I should add about yesterday, that last night was the first time since the dissection, that I have not needed to take a couple of Tylenol before going to bed. No pains of any kind. While walking around yesterday I was consciously noting, “yup, feels normal”. With the one exception of stamina; I do get tired faster, and find myself thinking, OK, I did something, can I have a nap, now?

Wednesday 11/04/2020

No electoral decisions at 5am when I couldn’t stay in bed any longer. No blue wave; more a blue seep. That’s deeply disappointing.

I went for a three-mile walk. At noon I did the laundry. In the afternoon I ran the numbers on the Nest Egg. It remains down about 11% for the year, but still ample to keep me in luxury.

My appetite is coming back well; I’m hungry at appropriate times, and able to finish most of my meals. So that’s all good.

Tuesday 11/03/2020

First thing I drove to Piazza’s grocery for the 7-8am senior hour, stocking up on my drinks and snacks that I previously was getting via instacart.

At 11 we had the writer’s group. The topic was “election” and as I noted yesterday, I wrote a survey of the presidential elections in my life, and how alienated the many losses have made me feel from my country.

After lunch I took a 2 mile walk, ending up at CVS to pick up my prescriptions.

Evening I avoided television coverage of the election, periodically checking instead the Election Night Integrity Process with its terse summary of A.P. data. But I don’t plan to stay up past 10, so I probably won’t know the result until tomorrow. (I will say that as of 9pm, I am sad that both McConnell and Graham appear to have won their senate seats. I really thought there was a chance one of them would be out.)

Monday 11/02/2020

In the morning I walked the exercise route, feeling pretty normal. (3.5 miles total for the day.)

At 1pm I visited my PCP, Julia Marx. Dr. Marx is a friend; she was PCP for both me and Marian. It’s just not the same, though, talking to somebody wearing both a mask and a face shield. We talked about my weight loss. I’m at 161, so down about 11 pounds in two months, mostly because of no appetite. Appetite is coming back, though; I was actually hungry preceding both lunch and dinner today, although I did not finish all my dinner. I fill up quicker than before, and have no patience with things that aren’t appetizing, like the veggies that often come on the tray meals.

Nothing much else of note. One annoying thing: she had me lie back on her exam table, and then when I sat directly up from a prone position, I disturbed the Vertigo Demon, which gave me little swoons of vertigo the rest of the afternoon. Hopefully a night’s sleep will pacify it.

One of the four volunteers who have been delivering newspapers in-house for the past few months wants to take the holidays off. I polled the others and rather than trying to cover for him, the general feeling is to give it up and pass the job back to the paid staff. So I will arrange that tomorrow.

Sunday 11/01/2020

Another Sunday morning, yay. I did the customary things, and in fact absolutely blitzed the Times Sunday Puzzle at 28 minutes. Minding my own advice I left the room at 9:30 for a long walk, to the California Avenue farmer’s market. I ended up with 3.7 miles, 10K steps, for the day. This long walk was distinctly more effortful than previously. I stopped at two points on the return leg to rest on a bench, do a sudoku.

Back home I finished a piece of writing. The Writers’ Group topic for Tuesday is “election”. Yesterday and today I put together a summary of all the presidential elections I could remember, starting with Eisenhower/Stevenson in 1952. I do not remember what motivated me, but I have a bit of memory of advocating for Adlai Stevenson among my classmates, at recess, on the playground at Kapowsin Grade School.

This was a useful exercise because it reminded me of how bad things have been. Do we think the country is in political chaos today? It helps to remember Watergate and the turmoil before Nixon’s resignation. Fake news? How about when Nixon’s direct employee, Ken Clawson, forged a letter purportedly by Edmund Muskie, the strongest Democratic challenger at the time, using the epithet “Canuck”, a loaded word in New Hampshire. When it was published in a New Hampshire newsletter, Muskie lost his composure when denying the letter to the press. He might have shed angry tears (or possibly melting snow on his hat dripped down on his face), but media reports of “Muskie’s tears” destroyed his campaign. (It was 1972, when real men just didn’t cry in public.) The Democratic nomination went to George McGovern, a far weaker candidate, and Nixon won in a landslide.

Anyway, remembering that, and Johnson’s “Daisy” commercial, and other awful or despicable bits of campaigning was a good reminder of how often we’ve been in turmoil and uncertainty and seemed on the brink of chaos; yet here we are.

Saturday 10/31/2020

“1.325” means there are only 40 days left in this blog’s year. Wait, you say, there are more days left in 2020. But this blog started on December 2nd, which was “Day 1” in 2018.

I woke up feeling well and felt basically well most of the day. However, I did very little physical activity and by evening I really felt that. Feeble. Lower back pain. It all comes from not moving. I know this. And I keep not doing anything, and then feeling crappy.

In the morning I walked to the Farmer’s market and bought a new 1-pound bag of jumbo slab dried apricots, a favorite snack. Also a chocolate hazlenut swirl pastry. So that was a good start.

From 10 to 12 I was a “safety sitter” making it possible for people to use the tables on the 11th floor penthouse to meet. Nobody came to meet. Several people came through to walk laps around the outside roof, though. And most of them asked how I was. I was really touched by how many people were concerned when I was hospitalized. I got several get-well cards and everybody wants to know how I am doing.

After lunch I went to the CVS in Sharon Heights. Earlier in the week I had a robot phone call from CVS that seemed to be telling me that at least a couple of my hospital prescriptions (the hospital sent them to the wrong CVS, Sharon Heights instead of University Avenue) would be renewed and ready for me on Saturday.

They weren’t ready, because the hospital prescriptions had specified zero refills, and CVS had been unable to contact the doctor who issued the prescriptions. I don’t recognize the name on the label, it must be somebody on the C/T team that I never met. So the prescriptions were “on hold” which puzzled the first clerk, but when I got to a manager she explained it. I just said forget it. I went home and sent a message to my PAMF doctor asking her to please create new prescriptions for those two drugs at CVS on University. It’s Saturday, so that probably won’t happen until Monday or later. No matter, my pill cases are full through Wednesday.

Friday 10/30/2020

Felt normal most of the day. Went for a longish walk, the jogging loop, first thing. Juuuust maybe, next week, I will go out in shorts and jog some portions of that route. Well, no, I have meetings with two, three doctors over November, and I think I will wait until those are finished.

I did some practical things, for example I put together the sign-up sheets for the next week of three volunteer activities. Then I needed to get Marcia’s input on them, and found out that she and her husband were out camping this week. They own an Adventurewagen, very similar to the one we owned in the 90s and oughts. They were just coming back from camping on the coast at Aña Nuevo, and she was back in time to finish the job.

While at the hospital I had requested genetic screening for anything that affects aortic or vascular tissue. Today I had a call from a geneticist at Stanford. I definitely do not have Marfan’s or any other connective tissue syndrome. I do have a single “misspelling” in the FN1 gene, which relates to Marfan’s, but there is no evidence to suppose it would have any bad effects.

Patty and I walked out and picked up a pizza at NY Pizza, and ate it on chairs outside City Hall. She has excellent manners, she let me talk about myself a lot. <jk> Well, I let her talk about herself, too.

Her father was a major executive at IBM Endicott in the 50s and 60s. Very possibly during the time I attended weeks of IBM training school there.

Thursday 10/29/2020

Yesterday I felt normalish. Today again I felt sub-par, short of stamina. I took one, two-mile walk with a long break in the middle of it. Spent the rest of the time slouching around the room feeling grouchy and low.

Well, it was Thursday, the alternate Thursday when I get a bag of fresh linens outside the door, but no actual housekeeping. Since we are coming to the weekend of turning back clocks, when I remade the bed, I put away the plain blanket, and brought out the duvet I bought last year. Also my shoes were very dusty from all the trails I’ve been on lately, so I polished both pairs of loafers, the brown and the black.

At 5:30 I streamed the first of the weekly shows from the virtual SF Boogie Woogie Festival. Maybe due to the energy in the music, I was feeling better by evening.

Wednesday 10/29/2020

I spent some time on grooming including using the long setting of my electric razor or shorten my hair. Spruced up I headed out to walk the old exercise route, the one that on Monday I had to abort ten minutes along. This time I went the full distance without a stop and felt ok.

Later in the day I took the car out and drove to San Antonio Open Space, where I added another mile. In between I fiddled with this and that and read. But didn’t feel the need to take any Tylenol until just before bedtime, when some general lower- and mid-back pains threatened to keep me awake. So, normalish. Which is a good state.

I had a call from Margaret down the hall about getting her new iPhone to talk to the right wifi. In the course of it we were discussing health. I said that I was feeling a lot more like 78 than I had two months ago. She says, “Oh yes, 78, that was a nice age. Enjoy it.” Senior humor.

Tuesday 10/27/2020

Felt better on arising, and no chest pains. Did Veronica’s aerobics class. About 10am I decided to try a long walk, and went off to Midtown, a 3-mile round trip. Once there I ordered a coke and a cookie from the coffee shop and spent a long half hour relaxing before heading back. Good walk, and a nap after.

Through the afternoon and into the evening I felt “normal”, the indefinable state of not being ill. The only pains are back pains, from sitting too long in one position.

Today was the launch of the annual Appreciation Fund drive. Like almost all senior residences, all kinds of tipping or gifting from residents to staff is absolutely forbidden. Accepting a gift of any kind is a firing offense for a staff member. The reason is obvious, it would be so easy for a predatory staff member to bleed a senior resident with a fuzzy memory.

However, everyone appreciates the consistent, reliable, cheerful work of the housekeepers, the food prep, the admin. staff, and wants to show it. That’s true in any year, but this year, when the staff has had to deal with continual changes in work assignments and stress from the pandemic, appreciation is running very high.

Hence the annual Fund: put a check in a locked box in the lobby, and the total contributions are distributed evenly to all staff members. Years past, the committee that runs the fund has held a gala party in the Auditorium, with music and skits and refreshments. Not in a pandemic year; the kickoff meeting was held via Zoom. The refreshments, a very tasteful selection of hors d’oeuvres in a plastic box with a tiny plastic fork, and a bottle of prosecco, were distributed to each room beforehand.

After supper I went down to get my mail and put a chunky check in the box.

Monday 10/26/2020

A day of up and down. A general “up” was that I felt very little of those chest pains. Don’t want to jinx it or anything but that phase may be over.

Nevertheless when I started out for my morning walk I felt unwell, and aborted the walk about 15 minutes into it. Back to the room for another nap. About 11am I went out for another walk, which went better; and for a third around 4pm. Right now I feel quite well. So, you know: up and down. Convalescence is a bitch.