Category Archives: Medical

Happy Spring

Medical

Wow, having my hand in a cast – even a u-shaped pseudo-cast? – was more constricting than I expected. And so was the cold weather. But yesterday, I went to my hand doctor, who said my bone was healing faster than expected and removed the cast. When I was young, I used to be a fast healer, but it has been a long time since anybody told me that. It feels liberating.

Next week, I’m going to the eye surgeon for the cataract – s? – removed from my left eye and replaced with a silicon lens. Life is already looking better; at the end of next week, it should be looking better and brighter.

Well, That Was Unexpected

Medical

To keep a short story short, yesterday, I slipped on our stairs while taking out the garbage. Sequoia Hospital’s Emergency Department Patient Discharge papers say that I have minor hand and elbow injuries, including a broken metacarpal. I had the garbage bag strap wrapped around my hand, and it tried to remove the skin from the back of my hand. The stairs did a pretty good job of removing skin from my elbow.

When I got to the hospital, the hospital x-rayed my hand and elbow, cleaned up the blood – on my hand and elbow only, Michele got the blood out of my jeans and sweater – glued the skin flap back down, put a splint on me, patted me on the popo, and sent me home.

Tomorrow, I am going to the hand specialist, and I expect to have an interesting scar.

Michele provided the documentation and reminded me five times to warn you, dear reader, not to scroll down if gore makes you uncomfortable.

I’m Getting a WATCHMAN

Medical, Science

I’m getting a WATCHMAN™  tomorrow morning, and I’ve been in a sort of denial about it. I have AFib – AFib is Atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that causes an irregular and rapid heartbeat in the upper chambers of the heart – according to Google AI – and although I’ve been through half a dozen procedures to get rid of it, the AFib keeps coming back.

However, the biggest danger of AFib is a stroke brought on by a blood clot generated in the heart, swirling up into the brain and causing a stroke. The fix for that is to have me take blood thinners – not just me, obviously, anybody with AFib – so that the blood doesn’t clot.

It turns out, however, that 90% of the blood clots come from an area lovingly called the LAA (Left Atrial Appendage). Big Medical, if there is such a thing, has invented a way to cover or plug the LAA as the sort of fascinating video below shows (if you can get through the pitch in the middle).

The entire procedure should take about 25 minutes, my doctor tells me, and I’ll spend 3 hours recovering. Prep starts at 5:15 AM, and I should be back home by noon.

A thought at 5 AM

Medical, Politics,

After waking up at 5 AM with a throbbing pain in my knee, I started thinking about the Iranian woman who was going to be stoned to death for adultery. It seems the case has now been referred to the Iranian equivalent of the Supreme Court to see if the sentence can be changed to….wait for it now, reduced to, commuted to….hanging.

I am not sure if the court’s thinking – and I am using the term thinking loosely here – is supposed to be based on legal grounds or a religious interpretation of  God’s unboundless Love; either way it seems to me, sitting here in the dark, the decision will really be made by some old man pulling an old, predigested, opinion out of his ass.

And that got me thinking about how arbitrary those in power, even the elected ones, rule. Rick Perry – what an asswipe – can let a man be executed without looking at the new evidence that might show him to be innocent. Like George Bush – or Dick Cheney, if you prefer to see Bush the Younger as weak – going to war against Iraq. Or Bashar al-Assad hanging on to power in Syria.

I want to be outraged, and I am somewhat, but it is really like being outraged that some people have more power, more prestige, more talent. No outrage changes the fact that some people are ruling other people or that the rulers, in the end, are doing what the rulers want.