Steven Harper's Blog, page 23

Shoulder Surgery 22 (Records)

One thing I do like about U of M Medical is its patient portal. The awful clinic didn't even =have= a portal, and I had to specially request the chance to look at my own records. UM is the polar opposite.

UM enters every single patient interaction, and in great detail, including the doctor or therapist's personal observations. ("Patient would benefit from...." "Patient seems to be....") When I have a session of PT, everything is entered into the portal--what I did, how I responded to it, even how I walked and acted that day. At first, it startled me. It was like looking into the caregiver's mind. Then I liked it. I have an excellent record of everything, which makes me less anxious about visits.

The portal has all test results, all images, everything. They even imported my records from other, non-UM, hospitals. The procedures I underwent at Ford and at Beaumont are all there.

They're miles ahead of the Other Place, and I like it.

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Shoulder Surgery 21 (Back To It)

Yeah, I'm back at PT.

I stopped going a while before we moved. I didn't have time--packing and all--and the PT didn't seem to be improving anything. My shoulder still hurt, my arm was still weak, and it was enormously stressful attending thrice-weekly sessions at the clinic that had savaged and ridiculed me. Even though these therapists weren't the perpetrators, they were still causing me physical pain, and they work for the horrifying place, so my mind lumps them in with the crimes committed against me.

After the move to Ypsilanti was done, I called around to find another shoulder specialist through U of M Medical. This was in June. The earliest appointment they had for a new patient was in September. I didn't like that at all! Living with near-constant pain was bad enough, let alone waiting over three months to address it.

I called the office back every couple days to see if they'd had any cancellations. Finally, one came up in late July. Not ideal, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, I suppose.

As the day of the appointment approached, I became more anxious. I've noted before that whenever I go to the joint doctor or the urologist anymore, I shut down. It's a defense mechanism. If I don't feel =anything=, I don't feel terror. The problem is that I don't ask good questions when I'm shut down. I've even written questions down beforehand, then failed to ask them. This complicates my medical care, and I was anxious both about becoming anxious (if that makes sense) AND about the appointment going badly because I couldn't pay good attention.

The appointment arrived, and I made my way up to the doctor's office. And there was good news. I didn't shut down. Go me! And the doctor had reviewed my MRI from a few weeks ago, and he said he didn't see evidence of re-injury or poor medical work. The pain came from two sources--an inflamed tendon and a need to open the space in my shoulder, which had been necessarily tightened during the surgery. And there was bad news. I would need a lot more physical therapy.

I almost lost it then, but held it back. I did ask why it was taking so long, and the doctor said it can take a year to fully recover. I get angry again just typing this.

There are physical therapy facilities very near our new house, and U of M Medical's facilities are a bit of a drive, but I was seeing wisdom in having all my medical records in one place, easily reviewed by all medical staff, so I decided to attend U of M Medical.

It was a good two weeks before they had an appointment for a new patient intake. The day finally arrived, and I drove up to northern Ann Arbor, where the facility is located. I was in a surprisingly good mood--I hadn't shut down at the doctor's office, so apparently the reaction came from the people and the place, not the idea of what happened there.

But when I checked in at reception--BOOM. All the energy drained out of me and I sat in a chair, staring at the floor. I had shut down again.

A PT staffer named G-- came out for me, and I went with him, barely looking up. This place is way bigger and clearly handles more than joint problems. They have more varied equipment, including a pool, and lots of staff members bustling about. G-- sat me on a padded table and took measurements of my ability to move and what the pain threshold was, then went into detail about what my PT program would be, and what we were trying to accomplish. I liked this aspect of it. The other clinic never went into this kind of detail. Still, my answers and reactions were short. It got worse when G-- projected that I would need at least three more months of PT. My blood actually chilled and I almost walked out, but that wouldn't make my shoulder better, so I didn't.

G-- took me through an initial set of exercises that emphasized stretching rather than strength. They were fairly basic, and ones I'd done before. I dutifully went through them.

