48 going on 79

When I started apheresis therapy a few years ago, after having a heart attack at 32 and requiring a double bypass a mere eleven years later, they scanned my carotid arteries. The doc told me I had the arteries of an 80 year old. I'm not going to claim to have led life as a health food nut or gym rat, but when genetics dealt the cards in the big Texas Hold'em game of longevity, my hole cards say 'just fold.'

So anyway, I've continued to let them filter my blood fortnightly, it takes half a day out of my life twice a month and even though I have what passes for good insurance in America these days, I have a team of lawyers faunching at the bit to burn my life to the ground over my medical bills. It's putting a serious crimp in my ability to ever, even theoretically, retire, but then if I don't live to be a senior citizen the question of retirement is moot. But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.

This past June, the doc at the apheresis clinic asked me casually who I saw about my diabetes. He'd just drawn labs, and I was like, I didn't know I was diabetic.

Your liver enzymes aren't fabulous either, how much alcohol do you drink? was his response.

So I've been trying to cut back on the booze but even more than that, I've been watching carbs, sugars, all that jazz. And taking the Metformin he wrote for. I lost about 25 pounds in a couple of months, then plateaued. And overall I feel better for the changes, though (and I would have thought this impossible) I've had some withdrawals that feel a lot like when I quit smoking around giving up those carbs. I love good beer, and what makes good beer good is, aside from hops, mostly carbs. I've tested my blood sugar before and after a variety of inputs, and good beer is a problem. So is the off-dry mead I made most recently. Dry red wines seem to be fine, and the hard stuff, Scotch, rum, tequila, that sort of thing, if anything that drops my blood sugar. My most recent mead, which finished slightly sweeter than I usually get, is a problem. It's only about 2% sugar according to the hydrometer, but a five ounce glass was enough to send my blood sugar out of range and I'm typically someone who drinks more like a liter of that stuff at a go.

And I had no idea how much I fucking love bread.

So my family got together the other day on account of my 48th birthday. A follow up scan showed some improvement on my arteries, but I figure being diabetic to boot erases that on the longevity game. But while the doc only wrote a script for Metformin and told me I didn't need to monitor my blood sugar numbers, I'm like fuck that, I am taking an active interest in this. I'm probably not willing to swear off beer judging and mead making but I'm also not willing to give up a foot over those things. So I've been checking a few times a day.

And while the birthday dinner was relatively friendly as far as low-glycemic foods: I had burnt ends from Jack's Stack (probably rubbed with a sugary rub and definitely sauced with a sugary sauce) and an enormous salad. And then pie. I've never been a big birthday cake fan, I think I was maybe nine when I thought to ask my Mom if I could have lemon meringue pie instead of Duncan Hines cake. I had a sliver of lemon meringue and a sliver of pecan for my 48th and a half hour later my blood glucose was 250, the highest number I've seen since I started testing.

But then, when I look at what I routinely ate before being diagnosed, I'm sure I tripped numbers like that almost daily before finding out about the problem.

Apheresis Day

I still go fortnightly for apheresis therapy. The therapy is still administered by a beautiful nurse with excellent bedside manner. It's still not the highlight of my week.

The upside, aside from being my best shot at being a senior citizen someday, is I get a block of Netflix time. I sometimes stream while I'm falling asleep at night, or when I'm sick (last weekend I made it through all of the first season of Better Call Saul just because I felt too lousy to do anything but screen time). And while TV isn't something I want being the center of every day life, when I can find good shows it makes the time pass quickly. While I sit with 17 gauge needles in both elbows, forbidden from moving even a little bit, that's when I binge on The Office.

I'm a bit concerned now that I'm into season nine of The Office. It's a great show, but I'm about out of it. An apheresis session lasts longer than most movies, and the remote I bought from Apple as so far eluded pairing with my MacBook Pro. I hate having to ask the lovely nurse to navigate for me, though she's a good sport about it, so I like when I can lock in a program and just let it ride for the several hours my blood gets filtered. I guess I better get by the Apple Store soon and find out why my Apple remote is not talking to my Apple computer.

They've been filtering me with a Braun device for the past year and a half. But apparently there are availability issues with the supplies for it, so they told me they'd put me on the Kaneka this time. Except I heard 'Konica' because I figured it was Konica-Minolta who made it, a manufacturer I've heard of like Braun. Kaneka is Japanese, but it's a different company. Anyway, this machine apparently takes a little longer to do the job (and apparently there are several variables involved so they took pre and post labs to see how the treatment did compared to what they've been doing). I talked my way into a slightly earlier start and warned my boss I'd be later than usual for work. And things went well as far as I can tell, and on my way out of KU Med I picked up my Crestor prescription at the pharmacy and went on to work.

And got there and reached for my laptop, not so much that I need it at work but I tend not to leave it in the car. And it wasn't there. I realized I must have left it in the lobby of the pharmacy, and as I drove frantically back there I dialed them. And spent almost the whole way there on hold, they're big on having the robot take the phone calls, which is fine when you're calling in a refill and not so hot when you're shitting your pants that you might have donated your $2700 computer and sweet noise-canceling headphones to a wino. Well, they don't really let winos run the halls at KU, but it is an urban hospital campus, and if someone just walked off with the bag like they owned it, I'd be stuck finding out how good LoJack really is.

When I did finally get a pharmacy tech on the phone she was like, 'Yeah, it's still on the chair, I'll move it behind the counter.' Such a relief.

Oh, and anyway, progress report: they wrap my arms in colorful Coban after my therapy to hold things together since they've run the equivalent of electrical conduit into my veins. When I started the therapy I started a Coban ball. It's growth has really slowed as the diameter has grown because Coban isn't very thick. It weighs one pound eleven ounces. Not quite as big as a volleyball at this point, but significantly past grapefruit size.

Out With the Bad Stuff...

I once got bounced from the blood bank when I fainted at the finger prick anemia test. If memory serves, they gave me a 'nice try' sticker, something fairly patronizing I think. I'm better with needles these days, I guess I kinda have to be.

After my heart attack, some of the drugs they had me on they wanted a quarterly blood check to make sure the meds weren't killing me even faster than my blood lipids. I went from making them lay me down before the draw to being able to sit up while they did it, with only a hint of light headedness provided I didn't look.

These days, I go fortnightly for apheresis. It takes roughly half a day (sometimes it's 3-1/2 hours, sometimes it's more like 5-1/2 hours), and I have to sit still with 18 gauge needles in both arms while they filter my blood. I know I've blogged about this before, so if I'm boring you, well, sorry. But my veins are tricky, and sometimes the lovely and personable RN who does this to me, she'll have to stab my right arm two or three times before things are flowing. Sometimes she has to go down to a 17 gauge needle, sometimes I come away looking like a skid row junkie.

Keep in mind, I'm already trying to watch what I eat. I already take a couple of drugs that control lipids. I have a condition, high LP(a), most folks have never heard of, that causes early onset heart disease. That aforementioned heart attack? I was 32 years old. I needed a double bypass eleven years later. Everyone's got a gift, I guess, and mine is I build plaque like a champion.

So here's before and after shots of the filters my blood percolated through today. The process looks a lot like donating plasma to yourself or maybe similar to dialysis. They took four liters of my blood out, removed a ton of lipoprotein A and LDL cholesterol (and a few other things that have similar charges/chemical bonds). When I was taking the after pic, Jennifer told me she'd had to slow the machine down today because it 'can only filter so much at a time.'

What a gift.

On the up side, after a year scans of my carotid arteries showed a 10% to 12% improvement in atherosclerosis, so besides costing me a lot of money (my out of pocket on my insurance just keeps going up) and wages (it amounts to a half day furlough every two weeks), it's at least moving the needle the right direction on manifestations of the Grim Reaper in my body. Money is nice, but if you're dead it's hard to spend.

