Then There Were Updates...

I recall an old "joke" I stumbled over a few years ago which is even more painful now than when I heard it originally.

"If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."  

Not that I had any reason to believe I was going to die young.  I have managed to get myself past 58, where my father had a massive heart attack, and while I do have a pacemaker earlier than Dad got his, I do attribute that to better detection and knowing what we now know.  My father was having episodes where he would essentially faint and have what my mother called "shakes".  I was out of the house by this time, so the tales of what he went through were weird.  

The doctors attached him to monitors in the office, and nothing stood out.  They sent him home with a monitor, which one of my sisters described as a "tricorder".  It hung on a strap from his shoulder, and was about the side of an old-style cassette recorder - maybe a foot long, three inches thick, five inches wide.  They put it on Dad, he went home, went around doing things for three days, nothing occurred, so he went back to the office, they disconnected everything, and he went back home.  He went up the stairs to his chair, sat down, and immediately had an episode.  So they took him back to town, and the doctors did tests, found nothing, and hooked the monitor back up.  He went back home, did his usual things for a week, and nothing unusual happened.  So we went back to town, they checked everything, he went home and the same thing happened.

This time, the doctors insisted.  He went to St. Cloud Hospital and they held on to him.  He had been in about ten days, under constant monitoring, when my wife and I went in to visit.  As we were from out of town, the rest of the family came in for a visit.  We sat there for about an hour, chatting, and nothing happened.  We went home, checked in, nothing unusual had yet occurred, so life went on.

The next afternoon I got a call from my mother at work.  "He finally did his trick."  The doctors had visited, left his room, and his lunch came in.  Before he could start eating, it happened.  And we were so disappointed.  No, not because they finally caught it, but because Dad had, historically, always managed to come up with some unusual diagnosis.  He was one of the few people whom I knew who had survived polio and was still walking around.  There weren't many.  So he was unusual, in that regard.  But this time, the diagnosis was "Ventricular Standstill."  One of my sisters said that since the diagnosis wasn't unusual enough, she was going to call it by the name of the doctor who figured it out.  It was, in her world, A "Bobildyke" 

So when they told me "your heart beat is pretty slow" I thought "good, I'm healthier than I thought."  Also far dumber. 

But the good news after this past week's "assessment" appointment is that what's gone wrong can be corrected.  The bad news is that the surgery will be uncomfortable and the recovery will be ... well, recovery.  I have good insurance, thankfully, and a good employer.  Once we know what's going to happen, I can talk with them.  It's unfortunate that I had to change jobs this year, because I used to go through every year dragging a lot of extra vacation, and I'd roll over the maximum I was allowed just in case, for things like this.  I'm earning time off at the rate of a little over half a day per period right now, and our pay periods are two weeks long.  I believe that I'm earning about 3 weeks a year, total, so I need to just get around to doing that.  I've been told by the doctor that the plan for moving this whole process forward is that the catheter will need to be out for a month before they will do the surgery, so my guess is that, right now, they're waiting for word from the insurance company regarding whether the surgery will be authorized, after which they'll schedule the catheter removal and then the surgery.   So I'm hoping I'll hear about it soon.  

Other than that, live continues going on.  Right now, as I sit here typing, Farm Aid 40 is on in the background.  John Mellencamp is singing in Huntington Stadium on the University of Minnesota campus.  He followed Dave Matthews, and later on Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan will take the stage.  

While neither my wife nor I  grew up on farms, we're no idiots.  The first house I remember living in was next to a large wooded pasture, and one corner of our yard was up against a corn field.  Some of my grade school classmates lived on or near farms.  My wife grew up in Iowa, and was close to farms, living just outside of town.  

As a boy, I do remember a large outcry by farmers in western Stearns County regarding power lines that were being run through their farms.  Crop lands and grazing lands were being crossed by high-tension high-capacity power towers to carry power being generated nearby to other communities.  I had been interested in science in school, but I had connected it only to stuff like the Space Program.  There were newspaper and TV reports about the possible dangers of working or living near these power lines.     

What really bothers me lately, though, has been the way we now expect the world to work.  Don't get me wrong - I do think the whole Farm Aid thing is great for farmers.  But this whole system is definitely bunged up.  What happened to paying a decent price for goods?  I get it, everyone wants a bargain, but we have created a system that seems to be totally screwed up.  I do recall, years ago, when a young woman went onto the internet and did a fundraising campaign to raise money for breast implants.  Now we have people raising money to get through medical problems and other things that our systems used to pay for, but these days, no, yer on yer own, good luck, don't let the door kick you in the ass on the way out.  

We either need to take a serious look at making some changes, or accept that this country will soon cease to exist.  The Orange Baboon may already have killed it, but I say this as the son of a man who was never in danger of being drafted, but I had several uncles who were pretty proudly Antifa back in the day - I had hoped we wouldn't get to this point, but it's pretty damned clear that the only thing the current Republican Regime learned from the Nixon Era is to never admit the crimes occurred.  There are jellyfish with far more internal structure than some of the current Republican leadership...