“Alls” is not a word. Please stop saying “Alls you have to do.” Right now.
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All posts by Ray Ivey
Oh, goody, On September 29 I get to go to Cedars at 6:30 in the morning and swallow a large pill which contains a tiny little movie camera. Over the following eight hours, it’ll create a fascinating and no doubt beautiful travelogue of my stomach and upper intestine.
What we’re doing is looking for other sources of bleeding that could be exacerbating my anemia. My gastroenterologist, my doctor friend Caroline and I all agree that it’s unlikely we will find anything dire down there.
The general consensus is that I’m too fat to have cancer and besides, cancer isn’t a one-symptom (anemia) disease. So I’m trying to remain calm and keep my hands inside the ride at all times.
Perhaps if they give me a copy of the movie I’ll post it here with accompanied by a pretentious, would-be-mysterious pretentious faux Pink Floyd score.
Or not.
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Yeah you. The couple sitting two tables over from me at the Silver Lake Acapulco restaurant I was trying to have an enjoyable dinner in last night.
For the first twenty minutes, I heard the shrieking of a baby. I mean the kind of shrieking that didn’t indicate hunger, but distress. Pain. Sickness. Repeats of “Blues Clues.”
Why don’t they take that poor baby out of here, I kept thinking. Then I looked up and saw to my shock that the caterwauling wasn’t coming from an infant, but from your kid, a child who was at least two, probably three years old.
And he wasn’t in pain, or sick, or in distress. He was simply sitting between his mother and father and they weren’t paying attention to him. Yep, this screaming, animal-in-pain noise was simply his way of announcing he was bored.
The parents then began taking turns occupying him. Picking him up, walking him around the restaurant. Whenever they did, he turned off the sound instantly and was suddenly the happiest kid in the room. Then the second Mom or Dad put him down, more screaming.
Which means that you two lousy parents have taught this little wretch that he can manipulate you any time he wants by turning the volume up to eleven. And he’s learned he can do it for any reason, whether important or utterly frivolous.
Mom, Dad, you think it’s annoying right now that you have to pick the kid up to stop the siren? Wait until he’s a little older and begins to come up with other ways to get your attention when you’re ignoring him.
You are not only inconveniencing anyone unfortunate enough to come with a ZIP code of your family, but you are raising a future dysfunctional, ugly, narcissistic adult.
Like we don’t have enough of those already.
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So I go in to see the same Gastro who helped me with my anemia when we first discovered it two years ago. I told him that taking Prilosec and staying away from caffeine, chocolate, alcohol and lying down on a full stomach wasn’t cutting it, as my hemoglobin is now 8.5 (it’s supposed to be 15).
He said that we had to assume there was another place I was bleeding internally beside the stomach issue we already knew about. Great. I reminded him that I was one of those White Coat Hypertension types (scared of everything medical).
“Here’s what we’re going to do, ” he said. “You’re going to go into Cedars and swallow this gigantic pill with a camera inside it. The pill will take movies of your upper intestine and we will look for problems.”
Great. I asked him, “So, like in the colon, are there scary lethal things we can find there in the upper intestine?” Of course I meant cancer.
“It’s been two years and anemia is your only symptom and you had a mysterious weight loss [obviously], ” he said. “Doesn’t sound like cancer. Sounds like any one of a bunch of benign causes.”
I informed him that that was the right answer.
In the meantime, he tripled my iron and gave me a choice of two drugs. Basically the choice came down to which gastroenterological discomfort would I rather have, diarrhea or constipation? [Yay. Welcome to my life.]
I chose constipation. Which, for the record, thanks to assiduous extra fiber intake, I have NOT suffered from so far.
For a few days I noticed no difference. In fact, I felt terrible. Normal walking was a struggle. Staircases were agony. Of course, my current gig is, uh, floor support, which, just like it sounds, requires lots of walking.
