2020 Hindsight

2 years ago today

This is not the first Movable Type weblog I've had. I began one a little over 2 years ago. It went for not quite a month, and had about 16 entries total. I created it for a small but very interested audience. I've gone back and re-read it twice in the last week. Here is the entry from June 27, 2002 (slightly redacted). It concerns Doc M, my boyfriend (as I refer to him in blogville)

After Surgery--NOMINAL!!!!

Doc M is out of surgery--which went really well. The Ross Procedure valve replacement (the one he wanted to have and the one that Bruce Reitz, MD, wanted to do) is what did in fact what he got. And it went well. (YAY!)

He's in the ICU right now. All open heart surgery patients are listed as "critical" in the first 24 hours or so. But his numbers look good. Here's the timeline of the day --so far, a long one.

• 4:30 wake up (yawn--eek)
• 5:30 arrive at hospital for pre-surgery prep.
• 6:45 ish, they wheeled him off for anasthesia
• 10:30 or 10:40 or so we got a report of how it was going-- the aortic valve had been replaced by the pulmonary one (in the Ross Procedure, Doc M's his own heart valve donor, offering his healthy valve from the low-stress position of heart-to-lung to go in the high-stress aortic position), and the replacement of the pulmonary valve by a new one (homograft, from a human cadaver).
• 12:00 noonish, we spoke to Dr. Reitz, who told us that surgery had gone well; he was off the heart-lung machine and his heart was beating on its own, and that we'd be able to see him around 1:00 - 1:15.
• 1:30 we saw him in the ICU; he was still unconscious from the anasthetic
• 3:30 Thanks to K, a doctor friend of Doc M's, I got to pay an unscheduled visit to see him just as he was first coming to... very groggy.
• 4:00 I came back with P and D, Doc M's sister and brother-in-law for the regularly scheduled visit (every 2 hours at the top of the hour); Doc M recognized all and nodded in response to comments and questions.

He's still on the ventilator/respirator that's used during surgery, so he can't talk and the tube's damn uncomfortable. It should come out in the next few hours.

I saw the anesthesiologist just as I was headed down here to this computer (yay for Stanford; they've got a wee Cyber Cafe in the hospital cafeteria, so I've now got blog!!), and he said that everything went very well from the anesthesia end, and that Dr. Reitz was very pleased with how the surgery went.

The valve that came out was calcified (Reitz gestured to indicate the outer ring of the valve), and the opening was small and the valve wasn't really opening or closing... so though Doc M wasn't abundantly symptomatic (standard symptoms: shortness of breath, dizziness and pain-in-the-chest; Doc M experienced muscular fatigue whenever he tried to 'put on the gas' while riding his bike uphill), that valve was in bad shape.

So... for those who aren't familiar with "nominal," it's space industry speak for normal, expected conditions. In other words, optimal. Freaked me out when I first heard it. I have repeatedly told Doc M that things are "nominal" and he nods in response. :D

okay

so that was embarrassing.

The benefits of middle age

Ah. middle age. When you get to sit at a wonderful table at the Dining Room at the Huntington Ritz Carlton and contemplate the idealistic follies of one's youth-- onesself, an idealistic quasi-vegetarian religous fanatic (3 pounds of grain = 1 pound of chicken meat; 8 pounds of grain = 1 pound of beef, and who's gonna feed the world now, o seminarian while one asks one's Doc M boyfriend his idealism and he speaks of not driving cars till a very late age.... [continued at breathless birthday ramblings]

Thanks!

Thank you for all the birthday greetings!

Birthday today! ;D

What a way to warm up to a birthday celebration! (yes, it's THAT day today for me. Same as for Prince, Tom Jones, Jessica Tandy, Paul Gaugin, Liam Neeson, Dean Martin, Gwendolyn Brooks. Some birthday pages ) Yesterday's pulled pork experiment was To Die For. The recipe was from Cook's Illustrated's American Classics cookbook; if you're a member of their site, you can view a variation of the recipe. I've got pictures of the whole process, but it'll be a bit before I can post them. Cooking it is a big, all-day affair. And so worth the time.

The night before: cut skin off of roast (shoulder picnic roast, in my case, tho their first choice of cut is Boston Butt) applied dry spice rub to pork roast, wrapped in plastic, and let it hang out in the fridge for the night.

The next day, un-refrigerated and unwrapped roast to bring to room temperature fro 1 hour.

