Sunday 05/29/2022

After all my usual Sunday morning pleasures (watering the plants, doing the crossword) I decided to go to the California Avenue farmers market and maybe buy some cherries. The 6th floor is having a picnic supper tomorrow night and I could bring them to share.

In other times I have walked that 2-3 miles, and probably will again, but this time I drove. And after buying cherries and an almond croissant from The Midwife and The Baker, to Safeway for a few groceries. Then home to pass the time until 2 when there was to be a jazz concert at the Congregational Church. That’s just a 1.2 miles away and my initial plan was to walk that, but when it came time to leave, I didn’t feel like walking so went again by car.

The concert wasn’t great. Nothing wrong with the musicianship, in fact the performers all had (per the program) very long resumés in pro jazz and the singer, Kenny Washington, is famous enough that I had heard of him, and he was fun to listen to. But much of the selections were not a type of music I can listen to for any length of time. I have a simple ear, I like melodies and rhythm. This was the kind of show where each of the six players would take a looong solo, in turn.

Anyway a quiet day and pleasant.

Saturday 05/28/2022

In the morning I first filled out my ballot for the June election. One more thing off my coffee table, it’s almost empty now. Then I walked the ballot up to the drop box at City Hall. I was walking briskly, more brisklier that lately, and feeling good. The TAVR really made a difference, it isn’t just placebo effect.

I came back by way of the farmers market, which I haven’t been in for a couple of months owing to dieting, and bought a pound of Rainier cherries and a chocolate hazlenut pastry. That was my breakfast and my lunch as well.

Then I helped a neighbor, Joan, record a treasured tape from her walkman (yes, a real Sony Walkman from the … 90s?) into her Mac.

After a nap I went down to the auditorium to help David M. run a concert. He would normally have done it alone, but he just had two stents put in and isn’t supposed to exert himself. I didn’t point out that I just had a giant stent put in and am not supposed to exert myself either. Turned out, there was no exerting needed anyway.

The concert was really nice, two women doing classical piano and violin duets. Very complex stuff by famous composers and done very well indeed.

Dr. Rammahan had referred me to a cardiac rehab program at El Camino Hospital. Dr. Margaret says there is a better one, HeartFit for Life, which was founded by the late husband of another resident, Karen. I like the look of their website and of course they are much closer than the other. So I messaged Dr. Dibiase asking if she approved would she refer me to that program. I kind of like the idea of a closely supervised fitness program to get back, or back-ish, to where I was. At some point.

Friday 05/27/2022

I had the usual hospital night. To much light and noise, and a really nice and kind nurse waking me up at midnight and at 4am to check vitals. Then the phlebomist at 6am to take only 3 tubes of blood this time, and at 7am, the nurse with a rolling EKG cart. And a little later, the nurse with a rolling echocardiogram cart to do that. This was really interesting, she was able to image the aortic valve in live operation really well and I could clearly see the little flaps opening and closing. And doing it perfectly.

At about 8am, Dr. Rammahan comes by very pleased with it all. The valve ought to last you the rest of your life, he said. And if it should start to break down, we could always put another one inside this one. I asked about the catch filter he put in the carotid: did it catch anything? Maybe a couple of little grains; he couldn’t tell if they would have caused a problem or not. He wanted me to go on plavix for 3 months. I told him all the reasons I hated being on plavix–bruising, nosebleeds that won’t stop, etc., and talked him down to 1 month only.

By 10 nurse Kim had pulled my IV, and I got dressed. At 10:30 another nurse brought the discharge paperwork for me to sign, and a few minutes later Dennis pulled up and I was on the way home. With a stop to pick up the plavix, I was home before lunch. Several of my neighbors welcomed me back, either then or later in the day. It was quite touching.

Spent a quiet afternoon. I had intended to go out to the Creamery for a chocolate shake for supper, but neighbor Patty insisted that was too much. She said I should take Betty and Jerry’s invitation for supper. Awww no chocolate shake? OK, she said, I have to go out for some errands, I’ll bring you one. And she did, about 3pm she showed up at my door with a Creamery chocolate shake. Which totally spoiled my appetite for supper, but worth it.

Thursday 05/26/2022

Up at 4:20, quick shower, dress. Make sure I have all of he needed paperwork and cards for admission. Down to the lobby where Dr. Margaret soon appears and we are off down Alma to the hospital where she drops me off with warm wishes. Seems my neighbors like me which is nice.

Registration and prep go smoothly. Jorge, who shaves my groin hair, has a slick electric razor with a vacuum attachment.

(Ok I am writing this with the WordPress app and its editor is TERRIBLE, just doing bizarre things. It gets really confused when a paragraph goes over four lines. I’m switching to the Notes app then pasting here.)

