Monday 10/19/2020

Started with a long walk, walking what was my normal jogging route, wondering if I could jog it. Two miles of jogging, another mile to close the loop. Probably could, with frequent breaks just walking. But I’ll wait until after I talk to Dr. DiBiase on Thursday.

Had an actual appetite for lunch and again for supper. That’s an improvement. For the record, I’ve dropped about 7 pounds in the past six weeks. Did it come off my waist, exposing my abs? Of course not. My general outline is just as it was, only areas of skin on my arms and elsewhere show more wrinkles than before.

Did a little prep work on parts of the model. Tomorrow I will attempt to shoot a heavy color coat on those parts.

In the mail from yesterday, the bill from the Palo Alto city ambulance for my ten-minute no-siren ride to the emergency room. $2500. The form asked for insurance information, so I returned it with that including a color copy of my cards. Presumably it will come back weeks from now, with a lower asking price.

Sunday 10/18/2020

Did my usual Sunday morning things, watering plants, NYT puzzle, etc. Then: what next? I should take a walk; I should take the car out; aha. I took the car to the Palo Alto Baylands and had a 2 mile walk.

Then it was 11am and I was a little hungry, that’s a nice thing. I remembered last time I talked to Dennis he had recommended “go out for a milkshake” as a cure for depression. Why not? I drove one hop down the freeway to Rengstorff and bought a choc. shake at the In and Out. Nice.

In the afternoon I fiddled with a fussy bit of the MG model. It has spoke wheels, and the plastic casting of the inner and outer halves of the spoke wheels is quite good but not perfect. Lots of the individual spokes have wee flashes and bulgy bits that keep them from looking like rods. So I spent an hour with the tip of the x-acto knife, spoke-shaving. Spoke-shaving was a thing, once. I should take a picture of this but it’s tiny close-up work. The kind of work where I take off my glasses and use the perfect focus at the end of my nose.

Went for a short walk after supper (2.9 total for the day). I think I feel pretty decent. Not recovered, but definitely recovering.

In the night I woke up feeling… good. Aware I had been several hours, it seemed, without any pain. Checked my watch, oh, 6:00 already? So I got up. But the clocks in the microwave and. the DVR said 3:00. My watch had been on its dual-time function, probably still set to London. Oh well, so back to bed.

Saturday 10/17/2020

And up still feeling quite good. The annoying chest pain was just a small sensitivity behind my breastbone. And so things stayed pretty well until lunch time. I went for a half-hour walk at 8am, and another at 11:30. Still not “normal” whatever normal is going to turn out to be, but better.

It was a slow afternoon. I made myself do some work at Zooniverse so as to not feel completely useless, but gosh. Naps. Reading. Naps. Podcast.

I had meant to do a short walk after supper, and might have, but it was already sundown. Now, we are a modern town, Palo Alto, and we do have street lighting. So that was no excuse. Just a wimp-out.

Friday 10/16/2020

Had plenty of sleep, woke up feeling just ok. With a forecast for hot heat (in the end it didn’t break 90) I went for a walk first thing. My stamina is definitely lower than a month ago. Later in the day, Nurse Diane from the CT group called to check up. She confirmed my understanding that the dissection was a trauma, “and the operation, too”, and that lots of symptoms come from recovery from internal trauma. So there’s that. “Give yourself permission to take naps,” she said. No problem there, Nurse. Frequent ones. “And take walks”. Well, I took the one. After supper, I just couldn’t find the motivation.

I evaluated all the pieces of the model that I have sprayed. They all need some degree of sanding to get the color coat level, never mind smooth, before anything else goes on. I have ordered a selection of fine sandpapers and will wait for that.

At Rhonda’s Friday open meeting, there was some good news,

This week, our last resident was cleared of Covid and moved back to their Assisted Living apartment. So, we are very happy to announce that we currently have no residents with Covid. Today, we have just 2 employees left who are still in quarantine.

We have had 3 consecutive weeks of 100% negative test results for our Lee Center residents and staff. We are all very relieved with this result!

As of this point, with this outbreak, 10 residents and 7 staff contracted Covid. All were symptomatic and several were hospitalized. And, sadly, 3 of the residents have passed away due to Covid.

Meanwhile the IL tower has yet to get a case. They are planning to reopen the dining room. People will be able to reserve a table and eat there, instead of a tray to their room. However, only one “household” per table, so bachelors like me would simply be dining alone, at a different table than usual. I guess some would see that as a positive change.

Thursday 10/15/2020

Feeling dour and grumpy this morning. About the slow recovery from the dissection (if that’s what I’m recovering from, see yesterday). I started a walk, got sidetracked in a ten minute talk with Marcia about volunteer matters (we’re getting fewer, is it time to hand the jobs back to staff?), did a five minute walk ony.

And later having gloomy thoughts about the MG model. I tried putting clear coat on a three small parts yesterday. Inspecting them today it is plain to see that the clear coat is not going to level out all the microscopic bumps and model-scale orange peel in the color coat. Which means: sanding. To get a good finish I will need to sand the color coat before applying the clear. This is really, really hard to do. The parts are tiny. There is no such thing as a 1/16 scale orbital sander, so it has to be done by hand, or rather, by finger-tip. A little piece of 2400-grit or 3600-grit paper on the end of a forefinger. But there are lots of detail lines, it is hard to get close to them, and if the sandpaper overlaps them, you quickly wear through the color and expose the primer along the raised edge.

Possibly I could get a smoother color coat in the first place by applying the paint more heavily. I was really careful not to get runs, and I didn’t, applying multiple light coats to get the opaque color. But that ends up with the matte-texture. Maybe I will experiment applying one more color coat as wet as I can get it (and damn it, there will be runs).

