The All-New Bunrab

The heart stuff first: yes, I did go to the doctor's the next morning, just to confirm that it was a real episode and what I felt was what I thought it was, and test the device just to make sure nothing's wonky with it. And indeed, yes to all of that. And they raised my dose of Coreg again, now all the way up to what it "should" be - I had previously been taking only half the full dose, for years, because it made me so tired and because nothing much was going wrong and the Coreg wasn't helping my blood pressure that much over and above all the other meds I take - the Diovan or enalapril, the diuretics, etc. And for years, that was fine. But now, it appears that I need it for the anti-arrhythmic effects as well as the antihypertensive effects, so full dose it is.


( a couple more paragraphs of whine )

Now, books. Part of moving is, I have to de-acquisition a LOT of books.
( whining about why I have to give up a few )

One of the things I'm doing is reciting a mantra that goes like this: "The library has this book. The library has this whole series. Every library in Maryland and the surrounding states has this whole series!!" That mantra is useful for a lot of the murder mysteries and some of the science fiction. Of course I am not giving up the Lois Bujolds - I want to be able to reread any Miles book on any spur of the moment! - but the mantra helped me get all the J.A. Jance out the door, because, really, libraries are very good about murder mystery series. And a bunch of Steve's vampire collection that I still had - since vampires have been more popular these last 10 years than they were when I first started reading them or when I turned Steve on to them, more libraries have them, more used book stores have them, and more of them are available as e-books. So I don't need to keep most of them. (The complete Yarbro St. Germain series stays. Don't try to talk me out of that one.)

( Another way to get rid of books )

Some of the reading I've done this past 6 months has been new stuff, and there's thoughts on that.
( Reading and rereading gets tiring )

So that's the process. I am trying to remember to record all the re-reads on Goodreads as I go along, and also the library books I have been reading interspersed because a body can't read 100% fantasy series 100% of the time. If there's still any of you who I haven't found or haven't found me there, well, I'm easy to find.

Whew, a longish list.
What NOT to Build, a book on residential architecture and home improvement. Some amusing bits, but often quite repetitive. All right, we get it already, Monticello good, McMansion bad. I thought a few of the photos must have been photoshopped because no one would build anything that awful - and then, the next day, taking a new route to my saxophone lesson, drove right past a new row of 5 McMansions that had most of those awful features, such as fake keystones on windows with straight lintels, window transoms over the door that are taller than the door itself, vinyl siding and brick on the same side of the house... There was at least one example in the book that I spotted that was used as a bad example near the beginning, and then in a later chapter, that same exact photo was the good example.
Children of the Machine - latest in Kage Baker's Company series. Deeply flawed but with some terrific moments. It's the "last" book in the series - we hit 2355, where everything stops, and find out why - and I'm not happy with it. Serious flaws, like all of a sudden a physical Dr. Zeus AI - WTF? But the dinner party Victor throws for Aegeus and Labienus is a wonderful scene, and exactly right. The real hero of the whole book is Preserver Lewis, under the hills with the little people - blind and reciting epic poetry, like Homer.
Heart Seizure by Bill Fitzhugh, the author of Pest Control - this guy writes funny, funny stuff. HS is about organ-napping, sort of. And the FBI. And family. And, well, it's a mess, but a wonderful, funny mess. Only complaint: our protagonists' mom, who has heart failure and is waiting for a transplant - Fitzhugh says her heart is only pumping at "45 to 60% of capacity" - well, an EF of 60% is normal, but if we assume he means 45 to 60% of THAT, then it's an EF of 27% to 36% - and at an EF that high, she wouldn't be on the transplant list, really. *My* EF is only 21%, for pete's sake.
Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? - a collection of the last page questions column from New Scientist magazine. So, a mixed bag - some serious, some not, erratic quality, but extremely full of trivia you never knew you wanted to know!
40 Days and 40 Nights by Matthew Chapman, about the Dover, PA evolution/"intelligent design" trial. A little lightweight - it's as much about Chapman's making a documentary of the trial as it is about the trial - but it's a good read nonetheless - a quick way to get an overview and find out a bit more about the people involved, not just what was said in the courtroom.
Dragon Lovers - a rather flawed anthology of four novellas/novelettes, in the fantasy romance genre. Not worth finishing, despite that two of the authors are actually pretty good writers when they stick to the Regency romance subgenre.
An Ice Cold Grave - latest in Charlaine Harris' series about a young woman who can find dead bodies - mostly murder mystery, slight amount of fantasy. It's OK - but not only the plot, but even much of the details, were awfully reminiscent of Kate Wilhelm's The Price of Silence, a non-fantasy mystery. Interesting side note: in the acknowledgments, Harris mentions Margaret Maron, and the place where Harper is working this time is Knott County - which see, next entry.
Hard Row - latest in Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott series - always good mysteries, and I like the characters, but there was rather more about vegetable gardening than I care about. As usual, touches on a few serious social issues, this time both spouse abuse and migrant labor camps.
Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1949-1984) - written in about 1984. Didn't agree much with the author's choices - too British, too New Wave, and he admits he flat-out doesn't like anything Asimov ever wrote, so he sort of picked a random Asimov since he felt it was obligatory.

