health – Our technological infirmity

Our backyard in early spring. I feel blessed to see it again

Goose and I have been quiet but it has been for a good reason. Last Friday after my annual physical at 10 AM, I was pretty happy. My blood sugar was at its best level since we moved here from the coast in February 2021. My blood pressure was 112/68 and I had lost a couple of pounds. I came back by the house and picked my wife, Glenda, for a trip to Winston-Salem. I neglected to have something to drink while home. Since I had been fasting that was a mistake. We decided on Culver’s for our meal because I want some good french fries since it is something we rarely have. I got my smashburger, order of extra crispy fries, and a Coke Zero which is also something I rarely have. After an enjoyable lunch we went across the street to Lidl to pick up a chicken to grill and a few other things. I had paid for the groceries, got Glenda in the car and was taking the cart back to the cart corral when I started feeling not so good. I stopped for a moment and rested by sitting on one of the concrete posts. Then I went back to the car put Glenda’s rolling walker in the back of the card and started sweating. It was a hot day, well into the eighties. I sat down in the driver seat and that is the last thing I remember until I woke up with Glenda pounding on me. I had passed out.

EMS was there shortly after I awoke. I was loaded into an ambulance and transported the short distance down Silas Creek Parkway to Novant’s Forsyth County Hospital. The only discomfort during the ride was them trying to start an IV on the bumpy road. They finally gave up.

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We spent the next six on seven hours in the Emergency Area while they ran tests. I was finally told that I didn’t have a heart attack but the enzyemes that show up prior to a heart attack were elevated. They suspect dehydration played a significant role in the event.

Wednesday afternoon, I was finally discharged after a battery of tests including a heart catherization and a transesophageal electrocardiogram (TEE). My heart rhythm came back on its own. “Heart catherization is a procedure where a thin, flexible tube (a catheter) is inserted into a blood vessel and guided to the heart to diagnose and/or treat heart conditions. The TEE is a type of echocardiogram (ultrasound of the heart) where a probe with a transducer is inserted through the mouth and down the esophagus to get clearer images of the heart structures, especially those at the back of the heart.” While both procedures sound scary, they are short and painless. They take probably 35 minutes for the two of the them if you ignore the 4:30 AM bath in some sort of special prep the night before each one. The nurse was careful to use warm water the first night. The next night it cold water which was no fun. I was also on Heparin drip with IV pole for three days. Getting on the drip is also no fun since they have test your blood ever six hours until they get it right. My hands look like purple pin cushions They eventually decided I didn’t need the Heparin.

What I do need is a new aortic heart valve since mine is calcified. They are proposing a “Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) which is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a narrowed aortic valve with an artificial valve.” It’s an alternative to open-heart surgery. We have several doctor’s appointments in the next few weeks and the hope is that sometime late this month a TAVR procedure will happen. I will go in on a Tuesday morning (TAVR Tuesdays I am told) have the hour long procedure then spend a day being observed before being discharged.

I have been told that within a month, I will regain much of the energy and strenght that seems to have faded from my aging (76 year-old) body. In the spring of 2018, my total mileage for the previous 12 months 1,530 miles. The next three years, I averaged 1,100 miles. The last three years, I have only average 600 miles. On July 3, 2017, I walked 10.5 miles in one day. I managed only a few quarter miles of swimming last summer, compared to several the year before.

There are more than enough excuses, more deskwork and less time but also a problem with a sciatic nerve. I have a goal to lose thirty pounds this summer. I already have lost six pounds which I credit to hospital food.

All this makes you look at life a little differently. I was able to finish up an office project with my 10,000 cell spreadsheet and the nice GIS maps that I do this afternoon. By Sunday night I hope to finish my taxes or as I say tie up an important loose end.

I have walked well over five times what I did any day in the hospital. I cooked my own breakfast and cooked the salmon cakes for dinner – I did not partake of the gravy. Strangely the high blood sugar that I have been battling seems to relatively stable right now. I haven’t had Metaformin in a week so that is also a good sign. I think being in a hospital long term can really suck the life out of you. I feel blessed to be home with my wife and tabby cats.

