Mid-Life Crisis

So you know that the Cap'n wants my car. Or more generally, he wants something sexier than a Volvo. He is a pilot, and pilots have certain unique needs. One is watches. Most of them very large. I cannot tell you how many watches that my husband has gone through in the last twenty-five years, and what is he wearing now? A self-winding Hamilton that he bought before we were married. Oh, the others are around. I learned early not to buy him nice watches, because he likes to take them apart, so many of the other are around, disassembled, in drawers and on trays, in various parts of the house.

So, he has been looking for a Jaguar XJS for some months, maybe years. He says there comes a time in a man's life that he needs twelve cylinders. I told him that between my six and his six, he already has twelve. Evidently that doesn't count.

Last weekend, we went to visit an1985 gray XJS HE in a neighboring town. It was owned by a former Jaguar mechanic, who had kept the thing in really very good shape, replacing parts with OEM parts; even the muffler is a British Leyland and not a Midas. It had not been driven in five years, but it had been started and moved weekly. It had no tags, it had no inspection stickers, it had no insurance. And the Cap'n loved it.

So, he bought it, and delivered it to his trusty mechanic José, and took the afternoon off for tagging and registration and such. He hopes to drive it to work later this week.

This is the kind of car that I used to call the "sorry about your penis" sort of car. I suppose I will have to stop doing that.

We are now a two-Jaguar family. The cost of both cars put together does not equal five figures. The Cap'n's philosophy is that when buying a car, one may either pay a bank or pay a mechanic. He prefers paying the mechanic.

Bat Mitzvah

My brilliant niece was called to Torah as Bat Mitzvah last weekend.

All the relatives, goyische and not, all showed up.

She had two great-aunts and great-uncles named Jack. She has two aunts named Ellen, two aunts named Carol.

But only one has a good ship.

She was brilliant, and magnificent in her torah portion, and in the haftorah as well. Her mother was brilliant for the half-second of blessing that she got through before losing her breath, her voice and her tears. Her father was appropriately amusing.

The party afterwards was a blast, and we were honored to light one of her candles on her cake.

Just to demonstrate what a good patient I am, I offer evidence that I did a Ventavis treatment just after dancing a hora.

To further demonstrate what a good patient I am, I had my annual right heart cath the week before we left, and my pulmonary artery pressure is down by two-thirds what it was at diagnosis! Still nearly twice what it should be, but way, way better than it was a couple of years ago!

We drove to the occasion in the mighty Jaguar. The Cap'n again lusted for it. He cannot have her, however. We navigated home using the kewl little Bluetooth GPS receiver that beams our position into the phone, which then actually gives us oral directions from a lovely feminine voice I've chosen to call Genevieve GPS. The Cap'n argues less with Genevieve's directions than he does mine.

My Confession

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

It has been an eternity since my last confession.

I have envied, and I have not loved my neighbors as I love myself.

Yesterday, I had two appointments. One with a dentist who is going to make me an appliance to keep me from having sleep apnea. One of my co-workers asked if that meant that my tooth would get a refrigerator. I told her I hoped not.

Anyway, I went to the dentist and he talked for two solid hours, never looked at a tooth, never looked at a gum, just talked about what these appliances are about, and that re-designing one's airway can do wonders, even cure autism. I'm sure that this may be true, but it will be a deep disappointment to those who are convinced it's caused by vaccinations. He has a website if you're actually interested.

The only time he actually touched me was when he took my check. Oh, and I have another two hour appointment next Wednesday. Maybe he'll look at a tooth then. Or maybe not.

Then, in the afternoon, I had an MRI for the sciatica I have been experiencing since returning from my father's funeral. If you have never had the pleasure of an MRI, let me help you prepare yourself for it. Lay flat on your back, and have some one shove you under your bed, then ask them to begin sawing 2 x 4's with a circular saw nearby. You may not move. This will go on for at least twenty minutes.

They didn't tell me it would take twenty minutes. I figured the folks that I heard in there for twenty minutes were getting their whole bodies done, not just their lumbar spine. Oh, NO!

I laid down on the track (just like the track I laid on for a CT scan, a V/Q scan and a thallium stress test). They gave me yellow foam earplugs. I observed that the aperture of the tube was rather small. They shoved me into a tube that was about the same size as a coffin. I kept my eyes closed the entire time, because I knew if I opened them I would freak clean out. Then the noises started. Like jackhammers, and steam shovels, and all manner of noisy machine sound. I was laying with my hands clasped across my belly, and I made the mistake at one point of flexing my hands, and my knuckles grazed the top of the coffin. Finally, they stopped. I breathed easier. A voice came from behind me, "Are you okay, ma'am?'' "Yes! Are we finished?"

"No, ma'am, we have about ten more minutes."

TEN MINUTES??? TEN MINUTES IN THE BOWELS OF HELL??? WHAT DO YOU THINK I'M MADE OF????

"Okay, sweetie, we have about five minutes, then I'll talk to you again." I screamed "WAAAAAAIT!!!" but the machine sounds started again. I screamed, I cried, I sang parts of Mozart's Requiem. Nobody could hear me, so who gave a damn if I got the lyrics wrong.

"Sweetie" came back up and said I had about three more minutes, she was going as fast as she could. She was lying, I know, but at least she had the human decency to lie to me in a way that I could not verify, since she had taken my watch.

And then it was over. And the tube vomited me out, like Jonah.

Very slowly, I sat up, recovered my spectacles, and walked very slowly back to the dressing room, where I replaced my trousers, my bra and my jewelry. My precious timepiece.

I walked out to my car, and opened the passenger door to put my oxygen in the front seat. About that time, a man, older than me with a small, Asian female companion, walked out and said "You opened your door against my car." I looked at it and said, "No, it's not touching your car." He said, from twenty feet away, "I'm looking at it." I stood up and looked at him and said "No, my ass is between you and the door, so what you're looking at so intently is my ass, and if I were your lady here (gesturing grandly), I'd be wondering why you were looking so intently at my ass!"

I closed the door, walked around the car and got into the driver's seat. He stood speechless.

Lord, keep folks from messing with me after I have had an MRI.

That's all.

Amen.

The Funeral

The minister at my parent's tiny country church is a high school history teacher. A pleasant sort of fellow, not complicated, but the sort of fellow who would satisfy the needs of a poor, rural congregation.

When my father died, the minister was in bed with suspected pneumonia. My mother said that she wasn't sure he would be able to officiate at the funeral. I told her not to concern herself, that we (my father's children) would be completely capable of conducting a funeral. In fact, I have planned and taken part in a number of funerals, though not my father's, for a number of years when I was studying for ordained ministry. (This didn't happen... long story)

I sent her a proposed outline for such a service. Very broad... like Opening Prayer, hymn, scripture reading, eulogy, scripture reading, hymn, homily of some description, hymn, prayer and dismissal. She replied that she thought that the minister would be recovered sufficiently, and that since he had been a part of their lives for the last 28 years, he would want to be involved, and probably nothing as formal as what I had proposed.

Formal?