Apheresis

Since I planned to ride my bike to work in the first place, I rode it to my first therapy session at the apheresis clinic. I couldn't see any reason not to, I try to maximize my bicycle commuting, usually that's three round-trips per week (though not always round trips on the same day, I leave the car at work and ride home/back in quite a bit. Usually I can work it to where I get at least a 12-1/2 mile ride every day of the week.

When I was 32, I had a heart attack and was told at the time that elevated Lipoprotein(a), and at the time I was prescribed Niaspan, a time-released megadose of niacin that can reduce LP(a) levels a bit. It hasn't been demonstrated to reduce future cardiac events, though, and sure enough eleven years after the heart attack I was primed for another, managed to get on the operating table for a double bypass in time to prevent that. My surgeon referred me to the doc at the Lipids Clinic where, almost a year later (I was warned that it took a while to get in), I learned of a couple of things that might prevent me from clogging back up.

With my familial hypercholesterolaemia and elevated LP(a), it turns out apheresis therapy may be my best shot at becoming eligible for a Senior Citizen discount at restaurants. Heart attack at 32, bypass at 43, this is not a trajectory that inspires confidence that I'll live to draw down my Roth IRA.

I hate needles. I'm not into pain, either, and this involves both. Every two weeks. For the rest of my life? I asked the doc. Five or six years, he said. There's a drug in clinical trial (which I'm also a candidate for) he thinks is five or six years from market that will make apheresis obsolete for treating my condition. If I go into the trial for that drug, I have a fifty-fifty shot I'm getting the drug, so since my insurance will pay for the painful needle trick, I decided that was my best option for now.

I was told the therapy takes two to four hours, so I took a half day off work. KU Med is on a hill, and I chose my route poorly I think. I went through the West Bottoms to avoid crossing I-35 on 7th Street. I've done that crossing in evening rush hour, and it's no fun at all. Too many lanes, too many people coming on and off the highway not understanding what a bike is doing in a lane they plan to sweep across. Morning rush hour, add to that the drivers are half asleep, steering with their hips as the juggle coffee and phone. The West Bottoms is out of the way, but I came out on Southwest Boulevard pretty easily and then planned to climb Roanoke. Which would have been an okay choice, maybe even the best, but there's a fork in the road as you start to climb it, and I could see that Wyoming angled more in the direction of the hospital and since I was cutting it close on time, I decided that direct counted.

Wyoming turned out to be one of the steepest hills I've ever climbed, and right when it looks like you're reaching the top, there's a corner and a bit more that's even steeper. Yikes.

So anyway, a very pretty nurse with a good bedside manner was soon running needles in my arms and starting the process of filtering out the junk in my blood. Well, not that soon, there was the initial paperwork and other first-time formalities so after arriving at 8:00, I think it was a little past 9:00 when the bloodletting began.

I had figured while I sat there for two hours, I could probably fidget with my phone. A reliable balm when I'm anxious and doing medical shit, but it turns out they want you to sit still with needles in both arms. Maybe she explained to me that I had to not bend or move the arms and I missed it, I don't know, but after a slow start (apparently first treatments take longer) my face itched and without thinking I reached up and scratched it. This got a rise out of the nurse, who told me if my face itched I needed to tell her and she'd rub it with gauze or something.

I learned the reason for the rise I got out of her when the machine started beeping and my right elbow started to get a little lump in it. I had 'infiltrated' I was told, meaning basically that the needed had gouged through the vein wall and wasn't returning my red blood cells to the blood stream but was rather creating a bit of a hematoma. I mentioned I'm not great with needles, right, I about fainted in the chair just realizing what had happened.

They tried to get it started again with a needle in my right hand. Then in my left. Then the doc came through and pronounced the situation hopeless since I'd been there four three hours and had only filtered 400 ml of the planned 3 liters, but the nurses thought they could salvage the situation and since I didn't want all this discomfort and disgustingness to be for nothing, I stayed put. They eventually got the original site going again, the swelling had gone down and apparently I clot well.

Having to sit perfectly still makes me want to bend my arms and fidget all the more, but I settled for sitting totally still and watching a bit of TV. The unit has a little TV included that can be moved around to wherever is easy to view. I had to have the nurse change the channels if I wanted a change, of course, and after growing bored with the History Channel I decided to try Food Network. Which was a mistake.

