Going out of style

I am a cup-a-day coffee drinker, and I like to make that one cup the easiest way possible: with a filter in a cone holder, like this one.

Image from Amazon.

I’ve had my holder for many years and never gave it a second thought. I took it with me when I went to visit my parents because they have one cone in their house and we often want to brew two cups at the same time. Unfortunately, I forgot to pack it back home with me, so I’ve been improvising with a funnel for the past couple of mornings and getting no satisfaction because the coffee flows through too slowly and ends up being lukewarm by the time it finishes brewing.

But I wasn’t worried about getting another holder because that’s a garden-variety kitchen item that is stocked in every grocery store in town, right? I mean, they were the last time I bought one … which was probably 10 or 12 years ago. But apparently they have since gone out of style, at least among everyday coffee consumers.

I was stunned, really flabbergasted, that not only could I not find a holder at the local We Have Everything store, but also I failed utterly in my attempts to explain what I needed to two different (very young) sales associates. The first one thought I was looking for a replacement part for a coffee maker and suggested I go to Bed Bath & Beyond. The second just looked at me blankly and finally said, “I’m just trying to visualize what it is you’re talking about.” She apparently was unsuccessful and also unable to assist me.

I felt not only old-school but downright old by the time I left the store. If one cannot pick up a cone filter holder at the supermarket nowadays, things are moving too darn fast. Even coffee drinking is getting complicated.

Maybe if I went all over town on a mission to find one I could, but of course such a thing can be found online (and available in silicone, stainless steel or porcelain as well as plastic). That is probably the way to go. I guess buying things in person is another thing that’s going out of style.

Out of practice

I’ve been at my parents’ house for the past 2+ weeks supporting them both through my mother’s recent surgery and stroke. I just got back to my home last night, and quickly found that I’m out of practice already in a few things. Such as:

Yoga: Exercise is one of the two foundations of self care (the other being nutrition) but is always the first thing I abandon in a pinch. I rolled out the mat this morning because every single muscle in my body was begging to be stretched and it felt sooooo good.

Hehehe. This appeals to my editorial tendencies.

Regular meals: I always eat breakfast first thing in the morning no matter what else is going on, but I only managed the occasional lunch-at-noon and supper-at-five that I am accustomed to having at home. So I’m back on schedule with that.

I like to know when the chuck wagon’s due to open.

Walking the dogs: My poor little pooches spent hours and hours and hours alone in the house or in the car while I was running hither and tither, and with the exception of some minor damage to some paper products for which Reggie is almost certainly responsible, they were beautifully behaved house guests and travelers. As I said, exercise is the first thing to go; I had no energy left at the end of the day to even run them around the block. I didn’t sleep very well last night and felt none too zippy this afternoon, but I took them out for half an hour anyway and they both were ecstatic about it from the moment I started lacing up my shoes to go.

They were both kind of like this, but with more barking. Much more barking.

Daily blogging: Boy howdy, have I missed my posting! But I didn’t want to get into all the details of my mother’s condition or her progress (which has been slow and steady), and the daily round of ordinary caretaking—visiting mom, cleaning house, doing laundry, buying groceries, providing regular updates to family and friends—just isn’t interesting enough for daily blogging. You kind of had to be there, as they say.

I’m happy to be back in my own little groove in my own little house, but of course I am still very concerned about how both my parents are doing and I will be keeping as close track of them as I can from 500 miles away until I can clear my calendar to go back to visit for another two weeks (hopefully in mid-June). They have plenty of people around to help them, but my dad is holding down the fort at home by himself and an extra set of hands to help with the everyday stuff is always welcome.

Here’s my family—dad, mom, me and my sister—a couple of nights ago.

Aren’t we just the cutest?

Cheering for my mother

This is my mom on the day before her birthday last year, having a laugh with her dog, Sunny.

Isn’t she just the cutest?

Mom is an artist in several media, including oil painting, tole painting, watercolor painting and pastels. She’s a gym rat who has clocked more than 600 workouts at Curves in the past two and a half years. She’s a former RN and massage therapist, a Reiki master, a gardener, a cook, a collector of museum-quality crystals and gemstones, a believer in angels, and a fan of all forms of spiritual practice that involve compassion and loving-kindness. She’s been devoted to my dad for more than 50 years. She is a lively, beautiful, kind, funny, generous, compassionate woman and an amazing mom. I don’t mind telling you, I totally hit the jackpot in the mom lottery this time around.

Me and mom, July 2010.

Two weeks ago, she woke up and was unable to move her legs. She called the paramedics, who took her to the emergency room. Many hours of tests and anxious waiting later, she went into surgery to relieve pressure on the nerves in her spine from herniated discs and lumbar stenosis. Just as it appeared she was pulling out of the dense fog of anesthesia from this surgery, it became apparent that she had suffered a stroke that affected both her legs (the left leg in particular) and prevents her from walking. What had been a fairly straightforward orthopedic case with an expected recovery time of a few days suddenly became a neurological case with no clear answers or predictable outcomes.