The problem is that my mother is genetically unable to plan. Anything. Retirement, weddings, graduations, college, all passed by without any to-do, or any planning. We all mostly put ourselves through college, which is not a bad thing altogether, but we paid for our own weddings, our own graduate schools, our own everything. We also began to contribute surreptitiously to a retirement account for our parents when they were in their fifties, because they weren't doing anything Somehow my mother was incapable of planning (yea, even expecting that they would happen) for any of these life events. And my father was out of the loop on most of these things. He was never actually aware of anything beyond the day-to-day knowledge that we had enough cash on hand for milk and bread. He actually said to me, after being homebound for a number of years, "I never DREAMED that anything like this could happen." Evidently he believed in the tooth fairy, as well.

So, the minster got better and he did the service. My mother's cousin Jack, who come from a family of singers on his father's side, as well as a good number of singers on we, his mother's side, led the singing, and chose some fairly standard funeral fare for this group.

The little church was packed with maybe 200 people. I saw folks I hadn't seen in a lifetime, including a baby I babysat in high school who had just turned 35 on Groundhog Day.

The "tradition" in this community is to open the box at the end of the service for a final goodbye. Not for me. I told my mother as much, but evidently she has to live among these folks and they just would have never forgiven her for leaving the box shut. So, as I saw them opening the box, I exited, stage right.

I went into the tiny lobby, and following me and my beloved husband was my beloved oldest friend, who is good to have around at times like these. We managed to summon enough dignity not to do anything publicly odd, and went around to the side door to greet the souls exiting after their final goodbye. We were goood.

After everyone exited, they loaded up everything and headed for the graveyard. It's a tiny graveyard, overlooking the interstate, and the plots are only $100 so local municipalities have buried some of their indigents there, too. We lined up piously behind the white hearse, and started the two-mile drive down there.

The only landmark between the little town and the graveyard is, sitting on the nearby Interstate, a casino owned by the Citizen Potawatomi tribe. It is the only structure nearby, with a Jumbotron that you can see for miles before you get there. The Cap'n says that it compares favorably with some of the medium-quality Las Vegas casinos he has visited, but since I'm not a casino-person, I don't know. However, Wayne Newton was there on Valentine's Day. They also have something called "Freestyle Cage Fighting" and Vicki Lawrence ("Mama" of "Mama's Family") is appearing in April. It's HUGE. It's GAUDY. And as we quietly, reverently drove by, the lead car, driven by my brother and containing my mother, two brothers, niece and sister in law, turned on their turn-signal, as if to enter the casino and play a little Texas Hold'Em. In the second car, driven by my brother in law, and containing my sister, my two aunts and an uncle, turned on his turn signal as well.

We, being tasteful sorts, did not follow their lead. And we were sure that it would confuse all those behind us.

We were not the worst people at the funeral.

Requiem

My father died this morning.

I'm glad he's not sick any more. I'm sorry that he spent the last ten years of his life sitting in his house. I think his doctor did not do him a service by looking at him and seeing an old man who needed palliative care, instead of encouraging him to rehabilitate, and teach him to use the tools he did have. Instead, he told him things like "I'm surprised you're still alive."

I think if anyone told me that, I'd shoot myself, just to ruin their surprise.

He was born in coal mining country. My grandfather was a sometime miner, sometime truck driver, sometime gas station attendant. I never met my grandmother. She divorced my grandfather when my father was a little boy. He was raised by a series of stepmothers, aunts, grandmothers, with a lot of cousins. He lost a sister when she was very young. I have seen one picture of that sister, and she looks like my baby pictures. She had "infantile paralysis," which can actually mean anything. Properly, it refers to polio, but she appears to have some sort of neurological deficit, from what one can tell from a seventy-year-old photograph. He has one sister, one half-sister and one half-brother surviving. (His half-brother has a stepson whom I refer to as my half-step-cousin.)

He left school in the ninth grade, and went to work. He joined the Air Force at seventeen, and went to South Korea and unloaded cargo planes. He returned to the US and married my mother in 1954. He took his GI benefit and learned to be an electrician, which he did for most of the rest of his life. He belonged to an amateur band for many years, where he played the guitar and sang harmony.

He like country music, the Dallas Cowboys, Oklahoma football, Kentucky basketball, coconut cream pie, jalepeño peppers, greasy chili, gravy on everything, and the most important activity in his life was attending church. Three times a week, unless there was something special going on at the church, and he'd be there in addition.

He was a simple fellow, lots of black and white, not a lot of shades of gray in his understanding. Nuance and subtletly completely escaped him.

He is already missed.

Time Marches On

I didn't even recognize the second anniversary of my diagnosis. Of course, I remembered it when I saw the date, but you, my vast reading public, did not hear from me. This must be getting routine.

My dad just came home from the hospital this week, a bit sadly, with care from Hospice. He did not recover well from the cold that sent him to the ICU after New Years, but when I called this morning, he answered the phone. He isn't himself, because he has a hard time remembering relationships (he called my brother "your uncle") and he is easily confused. But he can get to the computer from his bed, and play solitaire, and he can play his guitar a little. I don't know if he can sing. He used to sing constantly. He burst forth in song at odd moments; in the middle of breakfast, at my sister's rehearsal dinner, while driving down the road. Now his wind is too precious for song.

I went to see my doc for my second anniversary present. I saw my doc, my NP, and some docs from the National Institutes of Health, who are working with the PH patients at my clinic. Everything looks fairly normal, 400 meter six minute walk, no problem with my liver, and I appear to be fairly stable. Hooray!

NIH doesn't do a lot of stuff on their campus treatment-wise, but they do a LOT of clinical trials there. So, if you have cancer, or diabetes, or IPF, or PH, you may go there for studies or trial treatments, but not for a long-term treatment. The nice part about it is that they pay for all the tests, so, for example, if I were in a trial there, they would do a right heart cath, and an echocardiogram and lots of bloodwork, and my insurance would not be billed and I wouldn't have any co-pays. However (and isn't there always a however, even if there's no but?), there are some side effects to some of these treatments.

The doc talked to me about taking part in some of the studies. I was asked to be in a study last year, but it turns out I'm too healthy for it. A great reason to be rejected! However, there are some other studies coming up that I may be eligible for. He said that the one he thought would come up next is a mild 16 week course of Taxol (the breast cancer chemo drug). He said Taxol works by killing fast growing cells, which the overgrown endothelium and the plexiform lesions in my pulmonary vasculature are made of. "Oh, by the way, for that reason it may also make your hair fall out." He just kind of dropped that one in passing. I'm just vain enough that this may be an issue. But who knows? Maybe starting from scratch will be an improvement? And maybe I'll find out how gray I actually am... eek!

Today I went to church and helped out with a confirmation class. I made a Powerpoint presentation, modeled after a Jeopardy Game, with answers and questions about the Old Testament. I made the questions too hard for this generation of young Christians in formation. Next week, we'll have the Who Wants To Be A New Testament Millionare? game, and a much easier version.