I am very grateful for my wife who cared enough to pound on me and for a lady named Judy Hill, a stranger, who was there to give her support when no one else would. I am impressed with Novant’s heart team and have no concerns about letting them try to fix me. The good news is that my arteries had no plaque so with a new valve, I might get back to some serious walking. My son, Michael, and been a champ in stepping up to do whatever needed doing including retrieving our car after an Uber ride and bringing me clean clothes at the hospital.

My primary care physician and I had agreed on having my life long heart murmur examined this summer. I think that might be one thing that I can take off the summer’s list. A few residents at the hospital even got to hear it. I can consider myself lucky to have been where care was not far away.

I did meet a trump supporter technician in the hospital. My conclusion is that evenyone who works in the hospital works such long hours (12 hour shifts) that they have no time to dive deep into the news. It took me two days to find someone who had watched the NCAA basketball final.

My last thought is what if we took all the people doing billing and collections and retrained them to work in hospitals? What a wonderful start that would be on better healthcare with universal covervage. I was once told there are more billing people at Duke’s Medical Center than there are doctors. That seems wrong and from how stretched the nurses were during my hospital stay, I know they could use some help.

A final word, I have a high dedcutible Blue Cross Health supplement. It has worked well because I haven’t been sick. Any paid subscriptions that I get will be going right into a saving account to cover what I think will be a substantial deductible. It is no fun getting sick and living on a fixed income.

I can assure everyone that I will continue writing and perhaps providing some real insight into what it is like being a heart patient. With some luck, I can convince my younger daughter to plant three or four tomatoes for me. It would be a wonderful gift to be able to look after them this summer.

Fun fact, I have had two overnight stays in a hospital, this most recent one of five days and another one night stay for a liver biopsy. It was the same hospital fifty-six years apart. I still remember waking up from my liver biopsy and a cute candy-striper told me that I had mail. It was a letter from the draft board ordering me to report for pre-induction physical. The hospital was in the middle of a field then.

Goose by the way says that I should nap through it all.

Years ago people ate what the cook, usually the mother of the family, put in front of them. When I was at boarding school, you ate what was on the table or went for the jar of peanut butter. It is interesting look back at not only what we ate but how our tastes have changed. Driving around the country in my teens taught me you could have ketchup with you eggs. Going to military school in Tennessee introduced me to grits and unfortunately powdered scrambled eggs.

A lot of today’s foods weren’t around when I was growing up. I still remember my first fast food restaurant, a Burger King, near Winston-Salem in the late fifties. Mostly we ate at home which in the South meant fried chicken on Sunday and lots of vegetables during the week.

My mother canned a lot, and she also froze some vegetables. We had relatives with bigger gardens and freezers than ours so we were never out of vegetables We ate a lot of Pinto beans and cornbread. I learned to love cabbage. Excitement when I was young was a Chef Boyardee Pizza kit. I didn’t have a real pizza until freshmen year in college.

After college on our farm in Canada, my wife and I were lucky to grow most of our food. I was the seventies and early eighties. There were hippies afoot but we were serious famers with tractors and lots of cattle. When we lived in Nova Scotia, we picked broccoli in five gallon buckets and rushed fresh picked corn to already boiling water in the kitchen. We gambled on tomatoes but ones ground on the shore of Nova Scotia were nothing like North Carolina tomatoes. New Brunswick had more heat which better tomatoes, more reliable corn and less broccoli.

Eating out when you were running a farm far from town and have three kids was maybe a trip to the one McDonald’s on a run to town or a stop by the Chinese restaurant that was usually deserted enough for the kids to run around and play. With a farm there was always beef in the freezer and my wife put up something north of one fifty jars of vegetables each year and froze plenty to go with that and fill our two big chest freezers. We hauled out of the cellar each year four times the number of potatoes that we ate.

My early years in North Carolina were different than when our kids were growing up. I never remember asking for something different than what was on the table. When our children grew up in Virginia, there were so many grilled cheese sandwiches and dippy eggs that I sometimes felt like a short order cook.

Our tastes started evolved as we started grilling salmon but we never gave up on canned salmon cakes which were always a staple when growing up. I never gave up on Codfish cakes, but my wife never took them and always maintained they were just an excuse to drink a lot of beer. When we could get good seafood, the years in Nova Scotia and our sixteen years on the North Carolina coast, fresh seafood was included as much as the budget allowed or my angling skill would put on the table.

