Category Archives: Around home

9AM….everyday

Americana, Around home, Science,

 

 

Everyday at 9 AM, I go into Sequoia Hospital for an intravenous shot of an high-octane antibiotic – daptomycin, Daptomycin with a capital “D”? – to protect my cow aorta valve. Every day for six weeks; Saturdays, Sundays, New Years Day, at 9 AM. I do not think that I have done the same thing at the same time for six weeks in my entire life, it is very strange – not bad necessarily, but strange – and I am having a hard time getting used to it.

What is also strange is the PICC line in my arm, just below the armpit, that runs through a vain – or artery, I am not sure which – up, through my shoulder, and down to a large gaggle of pipes near my heart. According to Wikipedia, the PICC lines are used when intravenous access is required over a prolonged period of time or when the material to be infused would cause quick damage and early failure of a peripheral IV, and I think that is the case with me. I had a peripheral IV port in my hand that they used for a couple of days and my hand is still sore.

I think of the PICC as a very small, very long, hole that runs from outside my body to, almost, my heart. It is very handy: anything anybody wants in me can just be shoved in through the hole; the Flue Vaccine I forgot to get earlier in the year, a Pneumonia Vaccine I didn’t even know I should have, lunch – I guess. But, and it is a big BUT, protecting that hole from bad stuff getting in is a big deal. A much bigger deal than protecting a  IV because any bacteria traveling up the PICC would end up right next to my heart which is what they are trying to protect, in the first place, by pouring in the dosages of antibiotic.

Tuesday is the changing of the covering-dressing day and it is sort of emblematic of my whole Sequoia experience and – by only slightly fantastical extension – our health care system.

 

The changing of the covering-dressing is almost ritualistic in its detailed, loving, complexity; it is driven, in large part, by outside vendors coming up with new, improved, and increasingly expensive ways to do it; it is staggeringly wasteful; and once you see it, it is hard to think of a cheaper, simpler, way to do as good a job. First the nurse takes a sterile envelope containing sterile gloves and opens it to to form a sterile area, then she empties all the cleaning supplies and sterile dressings on to the sterile area. After she puts on the gloves and facemask, my existing dressing is removed and the area cleaned.

Each part of the new dressing comes in a sterile package that is now waste and has to be carefully disposed of. As an aside, much of the waste has my name and birthdate  on it and each time that happens, it has to be disposed of differently so that my name doesn’t end up in the garbage where somebody could see it. End aside. Then the new dressing, including a jell-packet of disinfectant, is put on to cover the entry point of the PICC.

Lastly, the new dressing is dated. Then, probably for the second or third time, the nurse asks me my name and birhdate and gives me my daily charge of daptomycin. I have no idea what all this costs, somebody once said that the daptomycin, alone, is $110.00 and it comes with its own – wrapped in a sterile covering, of course – connecting line and two syringes to flush the PICC line before and after the dose.

Then I am happily on my way, back into the world.

 

 

 

 

Dharma talks

Around home

 

On Thursdays, Michele and I usually go to a Sitting and Dharma talk at our local meditation center. IMC, as it bills itself, says that it is a community-based urban meditation center for the practice of Vipassana or Insight meditation….dedicated to the study and practice of Buddhist teachings. One of the things most striking about the Dharma talks is the simplicity of their form. We enter the space quietly, sit on the floor or in a chair facing the teacher on a dais, meditate for about an half hour, then the teacher gives a Dharma talk for about an hour and an half – actually, exactly an hour and an half – then we put our hands together and bow – Gassho – to the teacher, and leave.

If we like, we can stay and mingle with fellow members of the Sangha, help put chairs away, make a donation for the teacher or the Center, and then leave. There is no music, no pomp, no passing of the donation plate, no chatting about the weather with the teacher at the door on the way out. In my imagination, the Dharma talk hasn’t changed in form since the Buddha gave the first Dharma talk or, for that matter, since Jesus gave a Dharma talk on the mount.

I love that. I love the subtle power of the tradition. I love the subtle change that the Dharma talks have made in our lives.

 

 

Lost in Reamde Cnt.

Around home

This morning started foggy and the fog hung around all morning making for a great day to read at lunch. As I was disappearing in Readme by Neil Stephenson, I kept telling Michele that it was great fun – after the first 100 pages or so – and she should get a copy from the library so we could read it together. By the time her book finally came in, I had almost finished but as soon as I did finish it, I was ready to start again. There were so many characters that I now knew but didn’t remember when I had first met them. Now we are both reading the book and are both lost in it.

So here we are, taking a break for lunch and both reading our books. I don’t think I have ever done this before and it is great fun. Talking about it makes it seem even more real and even easier to get lost.

 

 

Lost in Reamde

Americana, Around home, Books

On a rainy fall day, there is almost nothing better than curling up with a good book in front of the fireplace. For me, this fall, the book has been Reamde by Neil Stephenson. But, now it is a bright sunny day and the book still has me in its clutches. To quote from the New York times book review:

Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting.

This is the kind of book that it is easy to get lost in, easy to be transported to a new place in . The world on the printed page becomes more real than the real world which fades to being only a distraction from the book. Lord of the Rings was like that. I think that I read Lord of the Rings about three times over a six year period. I knew I was hooked when I would try to catch a few paragraphs while stopped at traffic lights. Another, for me, was Shogun by James Clavell.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer – for some strange reason – was one of those books and it started me on a World War II binge.

Not that Stephenson always makes it easy: his characters usually have goofy names that are hard to pronounce like Richard Forthrast, they are sort of improbable, and the first hundred pages are setup. But then it takes off, much like Shogun, in an episodic blast. Each event leads to another with consequences that seems both improbable and,  somehow,  inevitable.  Along the way, while we are running at full speed, Stephenson – running alongside and whispering in our ear – explains the world. For example, a British handler explains to a spy how the American counter-terrorist system works:

The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex…. It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.

How can a nice, sunny, fall, day compete with that?

 

 

 

 

Occupy Wall Street far west edition

Americana, Around home, Politics, San Mateo County

I went to an Occupy Wall Street protest last Friday. We occupied an overpass over Highway 92. The theory being that this overpass was one of 74 bridges have been found to be structurally deficient in San Mateo County. That is a pretty amazing figure; San Mateo is one of the richest counties in the United States and pretty consistently votes democratic and even we doesn’t take care of our infrastructure. There were 122 people signed up to be here and I talked to a couple of people who said that they hadn’t signed up so there were probably somewhere between 120 and 150 people spread out over the overpass.

They were just regular people, some of whom took off work early and some – like me – that didn’t have work to take off of. The crowd seemed completely middle class.

 

 

I especially liked the accidental juxtaposition to the sign in this picture.

It was mostly a late middle age group although there were people of all ages.

I am not sure how much of what I saw and felt was reality and how much is my projection, but – with that qualifier – everybody seemed more sad than enraged, disappointed with a deeping realization that it wasn’t going to get better. At least without a huge amount of work on our part. I talked to one woman who said that it was a typical San Mateo crowd, We are nice people who don’t make waves. These are people who believe in democracy, who haven’t given up or they wouldn’t be here. They are aware that America’s day in the sun is ending but are not happy with the government only helping the rich.  I had the sense that they weren’t going away.