She spent 10 days in the hospital, attended and cheered almost around the clock by her family and friends, and today my mother is rehabbing in a skilled nursing facility, working hard each day to regain the use of her legs and return to her normal life. Every day brings another small victory and success, and her therapists promise her she will walk again. That is what we are cheering for as well.

My father is also a stroke survivor since December 2009, so we know how this goes in my family. The main effect of his stroke was on his speech, which is still recovering its former fluidity, but he walked out of the hospital one week after it happened and has never had any significant mobility issues. Because my mother’s mobility is mainly affected, she is likely to have some issues with it for years to come.

It is fair to say that my mom got sick gradually, then suddenly. What has smacked us all in the face, though, is the sudden part—how life as we’ve known it all changed in an instant, and returning to that life exactly as it was before is not an option. This has given us the opportunity to reexamine and recalibrate our relationships with each other, one by one. My brother and sister and I, always formerly at slightly awkward cross purposes in different ways for different reasons, are solidly united now in the service of a single mission: to keep our parents together, in their own home, as safe and as comfortable as possible for as long as possible. My parents, always close and growing ever closer over the years, have pared their priorities down to only one: being together.

We all have a lot of work to do to adjust to this new life, and not everyone is going to be ready to move forward in the same direction at the same time. We’re talking about the options for rehab, for recovery, for new living arrangements for my parents that could help to ensure their safety and comfort in the years ahead. There will be hard choices to make and some hard losses, but there will also be opportunities. Sometimes letting go is not so much about the things you lose but rather about the freedom you gain by no longer having to care for, maintain, clean, insure and safeguard all that stuff. My hope for my parents is that they will be able to let go of the things that no longer serve them, and in so doing they will gain freedom from obligation, risk and fear for as long as possible.

We are all cheering for that.

Real-world medicine is nothing like “Gray’s Anatomy”

I’ve learned the hard way this week why they call what physicians do “practicing medicine.” Without a lot of tests, a thousand questions, and a lot of watching and waiting, they have no idea what is wrong with many of the patients they see. Every person’s body is a different and unique combination of strengths, weaknesses, anomalies and unknowns that make accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment anything but straightforward. Often it’s just a matter of guessing among several options and hoping for the best.

Television doctors ruin our expectations of real-world doctors by giving each patient their complete attention, ordering tests that are done right away, then sitting there with the tech looking at the MRI screen or the CT scan or the EKG or the X-rays and determining on the spot precisely what is wrong with the patient and how they are going to fix it. Which they do, by the end of the hour, every week. They don’t perform surgeries that fail to fix the problem. They don’t order test after test looking for something they can’t find. They never doubt that they have the power to make everything okay, and they make us believe it, too.

Damn you, McDreamy, you make it look so easy and you look so good doing it!

TV doctors never leave the families hanging—at least not for one moment longer than they have to before they walk out of the operating room, strip off their skullcaps and deliver the good news to the anxious family with a tired smile and a handshake. In real life, they simply disappear after the surgery and good luck finding them anywhere in the hospital for the next 24 hours. They talk a lot about possibilities, make a lot of guesses, and run a lot of tests, but they really don’t know what caused this symptom or that complication, let alone how they’re going to fix it, except to “wait and see” some more.

What you don’t see on TV is the seemingly endless waiting, sitting and pacing by the patient’s family members and friends as the hours drag by—hours of surgery, hours of recovery, hours of tests, hours of expecting the surgeon to answer his page. The meals missed, the bad coffee consumed, the snatches of sleep caught in a bony chair in an empty room, the endless worry and fatigue of the loved ones who can do nothing but wait and see what the next test shows, wait for the attending to look at the chart, wait for the surgeon to check in and provide any kind of evaluation or prognosis or even answers to their own thousand questions, all of which really boil down to just these two: 1) What has happened? and 2) What is going to happen?

Television medical shows are not about the patients who are sick and the people who love them, they’re about the doctors who are depicted as miracle workers and heroes when in real life they’re overworked, overtired, ordinarily fallible human beings who simply don’t have the time to give any one of their patients their full attention, let alone care about their patients’ families. You also never see on TV the family and friends at a distance, their cell phones never out of their hands day or night as they wait for a call or a text to tell them what is going on with someone they love 500+ miles away. Nothing resolves in an hour, a day, even a week. Questions are not answered. Fears are not assuaged. And the waiting goes on and on.