There, that's about caught up. Skimmed through any number of magazines, of course, including a big lump of knitting and crochet magazines. And a couple of short story anthologies that were obviously forgettable, since I've forgotten what they were. Although I didn't agree with a lot of the "100 Best" above, the author's side comments and discussion reminded me of a few classics I wouldn't mind re-reading, so watch for upcoming old SF!

As in, discharge time Tuesday was supposed to be around 10 a.m., but I actually got let out of there around 5 p.m. So that was most of the day shot.

And today I still mostly slept - even moderate sedation, as opposed to general anesthesia, leaves a person groggy for a couple days till it all gets out of the system. And also gives one *very* strange dreams.

Right now, the refrigerator delivery guys are late. I guess late is the new on time.

Anyway. As expected, they did not manage to implant the 3rd lead. They did spend a little more time looking for ways to do it than they promised, thereby alarming squirrel_magnet and also thereby subjecting me to a bit more sedation than I wanted; I have amnesia for the whole day, although I supposedly woke up, ate, chatted with the doctors, etc. The extra exploration did give them a good picture for when, maybe six months from now, they go back in to do the third lead a different way. Apparently, the route to my coronary sinus is much tinier and twistier than normal, enough so to be interesting to a doctor who sees lots of them every week.

It was never on my list of goals in life to be on a chatty first name basis with a bunch of cardiac ward nurses - people who see me and ask about the rabbits, people I see and ask about their due date, etc. But that appears to be the situation in which I find myself - well enough acquainted with John, Gerry, Cookie, Pelagie, etc. to even recognize them in other hallways.

Since hospital food sucks, even at the great Johns Hopkins, I brought my own food with me, which everybody thought was funny, but which made me popular with my roommate, as she was finding the hospital food bland to the point of inedibility too. I brought low-fat yogurt, and low-fat chocolate pudding, and fresh fruit, and reduced-sodium cheese and low-sodium crackers, and good fresh-brewed iced tea, and just totally ignored the food the hospital served. And my menu was every bit as low-fat and low-sodium as their nutritionist-planned ones. There's gotta be a lesson there. Let's hear it for end-of-season nectarines and peaches!!

OK, that's enough for now. Itching occurs, and also I've made myself hungry by talking about food!

So, let's see.

( Wednesday I saw the doctor )

Thursday, I took the train up to NY. ( the details )

( music stores )

Public transportation that works and goes where one needs it to - a great concept.

Friday we hung around Sally's house and played music - her on her fiddle and me on the recorder, but then she let me use one of her violins, and it turns out I can still scratch out a tune. I wouldn't give you five cents for my technique, but the fingers still go pretty much where they're supposed to, and can move along at the pace of a waltz or a reel, though I miss a few notes trying to do something as fast as a jig. Then we went out to Sam Ash, another large music store. Where I bought more jazz duets, more Jewish music, and a book of Bach cello stuff transcribed for saxophone, which I am going to enjoy. Then to supper, and then I spent the rest of the evening starting to clean up and straighten out Sally's computer. She's a bit of a technophobe, and it's an old, cranky computer, a combination guaranteed to cause hellish aggravation to all concerned. Uninstalling some stuff, cleaning up the desktop, running Spybot Search & Destroy, stuff like that. Cranked it up from extremely slow to merely irritatingly slow.

