Steven Harper's Blog, page 34
August 1, 2021
Vacation: Well, We Tried
Against all odds (with Darwin working out of town at a job that doesn't give him vacation time), Darwin and I discovered we actually had a week off together. We could take . . . a vacation!
Trouble was, there's a rush on vacations right now. No one got to take trips last year, and this year (post-vaccine, with the Delta variant not making anyone nervous yet) EVERYONE wants to go. So there was a run on cottages and other places to stay. But lo and behold, I found a place to stay on a Grand Lake in northern Michigan. Grand Lake is separated from Lake Huron by only a few miles of forest land up by Presque Isle, and the cottage looked very nice. It was also pretty big, so on a whim, we invited my mother and her husband to come up and stay for a couple days, too.
The cottage was part of a group of several cottages and a renovated 1930s motel that cluster around a small beach and boat launch on Grand Lake.
The day before we were supposed to head on up, I got an email from the cottage owner. The previous tenants had done Something Awful that had backed up the toilet and sewer system in "our" cottage, and it didn't look like it would be habitable for several days. However, she =did= have a house in the same resort complex. It used to be the office for the complex and, although her renovations weren't completely finished, it was habitable, though just barely. She was willing to give us a partial refund if we still wanted to come up, or a full one if we didn't.
Darwin and I searched around for other places to stay, but finding a week-long rental in high season with 24 hours' notice? No. So we took the partial refund and went up anyway.
(Side note: I'd heard of rental scams that operate this way. Just before or just as you arrive, the landlord says there's a sewer problem, but no worries--there's another place to stay, and it turns out the other place is a crap hole, but you've already paid through the rental web site and it's almost impossible to get a refund. I was leery of our situation, but Darwin and I decided that if the new place was super bad, we could just go home. It wasn't like we'd flown in from Kukamonga or something and would be stranded if we turned the new place down.)
Grand Lake was lovely. A big lake with some islands to explore and warm enough to swim in. The bottom is rocks, though, so you need sandals or pool shoes.
The cottage . . . wasn't lovely. Like the landlady said, the renovations weren't quite done. Really, they were barely started.
Judging by the fireplace and other structural bits, Darwin and I figured the place had been put up in the late 40s or early 50s as a two-room cabin with knotty pine paneling. Later (60s?), someone added another section with three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a utility room, turning it from a cabin into a house.
The newer section was, frankly, run-down and shabby. The bathroom was dingy and dimly-lit, and there was no wall mirror. The landlady had propped a mirror behind the faucets, but it was so low, you could only see your stomach. (I had to kneel to shave.) The tub and toilet were placed in such a way that you had to do a little dance to use either one. The kitchen had been redone recently, but some sections of the walls weren't finished, and showed bare plywood.
Only one bedroom--the smallest--was open. The other two were locked. The landlady said she was storing stuff in them. She offered to clear out one of the bedrooms so our visitors could stay, but my mother and her husband have some mobility issues, and this cottage was definitely not set up for them (the original was, which was why we had issued the invitation). I didn't see how either of them could use the bathroom, for example. I called my mother and told her not to come up unless she didn't mind me helping her in the bathroom. :)
To be fair, none of this was the landlady's fault. We later learned a child of the previous tenant in the original house had flushed a washcloth and a toy car down the toilet, causing the sewer problem. The landlady worked hard to make the new place as habitable as possible while also refunding us a big chunk of our rent, and the place was decent enough at the new price.
So Darwin and I did our best to have a good vacation.
The weather didn't help. The first two days were chilly and dreary. We explored the area and visited some of the towns, where we tried to unravel some of the local history, which we enjoy.
Wednesday, we went up to Mackinac Island, something we usually do every year but couldn't last summer. Wednesdays are best, we've learned, because the crowds are lighter. Not this time! Mackinac was packed! The downtown area is almost all souvenir and fudge shops (Mackinac =invented= the idea of selling fudge to tourists), and Darwin and I aren't interested in either one these days--we go to Mackinac for the view and the lake and the cool breezes and the no-cars rule and to people-watch. We rode our bikes around and enjoyed ourselves very much.
Thursday, we hung around Grand Lake. I swam and read a book from cover to cover. We kayaked out to one of the islands on Grand Lake and I saved a caterpillar that had fallen into the water. A large family had taken over the rest of the cottages in the complex for a family reunion, and we talked to some of them around the common area campfire. They were Very Nice People.