Dr. Rammahan stops by for the usual pre-op check and he has fresh news. He has studied the notes from my original valve job and the recent images. He explains (what I originally knew but had mostly forgotten) that Dr. Gaudiani installed not just the pig’s valve but its whole aortic root as a unit – like a 4-inch tube with the valve closing the end. So in present images that ascending tube is, quote, “calcified like crazy”.

This raises the chance of stroke, a known but usually rare side effect of TAVR. To prevent that he will do an additional piece of work. He will put a catheter in through my right radial (wrist) artery, up to my carotid, and install a filter to catch any trash that might get loose and head for my, um, head. When the TAVR is in place he will take the filter out before closing up. I’m cool with this, not being a fan of stroke.

An IV gets installed in my left arm, about six vials of blood are drawn from the right, then I am left alone to do a couple of sudokus, and at 7:30 Tyler comes to escort me to the toilet and then to wheel me on a gurney to the OR.

Here I find about six people all being very busy and professional. They prep me from all sides somewhat like multiple chefs prepping a rack of lamb. Zack the anesthetist says he is putting in the juice. I have just time to say, “I taste it on the back of my tongue,” and Zack says, “Oh yeah that’s the Lidocane,” and then…

I’m In a different room and Zack is saying “All over, and it all went according to plan.”

After half an hour I am transported to a regular room. I get my glasses back, and my phone, and my head clears up and basically it’s all over but the shoutin’. I have two small purple wounds on my groin, one I assume for the camera and one for the business, plus a clear plastic inflatable cuff on my right wrist.

And a strange quiet in my chest. This is odd. I never notice my heart beating (except at night sometimes). It’s definitely beating now, I can find my pulse in my wrist or neck. But somehow there is a sensation of stillness in my chest, as if I had changed from a gas engine to battery power. Was I sensing the back flow, AKA “heart murmur”, before? And it’s gone now? Or maybe it’s imaginary. Not a bad thing, anyway.

I exchange texts with several people, have lunch, take a nap, all very normal except I’m wearing a backless gown and bright green bed socks. Jean drops by to visit (to my surprise there are no Covid restrictions on visiting).

And that will do for now. Medical adventure proceeding nominally!

Wednesday 04/25/2022

Went for a walk but cut the distance quite short. I am definitely feeling tired faster, although not short of breath. There should be a clear change by this time next week.

Did a number of small things that needed doing, putting my apartment in order and taking care of old paperwork. Then I mixed a bottle of raspberry-pink paint, using pink, black, red and gold to get a pretty fair match to the dusky rose spray can.

Solved a tech puzzle: neighbor Stew installed a lovely new 65″ Samsung TV in his 4th floor lounge, but then couldn’t put it on our in-house network because that needs its MAC address and neither he nor anybody else could find it in the TV’s menu structure. I had tried a few days ago and failed. Leon had tried. Stew had called Samsung and spent half an hour on the phone with their support, and still couldn’t find the MAC address. If you google it, you get clear directions that don’t produce it. Well I found it. Turns out the “About this TV” menu option opens a page that is longer than the screen, and unlike any other page in any menu, it needs to be scrolled to see it all. And if you scroll down, there’s the MAC address along with all the other details.

Set an alarm for 4:20. Neighbor Dr. Margaret is going to drive me down to the hospital. Next post will be from my hospital bed.

Tuesday 04/24/2022

Went for a short walk. Then I did some cleanup and prep for Thursday. I made a copy of my medical PofA and my Advanced Directive and put them in the bag I’ll take to the hospital. I thought carefully about what devices I would take and settled on only the phone. I’ve installed the WordPress app so I could if I wanted, post to this blog from the phone. And the phone has Kindle and the books I’m reading, and email and games. I have a battery pack I can charge the phone from, and tossed that in. That’s about it, for a 24-hour stay.

Then I cleaned off my coffee table, where I had been dropping things to “do something with” for a while. Some of those things were the Heritage Circle grant requests for the auditorium, and I realized that today is the actual deadline for turning them in. So I did that. Got other stuff off it and filed away or tossed.

I still had 45 minutes until the writer’s meeting so I quickly turned the account of when we had to drive from Feltham to Sudbury to use a computer, into a short essay and submitted it. So I had something to read at the meeting.

I ordered lunch to take out today, and for supper made a sandwich. Today’s Covid email said we have one more resident and one more staff infected. I am laying very low until Thursday.