( then, Saturday, more music )

I told Sally, that even though the price of train tickets is a little more than I could afford to do willy-nilly every month (for some odd reason, it's $80 from Balto. to NY, and $93 from NY back to Balto.), if she would please expend $700 bucks on a new computer that would be faster and more powerful than her $3000 old one, I would make the trip up there again, no matter when, to set it up for her from scratch, *before* she had a chance to accidentally do something weird to it. We shall see if she takes me up on that.

( tehn, Sunday )

Well, now back to rehearsing, reading, etc. MVCB has a concert at Leisure World tomorrow.

We didn't get to the State Fair today because one of the lenses popped out of my glasses; I glued it back in, but I also went over to Penney's to see the optometrist and get a new prescription. Which I then had to take elsewhere to get filled, because my right eye has gotten enough worse that it's no longer within the range of prescriptions that Penney's can fill. The right eye used to be -11.00 diopters (that's 20/1100), and the left -9.25 diopters; the left is only up to -9.75, but the right eye is now up to -13.00. Yes, that's coke bottle bottoms. So I took the scrip to a more full-service eyeglass specialty place, and three weeks from now I should have new glasses, and meantime I should be careful. And so we're gonna try and get up to the fair on Thursday. Gotta have my yearly dose of fancy chickens, ridiculous goats, pickle relish and chow-chow judging, quilts, and weird new products in the food pavilion. Then Friday we head up to Pittsburgh. Whee!

Oh, Sam, I figured out what to call that thing we've been calling a closet, which is really too tall to be an armoire or a wardrobe the way that Ikea calls it. The tallness is what suddenly lit up the lightbulb over my head: it's a highboy! (Sort of odd realizing that that and oboe are from exactly the same root.)

All the messages I got from you while I was in the hospital were wonderful.
I had just hit a temporarily whiny moment.

OTOH, let me point out that a great number of LJ "users" are people who have gotten a name so that they can respond with comments to other people, not so that they can actually run their own LJ. I suspect that if one eliminated from the stats all those who have only 1 or zero postings to their own journal, indicating that they are not on LJ for their own sake, that the median numbers and those percentages would change drastically.

My regular cardiologist, whom I saw Friday, says that I am handling all this with far more equanimity than anyone else he's seen in a similar situation. Well, I'm trying to. But I do have the occasional whiny moment, a bit of crankiness. I try not to let it get out of hand, as whining is quite pointless. One of the things I haven't found yet in our boxes is my little pocket copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations which I need to randomly flip through for a reminder dose of common sense. While I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a Stoic, an awful lot of Aurelius strikes me as a good way to lead a life. A good hearty dose of "this is the life you've got, now go out and use it and stop whining!" is what I need. Perhaps I'll go buy a different edition just to get a different translation and to have something until I find the other. (No, my Latin has never been anywhere near good enough to read him in the original.)

Things had been proceeding normally here, although as Kelly threatened a few days ago, the cheerful and funny patient did have occasional moments of tired and cranky as the week wore on. We thought she was on track to leave the hospital Thursday, but some procedural difficulties have interfered, delaying check-out until Sunday.

In order to continue intravenous antibiotics at home for the next several weeks, they wanted to install a PICC (Periferal Inserted Central Catheter, the long-term IV socket I mentioned earlier), but the team that does this was running a couple of days behind. They finally got to Kelly Friday morning, inserting a catheter tube into a big artery in the upper arm and running it through to near the heart, then verifying its proper placement with a big portable X-ray machine.

The only remaining issue now is the daily change of dressing on the wound left by removing the pacemaker, which I will be doing at home on weekends and other days that the in-home nursing visit does not occur. Although I have now seen this done in the hospital, I want to see it with the different set of supplies designed for in-home use. Since the first available visit at home for this is Sunday, Kelly will remain in the hospital, under professional care, until checking out Sunday morning.

It's late, and I need to get some sleep before going back in Saturday. Good night, all.

Hi, Mr BunRab back with another inside story from the world of big-city hospitals. Here's an approximate rendering of Kelly's notes to be delivered to her friends:

- - - - -
Sunday, early AM:
The excitement of the emergency room! Such as: the guy who runs the pod I was in--very funny; the federal prisoner in handcuffs with several Baltimore Police accompanying him, who had drunk a cup of ammonia cleaning fluid; the seemingly endless blood draws--must have been for party favors.