I have always done some of the cooking. My wife claims that she has never cooked my breakfast in over fifty years of marriage. Even the very few times we had pancakes, I always cooked the breakfast meat. Now I am semi-retired, working only three or four days a week, and my wife is unable to do the shopping. I try watch my carbs and my wife has to watch what she eats because of her kidneys. We also have an adult mid-forties son living with us. He will not eat chicken, turkey, or fish. He eats limited amounts of pork, beef, and hotdogs. My wife and I love beans and soups. We have expanded beyond Pintos, eating Anasazi beans and whatever we see that catches our eye on Rancho Gordo’s site. We have older relatives who supply us with a localized version of Crowder peas which we call Joe’s peas since his family has been growing them and saving the seeds for over one hundred years.

We are also fans of cabbage, broccoli, and whatever else that can be sourced locally. My wife and I love local berries and all sorts of apples. Our son will only eat honey crisp apples preferably from Whole Foods. We grow our own tomatoes during the summer and readily admit to loving either plain tomato sandwiches or BLTs.

I am a huge fan of country sausage, country ham, and true country bacon, but the breakfast meat that I eat the most is turkey sausage which no one else in the family will touch. I also love country fresh eggs and rarely buy any from the grocery store.

I started baking sourdough bread in the seventies and my wife took over the bread baking in the eighties until we moved back to the states. I took up sourdough baking seriously again fourteen years ago. Recently to save time and mess, I have been using the Wildgrain par-baked frozen bread service. When I want a loaf of bread, I put a frozen sourdough loaf from the freezer into the toaster oven. It bakes for 21 minutes in the oven and finishes baking another twenty minutes outside the oven. It is very good and very little different in price from the bakery bread I sought out when I didn’t have time to bake.

I enjoy grilling, my favorite food to grill is half-chickens. We have consciously given up on the big steaks that I used to carve up into fillet mignon and a strip steak with a bone. I would buy a couple on special, my wife and son would eat the fillets. I would eat the strips, first hot and then cold sliced in wraps or on a salad. I am also a big fan of smoking food and chicken thighs would be my smoked food of choice.

This is North Carolina so a good third of meals out revolve around barbecue. We try to limit out eating out to one or two meals a week. My wife and I often split a Jersey Mike’s sub while our son can do in a whole one. We sometimes do fried flounder at one the local restaurants and maybe once every three months, I might get some Chinese food and try to go light on the rice.

My wife loves ice cream which I try to avoid but I did have a Dairy Queen cone with her the other day. It was the first Dairy Queen we had seen in the three years that we have been here. That Dairy Queen in Salisbury, NC has been operating in the same spot for 75 years.

Given all that, meal planning and the shopping to make those meals is challenging. My son is always up for a taco and since I have found some good low-carb wraps, I can live with that. My wife makes a great turkey meatloaf based on the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe, I can eat that hot or cold, breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Given all this history perhaps the hotdogs and steak at the top of the post make a little sense. My wife and son had hot dogs and I ate a grass-fed sirloin steak. Neither of them like sirloins. I have one eight ounce steak a month from the Pre company. It usually costs $7.99 on sale which I consider reasonable for the quality. It took me a little experimenting to get it right but I can now cook it perfectly to my taste. In the continuing effort to improve the quality of what we eat, I added red Quinoa to my spinach salad. Usually by this time of year I have switched to the spinach from our garden but something has eaten most of it and the weather hasn’t been kind to the rest of it.

However, Sunday April 28, we had a big lettuce harvest with a small bag of spinach. With an upcoming week of heat, we figured it was time to take what we could and hope for a better season next year. It turned out to be a pretty nice harvest.

This afternoon it was time for another food compromise. My wife was worn out from processing all the lettuce we picked. I had hoped to grill some chicken thighs but I ran out of time. I agreed to a simple dinner. We stuck a frozen baked ziti into the oven. My wife made fresh Caesar salad. A baked a loaf of sourdough from Wildgrain and made some crouton from hotdogs buns. Normally I would veto a pasta and fresh bread at night but I considering the circumstances I went for it. Tomorrow, I will really have to watch my carbs but not until after breakfast.