Word Up

This was billed as a spoken word poetry event, and there was plenty of that on offer, but it wasn't just spoken word.

It actually ended up being more like a warm up for the Fringe Festival, hosted by our friend Sarah.

I had a lot of fun trying to shoot the gypsy dancers, about burned up the shutter on my D7000 trying. Here are a few of the better examples I got, battling flourescent lights, not that much light, and trying to capture their faces sharp with a a narrow depth of field and some blur on the action of their skirts which flowed and swayed violently.

I managed to get a shot of Sarah modeling the Connect Power t-shirt. She never, and I mean never wears t-shirts as far as I can tell. Kind of like me with my Hawaiian shirts except her wardrobe has more variety.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cardiothoracic Surgery

So I had my appointment today at KU, Mid-America Cardiology. This was for a second opinion about my scheduled triple bypass to be done this coming Tuesday. I was pretty well resigned to the bypass, but I was frustrated that there didn't seem to be a better way. The interventionist who did my cath didn't think you could stent my blockages, and when I asked the cardiothoracic surgeon about a hybrid approach where you bypassed the LAD with a more minimally invasive procedure (MICS, I'd read about that online) and then stented the rest, he launched into a dog and pony show about how in my situation his fix was the fix.

I'm sure he's a very competent, experienced surgeon, but I needed to hear this story from someone independent. That old cliché about how when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail, well, he's a cardiothoracic surgeon.

So today's visit was with an interventionist, and he's another kind of hammer or maybe he's the screwdriver who's bound to see everything as if it were a screw. He told me the bypass by open heart was an entirely reasonable approach, he knew of the surgeon and thought well of him, that I'd be in good hands.

He also thought he could stent my blockages, and told me how you overcome the difficulties of bifurcations and whatnot. He also told me the percentages as far as the likelihood I'll be back for more in a few years, which isn't insignificant when you open up three or four blockages. So the bypass is more for-sure, but also much more invasive. I'm young enough to be a likely candidate for a second bypass later, so that's a reason against open heart, but there's a significant chance with just stents I'll be back for more stents or bypass again in two or three years.

In other words, nothing is perfect and I have options. Then he said there's a third option, a sort of hybrid where they'd do a bypass, hook my mammary artery to the LAD with a robot that goes in between the ribs, minimally invasive bypass, MICS; then after I've healed a bit from that, go in and stent me up everywhere else.

I was on guard against hearing just what I wanted to hear, but I wasn't prepared to have the second cardiologist actually propose my own idea.

Turns out the MICS thing is pretty new, so the drawback is there's not a lot of long range data for this method of bypass. The bypass itself is nothing new, the doc said he'd seen patients thirty years out that still had great results with that, but doing it by remote without splitting the sternum is only a few years old. But I'd get the benefits of the mammary artery bypsss to my LAD, likely a lifetime fix, but with a shorter recovery time. Stent the rest and with a little luck, if I'm careful about meds, diet and exercise, there's a good chance I could keep my sternum intact many years to come.

To Bypass or Not to Bypass?

My heart is all stopped up.

My brother in law sends me stuff via Facebook about how chelation therapy will fix me right up, just stick a big 'ol suppository up my but and problem solved. Which is a fine theory if I hadn't also heard for years that this exact same nonsense would cure my daughter's autism.

What I've been holding out hope for is stents. I have three blockages, all in that 90% range, but two are up front, the other in the back. The back one is supposedly too long to stent, but a doc friend of mine (internal med, not a cardiologist) says he's seen them 'full metal jacket' things with a series of stents. I already have one in my LAD from a heart attack 11 years ago, that LAD is part of the problem again (I've heard it's nicknamed the 'widowmaker').

But the interventionist who worked on me a week ago Monday pronounced me beyond intervention and sent me to a cardiothoracic surgeon for a triple bypass. About as invasive as surgery gets, and a long recovery period. Months before I can be back to riding my bike to and from work, tending to our two dozen garden beds, etc. Weeks out of work, not good either.

The surgeon seems capable and what he's telling me makes sense, but this still starts roughly like field dressing a deer. So while I'm scheduled to go under the knife next Tuesday, I also have a Friday afternoon appointment with an interventionist at a different cardiology group, one that's supposedly the best in the city. I don't know who ranks these things or by what criteria, but supposedly top 100 in the country.

And after reviewing a CD of my scans from the other chop shop, this interventionist thinks stenting might be possible. I'm all ears.

If there's anything innovative going on, that's probably where it's happening. Even if I still end up having the bypass surgery I might prefer to have it there. Plus the place is half way between work and home, so I will probably pursue my after care and follow up there no matter what.

The only thing I worry about here is getting someone who tells me what I want to hear (that I don't need a bypass) but it turning out that the bypass is my best option. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so I suspect an interventionist is vulnerable to a bias that stents and balloon angioplasty are awesome, and a cardiothoracic surgeon is likely just as apt to think bypass surgery is the thing. Which one is likely to see me become a senior citizen (I'm 43 now)?

Duly Posted

Tomatosaurus Rex. Pre-Op

I've been tying my tomatoes the way I used to, as if they were plotting to get away.

I have 36 plants out this year, only one duplicate so 35 varieties. I'm about to go under the knife, probably in the next week or so, for triple bypass open heart surgery. So I want to get these plants as under control as possible before they gut me like a tomato-raiding squirrel.

I'm amazed at the plants, though, they're easily five feet tall a lot of them, and even the runts are three or four times as big as they were a month or so ago.

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.

Fireworks

Corinna insisted this was the best place to watch fireworks for free on the Fourth.

The Three O'Clock Ride scouted it a few years ago, and it's up at the top of downtown where you can see the Berkeley Riverfront stuff, Worlds of Fun to the East, all the small fry stuff in KCK to the west, and hints of Gladstone and Riverside displays.