Afterward I came home and picked up my husband and we had an elegant lunch at a very elegant little joint in downtown Old Town. Today was a busy day for him on the phone, evidenced by the fifteen minute phone call he took in the middle of lunch. Then we went down the street to my new favorite shoe store, and he bought a pair of decent dress shoes (he always buys whatever he can find at the discount closeout store), and sadly, they had a sale on and I bought two new pairs of shoes, one a pair of Icon ballet slippers with Botticelli's Venus on the Halfshell tattooed into the leather, another a pair of Zeeta clogs (cork sole like Birckenstock's), black leather with gold skull and crossbones printed. They look like shoes that I need on the boat in case pirates attack! He got Ecco perforated wing tips. Both of mine were cheaper than one of his...

I realize that I don't think that I've told you that the Captain has a new job. He has worked for more than twenty years for the Federal Aviation Administration, first in Orlando for twelve years, and now in Washington. Just before we went to England in July he was selected to be the manager of the accident investigation division of the agency. The division's territory is worldwide, for US air carriers, and for all US-manufactured aircraft or componants (for example, some of the airplanes built in Canada and Europe have engines built in the US). And he gets beeped and called for every accident or incident of any consequence. Today he was beeped nineteen times before lunch. He doesn't have to respond to all of them, but they do let him know about all of them (by text message at the beep). Sometimes he has to respond, and he has a staff of eleven very experienced, very expert and very respected investigators who are on call 24/7 to hop on the next plane to Timbuktu, if necessary. One of his guys has been in London for the last couple of weeks, looking at the possible causes for the British Airways plane that landed short of the runway at Heathrow. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured in that one, and fortunately for the investigator, he's in London and not in Timbuktu.

We get a lot of phone calls in the middle of the night. They don't scare me anymore. Especially when I see the phone number of the communications center on the caller ID on the phone.

A Christmas from Heck

My beloved mother has visions of Norman Rockwell every Christmas.

She experienced a perfect Christmas when she was about five years old, and has spent my entire lifetime trying to recreate it. And when it never happens, she is invariably disappointed. And lets us all know about her disappointment.

She has crapped on my Christmas every single year of my life.

So, knowing this, I got on the plane to go home for Christmas. We were delayed at the airport about four hours for departure, so I got to sit and recharge my oxygen concentrator batteries that I would need en-route. I have learned that when you have a large amount of medical stuff you're hand-carrying on the plane, it is easier to get through security in a wheelchair, whether you need one or not, because they then expect the unexpected from you. Therefore, I had a wheelchair at the gate, but no place nearby for my husband to sit. He grabbed a seat elsewhere, and would telephone me from time to time to see how I was doing. Pretty funny, actually.

I keep audio books on my phone to listen to in doctor's waiting rooms. While waiting at the airport, I listened to the first half of Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower," the story of the settlement of New England through King Philip's War. It was very enjoyable, especially since the reader was Edward Hermann.

When we finally boarded the plane, it was a nonstop flight to our destination. I was boarded in the beginning so I could get situated with my oxygen concentrator without holding up anyone else. A young woman came in and sat down next to me. She took my oxygen hose between her forefinger and thumb and said "What's this for?" I told her, and she said, "I understand. I have something called Tetralogy of Fallot, and my pulmonary valve is a pig valve." She did indeed understand; Tetralogy of Fallot is one of the heart problems that causes Pulmonary Hypertension. We chatted about pulmonary rehabilitation, and the gratitude that one gains from having a life-threatening illness. I told her about a young woman of my acquaintance who was very immature and unrealistic about her condition and her prognosis, and what she needed to do to survive. The young woman gave me her business card and said if I felt like it, I could ask her to e-mail with this young woman to give her encouragement. When I looked at her business card, I realized that I had known the young woman's parents in another lifetime.

This is a very small world.

When we arrived, we were twenty minutes behind a small ice storm. The Captain rushed off the airplane to make sure that we still had a rental car, since the rental desk closed 20 minutes after our late arrival. I gathered up all of my stuff, of which there was a ton, and left the plane, debating on whether I needed a wheelchair. Fortunately, the airport terminal is small, and I didn't have far to walk . I got down to the baggage claim/car rental area and discovered that due to the lateness of our arrival, there were no more cars in the class I had reserved. So, instead of an Chevy Impala, we had a Benz CLS 550. To drive on the ice. Forty miles.

We did okay.

We went straight to the hotel. Hotel, you ask? I have discovered in the last ten years that going to my mother's house (notice this is my MOTHER'S house, not my parents' house) is much more tolerable if I have a place where I can go chill out for a while every night. And my own bathroom.

My brother and his family had arrived earlier in the day, and were staying at the house. My sister and her family were to arrive a few days later. My youngest brother still lives at home, at the tender age of 43. They were all staying in a three bedroom house. And actually, that meant that eight people were sleeping in the spare room, the living room and the dining room.

I have a hotel room, I have a hotel room.

When my sister arrived, the baby had a cold. By the time we left, we all had a cold. I stayed in bed for a week. My father, who has advanced COPD, ended up spending a week in ICU, and is still in the rehabilitation portion of the hospital.

I wanted to cook Christmas dinner, because (a) I'm a pretty good cook, (b) my mother keeps complaining about cooking, saying that she doesn't like to cook, and yet she won't turn loose of the reins, and (c) I could go buy top quality things that my frugal mom would never do.

I went into the nearby city to the best grocer in town, and bought a leg of lamb, boned, and fresh herbs with which to stuff it, fresh bread, the makings for bread pudding (including the forbidden ingredient for the whiskey sauce), a dozen or so big Honeycrisp apples, fresh turnips, parships, rutabagas, celeriac, carrots and leeks for a root vegetable roast.

The thing I hadn't counted on is that Mother's oven will not hold an even temperature. I speculate that this may have something to do with her dislike of cooking. So, on Christmas morning, she got up and put nine pounds of butt roast in the oven, and it came out slightly burned and like shoe leather. I put the small leg of lamb in for three hours and it was still raw when I removed it. Same temperature. Oh, and the vegetables came out the same raw way. I nuked them for a few minutes to some result, but still not what I had hoped for.

We have offered to get the range fixed. We've offered to replace it. "Oh no," she says. "I hardly ever use it." DOES IT OCCUR TO YOU THAT THE REASON FOR THAT IS THAT IT HAS NEVER WORKED CORRECTLY???

I have a hotel room, I have a hotel room.

We opened all our presents. Santa brought me a shiatsu massager chair cushion thingy. My husband got fleur de lis cufflinks and studs from Mignon Faget. I bought Mother and youngest brother blood glucose meters so that they had no excuse for not being on top of their diabetes. We bought Dad a radio with a hand-crank generator, so that they could have contact with the outside world next time they lost electricity for three days (which had happened in December).

Aunts and uncles and cousins and friends came to visit. More people in a small house.

I have a hotel room, I have a hotel room.

Once when the baby was screaming, the girls were bickering and the five year old was doing cartwheels in the living room, I looked across the table at my brother and softly sang, "I have a hotel room, I have a hotel room." He made an obscene gesture toward me. By day three, he also had a hotel room.