I'd been there half the day and I was getting hungry. It only took an hour and a half of Bobby Flay torturing me with his barbecue addiction for me to realize how miserable the food porn was making me and ask for the TV to be turned back off.

Finally, my three liters of blood was filtered, my plasma was rinsed back into me and I was free to go. I'd missed the whole day at work, basically, I had a caffeine withdrawal headache and I was starving—having only had a dry granola bar fed to me by the nurse and a few sips of Gatorade. I was told to maybe not ride my bike to therapy, that working out before the session makes your blood flow slower, too (counterintuitive, I think, but I can put my bike on a bus next time and not sacrifice that many riding miles).

And I'd produced a filter full of yellow gick. I asked, "Is this the stuff that gives food its flavor?" I teased that I should go get a big fat slice of pepperoni from d'Bronx to replenish my bodily fluids, though while LDL is part of what gets filtered out, the LP(a) is the real reason for the therapy—it doesn't really respond to diet or available drugs or else Humana wouldn't be paying to give me these exotic oil changes.

I think the filter unit is about a quart in volume, but the filter medium takes up space so no way did a quart of fatty crud get removed from my blood. Quite a bit, though. I asked if I could take it home with me and make soap, Fight Club style, and I think they thought I was kidding.

Critical Mass May '14

I'd really needed this, the week I'd had.

In case you're new, I'm a pretty regular participant in Critical Mass. It's basically half party, half parade, half protest, half not very good at fractions.

I don't generally think of my job as stressful, but there are circumstances where it can be and those circumstances abounded this week.

Then there was the medical front. After a ten month wait, I finally got in with the guy who is supposed to the man when it comes to my crazy, heart-disease-causing lipids disorders. He was recommended to me by my cardiothoracic surgeon, the one who did the double-bypass I needed at 43, elven years after my heart attack & stent at 32. The surgeon said, Look, you have an inherited condition, I know a lot about it because I have it, too. I'm one of his patients. It won't be quick to get in to see him, but make an appointment.

I went expecting to hear nothing I hadn't heard before. Eat less, move more. More rabbit food, less pogey bait. Statins, beta-blockers, fear the salt-shaker.

But apheresis? I knew I had eleveated LP(a), a relatively unknown issue that's strongly correlated with early onset heart disease. It's a treatment that amounts to donating plasma to yourself, they suck your blood, filter out the lipoproteins and whatnot, return plasma and red blood cells. Two to five hours, twice a month. With an umpteen gauge needle that hurts enough they will give you lidocaine to put on the target an hour before your treatments.

I hate needles. But this treatment is apparently the only thing the FDA has approved that's got a track record of preventing cardiac events in people like me. It seems like the choice, if my insurance will pay for apheresis, is do I want to live long enough for retirement savings to matter? Because I might as well start partying with my Roth contributions if I'm not going to see 59-1/2. Camera lenses and gear, bicycles, a new iMac, temperature controlled cylindriconical fermenters, get them while the getting's good, and don't buy any green bananas.

So all this was percolating through my brain in I went to Mass. Sorry, Julie, I know you asked for my text to have some bearing on my photos and I tried but this post is a fail on that point. It was a great Mass, with lots of first-timers, and probably the biggest field I've ever seen turn out. I shot some video with a used Powershot I picked up off Craigslist, but it really didn't capture the size of the group. I'm guessing 250 riders total. We had a small amount of drama when a cop on the Paseo decided to try and single-handedly stop 250 cyclists holding a protest/parade/party/bad-at-fractions ride, who bizarrely raced ahead of us and then parked his car across the lanes.

To my astonishment, a substantial number of people stopped, but at least as many decided to try going around, and the next thing I know the cop had retrenched in the opposite side of the street. If I'd been close enough to talk to him, I would have simply said, We're exercising our First Amendment rights to free speech, to petition the government for redress of grievances, and free assembly. Happy Friday, if you want to provide us an escort, that's great, but this isn't Hell's Angels swooping into town to steal and rape. Well, I would have said some of that, I've never met a cop who will sit there while you speak in carefully constructed paragraphs, backspacing and re-phrasing everything.

