Out of Order

Okay, I lied. Sorry. 

In this post I indicated that I'd post periodic updates, and then I went and had a triple bypass and took a three month break with no updates at all. 

No one was more surprised than the cardiologist by the results of the heart catheterization. He detected four "old" blockages. These were candidates for being stented, but this approach would have required multiple procedures and necessitated being on blood thinners for an extended period after the last procedure. This would have put me out of the kidney transplant window for a longer period, with the added risk of additional kidney damage from the dye needed for each stent procedure. He and my nephrologist recommended bypass surgery, and referred me to a cardiac surgeon. 

Turns out my referral was to the best guy in town. He consulted closely with my nephrologist. He would install a dialysis port as part of the surgery, as kidney failure is a real possibility with bypass surgery even in people with normal kidney function. It was not at so great a risk for a heart attack that they needed to do it right away. The first date they offered me for the bypass was my birthday, and I didn't see any point in delaying it further so I could celebrate another completed trip around the sun. 

It turned out they only needed to bypass three of the four blockages. My kidney function held steady enough that they didn't need to dialyze me. My previous post covers the immediate post surgery experience. I'll share a little more about recovery in a future post.

Another hiatus

Well, the previously mentioned bypass surgery knocked me out of the communication loop for a long time, although it isn't entirely to blame for my absence. Priorities, I guess. I think a few notes to remind my future self what this was like are in order.

First of all, this isn't something I ever want to do again. When they're preparing you for a surgery like this, they don't do a very good job of explaining how traumatic to the body it is. I knew about and dreaded having my sternum sawn open. That in itself worked its way into every dream I had for half the summer. I didn't realize how sore my leg would be, where they got the blood vessel from for my three bypasses. I almost couldn't feel the incisions themselves, especially the one up in my groin. But the bruising extended the entire length of my leg down into my foot. Any my right arm was a lovely thing due to the blown IV on the third or fourth day after surgery. The most intensely painful thing was definitely the chest tubes. It was frustrating having my blood sugar checked before every meal. The food in the hospital was good, though my appetite wasn't. The most depressing part was the extra hospital time waiting for my blood count to return to normal. Finally they just sent me home on iron because it wasn't happening.

Those are the negatives. There were many blessings, too, though. My health going into the procedure turned out to be a great positive. The rehab folks who came up to the room could tell I'd been pretty active prior to the surgery, even the day after surgery. My dear wife was concerned over how long it took me to come out of the anesthesia and get my tube removed, but when they took it out I tried to sing to her almost right away, attempting to croak out "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." Before that, I faintly remember being frustrated as I tried to write on her leg with my fingertip, "PAIN." They brought me some of whatever they were giving me for pain. They don't really use opioids much, which helps with the bowel recovery. They were surprised at how quickly that bodily function bounced back. 

All in all, I think the experience has me more prepared for what I'll go through with the kidney transplant.

Recovery is going nicely. I'm not running as much as I expected to be by now,  because it's hard to keep the heart rate in range. But I was able to get back on my bike for the first time yesterday, which felt great. That was a matter of waiting for my sternum to heal sufficiently, and the recumbent riding I've been doing in rehab had my legs well prepared for that activity. 

 

Waiting . . .

Finished my "just checking" tests this morning for increased risks associated with PKD. The first one, the intracranial aneurysm check, provided a temporary . . . I don't know, "scare" is too strong a word . . . concern? . . . in the MRA that the angiogram revealed wasn't one an aneurysm after all. We'll see what today's echocardiogram and liver ultrasound turn up. Hopefully nothing. Should have results in a couple days.

Stupidity and self-destruction don't win, this time

Looks like my hand is going to heal up just fine. And it also looks as if the four weeks it took me to get in to see a doctor - a delay which was mostly not my fault - hasn't had any adverse effects on it, either.

A potentially big little thing

As soon as I felt the little lump just above my collarbone I knew what it probably was. I still don't know what it means, but I'm not going to dilly-dally in starting to find out.