Thursday night was both chilly and stormy, and Friday was seriously windy and also chilly. The lake wasn't safe--choppy whitecaps--so we went exploring elsewhere. We checked out two historic lighthouses on Lake Huron, though vertigo got the better of Darwin and he couldn't bring himself to climb either one. I did, and the view from both was spectacular. I could see lakes and Great Lakes and forests for miles and miles and miles, and I knew that this was the reason the Huron lighthouse keepers stayed at their jobs.
We also hiked over to Besser Bell because there's a sort-of ghost town in the nature preserve over there. Bell, Michigan was founded in 1870 as a logging town and peaked in 1900 with 100 residents. It had a bank and a post office. But the lumbering time in Michigan was ending--all the trees had been cut down, you see--and the town started to dry up. It tried to transition into a mining town, but that didn't work out. By 1910 or so, the place had evaporated.
Now you can find the town by hiking through the Besser Bell nature preserve on Lake Huron. The hiking trail threads through thick woods that give you occasional peeks of Lake Huron, including a lagoon that has a 100-year-old shipwreck at the bottom. Eventually in these woods, you find a few boards nailed together in a way that makes you think, "Oh--someone had a deer blind here several years ago," until you realize you're looking at the remains of a house and the trail is actually what's left of Bell's main street. You can also find bits of rusted metal and a four-foot-tall safe lying on its back with the door missing. If you look closely, you can see mounds and depressions that mark out where building foundations used to be. A bit father down the trail is a big stone chimney and fireplace standing among some trees. There's no obvious sign of the house that must have been there. And that's all there is left of Bell, Michigan.
Well, that's not entirely true. There's also the cemetery.
The Bell Cemetery is hidden fairly deep in the woods, and not where you expect. Darwin and I hunted for it in the Besser Bell preserve and couldn't find it anywhere. Then we ran into an old man walking his dog on the trails and we asked him about it. He knew the place and gave us directions.
If you want to find the cemetery, park you car in the little lot at the Besser Bell preserve, then turn your back to the main trail and its signs. Cross the parking lot. You'll see a rough two-track road cutting through the trees ahead of you. Turn right and follow that road. It's a bit of a walk. Just at the point when you think you must have missed something, you'll see a trail split off the road to the left. Follow that trail. Again, you'll start to wonder if you've gone the wrong way, and then you'll see an arched wooden gateway and a wooden fence. That's the cemetery.
I'm writing this here because none of the other web sites that mention the cemetery actually give directions about finding it. They just say it's in the Besser Bell nature preserve, and it really isn't.
Anyway, the Bell cemetery is the definition of a Midwest frontier cemetery. It's hidden away in the forest, and would be seriously creepy at dusk. Most of the graves are marked with simple concrete crosses with RIP written on them. Still more graves are marked with rough wooden crosses. Darwin and I thought maybe the wooden crosses were new(ish), but we looked at them more closely and saw that the fastener that held the two pieces together was clearly hand forged. So the wooden crosses are all 100 years old or more, too. Only a couple-three graves have tombstones with names on them, and they're carved roughly, the work of someone who doesn't do it professionally. ("Well, I suppose I could try doing a tombstone for you. I mean, I usually just cut stones for walls and foundations.") Bell wasn't big enough to have a full-time gravestone carver. One stone was a step above the rest, and we suspect the family had some money and had a stone shipped in from Alpena or farther south. Everyone else made do with wooden crosses.
Darwin and I always wonder who the people were. Why did they come to Bell? Do any of their descendants still live in the area? (We later learned that yes--several do. Bell itself dried up, but a bunch of the people stayed in the area and just spread out instead of leaving entirely.) How did they die? What was the funeral like? We found a spot outside the graveyard that seemed to be a parking area for the hearse wagon, and we tried to imagine a group of 80 or so people in their frontier Sunday best gathered among the other graves for a burial.
There was also a much newer monument put up in the 1990s that listed the names of several people in the cemetery. We assume it was put up by the same group that did the new fence and gateway, and we thought this was a very nice thing for these people to do. Darwin, especially, finds anonymous or badly-marked graves sad, and it was good to see this effort.
Later, the weather turned yuckier. The wind was replaced with clouds, cold air, and finally the kind of rain that digs in for a few days. And so we called it quits. We packed up and left for home early.
We had some fun and saw some interesting sights, but on balance, I have to put this trip into the category "Oh well--we tried."
comments
Trouble was, there's a rush on vacations right now. No one got to take trips last year, and this year (post-vaccine, with the Delta variant not making anyone nervous yet) EVERYONE wants to go. So there was a run on cottages and other places to stay. But lo and behold, I found a place to stay on a Grand Lake in northern Michigan. Grand Lake is separated from Lake Huron by only a few miles of forest land up by Presque Isle, and the cottage looked very nice. It was also pretty big, so on a whim, we invited my mother and her husband to come up and stay for a couple days, too.
