Monday, 09/27/2021
First thing, I assembled a small spreadsheet with my morning and evening blood pressures for the last two weeks. Then at 9 I headed out by car to PAMF. By car because, the last couple of times I went there, the admitting nurse took my BP and got a nice low reading, 120 or 118. This is 20 points lower than my average, and I attributed the low number to the fact that I had walked there both times, and she took my BP while I was still nice and warm from exercise.
This time she got 135 so, hypothesis confirmed. Blood pressure was the main topic of my talk with the cardiologist. We agreed we didn’t like mine. She said, although the small mass on my adrenal did not seem to be having any measurable hormonal effect, it might still be having a “sub-clinical” effect, so she wants to try something new.
She prescribed a combination pill containing HCTZ, a mild diuretic, combined with Spironolactone, a drug specific to high BP caused by excess aldosterone, the primary output of the adrenal gland. In the event that my adrenal gland is overproducing, this should have an effect on BP. It takes a while to build up, and it can have side effects, so I’m to get a metabolic panel in ten days.
We agreed that Dr. Yalamanchi, the endocrinologist, was great; see Day 2.258 where I called her “the cutest person”; but Dr. DiBiase had more substantial reasons for liking her, praised her highly, said her notes on the patients she sent to her were “so helpful”, and called her a “star”.
We also agreed that since it is a year since I get my cardiac stent, I can stop taking the Plavix. Yay!
Then I bopped back to CH and set up to work with Connie in the auditorium. She is scheduled to do a poetry reading (as part of the Sunday at Home series) on 10/17 and wants to have a zoom simulcast. I had worked out how to do that, which I showed her.
After all the waffling and frustration about how to get an image of the stage into the computer and shared with Zoom, I had finally realized that Zoom will do it for me. I set a Macbook Air on the seat of a chair, and set the chair on the front edge of the stage, with the computer facing the performer, which in this case is just Connie standing by a lectern. The camera is wide enough that it gets the performer from below the knees up, and with room for them to move left and right a few feet if they want.
Start a Zoom meeting on the laptop. Set it so that everyone who joins is muted; and set the view to show the speaker. Anyone who joins the meeting sees the performer in the middle and hears whatever sound is picked up by the laptop’s mic. The volume was adequate. The sound had a bit of echo because the computer could hear the performer’s voice directly, as well as picking up the amplified sound out of the ceiling. But it was adequate.
This will do for the time being. It would be preferable to supply a feed directly from the audio console to the computer, that would eliminate the echo. But I don’t know any way to do that, not least because as noted on day 2.290, we can’t figure out how to get line output from the console. If we could, then we could try to figure out how to get it into the laptop doing Zoom.
Codgerville 