Glands above the collarbone (supraclavicular lymph nodes) may swell from an infection or tumor in the areas of the lungs, breasts, neck, or abdomen. - WebMD

Enlarged lymph nodes above the collar bone (supraclavicular lymphadenopathy) are always considered to be abnormal. These generally suggest a cancer of or an infection in the region close by. Examples of these may include lung infection, lung cancer, lymphoma in the chest cavity, or breast cancer. Occasionally more distant cancers may seed these lymph nodes, such as genital cancers or colon cancer. Some inflammatory causes of the swollen lymph nodes above the collar bone (clavicle) can include tuberculosis or sarcoidosis. - MedicineNet.com

No, I'm not self-diagnosing. But I'm also not going to play around and hope it just goes away.

Whatever this turns out to be, I trust God to take care of me through it. Nothing happens that He does not use for good.

Pretty sure . . .

. . . that this is the first time I've ever spread the urushiol from poison ivy contact in the shower before getting it all washed off.

This is unpleasant in a way that significantly greater exposures have not been.

I will now spare the dear reader any further details.

A sick and annoyed night

I could tell something was wrong. I don't customarily get chills like that. By the time I climbed into bed, I could tell they had developed into a fever, plus my heart was pounding.

It had been a frustrating evening, too. Our car had been out on loan for the previous two days, and the person who'd had it thought it was entirely reasonable to keep it over one more night, even though that meant that my wife would be stuck without a car again for a third consecutive day. That hadn't been much of a problem, given her volunteer day on Wednesday, and since her friend had loaned her a vehicle for a doctor's appointment on Thursday, but I agreed with her that we needed a different answer for today. So we patiently worked with the person who had it to come up with a mutually-agreeable solution that would suit all of us. We stood our ground, and didn't let ourselves get run over by assumptions, but it really took a team effort to make that happen.

I 'd already been planning an early morning, and my chills had convinced me that an early evening was also a good idea. When I got home from dropping off our daughter at work, my head hung as I removed our keys from the car and noticed hers still attached. Ugh. So I went in the house and texted our daughter, but got no response. We then tried to look up a phone number for her work place, but the only number we could find was no longer in service. Those efforts wouldn't have mattered, as it turns out: yes, she needed her keys. Even though my wife had suggested that she could take them to her after the younger two granddaughters were asleep, the amount of time she spent continuing to look for a phone number after it was obvious we weren't going to find one made it equally obvious that she didn't want to go. So rather than waste further time in a fruitless effort that was probably only going to confirm what we needed to do anyway, I loaded my chills back into the car and drove back to our daughter's workplace, where she was most grateful that I had brought them to her. I then came back home and went to bed. So much for my early night, and I was plenty miffed about it. I'd also taken a disposable plastic and a paper soft drink cup out of the car; I might have left just the plastic one, but was afraid the paper one might give out and make a mess to deal with.

As soon as my head hit the pillow I knew I was feverish, but I still lay there for an hour before texting my wife and asking her to come up the stairs. I knew I was being a bit of a baby, not just taking care of myself, but wanted to be "evaluated" where I was. Sure enough: 101.1°.  She brought me some acetaminophen, but I still lay there awake until 1 a.m., when I moved out to the sofa for a while. I slept fitfully through the night, but could tell that my fever had broken before I'd gotten out of bed.

She still loves and tries to take care of me, and I still love her, too.

Conforming (phase 2), Jesus Heals: To be Free to be Able to Choose - AtaDc (step18), session 1

For the sake of shortening post titles, I'm abbreviating "Arriving to a Decision (cont.)" in these next three steps to AtaDc.

If I continue to respond daily to God's call of grace in these Exercises, even on weekends, then I shall arrive at step 21 on Palm Sunday, just as the calendar suggests, perhaps with one day to spare.

The title of this step appeals to me in connection with the idea of the spiritual freedom which Christ has won for us. Even in some of the examples in the first AtaD step, Jesus Calls His Followers (step 16) we see examples of Jesus freeing people from the things that keep us from freely responding to him. As I continue to grow in him, I recognize that I also continue to need to be set free to choose to follow him on one way or another. So I am eager to see what examples and insights this step brings.