The cottage was part of a group of several cottages and a renovated 1930s motel that cluster around a small beach and boat launch on Grand Lake.
The day before we were supposed to head on up, I got an email from the cottage owner. The previous tenants had done Something Awful that had backed up the toilet and sewer system in "our" cottage, and it didn't look like it would be habitable for several days. However, she =did= have a house in the same resort complex. It used to be the office for the complex and, although her renovations weren't completely finished, it was habitable, though just barely. She was willing to give us a partial refund if we still wanted to come up, or a full one if we didn't.
Darwin and I searched around for other places to stay, but finding a week-long rental in high season with 24 hours' notice? No. So we took the partial refund and went up anyway.
(Side note: I'd heard of rental scams that operate this way. Just before or just as you arrive, the landlord says there's a sewer problem, but no worries--there's another place to stay, and it turns out the other place is a crap hole, but you've already paid through the rental web site and it's almost impossible to get a refund. I was leery of our situation, but Darwin and I decided that if the new place was super bad, we could just go home. It wasn't like we'd flown in from Kukamonga or something and would be stranded if we turned the new place down.)
Grand Lake was lovely. A big lake with some islands to explore and warm enough to swim in. The bottom is rocks, though, so you need sandals or pool shoes.
The cottage . . . wasn't lovely. Like the landlady said, the renovations weren't quite done. Really, they were barely started.
Judging by the fireplace and other structural bits, Darwin and I figured the place had been put up in the late 40s or early 50s as a two-room cabin with knotty pine paneling. Later (60s?), someone added another section with three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a utility room, turning it from a cabin into a house.
The newer section was, frankly, run-down and shabby. The bathroom was dingy and dimly-lit, and there was no wall mirror. The landlady had propped a mirror behind the faucets, but it was so low, you could only see your stomach. (I had to kneel to shave.) The tub and toilet were placed in such a way that you had to do a little dance to use either one. The kitchen had been redone recently, but some sections of the walls weren't finished, and showed bare plywood.
Only one bedroom--the smallest--was open. The other two were locked. The landlady said she was storing stuff in them. She offered to clear out one of the bedrooms so our visitors could stay, but my mother and her husband have some mobility issues, and this cottage was definitely not set up for them (the original was, which was why we had issued the invitation). I didn't see how either of them could use the bathroom, for example. I called my mother and told her not to come up unless she didn't mind me helping her in the bathroom. :)
To be fair, none of this was the landlady's fault. We later learned a child of the previous tenant in the original house had flushed a washcloth and a toy car down the toilet, causing the sewer problem. The landlady worked hard to make the new place as habitable as possible while also refunding us a big chunk of our rent, and the place was decent enough at the new price.
So Darwin and I did our best to have a good vacation.
The weather didn't help. The first two days were chilly and dreary. We explored the area and visited some of the towns, where we tried to unravel some of the local history, which we enjoy.
Wednesday, we went up to Mackinac Island, something we usually do every year but couldn't last summer. Wednesdays are best, we've learned, because the crowds are lighter. Not this time! Mackinac was packed! The downtown area is almost all souvenir and fudge shops (Mackinac =invented= the idea of selling fudge to tourists), and Darwin and I aren't interested in either one these days--we go to Mackinac for the view and the lake and the cool breezes and the no-cars rule and to people-watch. We rode our bikes around and enjoyed ourselves very much.
Thursday, we hung around Grand Lake. I swam and read a book from cover to cover. We kayaked out to one of the islands on Grand Lake and I saved a caterpillar that had fallen into the water. A large family had taken over the rest of the cottages in the complex for a family reunion, and we talked to some of them around the common area campfire. They were Very Nice People.
Thursday night was both chilly and stormy, and Friday was seriously windy and also chilly. The lake wasn't safe--choppy whitecaps--so we went exploring elsewhere. We checked out two historic lighthouses on Lake Huron, though vertigo got the better of Darwin and he couldn't bring himself to climb either one. I did, and the view from both was spectacular. I could see lakes and Great Lakes and forests for miles and miles and miles, and I knew that this was the reason the Huron lighthouse keepers stayed at their jobs.
We also hiked over to Besser Bell because there's a sort-of ghost town in the nature preserve over there. Bell, Michigan was founded in 1870 as a logging town and peaked in 1900 with 100 residents. It had a bank and a post office. But the lumbering time in Michigan was ending--all the trees had been cut down, you see--and the town started to dry up. It tried to transition into a mining town, but that didn't work out. By 1910 or so, the place had evaporated.
Now you can find the town by hiking through the Besser Bell nature preserve on Lake Huron. The hiking trail threads through thick woods that give you occasional peeks of Lake Huron, including a lagoon that has a 100-year-old shipwreck at the bottom. Eventually in these woods, you find a few boards nailed together in a way that makes you think, "Oh--someone had a deer blind here several years ago," until you realize you're looking at the remains of a house and the trail is actually what's left of Bell's main street. You can also find bits of rusted metal and a four-foot-tall safe lying on its back with the door missing. If you look closely, you can see mounds and depressions that mark out where building foundations used to be. A bit father down the trail is a big stone chimney and fireplace standing among some trees. There's no obvious sign of the house that must have been there. And that's all there is left of Bell, Michigan.
Well, that's not entirely true. There's also the cemetery.
The Bell Cemetery is hidden fairly deep in the woods, and not where you expect. Darwin and I hunted for it in the Besser Bell preserve and couldn't find it anywhere. Then we ran into an old man walking his dog on the trails and we asked him about it. He knew the place and gave us directions.
If you want to find the cemetery, park you car in the little lot at the Besser Bell preserve, then turn your back to the main trail and its signs. Cross the parking lot. You'll see a rough two-track road cutting through the trees ahead of you. Turn right and follow that road. It's a bit of a walk. Just at the point when you think you must have missed something, you'll see a trail split off the road to the left. Follow that trail. Again, you'll start to wonder if you've gone the wrong way, and then you'll see an arched wooden gateway and a wooden fence. That's the cemetery.
I'm writing this here because none of the other web sites that mention the cemetery actually give directions about finding it. They just say it's in the Besser Bell nature preserve, and it really isn't.
Anyway, the Bell cemetery is the definition of a Midwest frontier cemetery. It's hidden away in the forest, and would be seriously creepy at dusk. Most of the graves are marked with simple concrete crosses with RIP written on them. Still more graves are marked with rough wooden crosses. Darwin and I thought maybe the wooden crosses were new(ish), but we looked at them more closely and saw that the fastener that held the two pieces together was clearly hand forged. So the wooden crosses are all 100 years old or more, too. Only a couple-three graves have tombstones with names on them, and they're carved roughly, the work of someone who doesn't do it professionally. ("Well, I suppose I could try doing a tombstone for you. I mean, I usually just cut stones for walls and foundations.") Bell wasn't big enough to have a full-time gravestone carver. One stone was a step above the rest, and we suspect the family had some money and had a stone shipped in from Alpena or farther south. Everyone else made do with wooden crosses.
Darwin and I always wonder who the people were. Why did they come to Bell? Do any of their descendants still live in the area? (We later learned that yes--several do. Bell itself dried up, but a bunch of the people stayed in the area and just spread out instead of leaving entirely.) How did they die? What was the funeral like? We found a spot outside the graveyard that seemed to be a parking area for the hearse wagon, and we tried to imagine a group of 80 or so people in their frontier Sunday best gathered among the other graves for a burial.
There was also a much newer monument put up in the 1990s that listed the names of several people in the cemetery. We assume it was put up by the same group that did the new fence and gateway, and we thought this was a very nice thing for these people to do. Darwin, especially, finds anonymous or badly-marked graves sad, and it was good to see this effort.
Later, the weather turned yuckier. The wind was replaced with clouds, cold air, and finally the kind of rain that digs in for a few days. And so we called it quits. We packed up and left for home early.
We had some fun and saw some interesting sights, but on balance, I have to put this trip into the category "Oh well--we tried."
comments
July 20, 2021
Hyper-Flexive Man Reframes Physical Therapy
I'm trying to reframe my physical therapy.
Lemme explain. It turns out, I have hyper-flexible joints, what people used to call "double-jointed." I can reach any part of my own back with either hand, for example. You know that police move where a cop grabs your left arm, wrenches it behind you, shoves it against your back, and lifts you up on your toes so you can't move? That doesn't work with me. You wrench my left arm behind me and lift, my arm bends all the way to the left side of my rib cage. I turn around and say, "What the heck are you doing?" It doesn't hurt in the slightest.
That's hyper-flexible.
It happens not because my bones are strangely-shaped. It's because my tendons and muscles are looser, which allows the joints to go where no man has gone before.
(SIDE NOTE: Hyper-flexible joints are also associated with autism. Aran is even more flexible than I am--he can bend his little finger back to touch his wrist. Given the number of times in my life when people thought my reactions to social situations were strange or even rude and the number of times I've completely misread people when everyone around me seemed to know what was going on, and given that my son is autistic, I wonder if I land somewhere on that spectrum myself. It would explain a lot.)