Since he seemed to have given up on stopping whatever we were doing, we all joked about how many bike racks they'd need on the paddy wagons if they arrested the whole Mass, and about how if we were going to take an arrest, this was the people we'd want to be arrested with, all that. But as we went down the hill toward Troost Lake, the cop came screaming down with his siren on again, and when I looked over my shoulder as I tried to get out of the way (250 bikes, it's not like we can all get out of the road simultaneously), I see the cop jump a curb and jump out of the car and tackle one of the riders.



I'm thinking, I don't know what that guy did, but whatever it was, bad idea. I later learned that the cop let the guy go, but I guess it started with the cop thinking he'd told this guy to stop and the guy didn't stop, at which point he cop decided he was attempting to elude. With so many of us, I don't know how the guy would know he had personally been targeted to halt, and that may have been part of why the cop didn't go through with arresting him. The other thing I heard after the fact, and I don't know if it was factual, was that there was a high speed chase proceeding through that part of town the cop was afraid we were about to run into. That sort of makes sense, but the supposed high speed chase was, according to legend, a grand theft auto incident, and I thought most police departments had quit doing high speed chases over stuff like that. It gets people killed, especially when your foolish chase runs through a big, buzzed bike parade.

Hell, when my car was stolen, the police could barely be bothered to fill out a report. An expensive car, one that qualifies as a 'grand theft,' the owner probably has insurance and resources galore, so if anything there is less justification to endangering people in the pursuit of justice.

But you know that old saw about how you know it's a good party when the police get called? Well, when the police interfere with Mass, you know it was a good one.

Yeah, well anyway, all my pictures are pretty much from the tailgate because the first stop, by NDS this time, it was starting to look a lot like rain so all my electronics went into dry sacks. The rain didn't materialize, but the cameras were done (in any case once the sun goes down, hand-held street photography is pretty much not happening).

Lobsterland Homecoming

Not long after the Revolution* they started talking about sending me home. It seemed soon, I'd gone under the knife Tuesday, they were going to send me home Saturday. But unless they wanted to monitor my sugars and vitals more closely than I could at home, there wasn't that much to be done. I can be uncomfortable at home as easily as at the hospital, plus I don't have to wake up every few hours for vitals checks. And hanging around in hospital is a pretty good way to catch MRSA or one of those other nasties that seem to hang out only in hospitals.

I'd asked my Dad to drive me home because between Corinna not driving much to begin with and suffering that concussion, it seemed prudent. Plus, she drove me after my cardiac catheterization and between her lack of familiarity with my car and my car's tight suspension, the ride felt fast and jerky with one minor injury let alone the full collection.

So of course I had a bunch meds to fill. Some of this stuff I was already on, Lipitor, Zebeta, aspirin. But they also have me on Cardizem CD, Lasix, KDUR, Senokot-S, Miralax, and Percocet. The Wal-Mart pharmacist told me it'd be about a forty minute wait, but I wanted to be home when I finally got home so I copped a squat on a bench there in the pharmacy area and waited. Corinna decided to do some grocery shopping, and my Dad looked around for nothing in particular. Then Corinna decided she couldn't take the noise inside, so she paid for the groceries and went out to wait in the cool afternoon air.

This worried my Dad, because there were dairy products in that cart. Milk, cottage cheese, etc. In his worry, I recognized that this was where I'd gotten my original phobia about dairy products going bad. It took me a long time, as an adult, to realize that the stuff didn't start to go bad before your eyes the minute it was poured into a glass or even set on the counter. I remember freaking out when giving a woman ride one time, in my twenties, because she bought milk at a convenience store and didn't start to drink it until several hours later. Wasn't she worried it would go sour? Or worse? She was completely calm about sipping it through the hot afternoon, even after it was warm. and to take the leftover home to put on her cereal the next morning. I was nauseated at the time.