You're not close to any of them, mind you, but you can see quite a ways from the IBEW building on Admiral.

We got there a tad early. I was thinking nine-ish for the fireworks, based on living in Gardner for over a decade.

Gardner has a nice display, my former employer pays for a lot of it, but they get antsy and fire it off before the sky is fully dark. It's always annoyed me, spend thousands of dollars and then fire it off before it will look its best.

So we were in place by eight o'clock, got a premium perch at the edge of the hill where the grass wasn't too tall to see over. I didn't realize we'd have a two hour wait for the big display.

But we had fun, met a few people who also turned out for this popular overlook. Beers, pickles and blue Powerade was consumed.

It might have been more impressive if we'd been closer, but we probably got home an hour earlier even with dropping my Mom off.

Putting the Fun in Funicular

We went to a party after the Trashboat Regatta for one of Corinna's old classmates who'd gotten tenure. Had a cool variation on the Lazy Suzan the host called a Lazy Simon. Basically it was a dining room table funicular for passing condiments and pizza boxes and whatnot.

Serious As a Heart Attack

At 32, I was sedentary, a workaholic, a boozefish, overweight (obese according to the charts) and had only recently started trying to do something about my diet. The diet was pretty radical, actually. I had a general practitioner who wanted to put me on statins, and I wanted to try diet. She told me I wouldn't be able to move it more than 10 or 20 points with diet and I proved her wrong. They did a lipids workup after I turned up sort of, uh, dead on my Mom's lawn. June 28, 2002 by all rights should have been the second date on my tombstone—only 4% of people who fit my scenario survived at all back then (it's a little higher now thanks to the proliferation of AEDs).

That lipids workup, I forget exactly, but I think I shaved more like 70 points off my LDL in the four months leading up to my heart attack. Too little, too late, but maybe if I'd been an almost-vegan from my teens...

The day before we went to this Royals game, I'd gone into the cath lab to have more stents put in, or so I thought. That's a pretty freaky operation all by itself, but I'd had quite a bit of angina lately and an abnormal stress test. What I hadn't counted upon was that there could be a bunch of stuff that stents don't cover.

I've got one blockage that's too long to stent, another pair that are at the fork of an artery that makes it impossible, I'm told, to stent. Which means they propose to cannibalize veins from my leg and maybe my shoulder, split my sternum, stop my heart, and patch those veins onto my heart, then restart my heart and wake me up.

I'm told I'll cough a lot after, and I'll have to have a pillow with me to hold against my chest when I do so I don't pop my sternum back open. Did I mention I'm a squeamish person who has fainted at an anemia finger-prick test at the blood bank?

Walking into the game I was holding my groin where they went in with the cath. The dressing was still on it, and it felt like (and I know this was all psychological), it was holding my blood in but barely. Like it was liable to pop off any moment and I'd just bleed to death there in the stadium.

We had premium tickets and parking thanks to my boss, the guy who may be covering my job for upwards of six weeks after my bypass surgery. Lot M, which is right between the stadiums, directly by the gate which turns out to be directly by section 232 where our seats were. There are more expensive seats in the park, but not much better as far as seeing the action.

Corinna rode there with a kid from the neighborhood on our tandem bike, and Gallmeyer met us there, also by bike. Michael is ten and Gallmeyer is, I think, 38 or so, but it was a brilliant pairing because their maturities are astonishingly well-matched.

The game was quite good, a lousy first inning with our pitcher walking in runs and hitting batters, a mid-game grand slam that got us back into it, in it all the way to the last at bat in the ninth inning. We lost, but it could have been.

The between innings stuff, the air guitar contest, the kiss-camera, the sing along to a bad country song, that was the real entertainment. They don't even need to play the baseball game, it's not much to look at most of the time anyway.

Most importantly, I forgot about the plug holding my blood in, forgot the pending bypass surgery, the blockages that have, in hindsight, been warning me loudly for a while now. Instead of worrying about my recovery, or having a heart attack before I get that far, I managed to care about whether the Royals might actually escape with a win despite that abominable pitching start.

BMX

I grew up riding BMX, but nothing like this. For one thing, I only ever did one race, at Rosedale Park and the 'track' was marked off with ropes, we were just riding on the grassy hills of the park.

Mainly, my BMX took me on my paper route and doing jumps down at the 'dirtbike trails,' a landfill around the corner from my house. The fill dirt would get dumped and that would become our ramps to do jumps on.

Corinna had been invited out to speek for Olypic Day, and we were both thinking hit-and-run. Do the speech, shake a few hands if anyone was interested in that, and clear out. Next thing you know, it's 9:30 and we've been having a lot of fun watching the races.

They had heats ranging from six year old girls to adult men amd everything in between.

There were kids wit incredibly sophisticated bikes and kids with Wal-Mart Mongooses, kids with the whole kit, all the expensive gear and clothing, along with kids in jeans and a cheap skateboard helmet.

And you couldn't predict who could ride based on the gear. The ability levels ranged as widely as the gear but not in tandem with it.

Guitar Society Concert

My Dad is a member of the Kansas City Guitar Society and he's been trying forever to get me and my brother to come to one of these events.

I don't know why it took so long, it was a free show and it wasn't far from home for me. The weather was beautiful, and as long as you can tune out the occasional bus or motorcycle, it's a nice, intimate hour of good music.

My friend Liz rides a motorcycle and it doesn't make a ruckus like a lot of them do. Hers is a little Honda Rebel, an affordable ride that gets great gas mileage and does not cause deafness. I'm sure most of the loud bikes that rumble around our streets are much, much more expensive. Maybe they could throw in a free muffler with a $20,000 motorcycle.