At one point, I pushed myself out of shutdown mode and told G-- what I had gone through at the other place. "I was hoping this place would feel differently for me, but it doesn't," I finished. "I hate coming here. It fills me with fear and anxiety. As a result, I'm not a social patient. I don't make jokes or small talk. I come here to grind through PT and get out."

G-- was appropriately shocked and horrified by what had happened to me and said he understood my reaction. We set up a series of appointments and I left.

The next time I went, a different PT therapist came for me, a woman named D--. I wasn't expecting this. I thought G-- would be the therapist. If G-- had mentioned anything to her, D-- gave no sign of it. I really, really didn't feel like explaining it all again, so I didn't. D-- was very nice, though shut-down me ignored her as much as possible. At one point, she wanted me to lay down on my back on a table with my knees up. There I came more to life. "I can't do that," I said. "It's a trauma trigger and it makes me upset. Can we do this sitting up?"

She said that this exercise wouldn't work from a seated position. Could I try lying down a little?

I finally allowed that we could, as long as she stayed a few steps away, where I couldn't see her. I got through the exercise set. That was the last one, so I left.

Later, D-- emailed me a list of exercises to do at home. I saw this as an opportunity. I hit REPLY and wrote her a note explaining what had happened and how to handle me as a result of it. Send.

Weirdly, sending that email made me less angry/anxious about the PT office. This actually makes sense--writing is the main way I process stuff and make sense of the world. When I showed up for the next appointment, I didn't shut down nearly as much. D-- told me she'd read my email and understood. I nodded, and we went on.

It's been three weeks now. The exercises have changed from only stretching to mostly strength-building. They have me planking again, something I haven't done since the surgery. I hate planking. (Does anyone like it?) Additionally, I can't do it like I used to. Before the surgery, when I was introduced to planking, I could do a bunch of poses and hold them for 45 seconds. Now I'm doing good if I can hold 20 seconds, and I can only do one pose. One. The planking right now reminds me of how weak I've become, and I don't like that. But it's easy to do anywhere and it's efficient, so I do it.

Recently, D-- put me on an assisted pull-up machine. I'd never seen this before. It works with you climbing up to a platform facing a pull-up bar. A stack of weights sit below the platform. They counterbalance your own weight, so you can do pull-ups with a single finger if you want--the platform rises beneath you and holds you up. You can also reduce the amount of counterbalance so you're pulling up, say, a quarter of your weight, or half, or whatever. I can't do full-weight pull-ups, of course, but they're good for the shoulders, and D-- experimented with different weight settings to see where I could handle it.

I bring this up because I think we need more of these machines, especially in schools. Being able to do pull-ups is one measure of fitness. The problem is, you can't build up to pull-ups. You can either haul your entire weight up, or you can't. It's not like doing bicep curls, where you can start at 10 pounds and use heavier weights as you get stronger. But this machine lets you build up. I remember in elementary school, I couldn't do pull-ups. I wanted to do them, but couldn't figure out how to get strong enough to do them. This machine would have let me.

So I'm back to doing PT twice a week at the facility and three times a week at home. For three months.

 

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Two Out Of Three

At about 6 AM today, we got the call. Although most buildings in the school district have power, two don't--one high school (mine) and one elementary school. Classes are canceled for those buildings today. So now it's two days out of three that we have no school!



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Stormy Start to School Year

This year's new school year proceeded normally. At first.

I did my two religious makeup days and used the time to make loads of lesson plans and a cornucopia of copies. I reset my classroom (what other job requires you to completely disassemble your office, including your computer system, and then set it up back up whenever you go on vacation?). Then we had two days of staff development. Then it was the weekend, and Monday we welcomed the students.

I have a section of mythology, three sections of English 12 (one of them co-taught with a special education teacher; the class is for students who struggle with English), and a section of English 9. First impressions? My mythology students will be fun. My freshmen will be a handful. And the co-taught English 12 will be surprisingly mellow. I was expecting more rowdiness from that class, but they were really chill. Which is cool.

I drove home--

--and the storm hit. Slammed into us, really. Winds at 70 MPH, sideways rain, continual lightning and thunder. I like thunderstorms, but this was a bit much even for me! But it passed after a few minutes, and things went back to normal.

And then we got the robocall. Turns out all of Wherever is without power AND is under a boil water advisory, to boot. School was cancelled for Tuesday.

I think that has to be the earliest school cancellation ever.

I feel I should point out that, in the entire time I lived in Wherever, our house never once lost power. Now that we've moved down to Ypsilanti, we STILL haven't lost power, and Wherever is in the dark. I take responsibility and offer my apologies.

As of this writing, there are huge areas of the district--the entire state--that don't have power and aren't expected to have it until late Thursday or even early Friday. The electric company's web site has no estimate for when power will be restored to the school where I teach. The boil water advisory makes it doubly complicated--the cafeteria can't operate properly, but federal law states that when the school is open, it must provide free lunch for those who qualify for it.

The district is in a bind. If they call school off again now and power is restored overnight, they'll get yelled at for calling off school needlessly. If they wait until the last minute to cancel school, they get yelled at for not giving people enough time to plan for child care. We just got an email informing us that they're going to decide early in the morning.  Yeesh.

It's been a stormy start to the year.

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Bunny!

The guest bedroom in our basement has an exit window, meaning there's a three-foot shaft with the bedroom window at the bottom, ladder rungs up the side, and a set of removable bars covering it. Last night, apparently, a baby bunny fell through the bars and landed in the shaft. It wasn't hurt, but it was there all day before anyone realized it. The poor thing must have been hungry and thirsty and terrified.

I opened the window and took the screen out, then managed to drop a milk crate over the bunny. It panicked, of course. It kept trying to get away, and even tried to leap out of the crate. It smacked its head several times. I laid a towel on the bottom of the shaft and scooted the crate and bunny over it, then carefully flipped it all over. The bunny calmed down a little once the towel covered the crate and it couldn't see anything.

I took the whole thing out to the back yard and gently tipped the bunny out. It sat there, stunned, for a moment, then realized it was free and bolted away. Hopefully, it learned its lesson!

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WSFA Award Nomination: Me!

I'm thrilled! My short story "Eight Mile and the City" in the anthology WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (edited by Joshua Joshua B. Palmatier and Sam Butler has been nominated for the WSFA award for short fiction.

I do love this story, a noir SF mystery set in near-future Detroit. https://www.amazon.com/When-Worlds-Collide-Esther-Friesner-ebook/dp/B094LHDF8Y/

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Poker Night With New Drinks

Since the pandemic started, our poker parties have become more irregular, but we still have them. This time, Darwin and I were hosting in our new house. It's fun to have it here because I can make party food I rarely get to play with. This time, the centerpieces were home-made mac and cheese and a pavlova, which is a frothy, meringue-and-fruit dessert perfect for summer evenings.

When the players began to arrive, our friend Carol produced a housewarming present: a 2-liter of the new Vernors Black Cherry , which is difficult to find. Vernors, for those who aren't familiar, is a brand of ginger ale you can only find in the Great Lakes part of the country. It's one of the few regional treats left.

I tasted it and liked it and remembered I had in the freezer a bottle of cherry vodka I'd bought from a specialty brewery in Traverse City. And a new drink was born. I declared the name to be a Cherry Popper. (Because it's made with cherry pop. What did you think I meant?)

CHERRY POPPER
8 oz. Black Cherry Vernors
1 oz. cherry vodka
ice

Combine ingredients in cocktail glass and stir. Garnish with fresh or maraschino cherry.

It turned into the drink of the evening!