Prepare BBQ: Light a medium-sized charcoal fire. Wrap hickory chips in heavy foil, poke holes in it, and lay atop fire... all on one side of the BBQ (A weber charcoal grill in our case), and set the roast in disposable foil pan on the grill rack on the other side of the grill. I wasn't present for the first part, but I understand that it began in an oh-so-smoky way. An hour later and again an hour after that, add 8 charcoal briquets to keep the low fire going.

After 3 hours, the roast was covered tightly with heavy duty foil, and went into a 325° (F) oven for another two hours. Through the foil, I could smell the smokiness. mmmmmm!

Meanwhile, made the BBQ sauce (the linked recipe has three other Carolina variations--which aren't in the book, we just made their straight up BBQ sauce). Ingredients: Sauteed onion, Canned tomatoes and tomato sauce, vinegar, sweetened with molasses and brown sugar, and spices (paprika, chili powder, salt, pepper), simmering slowly for 2.5 hours, then pureed in a blender.

When the roast was done, out it came, where it immediately went into a paper bag (in this case, one bag tucked otherway into another bag) for an hour of resting and juice absorption. Then we took off the foil overing, and pulled it apart. Couldn't wait for it to cool enough to do it with fingers, so we went at it with forks. Then poured about 1 cup of the sauce over the meat, with more sauce on the side if we wanted it. I did. It was eaten in three styles: between toasted hamburger buns, rolled up in low-carb tortillas, and just plain with a fork (well, I guess that doesn't count the finger-samples during the pull phase).

Oh. my. Oh. my. Oh. my.

Also watched Saving Private Ryan in honor of D-Day --I hadn't seen the film before. (Incongruity supreme: simultaneously blissing out over BBQ while watching battle beach horror.)

Today's birthday lunch: leftovers. Don't feel sorry for me that I'm eating leftovers. Be jealous.

Wet eyes of the soul

You know you've been working at home too much, crouched in front of the keyboard for too many hours, when the thing that strikes you most vividly, upon getting out of the house to go to a Vroman's Bookstore booksigning of Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and numerous other titles (something like 15 in the last dozen years), and who is now on a book tour promoting his most recent book, Dark Nights of the Soul, and you find the man's discourse good and deep, moreso the back and forth discussion with the articulate audience, you look at the other people with curiosity because, well, you haven't been out and here is a roomful of people you've never seen before, and you observe their dress and hair and glasses and that woman with the slouchy ballcap and the man with the well-curled moustache, but what strikes you the most as you glance about the room (is it a trick of the lighting?) is the wetness of their eyes. This is not a roomful of people about to cry. This is a few dozen people on a Wednesday night, each of whose eyes are lubricated from tear ducts, the same as your own. They shine, they reflect. You've seen it before, of course, without noticing it. And instead of shaking your head and glossing (!) over it and thinking that you've been inside way too much (which is true, of course), you think that it's an odd enough observation that needs to take centerstage for a bit. And so you blog it.

Homeostasis

Dictionary.com : "The ability or tendency of an organism or cell to maintain internal equilibrium by adjusting its physiological processes ."

I define it thus: "Whenever your adjustable rate mortgage payment decreases, your health insurance premium goes up."

a nice little break from the net, but not from clutter

Been taking a break from the net. Break will continue. In non-virtual space, I'm cleaning. Gathering. Processing. Trying to get things done. Still working on those new years resolutions from 2003 . If you came here for Mars news, check out the links to the left or my blogroll.

As Sam says, "Well, I'm back"

Back from Christmas escapades. White Christmas (night) in the San Bernardino mountains. Have fotos of the place where the burn jumped the rim of the world highway. Burn smell very strong, even under a coupla inches of snow. Amazing, at Green Valley Lake, it was all untouched. Still lots and lots of dead trees up there. More fuel.

Caught respiratory crud on the weekend, am only beginning to dig out from under stuff. Hooray for Apple's Mail spam filters. Oh, say, is this New Year's Eve? I guess I've got some year-end tasks to attend to now that I have a slight bit of energy.

If I don't get to posting anything else here today, you all have a Happy New Year. Drink. Or drive, but don't do both.

Rainy and gray day

Sunday was one of those rainy gray days. Great for indoor movie-watching. A handy day to be at boyfriend's house, especially when one does not possess a TV. However, when boyfriend's big-ol' TV is busted, it's good to have redundant TV/DVD-viewing technology:

We watched two movies about TV (!): My Favorite Year and Being There.

Incidentally, I don't watch TV at boyfriend's on my own. I'm not afraid of technology, but I've yet to learn the ways of all of these: