Category: Health

Time and Flight

Hello, Holidailies!

I know more folks do Holidailies than Horrordailies, so perhaps I should just give a little run-down of 2023 so far. This way we can get it over with and move on to better things because friends, unfortunately, this year has been hands-down the most painful year of my life. To review:

In February I witnessed gun violence.

In March Inigo and I said goodbye.

Also in March I was nearly killed by a drunk driver.

In April I popped three discs in my back and was incapacitated to the point of needing a walker, a steroid shot in my back, and a couple of months of physical therapy.

In October I had a massive heart attack, which meant I had to cancel two trips in November, one to England and one to Finland.

And just this week they cut 21 positions at my workplace.

The one amazingly bright moment in the year was a trip to Warsaw with a friend, where I met more friends and got to see my favorite band, Poets of the Fall. The trips to England and Finland would have been more of that friendly and musical goodness, but yeah, no, not just a few weeks out from a heart attack.

But other than that, 2023 was horrible, so I’m ready to kick it right on out the door. Thank goodness for friends and birds.

Speaking of birds, I have a rocking Birdie Balcony Café going on. Birds come and go all day long, from dawn past sundown. I can never seem to get decent photos of them because they get spooked if they see me, but here are a few Mourning Doves, AKA MoDos. They didn’t have a reservation for the table, but okay. Things here are first come, first served.

Three doves on a table.
Three little birds: Every little thing gonna be all right.

There are usually anywhere from three to eight MoDos sitting on the windowsill, table, and balcony railing when I wake up in the morning. They eat with a flock of Sparrows that come for breakfast, then everyone flies off until about 10:30.

And lemme tellya, they all stalk me.

When I went out on the balcony this morning, Sparrows, Northern Mockingbirds and a male Northern Cardinal were in the tree outside my living room window waiting for their mid-morning feeding. They usually come back again around 2:00, bringing the MoDos with them. The Sparrows and MoDos come back around 4:30, and then the MoDos come alone around 6:00, after it gets dark, for dinner. Sometimes the Cardinal also comes by during twilight.

They’re ravenous, too. I just bought a five-pound bag of birdseed last week and it’s almost half gone. Same for a 1.5-pound bag of peanuts. I put crushed, shelled peanuts on the windowsill and the Mockingbirds know that if the Peanut Lady isn’t in her living room, they can tap on the metal part of the windowsill and she’ll appear. While they’re simultaneously eyeballing me and chowing down, I throw whole peanuts in the shell down for the Blue Jays, Crows, and squirrels. It’s like a second job for me, heh.

They keep me company, and for that I’m grateful. I have a huge apartment and it’s kind of cavernous without Inigo. I miss the little guy tremendously, but he has left his imprint on this place and although he has moved on to other things, occasionally I do still feel his presence here. He comes to visit at random times, just to say hello and leave a warm spot on his little bed in his house, which is still in the living room with the door open. When I’m super low, he comes to comfort, landing on my back and spreading his wings over my shoulders in a hug. Sometimes Jimmy the Green Cheek comes with him and lands on my shoulder. Sounds crazy, but I don’t care.

I remember thinking last Christmas that it would be Inigo’s last one. Now this is really strange, but last night the thought came into my head that had he not hurt his leg and needed release from pain, that the day of my heart attack would have been his own day to pass. I don’t know where that thought came from.

Have you ever seen the German TV series Dark? It involves time travel, but not in a hokey Back the the Future kind of way. (You know, because it’s dark.) It’s all about the nature of time, destiny, whether actions are free will or ordained to happen because there is more than one reality and you take the same actions over and over again in each one. There might be minor differences between timelines and realities, but your general story arc produces the same results.

Maybe watching that series had something to do with my thoughts. I don’t really understand quantum physics, time-bending, or things like Schrödinger’s cat, but if there is more than one reality, maybe that heart attack was the pain of Inigo’s passing in an another one. Heaven knows when we said goodbye in this reality, it physically felt like a kick in the chest.

Really, they ought to drum me out of science writing, with theories like that. But who knows? I don’t believe in any gods, but plenty of prominent scientists talk about things like time, other universes, and other realities. If there is science to the concept of multiple realities, I’m all for it.

Me and My Big Mouth

Remember the entry from the day before my birthday, in which I described the bad tickers on my father’s side of the family?

And then the entry the next day, titled “But I Lived to See 57?“

Right.