This might sound amusing. I've had a super-power my entire life and didn't know it. I'm Hyper-Flexible Man! And it's had its advantages. Until now.
Having hyper-flexible joints means I do things that human joints aren't actually meant to do. One of these things is reach into the back of the car from the driver's seat to grab the bag of pandemic masks I kept there. I've learned this is something most people's shoulders won't let them do--they literally can't bend that way. My shoulders aren't supposed to bend that way, either, but my loose ligaments allow it to happen. Doing this particular move daily during the pandemic finally caused some minor tearing, which in turn causes pain when I move my left arm in certain ways.
The pain is instant and debilitating. There's no build-up, just WHAM! Agony so bad it brings tears to my eyes and I have to stop whatever I'm doing. It last 30-40 seconds, then ends just as abruptly. There's no real pattern to it. I can move my arm in a certain direction and I'm fine. I do the exact same motion again and WHAM! I turned over in bed once and yelped loud enough to wake Darwin.
I went to a joint specialist, who gave me an MRI scan and said my hyper-flexible rotor cuff was injured. He gave me a cortisone shot, a process I'm not eager to repeat, and sent me across the hall to regular physical therapy sessions.
The physical therapy office looks like a hospital ward mooshed into a gym mooshed into an elementary school playground. Hospital beds line one wall, and the other walls are lined with brightly-colored inflatable balls, weights, miniature staircases, and weight machines.
PT started off . . . badly. Not because it was painful. It wasn't. That was part of the problem. Every day, I went in and did some warmup on an exercise machine. Then the therapist gave me little exercises to do, mostly with these giant rubber bands. I wrapped them around my wrists and moved my arms in different directions against the resistance of the band. The exercises didn't feel like I was doing much, but I did them dutifully. After about 40 minutes of "work," the therapist massaged my arm and shoulder VERY gently, put my shoulder on ice for ten minutes, and I went home. This happened twice a week. I actually felt resentful because it seemed like a colossal waste of time.
I also noticed that I was the youngest person there. Every other client in the PT area was in their 70s or 80s, many of them morbidly obese. Their exercises were, as a result, very low-key, very gentle. I wondered if the therapists' mindset was that I was also that age, and also a generally inactive person, when I'm neither. I finally sat the therapist down.
"I'm not working hard here," I said. "Am I supposed to be? These exercises are no effort for me, and if we're supposed to be strengthening my shoulder, it's not going to happen at this rate."
E---, the therapist, said the exercises were supposed to =tighten= my shoulder more than anything else. This is where I learned that the hyper-flexibility was an actual problem. PT is working to reduce or eliminate my flexibility because of the stress it causes on my arm and shoulder.
This caused an unexpected storm of emotion. This hyper-flexibility was . . . ME. It's something I can do, something I've always been able to do. I like being able to do it. PT is trying to take that away from me. This upset me a lot. But I also knew that the pain can't continue, and that, just because I CAN flex that far, doesn't mean I SHOULD. And I'm having trouble reconciling these two things.
The whole thing also wraps itself around the general anxiety I get now over nearly any medical procedures in general. This all this turned PT into a source of stress. I realized I was starting to see the therapy team as adversaries, and my reactions to them were becoming icy. I was also doing my best to circumvent the exercises--doing the minimum, doing them too quickly to get them over with, and so on. This wasn't where I wanted my thinking or behavior to go. It certainly wouldn't help the physical pain go away.
Just to top it off, I was =angry=. I've already spent--and continue to spend--so much time in hospitals and doctor's offices. Not a single week has gone by this summer without at least two appointments, and often more than that. One week, I had four separate appointments in three days. I'm supposed to be unwinding and recovering from the worst school year of my career this summer, a year in which four family members, including my father, died. And I'm spending it at medical centers getting poked and prodded and tested. The cancer diagnosis, the one that the urologist assured me is a very low risk of becoming a problem, also puts its oar in here. COVID, multiple family deaths, kidney stones, cancer, and now my shoulder. I can't get a break, and I'm furious, and don't know what to do about it.
Totally unaware of all this, E-- said they would step up the exercises, and they did. The stupid rubber band exercises ended, as did the useless massaging. Instead, they put me on a weight machine and started me with advanced planking exercises. They also had me lifting free weights and holding them outstretched. These all were =much= more difficult, even painful. Not injury painful; straining and burning painful. The kind where I had to chant to myself, "You can do this. It's only ten more seconds." Or, "Two more reps. Come on, man. You can do it." I end my sessions drenched in sweat.