Plus I am realizing there are small projections on these parts that represent hinges or door locks, which shouldn’t be given color and clear coats, they’ll get chromed later. So I should be masking them, and haven’t. Grump grump grump.

And my bag of clean linens didn’t arrive on schedule. Grump.

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Oddly, later in the day I felt better. I ate a good supper and took a second walk afterward.

Wednesday 10/14/2020

Taking Nurse Diane’s advice I set out first thing for a walk. I decided to use the timer in the phone, go 15 minutes out and when the timer expired, return. That worked ok, and later, before lunch, I did another like it. I was going to do a third after supper but felt too tired. Lord knows when I will feel well enough to try jogging again.

So I had a bit of a realization about this medical adventure. This is my own thinking, to be checked with the next professional I talk to (Diane on Friday, Dr. DiBiase next week). Why do I feel crappy, and have felt crappy all the three weeks since the event of Wednesday 9/24? The weekend after that I was already commenting on running a fever and reduced appetite and feeling unwell. Those have continued throughout. At first I commented maybe it was some random coincidental virus. Then I got stented 9 days ago; was that supposed to be a “fix”? I don’t feel “fixed”.

Here’s what I’m thinking now. The dissection was, in effect, an internal trauma. A derangement of certain tissues, just like a broken bone or a stabbing (or an invasive operation). Healing the damage of a trauma is a process, it takes time. The stenting procedure, by closing off the top of the dissection, makes it easier for the rest of it to heal (to whatever extent it will) but isn’t a fix as such. The on-going symptoms, I am speculating, are the results of the body trying to patch up and repair the internal trauma.

This could be complete fantasy. Certainly none of the medical people at the hospital advised me, “this will take time because your body has to blah blah and so you’ll probably have a fever and feel run-down for a while until that happens.”

Tuesday 10/13/2020

Began the day with the adventure of going into a grocery store. Rather than use instacart, I decided to enter Piazza’s, my favorite market, during their Tuesday 7-8am senior safety hour. I was surprised at the number of changes they have made in their layout to make it more open and safer-feeling. I quickly stocked up on my basics (bread, PB, coke, beer, grapes).

Then I had an hour to kill before meeting Harriet for coffee. Pleasant meeting; but there’s not a lot to talk about with all our shared sports and travel interests on hold.

Back to CH in time for the bi-weekly writers’ meeting. Of course I hadn’t done any writing for it, so I just listened.

Following that I finished spraying color on the red parts of the MG model.

I was feeling low when I got a call from Diane, the nurse coordinator for my surgeon, checking on my progress. I was glad to be checked up on, I’d been of several minds about whether to contact them and when. I described my minor but persistent chest pain. It could be a lot of things, she said; if it ever gets severe, or your blood pressure drops, that’s an emergency. Can you control it with tylenol? Yes, tylenol makes it mostly go away. OK, then, I’ll check back with you on Friday.

She also commented that taking three short walks a day would be better than taking one longer one. So starting tomorrow I’ll implement that.

Monday 10/12/2020

Not ready to attempt even a short jog yet, I went out at 7:30 for a 1.5mile walk. Back in plenty of time for the monthly Resident Association meeting via Zoom. Unusually low attendance, around 80, and I noticed the couple that just moved in on my floor did not attend. That’s too bad, because this is one event where you can really see CH as a functional community.

Later I put a couple of coats of red on the two big body sections of the MG. One more coat I think, and then it will be time to apply clear coat.

I’m not pleased with my condition. In the morning when I got up I had a bit of vertigo; it passed off before my walk but I hate the reminder it is always lurking. And I have intermittent small chest pains, like muscle aches. No, not angina. Easily suppressed with Tylenol, but it keeps me feeling unwell. Grump grump. I want to back in the state of “normal” which is simply the state of never thinking about my body at all, just occupying it.

Sunday 10/11/2020

I’m sleeping well, that’s nice. My appetite is all over the place, I woke up ravenous about 3am, made a little snack and read for a while. But at 7am, didn’t want any of my nice breakfast shake. Ate enough at lunch and dinner.

I went out for a walk mid-morning, the phone says only 1.3 miles. Felt like “enough”. Bed rest, it’s a killer.

After lunch I decided it was far enough from the op. that I could drive, so I took the Prius out for a run up 280 and and back. North to Millbrae, back south to Los Altos. Which eventually brought me to a cheap gas station on Middlefield, where I topped up the tank, 7.2 gallons. I had topped it up twice before, for a total of 17.5 gallons consumed since the last fill-up which was 1020 miles ago in… go on, guess. March. I’m on pace to break 40 gallons total consumption for the year 2020.

Saturday 10/10/2020

Got a lot of good sleep. Woke up sometime around 3am to pee, and had the conscious thought, “huh, I feel healthy”. Also felt that way off and on through the day.

Did a couple of deferred chores, including filling the hummingbird feeders. My neighbors may notice a reduced buzz crowd now. Then at 9am, took the first walk of the day, just around the neighborhood. I went to the Saturday Farmers’ Market, but then realized, I hadn’t gotten my money clip with bills off the desk. So no cash, no farmer foods.

Did a lot of sitting around in one or another of my comfy spots. After lunch I got serious about my ballot, which had come last week. Went through various recommendation sources, voted everything except the De Anza College district board. Then went out for walk number two: up to City Hall to stuff my sealed and signed ballot into the collection box.

On this walk I realized I was breathing harder than I normally would. Is that shortness of breath? Does it mean something? Dennis, when he called later in the day, said, it means you’ve been lying on your butt for two weeks. OK, I’ll go with that explanation. Two weeks until I see my cardiologist.

I am eating better than in the prior weeks, although still not up to normal; also my temperature is still typically +1 to +1.5 over my historic norm. Do I have a new norm? I shall try to find something on TV to keep me up to 10pm, which I did last night. But I may cork off early.