Finally out of emergency and settled into room 570 of the Cardiac unit--never a chance to sleep more than 45 minutes before another procedure, check-up, etc.

Sunday day:
Doctor #1, asking what happened. Then Dr #2, asking. Then Dr #3, asking. The visiting fellow and the cardiology fellow and the floor doctor and the infectious disease specialist, the infectious disease specialist's attending doctor, the doctor on call, probably a few people who happened to be in the cafeteria with any of the above...

I did get to finish Charles Stross' Atrocity Archive, very interesting. Very odd. A short story follow-up in the same book--I'll never look at traffic cameras the same!

I will admit that being cheerful and funny for all these doctors is tiring. I'm thinking about bitter and sarcastic as a change of pace.
- - - - -

I brought her a print-out of the comments to the previous post. She appreciated them and said you're all very nice people.

Subsequent to her message above, the nice men in white coats came and carried her away...to surgery, not the funny farm...where the operation to remove her ICD (Implantable Cardiovertor Defibrillator) was evidently straight-forward, without incident, and quicker than normal. The time between wheeling her away and the surgeon reporting back to me was only 95 minutes. The next 4 or 5 hours were not too scintillating while the surgical drugs were fading away, but by the end of the day, with 2 meals behind her, she was much closer to normal (her normal, not necessarily normal normal; for me, that's a good thing).

We're hoping a couple of relatives will be able to visit tomorrow.

It's not the flu. Seems to be an infection in the pacemaker site. Going to have to go back in for surgery Monday morning. 5% chance it's harmless serum, they drain it, I go home. 95% chance it's infected, they will remove the whole pacemaker, which happens to be somewhat more complex and riskier than putting it in was (details provided at some future point when I feel more like typing), and have to stay in the hospital for several days because of the risks and so that they can keep me on IV antibiotics. Crap crapcrapcrapcrapcrap.

Little ray of sunshine, aren't I?

Kelly will be away from the keyboard for a few days:
I need to be at Johns Hopkins at 6-freakin-30 Thursday morning for prep for surgery, and will be in the hospital overnight; I'm getting a new lead added to my pacemaker; Wednesday I will be very busy trying to do RL things that I shouldn't put off till after surgery, such as paying bills, getting a new octave key linkage pin put in my bari sax, and assorted other errands in the Montgomery County, area such that I may not get a chance to post on Wednesday (other than this 1:30 a.m. post) and so probably won't sit back down at the computer until Saturday. Just so's y'all know why I am out of sight for a bit.

The surgery is minor, but it's one of the reasons we moved up here - better technology, better doctors, so they can put in the third lead for bi-ventricular pacing that the doctors in Austin couldn't back when I got the ICD/pacemaker in 2003. Since it involved poking around just under the clavicle, it leaves the shoulder a bit sore for a few days, which may curtail both typing and knitting. Possibly even saxophone playing. Definitely riding - after I got the pacemaker in 2003, I wasn't allowed on the bike for 2 weeks, and I imagine this will be similar, since there will be stitches that they don't want rough pavement and a bouncy ride interfering with. There, that's more than enough detail, right?

Squirrel Magnet will be at the hospital with me, of course, and will have my cell phone, if any of you need to contact me.

Try not to do anything TOO newsworthy till I get back, OK?

Lovely day for a ride again, nearly 60 degrees. fadethecat, it actually hit 60 in Pittsburgh today - warmer than here. Ridiculous, ain't it? Nonetheless, I am more than halfway finished with your afghan. However, the sewing together is the slow part, much less fun than making the granny squares.

While we were at Panera, I noticed a little kid admiring my bike as he and his mom were coming in; on their way out I told the mom it was OK to let the kid touch the bike, and he was in absolute transports of joy. I'm a bad influence.

Symphony tix for tonight - Marin Alsop's conducting.
Sock-knitting session tomorrow night.
Youngest sister's newest baby's christening, up in PA, Sunday afternoon. If the weather keeps up like this, I wonder if we could ride up there instead of driving? Might be risky, if it cools off and precipitation condenses to rain once it gets dark, as we'd be coming home. I will have to think about the risk/benefit ratio there.

( boring medical stuff )

Oh yeah, magazines so far this week: New Yorker, New Scientist. Didn't get by the PO today, so tomorrow should see a whole bunch more mags and therefore more reading.