You would think this would solve the anxiety and anger problem, right? It was what I'd asked for, and it's what I know I need.
It made things =worse.= My emotions told me I was being bullied. "You thought those exercises were wimpy, huh? All right--we'll make it way, way worse, dumbass." My stress levels climbed, to the point where I had to force myself to walk through the PT facility door.
I need to say here that the PT people have always been friendly and polite. Their only fault was underestimating what I could do for the first several sessions, and they worked on correcting the problem when I brought it up. This is all about my emotional responses and a reflexive mistrust of their motives. I see them as only =pretending= to be helpful, while inside they must have a secret agenda and are going out of their way to make life hard for me. I know this is foolish and idiotic. My emotions don't care.
Yesterday, the therapist set me to do an especially harsh planking exercise, and upped the time for each position from 30 seconds to 45 seconds. Complete four positions--and go! It was painful and crushing, and I was dripping sweat onto the mat. When I finished the second position, I sat on the mat and cried.
I turned my back to the rest of the room to keep it to myself, but I did sit for several minutes, crying behind my mask. I couldn't live with this. Not just the PT--the deaths and the stress and the pain. Then I made myself get up and do the rest of the positions.
When I left that session, I was so tired and wrung out I could barely get the car open to drive home. I was miserable and frustrated and angry.
I sat in the car to think about this. It couldn't go on this way. I do the exercise and it helps my body, but my psyche keeps damaging itself in the process. I saw that I needed to reframe my thinking toward PT.
I checked my Fitbit. It gave me the number of calories I'd burned during the new workout, and they were comparable to what I burned during a decent run. Huh.
Okay. Let's look at it this way. I used to lift weights at a gym as part of my exercise regimen. I went three times a week for about 45 minutes. The physical therapy facility and the gym are much the same. In both places, I would go in, warm up a little, and work out, then go home to shower. And the PT facility is even BETTER than a gym. It's covered by insurance, so there are no fees. A personal trainer follows me around, corrects me when I'm exercising wrong, and increases the intensity or gives me something new to do when I "outgrow" an activity. I'm getting a better workout at physical therapy than I did at a gym, in fact. And if I've already had a gym workout that day, I don't need to do a run or ride or other workout.
I'm not going to physical therapy; I'm going to the gym. I don't have a physical therapist; I have a personal trainer. And it's FREE.
I'll see if this approach works.
comments
Lemme explain. It turns out, I have hyper-flexible joints, what people used to call "double-jointed." I can reach any part of my own back with either hand, for example. You know that police move where a cop grabs your left arm, wrenches it behind you, shoves it against your back, and lifts you up on your toes so you can't move? That doesn't work with me. You wrench my left arm behind me and lift, my arm bends all the way to the left side of my rib cage. I turn around and say, "What the heck are you doing?" It doesn't hurt in the slightest.
That's hyper-flexible.
It happens not because my bones are strangely-shaped. It's because my tendons and muscles are looser, which allows the joints to go where no man has gone before.
(SIDE NOTE: Hyper-flexible joints are also associated with autism. Aran is even more flexible than I am--he can bend his little finger back to touch his wrist. Given the number of times in my life when people thought my reactions to social situations were strange or even rude and the number of times I've completely misread people when everyone around me seemed to know what was going on, and given that my son is autistic, I wonder if I land somewhere on that spectrum myself. It would explain a lot.)
This might sound amusing. I've had a super-power my entire life and didn't know it. I'm Hyper-Flexible Man! And it's had its advantages. Until now.
Having hyper-flexible joints means I do things that human joints aren't actually meant to do. One of these things is reach into the back of the car from the driver's seat to grab the bag of pandemic masks I kept there. I've learned this is something most people's shoulders won't let them do--they literally can't bend that way. My shoulders aren't supposed to bend that way, either, but my loose ligaments allow it to happen. Doing this particular move daily during the pandemic finally caused some minor tearing, which in turn causes pain when I move my left arm in certain ways.
The pain is instant and debilitating. There's no build-up, just WHAM! Agony so bad it brings tears to my eyes and I have to stop whatever I'm doing. It last 30-40 seconds, then ends just as abruptly. There's no real pattern to it. I can move my arm in a certain direction and I'm fine. I do the exact same motion again and WHAM! I turned over in bed once and yelped loud enough to wake Darwin.
I went to a joint specialist, who gave me an MRI scan and said my hyper-flexible rotor cuff was injured. He gave me a cortisone shot, a process I'm not eager to repeat, and sent me across the hall to regular physical therapy sessions.