I had a massive heart attack Wednesday night, followed by ventricular tachycardia that required them to zap me in the modern version of those paddles they used to use in medical dramas. I started feeling weird during my usual cardio-kickboxing workout, so I stopped it halfway through and cooled off. Had some Gatorade and water, and an orange. Sat on the couch. And WHOA. I really don’t know how I had the presence of mind to call 911, or make it to my front door to unlock it. The last thing I remember was the EMTs saying they were going to life me onto a stretcher, and the next thing I knew I was trying to pull out a breathing tube and vomiting on my back with the tube in.

The cardiac team put a stent in that releases some medication, they changed all of my blood pressure medications, and I’ll be on blood-thinners for a year and low-dose aspirin forever. A few days in the ICU, a night in regular care, and I came home Saturday.

I had some symptoms again yesterday morning, so I went back to the emergency department, had scans and tests, and although I am making a recovery that has been described by clinicians as “remarkable,” “astounding,” and “impressive,” I do have pericarditis, which is inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart muscle. I’m also dealing with a LOT of coughing because of the breathing tube, which irritated my airways.

Long story short, I’m damn lucky to be alive right now. The doctors, nurses, and techs said that if I had not been such a devotee of cardio-kickboxing, hiking, and avoiding meat, fried foods, and smoking, I would not have survived. SO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES, PLEASE.

Happy Halloween, all. Hug your loved ones.

Exposed.

Did you know the CDC has a calculator that tells you what steps to take when you’re
exposed to COVID?  Now you do.

And so do I. One of my cubemates tested positive this morning. He thinks he picked it up over the weekend, but in my opinion, he probably picked it up sooner. It really depends on the variant, but a lot of them don’t show up on a test that quickly. It’s usually five days.

Well, we were both in on Friday and talked a bit, so I consider myself exposed. I feel fine and have had five COVID vaccines, including the bivalent in September, but I went to the CDC website to figure out what I should do because people, have you ever Googled “exposed to covid what to do no symptoms?” So much conflicting guidance. I’m not talking about woo-mongering antivax sites, either. I’m talking about university medical center sites, health systems sites, WebMD (hey, don’t knock it, I used to freelance for them and can tell you the citations requirements are onerous, to say the least), and mainstream media.

I’m following the CDC guidance, which says I should get tested on Thursday, and then again on Saturday. It also says I should mask up in public through Sunday, but as I am sick to death of masking and the weather is largely going to be lousy until Monday, I am staying home barring grocery/CVS/testing runs until then. (“Oh, no! Not the briar patch!” cried the introvert.)

This does throw a wrench into a bunch of plans, but I really don’t want to spread this around and ruin anyone’s holidays should I be infected.

At the risk of tempting fate, as I mentioned in another entry, I have managed to avoid getting it so far. Or, I have managed to avoid it as far as I know, as any time I’ve had even the slightest symptoms, I’ve tested negative. It’s strange, given that I take public transportation and Metro is a Petri dish, but there it is. There are studies to suggest that people who eat a plant-based diet are less likely to contract the virus and less likely to get severe symptoms if they do contract it, regardless of vaccination status. I’d been a pescatarian since 2009, until about a month ago when I went largely vegan, barring mistakes, ignorance, and oddball circumstances. (Never would have thought some brands of plain ol’ vegetable soup use eggs or milk?) I hope I can keep my streak going.

I will say this, because it’s my blog and I can, but no one will ever convince me that this whole pandemic isn’t a direct result of humanity’s exploitation of animals as commodities. I sincerely believe that there would be a LOT more vegetarians and vegans if people only saw the absolutely filthy and abhorrent conditions the animals they eat are born into, live short miserable lives in, and die in. Hint: You wouldn’t be too healthy if you had to stand in one place all day long, shoulder-to-shoulder with your neighbor, sleep on feces- and urine-covere concrete or wire, and eat food with feces, urine, blood, dirt, feathers, and other debris in it, all while being shot up with hormones and fed a diet designed to make you as huge as possible, right? Well, that’s what factory farming is. Never mind cruelty and the environment. Animal farming is just plain dirty and gross, and pathogens love dirty and gross, like the obscenely filthy wet market where the coronavirus that gave us COVID jumped from animal to humans. Hard pass.

Plus, when your baking is vegan, you can lick the spoon and not have to worry about salmonella. It’s the little things.