Two days after Christmas, we departed for home early in the morning, and arrived home in time to go pick up the beagles from their Christmas camp.

I stayed in bed almost all of the next week, through New Year's Eve and beyond. I'm feeling almost normal now.

We've changed insurance carriers and I've spent the last week or so on the phone changing everything over. So far, one of my drugs is four days late arriving, and I had none to spare, so we shall see what the result is soon. I have an appointment with the PH doc next week. Wednesday of this week is my two-year anniversary since diagnosis. I will have my annual right heart catheterization in the next couple of weeks, and a new set of pulmonary function tests. I'm certainly better than I was before treatment. We'll see how much better my numbers are then.

No Apnea

Evidently.

I did a split-night sleep study last night and it was dreadful. In a split-night, they stop you in the middle of the night if you have sleep apnea and fit you with a C-PAP machine for the balance of the night. They didn't do that for me, so I must not have any apnea. I will have a debrief of the study in a couple of weeks.

The attendant was very pleasant and cheerful. And clueless. The room was a little stuffy, and she cranked the mutha down to about 40 degrees. It was already about 30 outside, and this clinic is in an office park on Highway US 50 in Falls Church, Virginia, with tons of sirens going by all night.

I took my laptop so that I could (a) listen to BBC World Service, which always puts me to sleep; and (b) Send an e-mail if it was really bad. I should have sent the e-mail.

They attached a hundred wires to my head, my chest, my legs, and surely other parts. They stuck a cannula in my nose but didn't turn on any oxygen. They wanted to see how long it took me to de-saturate, and when I did, they'd turn it on.

I turned out the lights before eleven.

At one-thirty, I woke up freezing under the covers. Cold dry oxygen was shooting up my nose. The Viagra and the inhaled treatment I do both cause my nose to be stuffy and runny, and the cold dry O2 had solidified my nose into a brick. I turned on the light summoning the attendant. She came, and I told her I needed some nasal saline. They didn't have any. She opened the door to go look for something and I saw the concentrator, just like mine, but with no bubble humidifier on it! The ambient dew point was about 15 degrees, which means there was nearly no humidity in the oxygen! She came back with some sort of "nasal creme" that you were supposed to put on the inside of your nose. I did so, and blew my nose, and immediately had a nosebleed. I asked her if she had a bubbler for the concentrator, and she said no. I asked if they had a vaporizer, and she said no. I asked her to turn up the temperature as she rearranged my covers and she said "Why, you're sweating! What do you want more heat for?"

Oh.

My.

God.

I'm being tortured. Just waterboard me.

I laid down, completely under the covers so they couldn't see me at all, and built a sort of oxygen tent under there, with the oxygen spewing out of the hose under the covers, instead of up my nose. I'm sure it was fine.

I fell into sort of a creepy, frightening half-sleep, sort of panicky, but not quite.

About 3:30 I woke up again. I rebooted my computer and turned on BBC again, and it put me soundly asleep for a couple more hours. She came in and unhooked all the wires and I got up and dressed and left.

I got home and fell into bed. I went to sleep until about noon.

I'm still feeling lousy, but I'm at least feeling lousy in my own room. With my own dirt around me.

Colder'n a sumbich

Pink shoes today. Black socks, pink sweater, black suit.

About 20 degrees when I woke this morning. Cold.

This weekend is the last one before everybody splits town for Christmas, and it was chockablock with parties.

Friday night was the Aero Club of Washington's presentation of the Wright Brothers Trophy, this year to The Last Man To Walk On The Moon, Gene Cernan. Nice dinner, nice program, got to wear sparkly long clothes which go magnificently with trailing oxygen concentrator. Sorry. But mine was the only nose hosed in the whole place. I thought about making a skirt for it, but then, no.

Saturday, midday come-and-go, nighttime office party at the boss's house. I hate the one at he boss's house, mostly because the annual "awards" are given, and usually to the undeserving. For example, this year the top prize went to someone who has been with the company less than three months, and is leaving to be re-activated with the branch of service from which they were retired, to a promotion. It was a suck-up move because this person can bring more business to the company, which is a good thing, certainly, but among other things, it means that a fellow who has gotten nothing but rave reviews from his customers for the last eight years, and is doing so in his third language (after his birth language and the language of the country of his first refuge) still has nothing.

We had two other invitations for Sunday, but blew them off, due to fatigue and high winds. Truly, the winds were gusting toward 50 mph, and it was in the 30s, and we were just too whipped to do it.

I have a sleep study on Tuesday to make sure that I don't have sleep apnea. More bondo to the head. I don't think I have sleep apnea, but they keep telling me that I must. So maybe I'll go and hold my breath to make them happy.

Next weekend is the trip to the parental unit's home. I hope it is fun. It has potential. It also has potential not to be. I'm staying in a hotel. I'm doing my part.

Further birthmonth activities

So, two weeks after my birthday, my brother and sister-in-law, and my brilliant nieces, and my sister and brother-in-law and brilliant nephews, the youngest of which is still sometimes called Soonyouwah, came to play happy birthday with Auntie.

Actually, my brother's birthday is nine days after mine, and they were coming to visit friends in my direction, so it worked out for several reasons.

We had burgers at Five Guys and came home for birthday cake, which we had bought at Buzz. On Sunday, we visited the Edward Hopper exhibition at the National Gallery, then went to the Old Ebbitt Grill for brunch. Then everybody went home. But it was great fun.

Then Monday, Mister Endocrine called and said my last tests showed that I was spilling protein into my urine, and that I should take high blood pressure medicine, even though I don't have high blood pressure, because it's good for the kidneys. Just one more pill for the cocktail, I guess.

Also, for some reason, I'm oxygen de-saturating during exercise at the gym. I have the oxygen bottle turned all the way up for the treadmill and the walking track. And I've scheduled a sleep study to see if I need a c-pap machine...

Life used to be so simple.

A Long Break

Okay, so I haven't written anything in a while. So sue me.

Lots of stuff going on. Before our trip to England, I was having some gastrointestinal distress. Like I was throwing up. Like every day. Okay, maybe not EVERY day, but multiple times per week. And I wasn't sick. It was just kind of a weird, sudden overload sort of thing. And it didn't matter what I ate, or how much.

In early September, I was complaining about this to another pal with PH (and I had made an appointment with the GI guy) and she said that those were the same symptoms she had when she was taking too much Revatio (the PH code name for Viagra). I asked her how long she'd been taking the high dose when she got the symptoms, and she said about 100 days. Wellllll, I'd had my dosage upped in May from 180 mg daily to 240 mg. About a hundred days earlier.

I shot off an e-mail to my PH specialist, asking if I could lower the dose since it didn't appear to be helping any, and it might be hurting some. He shot back that that seemed entirely reasonable to him, and I lowered the dose, and the symptoms got better. But not gone.