Real life medicine can never be as clean, quick, simple and unambiguous as television medicine, but nevertheless one wishes that in real life there were less practicing of medicine and more precise delivery of medical care.

---

 as they say in the movies, “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

 

Focusing elsewhere

I probably won’t be posting much this week because of some serious health issues in my family that are taking most of my attention and keeping my focus elsewhere. So if I’m missing from your Reader or Inbox, that’s why.

We are hopeful things will work out “for the highest good for all concerned,” as my mother is fond of saying.

This photo is for my mom and dad.

Garden of weedin’

Such a nice day we had today, just a tad over 80 degrees with plenty of sun. A delightful day to be outside working in the yard.

Unless, of course, your boy dog has a touch of the trots overnight and wakes you up no fewer than five times for an urgent run to the backyard and you’re so darn tired that all you want to do is go back to bed and sleep through that nice sunny day. Oh yes. I was up and making my coffee at 7 a.m., reluctantly, and to say I am not a morning person doesn’t even begin to cover it. But I could see a lovely day coming up and I really, really didn’t want to waste it.

Even though my eyes were gritty all day from lack of sleep, I suited up in my work duds, slathered on the sunscreen and tackled the worst of the weeds in my back yard. I started my assault with the electric string trimmer, but I’m not good at making consistent passes with it so I plowed up a lot of dirt and made more of a mess than anything else. So I switched to the hula hoe, which proved to be pretty strenuous work with, again, a lot of dirt plowing. The easiest and cleanest way to get the weeds up, as it turned out, was just to get down on my knees and pull them by hand.

I don’t know what they’re called, the ones that colonize the bare spots in my yard every spring. They have little buds on them that are soft and tender now but that dry out in the summer and become quite spiky, which presents something of a hazard to the dogs’ paws (if you’re wondering, no, they’re not goat heads; if they were, I’d kill them with fire).

---

Update, April 28: After much Googling (which I was too tired to do last night), I’ve determined that the weed is called the bur buttercup. So now we know.

---

They have super-shallow roots that make them the easiest weed to pull on the planet. One just has to get down to their level to do it, and god knows that stooping and kneeling are really hard on bodies of a certain age and, ahem, girth.

But it had to be done (fortunately, only once a year because they don’t regenerate during the growing season) and I am the only one to do it so I did. I reformatted a camera card prematurely and lost my before photos, but here are the after photos of the two patches I cleared. Both were completely covered with a 4-inch-deep carpet of weeds, all of which filled two 30-gallon yard bags.

The far corner of my yard that gets full sun exposure all day and would be an ideal spot for a raised bed or container garden if I had a green thumb. Which I do not, sadly, so it’s pretty much just a doggie latrine.

What a real estate agent would call a ”small RV parking pad” on the side of my garage (I call it a barren waste of space; I’d rather my garage were wider instead). It’s on the north side and half-shaded like this for most of the day so I haven’t considered it to be a good garden spot, either. It sure does grow weeds well, though, so perhaps I’m misunderestimating it.

Between the warm sun, the hard labor, and last night’s brief and fractured sleep, I am plumb tuckered out right now. I hope Rudy has worked out whatever is going on with him and we can all enjoy uninterrupted dreams tonight!

Into the light

My studio photography efforts have been disappointing me lately. I can’t seem to get the crisp, vibrant images I used to get, and it has been almost giving me a complex. I’m an experienced photographer and I know how to use my equipment, so why is every image coming out muddy and fuzzy?

Today was one of the nicest spring days we’ve had yet, so I hauled my tripod and photo cube out into the back yard and set them up under the mother of all studio lights, the sun. I grabbed a few things off my desk just for giggles, not intending to create any kind of art but rather just to see whether my camera and I are still capable of producing the kind of results of which I can feel proud.

Fortunately for my peace of mind, we can. The problem in my studio is simply inadequate lighting that necessitates really long (1-second or longer) exposures to compensate for the small aperture I need to achieve sufficient depth of field. In the sunlight, no worries—I could stop it all the way down and still shoot at 1/250th. So I fooled around a bit and came up with several shots that restore my faith in both my camera and my eye by achieving the objectives I wanted: clarity and vibrancy.

Click on any image to see a larger version.

First, a set of mini Sharpie markers.

I love the intensity of the colors.

I also shot several other small items that aren’t worth posting here, then decided to move on to see what I could find in my garden (such as it is).

A single tendril of this year’s edition of my unkillable clematis vine establishes a firm grip on the trellis.

I can’t stand the damned things, everywhere in my yard. But they are kind of pretty at this stage, I have to admit.

And last but not least, I had to take some close-ups of the dogs. Rudy was the star of the show today; Reggie just wouldn’t hold still long enough to get a great shot.

Next week, I’ll head out to the camera store to see what I can do to brighten up my studio, short of installing skylights.