The game itself was weird. We had long, long streaks of dull hands. The flops had no face cards. Few of us got pocket pairs. The big moment, though, came when two players went all in and turned their pocket cards, only to show they BOTH had a pair of kings. (!!) The flop cards didn't have the right combination to give anyone a flush, so no matter what other cards showed up, it would have to be a tie!

It was a fun evening of food and cards.




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The Teacher Shortage--Now

I think most people were thinking that the teacher shortage was something that would show up some time in the distant future, ten years or more down the road or something. It isn't. It's happening right now. You and your kids are going to feel it this school year:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/03/school-teacher-shortage/

The TL;DR version is that thousands and thousands and thousands of teacher positions are going unfilled across the country. Every single school and school district is feeling it. My own district in Wherever is one of the higher-paying districts in the state. Not long ago, a single vacancy garnered dozens of applications, and we had very few vacancies. Wherever was able to poach teachers from other districts, in fact. A few years ago, we had a special education position open up in mid-year, and Wherever persuaded a teacher one town over to leave and teach for us.

Now? I see the HR department putting out several vacancies a week. Just yesterday, they posted three more. And they can't get applicants. Keep in mind that teachers used to fight to teach in Wherever. Now there just aren't enough teachers to go around.

The trouble is, all the solutions are long-term. You've heard it before, and it hasn't changed. We need to increase salaries, improve benefits, reduce class sizes and workloads, and stop vilifying teachers. (Funny that when the pandemic started, we were heroes who restructured schools in less than 24 hours in order to teach and help and reach students during a national emergency, then less than a year later, we were mustache-twirling villains who are trying to wreck every child's life.) But all this will take time. Even if the legislature passed budgets that gave all teachers a 20% raise and restored all benefits and retirement to what they were in 1990, the shortage will continue. It takes four or five years of college to make a teacher, and right now teacher-education programs are empty. Young people aren't going into teaching. Meanwhile, the old guard is bailing out to retire early, and the middle guard is taking jobs elsewhere. If all the problems surrounding teaching were solved tomorrow, it would still be four or five years before the shortage ended.

And rather than address the big issues, some places are trying to lure people into teaching by loosening the licensing. Are you a vet? You can teach! Are you married to a vet? You can teach! Do you have a degree of some kind, any kind? You can teach! Are you in the National Guard? You can teach!

Some people are hearing the call and marching into the classroom, but it's not enough. You can't solve a staffing problem of thousands by hiring a few hundred. And in any case, I doubt retention from the National Guard/vet/business degree set will be very high. The school will be lucky if these people get through three months before they throw up their hands and flee. It's not because the kids are awful, but because they just don't know how to do the job. (I wonder what their state-mandated evaluations will look like?)

No one is allowed to act surprised that this shortage hitting so fast and so hard. Teachers and schools have been shouting about it since the pandemic began. But as I said above, I think the general public (and the legislature) said, "Yeah, yeah. We have time. The shortage is a few years away yet."

It isn't. It's here. It's now.




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Why Tom Swift Was Cancelled

 TOM SWIFT is the first CW adventure show featuring a Black gay man as the lead character. We all had high hopes for it. Now the CW has announced its cancellation.

Why? The ratings were, frankly, shitty. No one was watching. Was it because of the gay Black lead?

No.

The show was awful. It really was. I could see what they were trying to do, but it was all done ... badly. Tom himself simply wasn't very engaging. I didn't really much care about his personal struggles. The networked hyped that he was gay, and they did make it very clear that Tom was gay, but his relationship with his sort-of boyfriend ... failed. There was no chemistry between them. Meanwhile, Tom does show serious chemistry with his bodyguard Isaac, but Isaac also has a thing for one of the women on the show. It looks like the studio wanted both a love triangle AND a "will they/won't they?" couple. What they got was a half-hearted, uninteresting tangle.

I also looks like the studio thought Tom's thing for cars and shoes would make him a cool-guy icon, but that didn't work, either. Yeah, there are the sneaker-heads, but most male viewers don't care what kind of shoe the character wears, even if it has some kind of tech embedded in it, and most female viewers don't care about men's shoes. And the cars such obvious product placement, it was painful. Also, the guy who gets to choose which multi-million dollar car he drives from an entire garage of them automatically becomes less relatable. I didn't envy Tom for his cars, nor did I wish to be him. I only felt he was spoiled.

The overall stakes are too low, or perhaps too abstract. In the first episode, Tom's father boards a Saturn-bound ship that Tom himself built, but the ship explodes after it reaches Saturn. At first, Tom--and everyone else--thinks Dad is dead, but Tom learns his dad is still alive and that a global conspiracy (sigh) sabotaged the ship. Tom now has to rush around the country trying to gather what he needs to rescue his stranded father. The trouble here is that, once the ship explodes, we don't see Dad. We don't feel that he's in danger. And he isn't. The show makes it clear that Dad has plenty of oxygen and whatever else he needs to survive until rescue comes, and in the series, Tom goes off on long, non-Dad tangents, and doesn't seem to be all that concerned that his dad is stranded in space. We have a "we'll get around to it" feeling here. Additionally, Tom doesn't like Dad very much, and for good reason. Dad is cold, homphobic, and plain ol' bitchy to Tom, who would frankly be better off without him. The viewer is left wondering why Tom is so bent on rescuing him at all.

The world-building was also lacking. The show is set in modern-day America, but Tom somehow has access to Star Trek technology--a faster-than-light drive, nanobots, easy retroviruses, and of course, an omniscient AI that malfunctions whenever the plot requires it. Tom's inventions show up lightning-quick, too. In one episode, Tom is able to whip up a miracle drug from some tree sap in just a few minutes. Star Trek can get away with it because of the far-future setting. Tony Stark in the Marvel movies can get away with it because of the super-hero setting. But for this show, the viewer is forced to wonder why all this fantastic tech hasn't made its way into the mainstream.

We also have no decent antagonists. The antagonist is a nebulous conspiracy called The Road Back. The heavy hitters in the organization are, frankly, bland. The group's aims are vague, but they seem to want to roll technology back to prevent ecological disaster. How is this a bad thing? Their members also act with astounding stupidity, which Tom himself fails to take advantage of. In one late-season episode, Tom is talking one-on-one with a tiny, Hollywood-thin woman who is a heavy-hitter in Road Back. She possesses a bit of tech Tom needs to rescue Dad, and she snottily refuses to tell him where it is. I watched this, thinking, "When is he going to grab her and force her to talk? When is he going to conk her over the head and tie her up in the basement until she talks? She's a third his size, has no bodyguards, no weapons, nothing, and she's making threats. Come on, Tom! Get her!" But she simply walks out of the room, leaving Tom shrugging helplessly.

Bad world-building, unsympathetic characters, no romance. It all equals a bad show.

 

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Ice Cream Evening

This evening after supper, Darwin and I decided to go for ice cream. Because we could.

The closest ice cream place to us is Go Ice Cream. It's a retro ice cream parlor, complete with counter and stools inside and spindly metal chairs outside. All the ice cream is made on site--the kitchen and its shiny equipment are visible through plate glass windows--and the selections rotate every week.

It's freakin' fantastic. The best ice cream I've ever had, anywhere.

Darwin and I took a pleasant 10-minute drive to downtown, where we easily found parking, and we strolled to Go Ice Cream. The summer air was soft, and other people were wandering about. The ice cream parlor is down an alley strung with lights, giving both a modern and a retro feel. I ordered Banana Brulee and Darwin got Three Bean Vanilla. We settled on a bench outside, enjoying the weather, the retro view, the ice cream, and each other's company. When we were done, we decided to buy a pint and a pair of GIC's huge ice cream sandwiches. It was a fine mini-date.

This is what I love about summer.




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