I've Found Him!

I found him! I found him! Doktor Mengele is alive and well and doling out punishment at my local cardiac rehab facility!

Well, okay, so it's not really Doktor Mengele. It's probably his grandson, Todd Mengele.

Oh, it's not that bad; I'm just being histrionic.

But is it just me, or does the fact that my EKG unit has unspecified "technical problems" every four minutes seem suspicious to you? Lemme 'splain. I'm supposed to do some set number of minutes on each exercise machine each time I go. Most of them are pretty easy - I could do the bicycle or the Nu-Stepper pretty much all day. But treadmills and I are not on the best of terms. Whenever I'm on a treadmill I feel like I'm taking part in some strange and potentially dangerous demonstration of plate tectonics. And I'm not really fond of the monotonous crash-crash-crash of my size-14 feet coming down on the belt.

So I'm on the treadmill, and I'm about four minutes into the workout, when all of a sudden there's a hubbub at the monitoring station. "We've lost your signal," they cry, which means either that my EKG unit has quit or I have died. So I stop the treadmill and Todd Mengele comes over and fiddles with my EKG unit. "Maybe it's the wires. Maybe it's the battery. Maybe it's the sideways manipulators." Time passes, and suddenly a huzzah goes up from the monitoring station - I'm back on-line! So the guy says "Well, since you cooled down, you may as well start over and do the whole duration."

Four minutes later, it happens again.

I'm so sure, Todd.

Celebrity Bull Riding

We've taken to watching Ty Murray's Celebrity Bull Riding on CMT lately, and I have to say, I actually enjoy it.

Normally I'm not a fan of reality TV, nor is CMT my usual haunt. Those who know me know that my musical tastes run in the direction of Scandinavian metal, not C&W, and there's little on CMT that would appeal to me (not even the camp appeal of the endless repeats of The Dukes of Hazzard, a show I found amusing when I was in high school but have since outgrown).

But I do like bull riding, and I've been watching the PBR for longer than the average TV fan, and Ty Murray has my respect for toughness, honestly and fair dealing - and for an extremely sly sense of humor that seems absent at first. Honestly, the idea of the poker-faced Ty Murray having a few drinks and riding the plastic cow on top the sign is difficult for me to wrap my mind around, but somehow reassuring all the same.

One problem I had with the show was that I didn't know who most of the celebrities were. I never watched Survivor, so Johnny Fairplay was a complete cypher. I don't watch Ultimate Fighting, so ditto Josh Haynes. Honestly, the only ones I'd ever heard of were Stephen Baldwin, mostly because of his membership in the bold, sprawling Baldwin clan, and the washed-up pop stars Leif Garrett and Vanilla Ice. So to me, it wasn't Celebrity Bull Riding so much as it was "Celebrity" Bull Riding.

Now I confess, when I first heard of the idea I had every expectation that the bulls would make red flapjacks out of the celebrities. Even the best PBR riders are periodically trashed by the bulls, so the inexperienced celebrities? I predicted mayhem. The thought of Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, K-Fed, Karl Rove and certain others perched atop bulls like Gnash and Doctor Proctor and Bodacious (now retired and dead, of course, but a man can dream) simply made me smile. At the very least, I wouldn't have to read about them every damn day once the initial surge of horror and macabre curiosity died down.

But as it turns out, some of the celebrities turned out to be pretty decent, and though I still think of them as "celebrities" instead of celebrities, at least I know who they are and what they do. And how could one not enjoy the impromptu performance of Ice Ice Baby on Ty Murray's porch in Stephenville, Texas? Or see the very great difference between Stephen Baldwin and Leif Garrett and come to think that there's something primal and instructive in that? I like to think that if I had been on the show, I would have gone out the way Stephen Baldwin did - physically beaten, maybe, but still trying down to the very end, and not copping a whine from the warm comfort of my bed.

Tiresome Movie

I watched Man on the Moon (or something like that) today, a supposedly grand examination of Andy Kaufman starring Jim Carrey.