I saw the GI guy a few days later, and he said he thought it was probably gastroparesis, which is a semi-paralysis of the stomach caused both by autonomic neuropathy in diabetes and also several connective tissue diseases. Since I appear to have both, he thought it a good bet. So, the only real treatment is eating small meals often.

I have discovered the joys of the hors d'oeuvre menu.

In addition, I visited Mister Endocrinologist and my HbA1c was 5.8, which for those of you who don't know, means that yours truly has blood glucose under such good control such that it's nearly unmeasureably good. So, as a result, he is taking me down off the oral meds for diabetes, because they are both hard on the kidneys and stomach, and upping the insulin dosage. This is a little tricky, but I'm working it out.

Finally, I went to see Mrs Rheumy #1, my old original rheumatologist. I have two telangiectasia. Two. Most people who have them have hundreds or thousands. I have two. Telangiectasia are little red dots, maybe purply, which are visible on the face and hands, especially around the mouth and on the cuticles. They are cause by capillary malformations. They are the "T" in CREST syndrome, or limited scleroderma. I have one on my left ring finger cuticle, and one on the left side of my lower lip. Whatever the connective tissue disease is, I have a very wimpy case of it. Oh, except for the PH part.

I went to her because I was hurting all over, hard to get out of chairs, etc., and thought that it might be rheumatoid arthritis. She says it isn't, that it's bursitis in my hips. Challenging my emerging hula career, is she? She said I need to wear my good shoes and get orthotic devices. I told her I had some already, and she said I needed to wear them all the time. So I had to go shoe shopping (first time under a doctor's order!). And while they didn't have any pink saddle oxfords, they did have some very cute ones that are very comfortable, even with the orthotics.

So now, it is happy birthweek to me. I try to celebrate happy birthmonth, but sometimes that is very hard, so I do make a huge effort to have happy birthweek. When one is born on Hallowe'en, one needs to do something to set the birthday apart from the holiday.

On Sunday, we did the happy birthweek brunch at FarrahOlivia, which if you are a foodie like myself, you will recoginize as the restaurant of Morou Ouattara, who was sadly eliminated from The Next Iron Chef on the Food Network last week, unfairly and undeservedly.

My brunch was simple and wonderful. I had a tomato salad, and this is how it was constructed. On a very thin circle of puff pastry (about four inches around), smeared with a mild goat cheese, cherry heirloom tomatos were halved, topped with a balsamic vinegar syrup and spicy sprouts (maybe radish?) and garnished with a saffron and cayenne flavored salt on the side. Amazing.

The captain had flame-grilled asparagus, topped with grated boiled egg, bacon and a hard cheese (parmesan-like, but not).

I had bacon and eggs, well done but unremarkable, and the captain had a ham sandwich with shiitake mushrooms and truffles and a flavored mayo on the plate. Coffee was very dark roasted and served in a french press.

Delightful!

We have more birthweek (and birthmonth after) activities planned. Stay tuned.

England

On August 3rd, we left Dulles Airport on Virgin Atlantic, me and the Cap'n, and my brilliant younger niece. We arrived early in the morning August 4th at Heathrow. I would like to throw in a small kudo to Virgin, because they handled me and my needs extraordinarily well. US air carriers either do not provide supplemental oxygen, or charge $100 per leg additional to provide you a bit of gas. Virgin Atlantic takes their required-equipment portable oxygen bottles (called walk-around bottles), which they must have for crew members to be able to move freely around the cabin during depressurization , and adds a pulse conserver device to the top, and one small bottle lasted me the entire eight-hour flight at 2 lpm. And they did this for FREE. Bravo!

We proceeded to rent a car which was disadvantaged by having the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car, and a six-speed manual transmission which insisted on being shifted with the left hand. It was okay, because it appears that the English drive these malformed cars on the wrong side of the road as well.

We then proceeded to drive into downtown London. The congestion rules that make you pay a fee for driving a car into central London do not apply on weekends, and at 8 am on Saturday morning there isn't much traffic. We were armed with the Google Map instructions that I had e-mailed to my phone, a Michelin map, and a strong sense of self preservation.

We drove into town, and rather promptly found our hotel in Mayfair. We parked our car there, but weren't able to check into the hotel until the afternoon. The hotel restaurant was still open for breakfast, so we had a touch of tea and toast (and corn flakes). We went for a walk, up Berkeley Street to Berkeley Square. We saw no nightingales singing, but plenty of pigeons. No angels dined at The Ritz during our stay.

When our hotel would let us check in, we did so, and took a nap until six o'clock or so. When we woke, we walked up and down Piccadilly, window shopping, and decided to get take-out from Marks & Spencer and dine in our hotel room.

Early on Sunday morning, we got up and took the doubledecker bus tour which is required with each trip to London. Our hotel was near Green Park, which was the starting point for the bus tour (did I do some planning, or what?) so we trotted over there for the first tour of the day. Hopped on the bus (with tickets I'd bought online before leaving home) and went forth.

We saw the sights.

We went to Buck House, and Liz wasn't home (the bobbys suggested she might be at Windsor, but as we all know, she spends August in Scotland). But they were changing the guard, nonetheless, so we hung out. Very lovely horses. I suppose they stay that way when they're not regularly in the mud.

After we finished the tour, we hopped into the malformed car and headed north. We were on our way to visit our friends Tim and Sally, (hereinafter referred to as our generous host and hostess) who live in a town outside Manchester called Wilmslow (which I liked so much, I keep looking at the realty ads for available properties there). We drove on the wrong side of the road up the highway, past Birmingham and Coventry (where they make Jaguars, so we bowed profoundly as we passed through). We arrived at our destination using only our map and directions that our gracious and lovely hostess had e-mailed me a few days previous.

They welcomed us with open arms! (Lucky us! What if we'd arrived and they'd taken us into White Slavery??) We rather decompressed and hung out. The Cap'n and our gracious host began their week-long course in the finer points of cricket, with a supplemental thousand-page-book of rules serving as their sacred text. UK was playing India in a test match and were losing their tails. They took this as a learning experience...

On Monday we visited the Manchester Museum, the regular home of the Lindow Man, who was unfortunately on holiday in London during our stay. Nonetheless, there were a variety of stuffed animals and dead Egyptians to greet us.

We also went to the Manchester Airport. Not to the terminal side, but the backside. Airplane watching is a sport like birdwatching in England. Folks collect the registration numbers of airplanes they have seen, and there are databases tracking where these airplanes have been sighted. (Rather odd, imho.) But, in the viewing section at the Manchester Airport, they have one of the original BA Concordes parked, and on certain days, they give cockpit tours. This was not one of those days, but the Cap'n was more excited because there was a Hawker-Siddeley Trident on display next to it, and he'd never actually seen one of those. (It looked like an airplane to me.)

We took it slow and easy on these days. I tried to remember that I needed to not go full speed all the time, and I was careful to charge the battery in my oxygen concentrator every time we were in the car. I had two batteries, and fully charged, the two of them would last about six hours, so I was generally in very good shape, and never was in danger of being without.