As noted a while back, I used up all of the can of dusky rose color on the T-bird body. Later I realized that the dash and some of the upholstery should be body color. What to do? I didn’t want to order another spray can, and anyway I’d rather brush those parts than do the intricate masking to spray them. (Also, upholstery wouldn’t be pearlescent like the body.) So I need a matching dark-pink shade. None of the makers of model and hobby paints had the right color but two had pinks that were kinda close so I ordered a bottle of each, and they came today. So I spent some time trying to mix small quantities of pink to match the body color. Pink, plus a little red, plus a wee bit of black, plus a good dab of gold, does it. The gold because the spray was a “pearl” and the microscopic pearl flakes give it a yellowish cast.

Monday 05/23/2022

Went for an abbreviated walk. Still, over 2 miles for the day. Actually I felt pretty healthy all day. I climbed the stairs from the basement to the ground floor and was thinking, huh, that feels fine. Then, maybe 20 seconds after I got to the top, suddenly I was short of breath for half a minute.

Anyway, at 10am promptly a person from El Camino Hospital called and walked me through a long script of boring questions, mostly confirming my health record. He didn’t really know anything and couldn’t answer the questions that Dr. Margaret had suggested. So I emailed nurse Masket and she answered them a couple of hours later. Yes I will continue to need to take oral antibiotics before a dental procedure; no, I will not need to take an anticoagulant.

And the interesting one: what do they do if arrhythmia develops, do they install a pacemaker right then while I’m anesthetized? I’d have never thought to ask that. I’m not sure I totally understand the answer,

If you develop an arrhythmia that requires a pacemaker we usually leave the pacing wire in and observe you in the ICU to see if your rhythm returns to normal before placing the pacemaker. Many times the arrhythmia disappears.

Dr. Margaret was very impressed with this and said it was very clever of them. I am stuck with how do they get a wire into the left ventricle and “leave it in” when their only access is a catheter up my femoral artery. Long damn wire and it comes out down there next to my balls? Well, I’m just going to go with it. Arrhythmia is not common (remember, less than 1% complications and arrhythmia is only one of them).

After the phone interview I had to get in the car and scoot down to the hospital, and through their parking garage for a drive-up Covid swab. From there I went back up Middlefield to FOPAL and processed four boxes of books. Back to the barn by 3pm.

At 4pm there was to have been an open meeting with CEO Rhonda but that was canceled yesterday: Rhonda has Covid! She will be working from home until she is cleared.

There are a number of cases in the tower now: four residents and three staff currently. We went two years with no cases! And now that we are all double-boosted? Thing is, I absolutely don’t want to catch it before my procedure! So as of yesterday I am eating in my room, and since today’s stop at FOPAL, not going into public places. We can still order for take-out even since the dining room reopened a few months back, and a fair number of people do that often.

Sunday 05/22/2022

Never turned on the TV last night. Once I’d opened the old UK diary and found the very first entry answered Dennis’s question, I didn’t stop reading, but kept on to the end. It got pretty spotty after the first year, so it only took until 9pm to finish the whole thing.

And woke up this morning feeling… “depressed” is a word that casts a wide net, but what I felt is somewhere in it. We always said that the almost three years we spent in England were a peak experience, a great thing, and we were always glad we’d done it. And I would still say now. Indeed I believe, as an older person speaking to a younger one, the best life advice I can offer is to get out of the USA, live in another country for a spell, you will always be glad you did. (As recently as a decade ago, I’d have said, “go live abroad for a few years.” Today I’d say, “and don’t rush to come back.” You’re better off in any other first-world country, or in many a developing one, than you are here.)

Just the same, going through that diary made me sad in ways that are hard to define. One was a sense of “we could have done so much more.” Except that’s really not true; we did a lot, saw a lot, all while working fairly demanding full-time jobs.

Just the same, we were in a suburb of London, a half-hour train ride from Picadilly Circus, and, so far as I can remember or the diary mentions, we never went to a single art gallery, not the National, not the Tate, none of them. We went to the ballet exactly once. We went to no plays in one of the great theatrical centres of the world. We went to no concerts of any kind of music, at a time when British music was at its peak. We visited the V&A, the Science Museum, and the British Museum just one time each; and after each of those museum visits we actually noted how we saw only a fraction of what was to see, and should go back — but we never did. Truly, I saw more of London’s cultural life in my ten-day visit in 2020, than I saw in two years back then.

And, also, the diary gave me an extended look back at how we related as a couple… We were good together, but in hindsight it could have been so much better. I could have been so much better a partner, which would have benefited both of us. But that’s how I, and we, were, and there’s nothing to be done about it now. But it makes me sad.

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Well. Here’s another thing that seems truly remarkable in hindsight. We both worked in a relatively small IBM group, the Data Center Systems Support Center (DCSSC) in Feltham, UK: 25 or 30 people who provided software support for IBM’s commercial data centers in Europe and Africa. (IBM had been forced to give up its data center business in the USA by an anti-monopoly consent decree, but these centers were still an important revenue source outside the USA.) So this group, a dozen programmers, a few tech writers, managers, and secretaries were in a single building and we all used — drum roll, please — ONE computer. It was a 360/50 running VM/CMS, a time-sharing system tied to maybe three dozen, type 3270 CRT terminals.

Think about that. A whole department including programmers, writers and editors, managers and support staff, working from one computer. It didn’t seem unusual at the time. That’s how everybody worked. When THE computer went down, everything stopped.

And the computer did go down, for a month. I don’t know any details now. It was a planned outage, some kind of major upgrade or move, but for a month our entire group had no computer. What did we do? Well, there was a larger IBM location half an hour away in Sudbury Hill. We could use their (one and only) 360/50, but only after 5pm. So for a month, everyone who needed computer time was on a split shift, working from 2pm to 5pm at their desks in Feltham, then driving half an hour to the IBM Ed. Center in Sudbury Hill. We would have supper in the cafeteria there, then use their 3270 terminals to do programming, writing, or whatever until 11pm or so, and go home.

Just think about a world in which it was a half-hour drive to get to the nearest other computer. (OK,the nearest one we could use. There were probably IBM and other makes of computers in businesses scattered along that route.) Nowadays, when are you more than six feet from the nearest other computer? Probably it is on your wrist.

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So I decided to do the NYT puzzle out, at a coffee shop. (My diet is over; my weight has been at 163 for 3 days straight, and I can haz carbz again). Drove to the old place in Midtown. After, looked up and realized it was a lovely day, far to nice to go back in my room. So I took a long drive, up and over the Coast Range to Highway 1, up to Half Moon Bay, and back by Hwy 92. Got out of the car a couple of times at scenic spots.

Saturday 04/21/2022

Puttered, basically. At 3pm I was to project a movie in the auditorium. At 2pm I took the old macbook down and made sure I could drive the projector with it. I wanted to show something prior to the main feature. Poking around on YT I found a 1976 performance of Rhapsody in Blue with Leonard Bernstein at the piano. Seventeen minutes long, perfect, I started that at 2:42 and lowered the lights and started the real movie at 3 on the dot. Felt very pro. Just like being in high school in the 50s and being the nerdy kid who ran the 16mm projector.

The movie was Belfast by Kenneth Branagh, about growing up amid the Protestant/Catholic riots of the 1960s, with lots of songs by Van Morrison.

Dennis has been going through albums of stuff, organizing to write about his past, and he came upon a picture of me and Marian, Emil, Cecil, and Joyce, with a “Bon Voyage” banner, dated in Cecil’s hand, May 1976. This confused me because I was sure we had started our two-plus years in England in 1975. But! During that time we kept a diary. It would have been a blog, except blogs didn’t exist then. Thirty years later, in 2006, we scanned it to digital and edited it, and I knew it existed, so today I found it and here is the very first entry. Tell me the tone and style of this sounds familiar:

Friday 28 May 1976
Up at 6 am in Flamingo Motel on El Camino . Rang up Joyce in the Folks’ room as promised; said “This is an obscene phone call… when you have your pencil & paper ready we’ll begin…” Had coffee in motel restaurant and set out. Dropped Emil at bus depot. Goodbyes. Left Joyce & Cecil at airport. More Goodbyes — ech. All checked in in fine style, with 1-1/2 hours free; had more coffee. TWA 760 lightly loaded to LA; there, had 90 min. layover, very dull. Immense crowd of people then boarded. Not so badly jammed as prior BOAC flight.

My writing, no doubt at all. Except for the date, that could have come out of this blog.

Anyway, what that establishes is that we left to begin our England assignment in 1976, not 1975. And it exactly fits with the picture Dennis found, which would have been taken the night before. (The reason we were all staying in the old Flamingo Hotel on El Camino is, we had rented our Tasso street house and had already moved out.)

Friday 05/20/2022

Didn’t do much today other that to take a moderate walk over to Gamble Gardens, and to work on polishing the T-bird body. I have decided to cruise gently toward the TAVR, not pushing anything physically.

Had dinner with neighbor Dr. Margaret who is concerned that I properly understand my condition. I do, but I enjoy talking about myself and my medical issues, and she did too so that was nice. She explained why “shortness of breath” is the first symptom of cardiac insufficiency: it’s just that if the heart isn’t pushing enough volume, it isn’t moving enough blood through the lung tissue to pick up oxygen. It isn’t “breath” you are short of, it’s blood flow through the lungs.

She turned me on to the POLST form which I hadn’t known about. I have an Advanced Health Care Directive but not a POLST. Although I downloaded and printed it, I don’t know how I’d get it signed by my doctor before next Thursday anyway.