What a waste of time. I never thought Andy Kaufman was the least bit funny or even edgy, and I thought the movie was dishonest by showing crowds leaping to their feet for standing ovations or doubled up in laughter over the lamest material imaginable.

If anything, the movie made me appreciate Kaufman even less than before, because it revealed him as a petulant manipulator. I guess we're supposed to accept his petulant manipulativeness as a part of his alleged genius, but I don't buy it. Mostly he comes across as a jerk, and a decidedly unfunny one at that. Ty Murray is funnier than Andy Kaufman, for crying out loud!

Not how I wanted to spend an hour and a half of my Saturday.

When In Rome

I thought I would post something halfway educational today, as opposed to my usual palaver.

I do this not out of a sense of pedagogical duty, but mostly because I'm waiting for the rice to finish cooking and I can't really do anything food-wise until the rice cooker makes it characteristic klunk-twing sound.

Let's look at Roman names for a moment. We see that most Roman men had three and sometimes four names, but we'll just deal with three. And let's take a very famous example: Gaius Julius Caesar. What are these various name fragments all about? Without clouding the issue with a bunch of technical Latin like pranomen and cognomen, we'll say the three name fragments correspond to the private name, the tribe, and the nickname.

Here, Gaius is the man's private name, a name likely to used only by his mother, closest friends, and wife. Anyone else using it would be in danger of being altogether too chummy - it's like when a guy in an elevator calls you son; you feel yourself bristle because he's invading your nomological space.

Julius, in this case, is the tribal name, equivalent to the last name in modern America if you accept the proviso that the last name represents some kind of now-lost tribal affiliation. The Smith tribe, if you like.

But there weren't all that many tribal names in Rome, so it was possible, and perhaps even probable, that in any batch of 100 random citizens you'd have more than one Julius or more than one Pompey. And since the son almost always took the private name of his father, well, you're guaranteed to have at least people going by the same name. Since if you can't use the private name to distinguish them, what do you do?

You resort to the nickname, the third fragment of the name, which often expresses something about the individual. Caesar, for example, means "curly-haired" or just plain "hairy". Pulcher means "beautiful". Crassus means "fat". One of my favorites is Cicero, which bizarrely enough means "chick pea" (and I can't begin to imagine what about the famous orator and senator reminded anyone of a chick pea).

So if one wanted to hail Gaius Julius Caesar in a crowd, you'd shout out "Hey, hairy man of the Julius tribe!', or, in Latin, "Heyus, Julius Caesar!"

Note that Caesar never meant emperor or principate. It just meant "curly-haired" or, perhaps, "hairy". So when someone later on referred to himself as Caesar, it was to simply to wrap himself in the glory of C. Julius Caesar, whether he had hair or not. (Confusingly enough, the Roman often abbreviated the private name in inscriptions, but for Gaius they used C. instead of G. I have no idea why, except maybe that C. is easier to carve into stone than G. But I'm just guessing.)

Let's pretend that a particular President became hugely popular, so popular that his very name came to stand as a label for perceived effectiveness or greatness. You'd hear people shouting "Hey, I'm the Truman of this meeting, so you all sit down and shut up!" Or politicians would run for Roosevelt - "I'm by far the most qualified candidate for Roosevelt, so give me your votes before I burn your damn huts down."

The situation for Roman women was both simpler and more complicated. They only had one name, and it was almost always the feminized version of the father's private name. C. Julius Caesar's daughter, for example, was named Julia (generally speaking, if the name ends in an "a", it's in the feminine or diminutive form).

But what happens of the man has more than one daughter? Since they're all supposed to be named after the father, how do you conduct orderly household affairs when you've got for daughters all named Julia? Here you give them unofficial nicknames, unlike the "official" nicknames given to men. And they're much more prosasic. First Julia, Little Julia, Big Julia, that sort of thing.

Oh, it must have been grand to be a woman in ancient Rome. "Hey, Big Julia, get over here, C. Julius the Hairy wants to talk to you."