Mk 10: 46-52 - The first reading for this step is the healing of blind Bartimaeus. (If I'd started this step yesterday I'd feel as if I was a week early, because the RCIA option reading for next week, which we always use in our parish, is the healing of the man born blind from St. John's gospel.)

One thing that strikes me about Bartimaeus' plea is that he has no presumption of deserving the healing for which he is asking. Mercy is, by its very definition, something that is undeserved. (How interesting that this should tie in so directly with my thoughts from the last session of the previous step.)  Yet he is nonetheless sufficiently, acutely aware of his need, and bold enough to cry out and to refuse to be shushed into silent resignation of his plight.  He has had no hope for so long that he refuses to give up on the hope he has now.

The way Bartimaeus phrases what he wants from Jesus causes me to believe that he, too, has never been able to see. He doesn't ask that he may "recover" his sight, or that Jesus would "restore" his sight, but rather pleads, "Master, let me receive my sight."  This causes me to wonder about the passage from St. John that we will hear this Sunday (Jn 9), and whether Bartimaeus is the same blind beggar about whom St. John writes. The details are different enough to suggest that they are different people, yet, St. Mark is often short on details. Ah, too much speculation about that distracts from the point I believe more pertinent to me today, yet the discussion in St. John is pertinent to that point.

We are blind in so many ways, yet often lack sufficient awareness of it to ask Jesus to let us receive our sight. I think of the useful definition of "evangelization" that I heard maybe fifteen years ago: "one blind beggar telling another blind beggar where he found some food." Maybe in this context it's more like a formerly blind beggar telling a currently blind beggar where he found his healing. At any rate, if we are unaware of our blindness, we do not receive healing and we do not lead others to theirs. Worse, in trying to do so, we are back to removing a speck from our brother's eye when we yet have a beam in our own.

This season of Lent is an annual opportunity to ask God to help us recognize our blindness so that we might know to call out to him to deliver us from it.

"I'll keep putting my faith in my rationalism, thank you."

Our response when the inexplicable - a word which I've intentionally chosen over the one I believe to be more applicable in this week's events - occurs can include a broad range of thoughts and feelings. Oddly enough, Christians and nonbelievers may share many of them.

This week, good friends whom we've known since at least 1988 received a bona fide miracle. Their youngest daughter was born with a hearing impairment that took a couple years to diagnose. She has used hearing aids in the six years since to engage in conversational speech, and has been seeing a speech therapist to help her learn to speak normally.

About a year ago, this wonderful young girl had a conversion experience, accepting Jesus as her Savior. That night she reported to her parents that God had told her he was going to heal her and use that to bring many people to know him.

Last weekend the first part of that prophecy was fulfilled. At a sort of workshop/service on healing prayer, her hearing was fully restored. When she went down front for the boisterous youth praise and worship, she asked her mom to please hold her hearing aids, as she often did before entering this loud environment.  She never took them back from her afterward, and at the end of the service, she told her dad she could hear.

What is your reaction to a story like this?

Mine is usually to search for the rational explanation. The most probable causes of most phenomena are rational ones, after all. Even when we pray for someone undergoing medical treatment, don't we end up attributing the credit or the blame to the medical process rather than to God?  But what might the rational explanations be, exactly, in this case? Dishonesty about the child's condition before or after the service? Did she just "grow out" of some childhood condition, even though they had never been told that this was possible? Could her own mind have healed her by some unknown means?

None of these seem to apply in this case, and some of them require a more irrational faith than the one that atheists reject outright. "I have no idea what it could have been; I'm only certain that it couldn't have been 'God'!" I've spent time with this dear child, as recently as this past summer, and listened as her parents fretted about the expense of continuing to provide her with the aids that improved her hearing well enough to allow her to function in society.  This couple is amazed and overjoyed at what has happened to their precious daughter. Still, my rational approach insists on defaulting to the likelihood of some scientific explanation that we just haven't discovered yet, and I find I must come against that natural tendency if I am to simply rejoice in this wondrous blessing that these beloved friends have received.