Thinking again, it was slow and easy for me, because I would doze off and nap in the afternoon car rides, while our gracious and generous hostess hauled me around at her usual hundred miles per hour (she is recently released from the Formula One circuit). It was neither slow nor easy for her.

On Tuesday, we went to Wales. Our gracious and generous host is a Welshman, and we went to the sheep farm of his brother, where our host grew up. This was during the hoof and mouth scare, and they could not move their rams (at the lower farm) to meet with their ewes (at the higher farm) to make lambs for next year, and were rather concerned that this might well be disasterous. However, the restrictions were lifted in a few days, so we are hopeful that the lambs of 2008 will be on schedule.

They also raise and show Welsh ponies at the lower farm. Driving up to the house at the lower farm was a bit of an adventure. The road wound up the hill a bit, off the paved road, and became increasingly narrow until there was truly room for only one vehicle, and not a large one at that. At one point we met an opposing car, and had to back up to let them pass.

The Cap'n decided that Welsh was actually English that had been typed starting on the wrong home row. For example, the previous sentence in Welsh would read "Tnd Czl'n cdckcdc gnzg Sdlxh szx zcgjzlly Dnblkxh gbzg nzc bddb gtped xgzfgknb ln ghd sfonb nlmd fls."

We left the farm and went to Castle Conwy, in the town of Conwy, and climbed around. I did not go all the way to the top of the tallest tower (and mostly because the stairs were very narrow and would have been very difficult to navigate with the oxygen concentrator, considering the traffic was two-way). I did, however, go as high as the Chapel in the front end, which was halfway up the tower.

Conwy was built by Edward Longshanks, my ancestor (and probably yours; he seems to show up on a LOT of geneology charts), so my niece suddenly discovered that she's a princess, and not the JAP sort either. I assured her that she was not any sort of princess, that even Liz's grandchildren weren't all princes or princesses. Add to the fact that my mother's maiden name is of Welsh origin, and my grandmother was a Campbell, and Longshanks tried conquering all of them, it's no wonder I'm conflicted.

We stopped at a posh hotel spa tea room sort of place, which was gracious enough to accept us for dinner in our going-to-the-farm-and-castle-clothes. We had a lovely dinner and acted respectably, to our great credit.

Wednesday dawned cool and clear (as did every other day; we were very lucky) and we headed off to the metropolis of Barrow in Furness. Barrow is the birthplace of the Cap'n's grandfather in the 1880s. The drive there is a beautiful one, through the Lake District, near Windemere. Barrow is an industrial town, where Vickers and the British Navy have been building ships (especially submarines) for a hundred years or more. When the grandfather was a child, it was a steel mill town, and indeed, there is a slag heap outside the town as tall as the surrounding mountains.

The intrepid Cap'n and our gracious host found grandfather's baptismal certificate, the church and font where he was baptized and a house he lived in as a child. Pretty remarkable, all told!

On Thursday we visited the Museum of Science and Industry of Manchester, which was very interesting and well done. Since Manchester was the cradle of the industrial revolution, they have mills and engines powered by water, hot air, steam, gas, electricity... probably some powered by captive Americans if you look closely enough. It was very well done and very interesting. It's housed in five or six separate buildings which were originally was the very first train station in the world. My brilliant niece was most captivated by the elaborate setup of Thomas the Tank Engine, an old friend of hers.

I got to have fish and chips for lunch. No mushy peas.

Our gracious and generous hostess is a lay reader in the Church of England, and her parish has two churches. St Bartholomew's is the older of the two, and the current church dates from the 1500's, with a crypt dating from the 1200's accessible from a tiny circular staircase in the sanctuary of the current church.

PS on PH

A really cool article in the Wall Street Journal....

Life is full of surprises. And stuff.

So, I haven't posted for a little while, because I went to ENGLAND, and it was FABULOUS, but I'll write more about this later.

This morning, we went over to see the boat and maybe go sailing, since we hadn't seen the boat in about a month. It was indeed too windy to go for a sail, so we did some maintenance, and puttering around.

HOWEVER!

As I got out of my car, and fiddled with my equipment (oxygen, backpack, bottle of water, other important items), and Cap'n Bligh got all his equipment together, I stood up, peered down our familiar dock with its familiar boats, and said in an inordinately loud voice, "WHAT THE F*** IS THAT?!?!?!!?!???"


Remember, if you will, that our boat is 34 feet long, with a mast 51 feet above the water. The biggest boat on our dock is maybe 45 feet, with a mast not much taller than ours. What I saw was a bowsprit, (one of those long spear things that stick out the bow of a sailboat) that at its tip was as tall as some of the masts. And masts, taller than anything else by far, with a square-rigged sail at the top of one of them. It was HUGE. It was F***ING HUGE. And it was at the end of our dock.

Well, we marched ourselves down our dock, passing our boat hardly noticing if it was still floating or not, and we marched with our silly mouths agape to see a square-rigged, two-masted, one hundred seventy five foot long ship parked at the end of our dock. On the back it says "Clipper City."


One of our neighbors was on her boat, and she said, "You guys haven't been around for a while, have you?" And I said "What the HELL is this thing??"

She explained that it had come from Baltimore, repossessed by the bank from a guy. It obviously needs a LOT of work. A LOT of work. Clipper City was taken by the bank and they think they're going to get a million dollars for it.

Banks are so silly.

Boats are not investments.

Boats are for work or for fun. They only depreciate.

This one used to give rides in Baltimore Harbor, and the Coasties shut 'em down because the boat is not safe for commercial use. Lots of rust, bad fiberglass over wood of questionable quality, a huge maintenance nightmare, and it needs a crew of ten or so to ever leave the dock.

And the bank is paying our marina about $3,000.00 a month to park it at the end of our dock.

They're not using the pool, or the showers, or the gym, or having coffee and danish in the breakfast lounge.

Maybe next year our rates won't go up.

Welcome, HUGE Friend.

Brushes with greatness

This morning we went down to our neighborhood diner for Saturday brunch, which is a weekly treat. (BTW, our neighborhood diner has a previous brush with greatness all its own; it is the very place where the pretend cops caught the attempted assassin on "The West Wing." We watched the filming from our lawn chairs with coolers, and applauded each take from across the street.)

At the next table was a neighbor who has been a docent at the National Air and Space Museum for over twenty years, who is current not only on the exhibits at the downtown museum, but also on the huge annex at Dulles Airport, the Udvar-Hazy Center. Now, to be a docent at NASM, you have to go through three months of all-day-Saturday training, spend every Wednesday night at refresher clinic, and vow to spend at least 80 hours a year conducting tours and educational groups around the museums. It's quite a commitment. And the odd thing about our neighbor is that he isn't retirement age, which most of the docents are. We'd just decided that he didn't have a life otherwise.

He and his lady friend were sitting at their table, not ordering, because their friends had not yet arrived. We ordered, and got our coffee, when their friends finally arrived. It was an elderly woman from the islands, I'd guess Turks and Caicos, and a young man walking slowly with a cane, and two shiny new prosthetic legs. She was a volunteer from Walter Reed, and he was a patient on one of his first journeys out. He ordered a western omelet and a toasted croissant. They discussed loudly the relative merits of the two museums, and which one was best depending upon what you wanted to see (The Enola Gay is at Dulles; the Glamourous Glennis is downtown), and the differences in what estrogen vs. testosterone wanted to see.