Of course it probably does shave a few days off the shelf life, but an hour or two outside on a 75ºF day isn't even going to get the process going really. Plus, when dairy does go bad, it's pretty obvious. That milk might start to drift towards yogurt, but it's not as if you're going to accidentally drink and not notice it's sour. Milk doesn't last long in our house anyway, and on the occasion that the last inch or two goes sour, it's a pretty good starter for waffle batter at that point.

By the time my prescriptions where filled, I was too worn down to question the quantity of Miralax in the bag. Three 527 gram jars, almost 3-1/2 pounds of laxative. My Percocet script is only 30 tabs, and at the rate I've needed them, they'll be gone in a few short days. Even with a cat that needs the laxative, I think I'm sitting on at least a two year supply.

Dad wondered where Corinna had gotten to at one point, and I said she was probably out in front, stretched out on a bench sleeping with her grocery bags spread out in front of her like a homeless person. Then I remembered we were supposed to pick up a bathroom scale so I could monitor myself against sudden weight gains that might indicate complications, and also to grab a thermometer so I could check my temperature—same reason.

I went to find these things, and got completely gassed walking before I found the scales. Meanwhile my Dad was calling me trying to figure out where I'd gone, and Corinna was trying to text me. Her text ring tone on my phone is James Brown I Feel Good, so while I was trying to tell my Dad where I was in the store, I was hearing James Brown scream and shout in my ear and couldn't find a way to make it stop. I finally gave up, bought family-sized bag of pharmaceuticals and went to the car where nobody was to be seen. There was a courtesy wheel chair abandoned between the cars, so I sat in it and waited. Eventually they turned up, loaded up the car and on we went to home. Dad had gotten the scale himself after finding Corinna stretched out on a bench like a homeless person, a package of toilet paper for a pillow.

I'm not sure I've ever been so exhausted in my life.

Getting my nest set up here hat home took a good deal of time and trouble, or so it felt. More remarkable than the pain of post-op is the exhaustion. I can slowly do much of what I normally would, but when I'm done it's nappy time. And actually there's a lot I can't do. I'm on a ten pound lift limit and I certainly don't have a full range of motion with my arms and neck.

Once I finally did get settled, I think I slept about 12 out of the next 14 hours. Over the past two days I've been cobbling together these posts. Jello and Zippy have helped some, Jello pinned me down for a good nine hours the second night I was home.

*The Revolution is a bit of TMI: they kept giving me laxatives and stool softeners to counter the constipating effect of the drugs, and it had finally worked. When they asked me if I'd had a bowel movement, Corinna offered that it was more like a revolution.

Cardiothoracic Resort Vacation

After doing everything I could come up with to avoid it, it was finally time for my open heart coronary bypass surgery. Well, except according to one person, I could just put some kind of chelation suppositories up my butt instead, and I have to admit I didn't give that a full and thorough hearing. I also have friends who think they're really going to get to the bottom of what's going on at Area 51 and expose it to the world, which is all good fun at a cocktail party but nothing I'd want to hang life and death decisions on.

So they got is there at the ass-crack of dawn all ready to rock and roll last Tuesday. Monday morning was spent getting registered, tested, inspected, educated and so on as far as surgery prep. That idea I had to shave my chest in advance, I found out Monday they would have canceled the surgery because they don't trust my razor and whatnot to be sanitary and nick-free. They gave me a special cleanser for in the shower both the night before and morning off the surgery, and so on.

There were some German Brethren hanging out in the lobby where my family was camped out to see me off across the River Styx. They create a bit of an Amish impression, though not quite as extreme in dress. Turns out my future neighbor was their relative, an older guy who'd been in for a couple of weeks to have the same operation as me plus maybe some more. In recovery, I'd be able to hear them sing hymns from the other room periodically, and see members of the family come and go. What makes their dress striking, I think, besides its 19th Century feel and long beards, is little boys and girls dress like miniatures of the adults, same dress, same bonnet, same pants, same suspenders. It's the effect of a mother wearing the bear midriff look of her daughter down to the jewelry and eye makeup except from the other direction and starting in Victorian times.

Corinna and I joke that we're half Amish, what with our TV-less home and doing so much cycling for transportation, but these folks were the real thing (not actually Amish but an Anabaptist theological cousin to them). Me, with my purple mohawk and goatee, I was getting at least as many long looks as they were, but I suppose the impulses and ethics behind my appearance were quite a bit different.

We had quite a wait which surprised me. The trains seem to run on time with Mid-America Cardiology, and with KU Med in general, from what I've experienced so far. I was supposed to be first case, too, so there shouldn't be much way for the doctor to get backed up. Except, it turns out, when someone comes in the ER feet first and needs emergency heart surgery.

When they finally took me back, got me changed and so on, they got to doing that shave job I was supposed to leave to the professionals. I'm ticklish, esepcially my legs and butt, but really everywhere on my body. Always have been. And these trimmers vibrated. And they were trying to deforest a zone from my clavicle to my ankles. It was ugly.

I suggested that since it's hard to tickle yourself, maybe they could hand me the trimmers for the trickier regions of my body, but the one doing the trimming didn't think she was allowed to do that. I guess I should have snatched them from her and just done it myself, but instead I focused on not jumping off the table as those trimmers came at me again and again. They acted like nobody had squealed and squirmed as much as me, ever, but I don't believe it. My oldest daughter is at least as ticklish as me, so I know I'm not some singularity. They've had others, I'm sure, and told them they were the record setters for screaming like a girl and giggling with tears in their eyes.

I think next time, I'll have to insist on anesthetic before shaving, no joke.

From there was the nerve-racking wait to go in to the OR. The 'love you's' and 'see you in a bits' from my family and I was off. My Dad said, 'Welcome to the club.' He's a bypass patient as is my uncle. Both my grandfathers died of heart disease before unpleasant procedures to extend life had been developed. In case I want to whine about what I have to go through, there's that.

I came to, I guess, with the tubes still in my throat and chest, not able to talk. Unable to communicate discomfort. I guess I squeezed Corinna's hand though I have no memory of this. By the time the tubes came out, about ten at night I think, my family was long gone. I didn't remember the post-visit so I thought they'd waited around all day for nothing and got sent away, I can't remember the complication that delayed my breathing tube coming out. I was allowed Sprite and oxycodone, I think the first time I've had that particular painkiller. I'm pretty impressed with it, gets the majority of the pain without making me feel high or dopey. Which surprises me, given its reputation as a street drug, but they told me if you have actual pain, the receptors for that get the drug and the euphoria thing doesn't happen.

Before my transition from ICU, they wanted my chest tubes out. In the process of pulling them I got a huge cramp in the wall of my chest that went basically from the shoulder to the diaphragm over the left half of my body. They'd been asking me to rate my pain on a ten point scale but that one was a twelve, minimum. They left in a couple of pace-making wires hooked to a box. "This is not the nurse call box!" one nurse told me as she tucked the pace box into a side of the bed.

Food was served as room service when I got up to the CTP recovery room I was in the rest of the time. Cardiac, low-sodium menu, but you could pick from quite a bit of stuff and Corinna was able to add a guest tray for six bucks. The room was fashioned as a suite, hotellish, with a desk and settee, several chairs and so on. Corinna commented more than once that it seemed posh, and I kept thinking what a lousy theme resort.

After my finger a couple of years ago, I was braced for a lot of post-op pain. That pain was intense, so I was surprised when my chest and arm (where they harvested my radial artery) weren't as bad as that. Not nothing, mind you, I'm still eating oxy to keep it at bay, but there must be more nerves in the finger or my finger surgeon must have been a clod.

They gave me devices for breathing exercises and sent in respiratory therapists to help me use them. I say the pain isn't as intense as my finger was, but you breath all the time, and getting your sternum split makes that breathing pretty damned uncomfortable. They also set me up with a Heart Hugger, a harness I wear to clutch closed when I cough or move in ways that strain my sternum while it's healing.

The first night out of ICU, I was awakened hourly to check my vitals, blood sugar, etc. I was on an insulin drip, SOP I'm told because the stress of heart surgery sends everyone's blood sugar out of control and that hampers healing.

Corinna didn't spend the night that night, but she did visit. She hadn't figured out the settee so she started arranging chairs to ice her head (she's been fighting back from a nasty concussion), and of course I doubted she could get the chairs arranged and get in there that way. So she proved me wrong.

When my nephew visited Friday, my brother warned me not to show him my full scars. 'He still worries about this scar,' he said, showing me his laproscopic hernia operation scar, perhaps 3/16" long. I've had cat scratches more impressive looking than that scar, and here I am with the marks from three IVs, including one in the throat, plus an eight in zipper on my arm, one of similar length on my breastbone and a couple of wires sticking out my belly. My nephew is three, so this is a freakshow.

Turns out he never even noticed my scars, just the purple hair. He wanted to see the dragons on my phone (Fort Conquer), wanted to play Fruit Ninja on Corinna's phone, wanted to explore the rest of the cardiothoracic surgery floor, but never even asked about the wounds that showed on me.

All the while these things are transpiring, I'm getting used to the constant monitoring. Peeing in a measuring thing so they can see how much I'm letting off, that sort of thing. They keep asking me if I've had a bowel movement and no, just a lot of farts. Almost from the first I came out of anesthesia and they say this is good, means things are processing at least. But they keep bringing me meds that include 'stool softener' in the list. Anesthesia and pain meds constipate, they explain, and you don't want to get backed up. They added the stuff we have to give our mighty hunter, Jello, Miralax. They hint that suppositories are in the arsenal if I can't produce.

When it finally happened, they asked if I'd had a bowl movement and Corinna said, 'More like a revolution!'

Living History vs. Disney

So when we death-marched my kiddos up to Shoal Creek awhile back, Em got interested and volunteered.

It's strictly first Saturdays, once a month, but so far it's what she's found int he way of summer job opportunities.

I drove her up there this morning, which meant I didn't get to sleep in, but it did mean I got to take in a movie. Driving all the way to Liberty, it didn't make sense to drive home and then back out & home again.

I'm not super familiar with North of the River, the Other Johnson County. But Corinna used to live up there and she told me the Dickenson Theater up off 152 had $5 early movies, so I went to see The Lone Ranger.

I wasn't 100% on this, we went to World War Z after my cardiocath last Monday and realized we should have done Man of Steel or Monster University instead.

But Johnny Depp, Brookheimer, Helena Bonham-Carter, I thought, well...

I should have seen the large warning sign that read 'Disney' and stayed away. It's not that it wasn't entertaining, but it wasn't what it could have been.

Disney violence just doesn't work. They have a guy eat someone's heart but they wouldn't want to gross you out so they don't show it. Then, there's a train chase scene (way too long and complicated) where you know no principal characters are in any danger. If Tonto and the Lone Ranger can't be killed, there ain't much suspense no matter the improbable situations they might find themselves in.

For that matter (spoiler alert, if you're planning to see this anyway you might want to skip ahead), how can they be on the trains racing toward the bridge that's about to blow up and simultaneously be at the bottom of that bridge setting charges and lighting a fuse to blow the bridge?

So yeah, plot holes you could drive a train through.

After, I went and found Em being the school marm at the living history museum. It's a cool setup, including some tombstones that really spoke to me. I'm feeling all sorry for myself as a slow-walk around a place like this that I have to have triple bypass surgery soon, but look at the people who died at 37, 39, folks who didn't even make it as far as me.

For that matter, I would have died as a baby back then, had the croup when I was one. Not to mention the heart attack at 32, that would have been the end of the show if the croup hadn't snuffed me out.

I was passing by the Marshall's office when I heard some of the reenactors planning their next move. "What do you want to do next, Bob? Rob the bank or the store?" The response was, "Whatever you want to do."

A pseudo bloodbath ensued, lots of smoke and booms.