Besides this skepticism, what other responses do I sometimes see in myself or others?

Sometimes I can feel resentful over not receiving such a gift for a loved one or for myself, even as I know in my heart that my faith has never been as great as this young girl's is.

Sometimes I feel frustrated with myself for not having such a simple, trusting faith.

I've heard others express indignation that a supposed God would pour forth this sort miracle when there are so many great(er) and (more) desperate needs to be addressed throughout the world. What about people who experience great calamities, or who are stricken with terminal illnesses or debilitating conditions? And why can't a God who can miraculously restore a child's hearing do some sort of wonder that would convince us to stop hating and killing each other?

In short, there are a lot of responses other than the one that I need to have: humble awe at God's abundant love, and a desire for a faith that would allow it to flow unhindered in my life, too.

More important things

So rather than the past three days of silence be an indicator that my Lenten journey has gone off the rails, it is more a matter of paying attention to other things I've needed to attend to. Music ministry and consistent daily prayer time, along with writing letters to a couple friends who likely need the support and encouragement have taken up the time I generally have available for my own reflections.

Now, if only these strained hip muscles would just loosen up . . .

The piece that the right is ignoring:

"If you start insuring a bunch of previously uninsured people, without any choice but to take them no matter what health conditions they bring to the table, then the average costs per customer have to go up." - this is the gist of the "simple math" argument against the ACA.

And actually, that's pretty undeniably true.

In the short term.

But the financing of the (heretofore) uninsured will shift from hospitals (and other providers) to insurance companies (along with the premium subsidies from the federal government). Hospitals have been trained over recent decades to inflate what they charge to cover the significant percentage of uninsured patients whose treatment they often eventually have to write off. Of course, this is why they've been able to offer insurers far lower pricing for the same procedure for which they charge private citizens a far higher rate. For many of these, they never receive any payment at all; the ones that do pay usually require service from an inflated staff/paid external billing service to deal with all of the follow-up payment issues. So in the short term, yes, the cost of insurance is going to increase. But in the longer term, if health care providers should be able to reduce their charges because there will be a higher percentage of treatment for which they are paid. If they don't, new providers should be able to step in and improve the competitiveness of the marketplace, which will reduce what insurers have to pay.

The real trick is going to be to get insurers to return this money to the pockets of customers in the form of reduced premiums, rather than lining those of stockholders. But if they don't it won't take long until new insurers step in to address this inflated market, too.

So I still don't know how I feel about the whole program, but I'm not going to jump to a conclusion based on the short term increase in premiums, even should it prove to be significant.

Recovery

My lunchtime massage was wonderful. I was still pretty sore afterward, but didn't feel as if I was still tied up in knots. I've been heeding Donna's advice to drink lots of water, and we'll see tomorrow morning if I'm really on the road to recovering from my labors.

Weakened

I suppose we'll find out here shortly what the ramifications are for my wife's broken tooth. I'm glad she isn't in much pain from it; it seems to have pretty much just broken off from structural weakness due to a cavity/filling. She didn't particularly bite down on it; she was just eating her lunch, happened to be chewing on the other side of her mouth, actually, when she felt something foreign and hard. It looks like she lost about half of the crown of the tooth, with the filling still attached to the part that broke off.

I think we're only going to be on the hook for 20% of this work, but depending on what they have to do it could be 50%. But there is no question about needing to have it fixed.

Taking poor care of myself

It's such a challenge to make my own health the priority it should be. I am overdue for a physical and for two specialist visits: one to my nephrologist, who I haven't seen in five years, and one to the urologist I was supposed to visit a year after my kidney stone incident. My scalp is acting up again, too, and I'm out of my prescription shampoo.

But every time I turn around our HSA is empty again. I'm going to have to put more money in it, but then, I expect to have to do that anyway next year just to cover the increased deductible I'm dreading. I suppose I may be buying trouble ahead of its time, but the bad news from today makes it time to think about this even if it isn't time to reach conclusions.