And one final thought: the word Caesar is not pronounced the way we pronounce it. It is pronounced the way the Germans pronounce it: Kaiser.

Ready for the Apocalypse

I've just cleaned the litter box and scrubbed and mopped the floor.

As far as I'm concerned, the Apocalypse cannot come quickly enough.

Still, there's something wonderfully humbling about cleaning the litter box. We humans strut around with our fancy cerebral cortexes and language skills and abstrast reasoning, imagining that we're the apex of evolution or the pinnacle of God's design, whichever way you want to view it, but either way, we're hot stuff. We can reason! Yeah! We can design things! Yeah! We can create lovely music out of nothing! Yeah!

And then, all of a sudden, we're on our hands and knees scrubbing cat poop off the floor of the laundry room, cleaning up after animals who don't give a wet slap for abstract reasoning, music, or much of anything else except for stealing the last iota of what passes for my dignity.

What's In A Name?

As an aspiring novelist, I spend a lot of time working on critical aspiring-novelist skills. And by that, I mean I spend a lot of time thinking about how I want my name to look on the dust cover of the imagined book.

It goes without saying that I don't want my real name on the dust cover. For one thing, my name consists of two words of similar length and is desperately devoid of hard consonants. It sounds like the kind of name you'd associate with French literature, not the hard-hitting but suavely smooth name you'd associate with modern American crap... I mean, fiction. And for another thing, if I wrote any sex scenes, I'm not sure I'd want my family and neighbors to trace them back to me. I dread the phone calls like "I liked the novel a lot, but don't you think the line spank me you crazy Visigoth was just a little over the top?"

In picking names, it seems to me that there is much room for error. It would be a mistake, for example, to adopt the name William Jefferson Clinton, because I could reasonably expect broad-shouldered mooks from the Clinton Presidential Library to show up to sort me out with meat tenderizers and tommy-gats. It would be a mistake for me to adop the name Burl Ives, because some people would expect me to sing, some people would expect me to be dead, and some people would get me confused with skin rashes ("I'm sorry, but I can't come to the cotillion; I've come out with a nasty case of Burl Ives!"). If I adopted the name Rupert Grint, people would arrive at startlingly inaccurate estimates of my age, and I would go through my literary life sounding like a wrestling move ("Soulfly is putting a Grint on Savage; mother of God have you ever seen anything so beautiful!")

So what's a writer to do? Obviously I need to pick a name that suggests action and decisiveness, but not at the expense of human warmth. Something with a pleasing combination of hard and soft consonants so there's something for everyone.

How about - Rocky Shaft?

Yeah!

Last Supper

I recently found out, mostly through a process of trial and error, that the last meal I ate before having my heart attack was generic "beef pasta" flavor hamburger helper. Aint that the beans? You always think your final meal will be something memorable - Beef Wellington served in Sigourney Weaver's limousine, perhaps - and instead it turns out to a box of two-for-a-dollar hamburger helper scarfed down in front of the TV, and not even the name brand, just the generic store brand.

It's like going in front of the firing squad and finding that your last cigarette was a Merit, one of those non-cigarette things that smells like burning socks. Come on, guys, make it a Marlboro 100 and snap the filter off, would you? I can take it.

The Stand

I've been rereading The Stand of late, the full and uncut version. I can't decide if that makes it sound like tobacco or a male porn star. I guess I shouldn't even say "rereading", since I first read it Way Back When (early 1980s) and I remember basically bubkes about it.

It's a beefy book. As Professor Noble would say, it's a "stout read". My wife was going to throw the book at me for some imaginary transgression before she realized that the book boasted actual poundage and would likely have killed me on impact. And that's the paperback. I imagine one could use the hardcover for a wide range of things. You could throw it in your trunk to serve as ballast on snowy days. You could attach a bench vise to it. You could use it to hold down Lineoleum until the glue grips. You could use it to tamp the fill in a major highway construction project.

