michele went to Mexico to see the Great Eclipse, but I have no idea why or even how the blog and attached email disappeared; all I know is that, when I went to make an entry in the blog, it wasn’t there. All I got was a sign that said This site can’t be reached. Check if there is a typo in srstern.com.

Every morning, I would get up and go to my website only to see This site can’t be reached. I would text Michele, and she would tell me that she was working on it and that the site was still there. She would say, “They say, ‘They can see it.'” whatever that means. About a day after I gave up – but, obviously, Michele hadn’t – there it was…back.

Also, on the good news front, I am getting a new heart valve—or, to be more accurate, a Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement. This means that they will not have to open my chest to get to my heart; they will just fish a new bioprosthetic valve in through my groin and up a vein to my heart. In my imagination’s eye, it is sort of like one of those collapsable paper umbrellas you get with rum drinks, only safer. The cheery handout I got from the surgeon’s office said that it will Help you live longer, Helps you feel better, Less invasive procedure, Shorter recovery time and Almost 98 out of a 100 patients are still living within two years and more than 2 in 100 patients will die.

So, as far as I am concerned, it is good news All The Way Down.

Sequoia: Redux

Japan

About two weeks ago, I caught the flu – I have no idea how – and I ended up in the hospital. In retrospect, that may be the good news. I have an artificial aorta valve, which, when I got it in 2002, had a projected life of about eighteen years. But I have now had the valve for almost twenty-two years, and, recently, I’ve been having trouble breathing. I’ve been complaining that the valve is starting to give out, but my doctors didn’t seem to feel any sense of urgency. My stay in the hospital has changed their minds. This is all by way of saying that I’m not particularly hale or hearty, but I hope I will be so, with a new valve, in a couple of months.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from an aborted trip to Death Valley. It was aborted because the adjustable suspension on our VW Touareg started to give out, and the warning on the dashboard started flashing: Stop! Apparently, a rat had chewed through one of the hydraulic lines, so we limped west to Lone Pine and then north to Reno.