Poison ivy "fun"

Ooh, ooh, itchy woman, she's got the moon in her eyes.

Hopefully my poor wife's severe encounter with the poison ivy in the back corner of the yard will be over soon. She seems to finally be starting to turn the corner. That area was newly cleared by the power company, and she didn't notice the hairy vines interwoven through the fence when she was reaching across it to get firewood.  I have it cleared out of there now, and judging by the lack of reaction that I have, seem to have taken satisfactory precautions to protect myself. It can take several days for a mild reaction to develop, though, so I'm not taking bets yet.

Sudden awareness

(Warning: TMI ahead. "I'd turn back if I were you . .  .")



Well, I believe figured out what caused last night's gluteal pain, and it was only partially the evening's intestinal issue. It seems that I need to let go of my pride in being able to wait to reach a good break point before relieving myself.

Pain in the glutes

Literally.  Last night I was dealing with some uproar in my bowels. I have to really be on guard against this. Older people (older than me) have to watch out for dehydration. I have to deal with fatigue and quite significant pain in the muscles around my backside, probably from clenching. I was up for a couple hours with it last night. Ugh.

Wounds that heal - a thought from Thursday night

Our theme was Healing in the Precious Blood of Jesus.  Fr. Angelo mentioned reference after reference describing the understanding of blood in ancient cultures and its significance in ancient ritual.  Then he talked about Jesus' healing ministry, those who were made whole through his compassion and care.  He talked about how much of Jesus' healing was rooted in correcting one form of blindness or another (which I found a particularly fascinating tie-in with Fr. Bramlage's healing ministry, which is so deeply rooted in the damaging effects of unforgiveness in our lives).  I wish I'd had a notebook to capture more of what he shared. He moved on to discuss the redemptive and healing nature of Jesus' sacrifice, and introduced two words together that just struck me: Healing Wounds.  I immediately knew I'd want to reflect and expand on his comments about this idea.

The natural effect of wounds we receive is to tear apart, to destroy, so most wounds are therefore destructive by nature.  While our bodies are equipped to heal in remarkable ways, the wounds themselves are a cause of damage.  This is true of emotional wounds that we receive, as well. Interestingly, the more compromised we are physically or emotionally, the less able we are to heal.

And yet the way we respond to harm we receive - indeed, our willingness to embrace them rather than resist them, in some cases - can cause the resulting wounds to be healing instead of destructive.  As we assume an attitude of grace and forgiveness instead of clinging to the hurt we receive, our wounds' harmful effects in us are diminished, and their redemptive, healing effects are magnified in our own lives as well as the lives of those around us.

For instance, when I focus on how unfair a situation in my relationship with my wife may be, our marriage is undermined and wounded.  But if I instead view that exact same situation as an opportunity to love my wife, it becomes a cause of growth for us.  This is true for each situation in which we decide to respond with an attitude of grace rather than focusing on ourselves.

Jesus' wounds remain visible in his resurrected body because they have lost the power to hurt him while taking on the power to heal us.  His wounds were healing for Thomas, who had declared that he could not believe Jesus was risen without their evidence, and they are healing for us.  This becomes true for the wounds we receive, as well, when we offer forgiveness and mercy rather than retribution in response to them.  Our woundedness can be a source of healing, and inspiration for others who need to experience healing as we have.

Feeling like the (alphabetically) penultimate dwarf

I woke up in the middle of last night - I've no idea of the actual time, as I made a concerted effort not to investigate it - with what felt like indigestion.  I went out to the living room and propped myself up on the sofa for a while, and after realizing I had nodded off, went back to bed, adjusting my pillows so I'd be a little more elevated.  I slept for the rest of the night, but woke with the same gassy feeling that had awakened me. I'm feeling better now in that regard.

I don't know whether it is the lousy night's sleep or just the day itself that has me feeling like I wish it were over.

Today's words

eructation \ih-ruk-TAY-shun\ - an act or instance of belching

I think I knew this word, once.

borborygmus \bor-buh-RIG-mus\ (plural bor·bo·ryg·mi) - intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas

But I didn't know this one.