I'm prone to a certain pattern when it comes to reading in bed. At first I'm alert and attentive, then I start to drift, then I'm just looking at the words because I'm actually asleep even though I'm still holding the book. Sometimes the book falls out of my nerveless hand. Today The Stand fell out of my nerveless hand and landed on my sternum, which since the surgery isn't very happy with having large heavy books land on it.

Most of the time the books don't fall on me, and instead of being jolted awake, I drift off into blessed slumber, where I usually roll on top of the book and crease it horribly. And the dreams start.

The other day I dreamed that I had killed, butchered and eaten The Stand. I can't remember if it was tasty, but I'll bet it was plenty filling.

Plastic

Anyone who's read much of my blog in recents weeks will know that I've quit smoking, and I continue to be off cigarettes. But that's not what I really wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the things that make me want cigarettes, the situations that seem to trigger the cigarette urge.

I've mastered most of them. One of the hardest in the early days was the coffee trigger. I'd get a cup of coffee and sit down and the urge to smoke would swarm over me, because coffee and cigarettes are two of the main food groups or something. Another toughie was the red light urge, which happens when you're driving and you hit a red light and the next natural move is to light a cigarette, I guess to keep your hands busy. This one hasn't been too bad because I didn't drive for six weeks, and when I started driving again, I'd already defeated the physiological craving.

But there's one that I still haven't quite mastered. If I go out to my workshop and sit down at my workbench, within about five minutes I'm having a full-blown nicotine fit. Every time. It's the weirdest thing. I don't think it's a case of having old nicotine on my tools or bench. I don't smell smoke or old ash trays. I just sit there, fiddle with my latest model (or would-be model, in this case) and my hand sneaks up to my shirt pocket and fumbles for a cigarette that isn't there, and it does it over and over. Somehow sitting at my workbench and smoking have become very closely interwoven.

I hope this isn't a permanent condition, because I really do like building models, but if working on a model is going to make me long for a Marlboro 100, it might be time to find a different hobby.

Anyone up for petroglyphs?

Mama Mia!

Why do I have this craving for Italian food? What kind of Italian food should I have? And where should I have it?

I have a "Lean Cuisine" spaghetti dinner in the freezer and maybe it'll suffice. They usually aren't too bad, though they almost always need additional garlic and salt. But somehow they just don't give me the same feeling that I get when I look down at an immense plate of spaghetti with a fork in one hand and a spoon in the other.

Sigh... I'm guessing my bowl of corn flakes didn't satisfy my hunger this morning.

Decimation

I was reading something the other day - it doesn't matter what, because this error is quite widespread - where the author said that a group of people had been "decimated" when he really meant "annihilated."

Decimation has a terrible reputation. "They were decimated! Oh, how horrible!" But it really means nothing more than the loss of one thing in ten. Think, folks! Think about that "deci" business! If you have ten trees in your front yard and you cut down one, you've decimated your front yard. The word actually comes from a disciplinary technique used in the Roman army, where every tenth man in a military unit would be executed if the unit had dishonored itself in certain specific ways.

Not that I want any group of people I'm in to suffer decimation, by any means, nor am I arguing that we should he happy with decimation because it only represents a 10% casualty rate.

But I do wish people would stop saying "decimation" when they mean something else. It's like going into a restaurant and asking for "tire tread" when you really want "spaghetti".

Stress Test Redux

I haven't heard anything from my cardiologist about the results of my stress test, which is actually a good thing. They never call to say "Healthy! You bet, you bet!" (Can you tell that I watch "Doctor-ology"?)

But there's something about stress test that, in retrospect, annoys me just a little.

They wanted me to stop taking my blood pressure medication about two days in advance of the test, so I quit taking the metoprolol. Then I go in to take the test, and they snivel at me because my blood pressure is high! What did they expect? Do they think I take blood pressure medication because I enjoy swallowing small expensive pink things? So they decided to give me nitroglycerine to regulate my blood pressure, so the rest of the day I had the familiar and quite unpleasant nitro headache (which feels like having a very large hose clamp tightened around one's head, by the way).*

Would it not have been easier to just keep taking the metoprolol?

But for what it's worth, as long as I'm on metoprolol, my blood pressure continues to be very low and very well regulated.

Now I get to deal with a more serious stress test. I'm cleared to start working on September 4th, and I know I could start working now as long as I didn't have to lift much. This means that I have to start looking for a job, and though I have connections and insiders willing to help, nobody likes going through interviews. The prospect of starting a new job doesn't bother me; I have sturdy faith in my competence. It's the interview that worries me, but at least I have a good answer when they ask me "How come you haven't worked for two months?"

*Not to go off on nitroglycerine, but it seems to me to be very a "devil and the deep blue sea" situation. Angina, or a headache? Tough choice. Can't I just have a cramp in my foot instead? Or better yet, a cramp in Frank Zappa's foot? (Yes, I know he's dead, and that means he won't mind the foot cramp.)

Pull Cord

I made an interesting discovery the other day - I have a tiny, delicate little suture hanging out of my chest. I thought it was a hardened sniglet of super glue left over from my surgery, but finally the glue fell off and there it was, this tiny knot. I talked to my cardiologist's office and all they said was "Leave it alone; it'll come out on its own." Unable to actually leave it alone, I managed to grasp it between my fingernails (no easy feat) and managed to pull it out to a distance of almost an inch before I chickened out and let go. It retracted smoothly into my body until just the knot was visible, and that's when it struck me.

It's not a suture at all; it's a pull-cord!

I wonder what I'll say if someone pulls my string and lets it go. ZIP-"Math is hard!" ZIP-"Skipper! Look out for that tree!" ZIP-"By the power of Grayskull!" Knowing me, it'll be a few bars of the "Manomanah dah-dee-dah-dee-dee" song. And I'm absolutely positive that everyone who reads this knows exactly what song I'm talking about!

I also have another piece of much heavier string hanging out of my leg, out of the uppermost of the three incisions they made to harvest veins. It's thicker and almost looks like a drain tube, and it also hurts when I pull on it, so it's probably not a pull-cord in the traditional sense of the word.

Stress Test

I go in for a nice stress test today at Boswell. I'm not sure what I want the outcome to be. There's a part of me that wants the doctors to say "Get out of the office, you healthy bastard, and go have a normal life." But there's another part of me that wants the doctors to say "We found some slight abnormalities and we need to monitor you monthly just in case."

The urge to be an independent monolith versus the crawly late-night anxiety of having had open-heart surgery...

Morphing

It's a good thing morphine is a prescription drug, because morphine became my friend when I was in the hospital.

A lot of people I know seem to have problems with morphine, or at least say that morphine doesn't do anything for them, and I think that's a pity because I personally found morphine to be a tremendous boon. I wasn't sure what it would feel like, never having had it before, but what it did for me was make me feel warm, safe, happy and sleepy.

During my night in telemetry, the nurse came in to see if I needed pain medication. I hurt, so I said sure, hit me with some Percocet. When he brought me the pills, he said I could have morphine if I wanted it; it wasn't any particular sweat on his brow. So I said sure, hit me with the narcotics.

Soon I was sitting up in my chair, warm and peaceful, leaning slightly to the right and drooling, and it was groovy to be sitting up, leaning slightly to the right, and drooling. Oh yes.

There are really two things I miss about the hospital. The first is the way that being in the ICU places you firmly in the center of the universe. It's a comfort to know that all those people - doctors, surgeons, nurses, therapists, visitors - are there to make sure that nothing bad happens to you. Mind you, it's not comfortable being in the hospital and I never developed much gusto for urinating into plastic jugs, among other things, but as long as you're in the hospital, it's nice to know the whole organization is determined to make you healthy. The other thing I miss about the hospital is sitting up in my chair, leaning slightly to the right, and drooling, man. Oh yes.