I got really blue. Have I waited too long? I thought. Have I lost my chance at good health? Am I doomed to either die young or be unhealthy and feel miserable all the time?
Then something lovely happened. I got out of my car Wednesday to walk to the building where I’m working, and I noticed that it wasn’t quite as hard as it had been before. Maybe the new drug just needed a few days to kick in, I thought. I’ll wait and see tomorrow. Maybe this is a fluke.
Thursday morning. Not a fluke! I feel even better today. So now I’m hoping that the drug is helping plug up the hole in my stomach so I can start to accumulate some decent red blood.
Tomorrow is my birthday. All I want is some hemoglobin.
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After seeing Dr. Chan, the nice podiatrist, I scurried across town to the x-ray place where I had a pleasant session with what seemed to be a very lonely x-ray technician. She sent me packing with the pictures of my feet which I was to return to Dr. Chan in a couple of weeks.
Alas, snag! I’ve been actually Denied clinical orthopedic shoe inserts by my medical insurance company! I wonder why? They don’t think heel pain is important?
Snag deux! Chan put me on Naproxen, an anti-inflammatory, to help with the feet, and boy did it ever help. Unfortunately it also turned out to be EXACTLY the kind of medicine that wreaks havoc with my poor corroded stomach lining, making my already bad anemia worse.
Exit the Naproxin. I’ll live with the pain for now. Hemaglobin is more important.
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Look at any photo of Palin, particularly any one of her during her speech. You can see the glint of meanness right there in her eyes. It’s that same bullying attitude that characterized the members of the Republican resurgence in the early 90s. In Palin’s eyes is the same bigoted, intolerant meanness that used to be displayed by such G.O.P. attack dogs as Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm.
One heartbeat away from being President? That scares the shit out of me. This is a woman who wants religion taught in science class and wants abortion denied even to victims of rape and incest.
I hope good, reasonable Republican voters realize this choice reflects McCain’s reckless nature when it comes to making important decisions.
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What do all of the following humans have in common?
Morgan Freeman
Bill Cosby
Ruby Dee
Barak Obama
Michelle Obama
Maya Angelou
Lawrence Fishbourne
Give up? Okay, I know it’s a tricky one. Here’s the answer:
They are all American Black people who know how to prounounce the three-letter word that means “to inquire.”
No, I don’t for a minute think that most black folks in America are dyslexic. I don’t think the majority of black people in America are ignorant.
So why, in the name of sweet tapdancing Jesus, do so few of them prounounce this tiny word correctly?
Since I have trouble believing that so many people cannot work out the phonics of the following three letters
a s k
then I have to open myself up the possibility that it’s a deliberate thing. Is that what it is? Is it a black thing? Am I just too damn white to understand it?
Well if so, then it’s true, I cannot. If it’s “a black thing, ” meaning some kind of mark of racial pride, what an idiotic choice. “Hey everyone! Let’s show how great we are by misprouncing a three letter word! That’ll show The Man!” That’s about as dumb as whenever someone accuses Muslims of being violent, and then thousands of deeply offended Muslims respond by burning things down.
Why celebrate ignorance? That to me seems as socially and spiritually bankrupt as the hip-hop culture, whose every facet is designed to glamorize prison life (that’s the reason for the baggy pants dangling to the floor . . . the first thing that happens in prison is that they take away your belt).
I fervently hope that when Barak Obama becomes our next President, people will not only listen to what he says, but listen to HOW he says it. Maybe then, FINALLY, I won’t have to cringe every time I hear the word “aks.”
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Here’s a shot of the easternmost town in the United States. The town is named, against all odds, Eastport.
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The Big Night!! Only Five to Seven Years Overdue!
Last night was my Sleep Study.