The physical therapy office looks like a hospital ward mooshed into a gym mooshed into an elementary school playground. Hospital beds line one wall, and the other walls are lined with brightly-colored inflatable balls, weights, miniature staircases, and weight machines.
PT started off . . . badly. Not because it was painful. It wasn't. That was part of the problem. Every day, I went in and did some warmup on an exercise machine. Then the therapist gave me little exercises to do, mostly with these giant rubber bands. I wrapped them around my wrists and moved my arms in different directions against the resistance of the band. The exercises didn't feel like I was doing much, but I did them dutifully. After about 40 minutes of "work," the therapist massaged my arm and shoulder VERY gently, put my shoulder on ice for ten minutes, and I went home. This happened twice a week. I actually felt resentful because it seemed like a colossal waste of time.
I also noticed that I was the youngest person there. Every other client in the PT area was in their 70s or 80s, many of them morbidly obese. Their exercises were, as a result, very low-key, very gentle. I wondered if the therapists' mindset was that I was also that age, and also a generally inactive person, when I'm neither. I finally sat the therapist down.
"I'm not working hard here," I said. "Am I supposed to be? These exercises are no effort for me, and if we're supposed to be strengthening my shoulder, it's not going to happen at this rate."
E---, the therapist, said the exercises were supposed to =tighten= my shoulder more than anything else. This is where I learned that the hyper-flexibility was an actual problem. PT is working to reduce or eliminate my flexibility because of the stress it causes on my arm and shoulder.
This caused an unexpected storm of emotion. This hyper-flexibility was . . . ME. It's something I can do, something I've always been able to do. I like being able to do it. PT is trying to take that away from me. This upset me a lot. But I also knew that the pain can't continue, and that, just because I CAN flex that far, doesn't mean I SHOULD. And I'm having trouble reconciling these two things.
The whole thing also wraps itself around the general anxiety I get now over nearly any medical procedures in general. This all this turned PT into a source of stress. I realized I was starting to see the therapy team as adversaries, and my reactions to them were becoming icy. I was also doing my best to circumvent the exercises--doing the minimum, doing them too quickly to get them over with, and so on. This wasn't where I wanted my thinking or behavior to go. It certainly wouldn't help the physical pain go away.
Just to top it off, I was =angry=. I've already spent--and continue to spend--so much time in hospitals and doctor's offices. Not a single week has gone by this summer without at least two appointments, and often more than that. One week, I had four separate appointments in three days. I'm supposed to be unwinding and recovering from the worst school year of my career this summer, a year in which four family members, including my father, died. And I'm spending it at medical centers getting poked and prodded and tested. The cancer diagnosis, the one that the urologist assured me is a very low risk of becoming a problem, also puts its oar in here. COVID, multiple family deaths, kidney stones, cancer, and now my shoulder. I can't get a break, and I'm furious, and don't know what to do about it.
Totally unaware of all this, E-- said they would step up the exercises, and they did. The stupid rubber band exercises ended, as did the useless massaging. Instead, they put me on a weight machine and started me with advanced planking exercises. They also had me lifting free weights and holding them outstretched. These all were =much= more difficult, even painful. Not injury painful; straining and burning painful. The kind where I had to chant to myself, "You can do this. It's only ten more seconds." Or, "Two more reps. Come on, man. You can do it." I end my sessions drenched in sweat.
You would think this would solve the anxiety and anger problem, right? It was what I'd asked for, and it's what I know I need.
It made things =worse.= My emotions told me I was being bullied. "You thought those exercises were wimpy, huh? All right--we'll make it way, way worse, dumbass." My stress levels climbed, to the point where I had to force myself to walk through the PT facility door.
I need to say here that the PT people have always been friendly and polite. Their only fault was underestimating what I could do for the first several sessions, and they worked on correcting the problem when I brought it up. This is all about my emotional responses and a reflexive mistrust of their motives. I see them as only =pretending= to be helpful, while inside they must have a secret agenda and are going out of their way to make life hard for me. I know this is foolish and idiotic. My emotions don't care.
Yesterday, the therapist set me to do an especially harsh planking exercise, and upped the time for each position from 30 seconds to 45 seconds. Complete four positions--and go! It was painful and crushing, and I was dripping sweat onto the mat. When I finished the second position, I sat on the mat and cried.
I turned my back to the rest of the room to keep it to myself, but I did sit for several minutes, crying behind my mask. I couldn't live with this. Not just the PT--the deaths and the stress and the pain. Then I made myself get up and do the rest of the positions.
When I left that session, I was so tired and wrung out I could barely get the car open to drive home. I was miserable and frustrated and angry.