I was in the presence of greatness all around.

And just when I thought it couldn't get any better, Brian Lamb walked in.

If you're not a C-SPAN junkie like my very self, maybe you don't know that Brian Lamb is an interview god. Brian Lamb occupied my every Sunday night for years uncountable, interviewing historians, political scientists and social critics of all sorts on his weekly show Booknotes, which evolved eventually into C-SPAN BookTV channel.

The Captain said he'd never seen me so excited, and he was a little jealous.

I mean, Brian Lamb is to Washington politico-geeks as Paris Hilton is to, well, whoever likes Paris Hilton. He's the top.

I feel so insignificant today. Some ice cream ought to fix that.

Some days you're the bug, some days the windshield...

Tuesday morning at about 7 am, I was driving up to the hospital for pulmonary rehab. I was listening to Mick Jagger sing about Brown Sugar, and driving my Very Cool Car at a Very Cool rate of speed.

Just as I came up to the exit to go to the hospital, The Evil Blue Lights of the State Police began to flash behind me, and I knew I was got.

I pulled over to the side of the road, and immediately grabbed my cannula and turned on my concentrator, while grabbing my license and insurance card.

When the State Policeman walked up to my car, he asked if I knew why he stopped me. I told him that I wasn't sure, but I was certain that he could tell me. I told him that I was absolutely certain that I was supposed to be at the hospital at 7 am, weakly pointing at my clock. (It was absolutely true, too. I just didn't say that you don't get demerits for being late to the gym.) He said I was going 61 in a 45 zone. I told him that was possible.

I looked as pathetic as humanly possible, which, when I'm going to the gym at 7 am, isn't all that hard.

He went back to his car, then returned, and told me that instead of giving me a big expensive speeding ticket, he was only giving me a ticket for "failure to obey a traffic sign." One that said "Drive 45 mph".

Today I am The Windshield.

Let's hear it for cannulas and looking pathetic.

My Father's Day gift.

My father is old.

I discovered he was old about ten years ago, when we drove away from the house after a visit and I burst into unexpected tears. My father was an electrician, and had always had strong hands and arms, and now, he had a constant cough and his arms were thin, and his hands were soft.

He's actually turning 75 in September, so he's not really THAT old.

But he has become deaf, and refused a hearing aid, preferring to have a disjointed conversation and keep the television at a jet-engine level. Unfortunately, he also has discovered the Fox Channel, and has grown opinionated in addition to being rather loud. And it is not unknown for him to burst forth in song in the middle of a conversation, since he can't hear the other conversant, therefore it doesn't exist.

For Father's Day this year, my siblings and I sent them a base station and four cordless phones, since the last time my brother called, my mother had to go through three different phones before she could find one that she could talk with.

I called him on his new phone to wish him a happy Father's Day. He thanked me, and we chatted on. He talked about a little neighbor girl who came to visit, who wanted to try on his oxygen hose to see what his air smelled like. He said that she was a lot like me, that when she walked in, she never asked for a hug. He said he had to convince her that it was a good thing to have.

He said that I never demanded a hug. He said that his lap was always full with another kid, and I never asked because I had been told no too many times already. He said I never got enough hugs. He said that he was sorry for that.

I still have a hard time asking for things. For help, for consideration, for a favor. And that's especially hard since I can't do everything now. I'm getting better but it is still very hard.

All this time I thought it was my fault. Thanks, Dad.

The Second Sail of the Season

Friday night we dumped the dogs at the kennel and took off east.

We hit the boat, unpacked and went to sleep rather early, anticipating an early departure.

Saturday morning dawned muggy, hazy but with a little wind. We left the slip at 9 am and headed north.

The wind never really rose above a couple of knots, so we left the engine running to assist us in our trip up the bay. It wasn't pretty.

At about 3 pm, we reached the Rhode River, and came around up to a small bay across from Mayo, Maryland.

By 5 pm, there were about 40 boats in this bay. A little more crowded that we had hoped. About sundown, a group of drunken powerboaters (stinkboats: sailboats are blowboats) tried to leave before completely securing their anchor. Idiots are so fun to watch.

We set up the gas grill and cooked some lovely pork chops, chicken breast fillets, and veggies. We then desserted ourselves with adult beverages. The Captain chose cheap scotch and cigars; I had Wild Turkey and Diet Coke.

After the sun set, we went to bed, for we were beat.

At about 2:30, I awoke with an irregular heartbeat. I could actually see the irregularity on the pulse part of my pulse-oxygen meter.

I thought very nasty four letter words. I did not wish to call the Coast Guard out to rescue me.

After watching it for a few minutes, I got up and went to the head (that's boat talk, you know).

When I came back, the captain asked if I was okay. Whining, I told him about what was going on. He lay silent for a few seconds, and asked "Do you think it has anything to do with that two fingers of Turkey you had before you came to bed?"

Hadn't occurred to me. Of course it might.

Went back to sleep. Awoke perfectly normally at daybreak.

Either I need to drink more, drink more often, or not at all.

We'll see.

We sailed home on Sunday afternoon, ahead of a cold front. It was very windy and rough, but we got back to the slip in time to be tied up securely when the strong thunderstorms came through. We spent the day on Monday doing boat chores; washing the boat, oiling the teak, cleaning the bilge, changed a pump in the shower bilge, et cetera, et cetera.

First Sail of the Season

It's been too rainy and cold and windy to sail yet, but today was supposed to be sunny and perfect.

It wasn't.

We went sailing anyway.

It didn't last long.

We left the dock at about 10 am, with gentle winds and a slight high overcast. We motored out down the channel, greeting the newly hatched ospreys who were peeking over the nest tops on each of the navigation markers as we went out.

When we got out into Herring Bay, the small inlet where our marina (and others) are sheltered, the wind picked up to around 10-15 miles per hour. Which is fine, not a big deal, but it was gusty. Gusty is not good.

When it's gusty, you trim and set the sails for what you think the prevailing wind direction and speed will be, then the wind shifts and blusters higher, and the trim you set only a minute before is completely inappropriate. When it's gusty, you spend all your time compensating instead of sailing.

When it's really windy, one's sails should be reefed, that is, trimmed downward so that the whole sail isn't released to the wind, but a smaller percentage of the sail area.

Women like to go out reefed. Men do not.

When we passed out of the gusty Herring Bay into the main channel of the Chesapeake, winds of about 35 miles per hour hit, bending the boat over getting the sails wet, the deck wet, the crew wet, and making the boat uncontrollable.