It was such fun. I had to show up at the Midway Sleep Center at 10:00 p.m. with my “sleep clothes” and a lot of paperwork. My sleep technician (I’m not sure if she had an actual name) set me up in a perfectly comfortable room which looked like a nicely-appointed hotel room (but no television). She then proceeded to hook me up to about twenty-five sensors. I had them on my head (even in my hair, ick), face, and all over my body. I had a contraption strapped under my nose. I had a strap tightly wound around my chest. I had a pulse reader on my finger. All of this was connected to a board of wires that had to go with me if I left the bed to go to the (down the hall, thanks) bathroom.
Hell, who couldn’t drift easily and immediately off to sleep in such a setup?!
At least none of this was a surprise. The big surprise was hearing that at some point in the night my S.T. might come into my room and put the actual CPAP mask on and make me sleep with the CPAP machine!
Say What?
At this point it occurs to me that I should define two important terms.
Sleep Apnea is the repeated stopping of breathing when you sleep. It is caused by the airways in the nose and throat being obstructed. It is very common in older (hello), male (guilty) overweight (my hand is up!) individuals with low muscle tone (oh bite me). Apnea is very commonly undiagnosed and is very dangerous. It is bad for the heart, can make diabetes worse, increases your chances for a stroke or heart attack by three times, and can make it almost impossible to lose weight.
Yep, did you hear that last one? Can make it almost impossible to lose weight.
I knew going into the study that I likely had apnea. I’ve been sleepy for about ten years. I fight sleep at work. I fight sleep behind the wheel. I fight sleep during Scarlet Johansson movies — no, wait, everyone does that.
A CPAP machine (the initials stand for Continuous Positive Air Pressure) is a very common and successful way of treating sleep apnea. You basically are wearing a mask connected to a machine which pushes air up your nose to keep those air passages from collapsing. For years I feared this machine. I feared its psychological affect on my would be devastating. Only recently have I realized that not getting any sleep is much worse.
Let Me Introduce You to My Little Friend
Back to the mask. Before lights out, my Sleep Tech introduced me to it and had me try it. I was surprised by how horrible it wasn’t. The gentle flow of air felt cool and nice. ST told me that, after the initial hour or so of sleep, if I “qualified” (yes, that was the term she used), that she’d come in and mask me.
Great.
I had a hell of a time going to sleep. Maybe it was the fact that it was only 10:30 at night. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because I was in a strange faux hotel room in a medical building on Olympic Boulevard strapped up to about fifty electrodes knowing that my every sleep nuance was being monitored.
At any rate, at one point in the night ST did come in and did strap the mask on me. Again, it was surprisingly okay. The gentle flow of air felt therapeutic. I drifted off to sleep easily.
ST woke me at 4:45 a.m. to tell me that I was all done.
The Bad News
Duh. I DO have sleep apnea. I have severe sleep apnea. I will probably have to sleep with the CPAP machine for the rest of my natural life.
The Good News
The above bad news was no surprise. What really worried me was the mask. Could I tolerate it? Would it be as big a nightmare as when I was given a mouthpiece to wear from my dentist a few years ago? That little $750 experiment ended in utter failure. (YOU try to go to sleep with a huge piece of plastic in your mouth.)
However, praise the angels, I took to the CPAP mask like a Halliburton executive to a no-bid government contract. Today, after only a few hours of real sleep, I feel better than I have in a long time. I’m actually looking forward to getting my very own Frankenstein sleeping machine, if it will allow me to rejoin the human race!
Now, the only quesion is this: Now that I’ve had a brief taste of how life feels after real sleep, how, o how will I be able to stand the weeks-long wait until I have a CPAP machine of my very own?!?
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Well, I haven’t seen my gastro doctor yet (soon!) but my general doctor has at least put me on iron for my anemia.
Today’s my first day on it. Good news and bad news. My head already feels a bit clearer. Not dramatically better, but better. I’ll take it!
The bad news is that I’ve had more frequent instances of light-headedness when getting up out of a chair too quickly. I’ve had that problem the whole time I’ve been anemic. But today it was especially acute.
We’ll see what a few days brings. Hopefully more of the former, less of the latter!
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