Blood Pressure

For most of my adult life my blood pressure had been on the high side. I don't know how high, exactly, but high, on the order of 160 over 100, that sort of thing. But since quitting smoking and going on metoprolol, my blood pressure is now about 120 over 70, as measured by the automatic blood pressure measurement stations in Safeway, Walgreens and Target. My cardiologist was initially a little worried that my blood pressure might slip a little too low, especially since she prescribed an additional pill for my consuming pleasure, an ace inhibitor that reduces blood pressure and helps damaged heart tissue heal. The threat of having blood pressure that is too low is new to me - it's about as alien to me as the prospect of being pregnant.

So at this point, I haven't smoked in a month, I haven't had a cup of regular coffee in a month, and my blood pressure is just about right. How do I feel?

1. I haven't had a headache since the heart attack. Not a single one, and I was renowned for having headaches virtually every day. This is a major boon, believe me, and the savings in Excedrin alone are not to be ridiculed.

2. Normally I suffered from Restless Legs Syndrome at least every other night, and often every night, and usually bad enough that I either couldn't get to sleep, or was awakened after sleeping for half an hour. My RLS hasn't entirely gone away, but I can report that I've had only one episode in the last month. It was a doozy, sure, but it was still just one episode, and I think it was triggered by Tylenol PM.

3. I used to keep an over-the-counter asthma inhaler handy because taking a shower usually caused my lungs to tighten up to the point that breathing became difficult and uncomfortable. So I'd take my shower, take a honk on my "air thing", as I called it, and then have an Alka-Seltzer to wash the residual "air thing juice" down, which if not washed down with a bunch of sodium bicarb caused me fairly serious heartburn. But I haven't had to use my "air thing" since the surgery. Not even once.

4. I used to feel my pulse pounding in my head. Now I don't.

5. I used to feel my heart misfire several times a day. I think these are called PVCs, little breaks in the normal sinus rhythm of the heart, that in my case anyway are perfectly perceptible without instruments, because I can feel the lurch in my chest when it happens (and when it happens three or four times in a row, the sensation is uncannily like having a mouse trapped inside your chest). I've been paying attention to these PVCs or minor arrythmias because I read that they can hint at deeper pathology, and thus far I have to say I haven't had PVC one since the second day after surgery. I remember feeling the PVC in the ICU and looking up at the monitor and actually seeing it, which was kind of eerie, but I haven't had one since. And remember, in the old days, I had them three or four times a day.

So, no headaches, a sharp reduction in the severity of RLS, apparently no PVCs, no pulse pounding in my head, and no need for the old inhaler. Is this the result of properly managed blood pressure? Smoking cessation? Elimination of caffeine? Cool drugs like Plavix and metoprolol and ACE inhibitors? Restoration of coronary blood flow?

I don't know, but I feel so much better I almost wish I had had my heart attack ten years ago.

Has It Been A Month?

Has it really been a month since all this started? Apparently so! I can now drive again. Yay! Not being able to drive isn't the worst thing that's ever happened to me, but it's not exactly a picnic either because "going for a drive" was often my final answer to boredom. Either that or running down to the store to get a roll of paper towels, just for something to do.

Sometimes it seems that I'm never getting better, especially first thing in the morning. But I am. I swam for some hours today, and though none of that swimming was vigorous, I was in the pool for a long time without getting too bunged up. I was a little sore, sure, and I had to take a Vicodin, but compared to my level of physical competence a mere two weeks ago, I might as well have been Conan.

Things get easier, a little at a time. My shoulders don't really hurt any more, and I think I'm down to only one major pulled muscle in my neck. If I overdo things my sternum hurts, something halfway between an ache and a burn. But when I first got home, three weeks ago, I couldn't do anything at all. Just sitting up in bed was a struggle.

Boy, it's all about me, isn't it? I read something on "the Internets" a while back about how blogs were all crap because they were all about their authors. I think I remember the phrase "navel-diddling" being tossed around, which I took to mean that the author of that screed was pissed off because nobody was talking about him. My point is that I'm going to continue talking about my surgery and recovery for as long as I feel like doing it, because I strongly believe all of this to be a life-changing event.

A full month without cigarettes! Crikey!