Captain Bligh, my husband, was swearing and struggling. I had the steering wheel turned all the way to the stops on the left and the boat was still going to the right. I told him to start the engine, and for the fist time all day, he listened to me and started the engine. As soon as the engine caught I threw it in gear and slammed the throttle forward. Mind you, throwing the throttle to the firewall on a 23 horsepower diesel isn't exactly the Indy 500, but it give you enough forward movement to give your rudder authority again, so you can steer. And I steered it straight into the wind, while Cap'n Bligh dropped the sails and we went home. Or at least to the dock. We had plenty of piddly little projects to keep us busy for the rest of the day, after our one hour sail.

But it was blustery. One measures the angle at which one is tilting from straight up and down on a sailboat by looking at a gauge that measures heel, or the amount you're leaning. We were up to 35 degrees of heel at one point in our short sail. And on the way back, with no sails up at all, only a bare mast, we were heeled over five degrees with a beam reach (a crosswind to you landlubbers).

And the doctor has me up to 12 Viagras a day now, to see if it improves my twinge.

Life is interesting, ain't she?

How I Spent My Wednesday Evening

On Monday and Wednesday afternoons, I have been attending a pulmonary rehabilitation class, learning how to exercise with reduced oxygen capacity. I have been quite successful in increasing my endurance and learning how to go longer by going slower.

On Wednesday afternoon this week, I had a progress six minute walk, and I walked 1705 feet, or 519 meters, which is about 100 meters further than I had walked earlier in the spring. I went pretty hard at it, since it was a one-shot deal and not trying to sustain anything. I got my heart rate up to 140 at one point, which is higher than I normally go, but not a lot higher. My oxygen got down to 90 percent, and I was breathing a supplemental 3 liters per minute of oxygen, so for you normal people, this would have been pretty exhausting. My body is actually used to it, so it didn't feel all that bad.

When I exercise hard, I have a small sore spot in the upper left quadrant of my chest. I was told some time ago that it was probably my pulmonary artery, since it was already under some high pressure stress, that the additional stress or exercise, or coughing, would make it further stressed. On Wednesday afternoon, it was a bit sore as usual.

When I got home, I picked up the mail, sat down on the couch and flipped open a laptop to look at some afternoon e-mail traffic, when I felt a TWINGE. In the upper left quadrant of my chest, in the same place it hurts when I exercise. It was sharp, it was short, it was instant, it was basically unremarkable except it made me cringe a little.

I wouldn't have paid any attention to it, except that in about 15 minutes, it TWINGEd again. And about every 15-20 minutes, it would do it. Not related to anything like breathing or pulse. Just TWINGE.

My husband came home in about 45 minutes, and we discussed what we needed to do for the evening, and I had another TWINGE. I mentioned it to him, and he immediately thought I should call the Cavalry. I said "It's only a TWINGE."

So, I agreed to call the on-call nurse at the PH clinic and see what she thought. She said to call the local EMTs and have them do an EKG and see if anything popped up, then to go from there. So I called the local EMTs. And they came screaming over the two blocks from the firehouse in the FIRE TRUCK, with all the lights and sirens and all that. All my neighbors came out. I waved at them. I waved at the EMTs. They asked if I was the patient. I said I was. They made me sit down. They did an EKG, and it wasn't remarkable. They were very impressed that I took nine Viagras a day. And I had no TWINGEs while they were there. Not a one.

So, I called the on-call nurse back and told her that we had decided we were going to go get some dinner and if I was still TWINGEing after that, we'd go out to the hospital.

We went out and got into my (wonderful) car. My husband promptly flooded the engine, which he does because he does not know how to treat a piece of machinery as marvelous as Miss Kitty, so I yelled at him to stop stop stop what he was doing. And I had a TWINGE. And another. And I said, "Screw this, let's go to the hospital."

So we drove out to the hospital uneventfully. I went inside and registered at the desk, and they promptly took me into the triage area and did a real big 12-lead EKG, not like the pesky 4-lead that the EMTs had. I chatted with the nurse, who had gout and had to sit down, and he told me to get dressed again and go into the waiting area until they had a proper examination room available in the emergency department. So I did.

When I went into the waiting area, I could not find my husband. I walked all around, looking at every face, but there was no one familiar to be found. Then, I heard a sound. A buzzing, flapping, whining sound, coming from outside. As I craned my neck to see the source of the racket, I saw whirling rotors attached to a Bell 412 descending upon the helipad next to the emergency room. And across the parking lot, I saw my husband, intently observing.

He had heard the discreet "code blue arriving by air, ETA 2 minutes" and gone out to observe this arrival. Since he is the head boy in charge of EMS helicopter voodoo at his job, he felt obligated. And he likes noisy things. And flying things.

It does not matter to him that his poor wife is inside busy dying of a TWINGE.

I told him so when he came in.

They came out and fetched us promptly, and I was moved into room 16, my new home-away-from-home. A nice lady came in and said she was Sue, a registered nurse. I told her I was Ellen, a registered patient. She and another nurse came in and started asking me questions and I answered them in way, way, way more detail than they were accustomed to, so they agreed to leave it to the doctors.

So Young Dr. Jesse came in. Young Dr. Jesse was about 12, I estimate. He claims to have been in the Navy, but I just don't see how that could have happened by age 12 if he also went to med school.

After I explained everything to him, he is leaning in the direction of pulmonary embolism. It is not the direction I would have leaned, but it is nonetheless a legitimate one. PH patients have a tendency toward blood clots and many of them are on blood thinners. I am not one, and I didn't have many of the other symptoms associated with clots in the lungs. However, this was the direction he decided to go, and I was along for the ride.

I told my husband to go home, because when I heard the list of tests they wanted to do, I'd done 'em all before and I knew how long they'd take. He can sleep at the drop of a hat, so I knew if he went home he could get a few hours rest anyway.

Under ordinary circumstances, they do a CT scan with contrast to look for emboli. But, as usual, nothing is ordinary in my world. I'm allergic to the contrast dye (which I found out when I had one once before and the tech said "Did you have that rash when you came in?" and I said "What rash?" and he said "Uh oh."). So instead, they did a doppler ultrasound on my legs to look for clots, a chest x-ray and a V/Q scan, which you breath radioactive stuff, then are injected with other radioactive stuff while they take portraits of your lungs.

The X-ray was uneventful, and the V/Q scan was uneventful.

The ultrasound was not.

The ultrasound tech was a little Filipino man named Gerry, about 60 I'd guess, chatty and grey haired. When the do the sonogram for clots, they take a picture of your vein, then they mash on it and get a compressed view of the vein. As Gerry pressed on my leg, I winced, because, well, it hurts. He apologized.

I was going to say "Oh, I read a book once by a man who was tortured and he told his torturers 'I can stand the torture if you can stand the screaming.'"

What I said was "Oh, I read a book..." and he cut me off and said "By Bill O'Reilly?"

No, I don't think I've ever read anything written by Bill O'Reilly. And I don't know exactly what this had to do with anything. Except maybe it would be torture to read a book by Bill O'Reilly?

Anyway, I don't have any blood clots but it took them until 3 am to figure that out. I called my snoozing husband and he fetched me home and I had a bowl of soup at 3 am because I still hadn't had dinner.

And I'm still TWINGEing. But less often.