I sat in the car to think about this. It couldn't go on this way. I do the exercise and it helps my body, but my psyche keeps damaging itself in the process. I saw that I needed to reframe my thinking toward PT.
I checked my Fitbit. It gave me the number of calories I'd burned during the new workout, and they were comparable to what I burned during a decent run. Huh.
Okay. Let's look at it this way. I used to lift weights at a gym as part of my exercise regimen. I went three times a week for about 45 minutes. The physical therapy facility and the gym are much the same. In both places, I would go in, warm up a little, and work out, then go home to shower. And the PT facility is even BETTER than a gym. It's covered by insurance, so there are no fees. A personal trainer follows me around, corrects me when I'm exercising wrong, and increases the intensity or gives me something new to do when I "outgrow" an activity. I'm getting a better workout at physical therapy than I did at a gym, in fact. And if I've already had a gym workout that day, I don't need to do a run or ride or other workout.
I'm not going to physical therapy; I'm going to the gym. I don't have a physical therapist; I have a personal trainer. And it's FREE.
I'll see if this approach works.
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July 16, 2021
Stoned?
Have the kidney stones started up again, you ask? They may have, thank you for asking. For the last few days, I've been having bad twinges that experience has taught me can easily turn into an ER visit. On Thursday, in fact, I lived on codeine. Before bed, I packed up an ER grab bag (pad, charger, medication list, book) in case I had to make a run for it. I didn't, fortunately, and on Friday morning, the pains had dulled a chunk.
I have my bi-annual sonogram scheduled for August to look for stones (the last one said I had seven of them), but I decided to call the urologist's office and see if I could move it up, maybe, perhaps. When I described my symptoms to the nurse, though, the office went into overdrive. They whipped into action, made several phone calls, and got me scheduled for a CT scan on Saturday.
So we'll see what that turns up. At least for this procedure I don't have to drink a ton of water beforehand!
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I have my bi-annual sonogram scheduled for August to look for stones (the last one said I had seven of them), but I decided to call the urologist's office and see if I could move it up, maybe, perhaps. When I described my symptoms to the nurse, though, the office went into overdrive. They whipped into action, made several phone calls, and got me scheduled for a CT scan on Saturday.
So we'll see what that turns up. At least for this procedure I don't have to drink a ton of water beforehand!
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July 14, 2021
A Weird Moment
In my entire life, it never occurred to me that one day I would design my father's gravestone. I mean, if you had told me ten years ago I'd one day be doing exactly that, I would have said, "Well, I suppose that makes sense--it won't design itself," but it wasn't something that I even once envisioned myself doing. It just feels...weird.
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July 12, 2021
A Pride Moment
Darwin and I have been flying a Pride flag on our balcony for several months now. Today, we got this email:
Steven and Darwin,
I was on-site on Tuesday and noticed your flag, according to the Rules and Regulation booklet, the only flag that can be displayed at Hidden Harbor Condominiums is the American Flag. We do realize you are new to the condominium and may not know all the by-laws, but if there are questions, please feel free to ask.
Attached is the deed restrictions and rules and regulations booklet you should have in your possession. We ask that you please remove your flag immediately.
Thank you for your cooperation,
R--- & S--- [property managers]
Hmmmm . . .
I went through the documents he sent me and sent this reply:
Hi, R--- & S---!
I'm afraid I don't see where the bylaws state that ONLY the American flag may be flown. The bylaws state:
"Co-owners may display the American flag, in accordance with US Code & Michigan State Law upon their exclusive use limited common element." (The rest of the paragraph is devoted to the display of a flag on common elements.)
So the bylaws say an American flag may be flown on our exclusive use limited common element--in this case, our balcony. The bylaws do not say no other flag may be flown. Thanks for your attention!
--Steven and Darwin
All nice and gentile.
But Darwin got royally pissed:
R-- and S--:
I left a voicemail message for you at your office today. As I inquired in my message, did you also request our next door neighbor to remove his Blue Lives Matter flag from his pontoon boat? If your company and Hidden Harbors Condominium Association insists on pursuing this matter, we intend to file a fair housing sex discrimination complaint with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, since we believe that your company and the condo association are targeting us due to our sexual orientation. We do not intend to remove our flag absent a court order to do.
Darwin D. P. McClary
We haven't heard from them about the matter since. The flag continues to fly.
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Steven and Darwin,
I was on-site on Tuesday and noticed your flag, according to the Rules and Regulation booklet, the only flag that can be displayed at Hidden Harbor Condominiums is the American Flag. We do realize you are new to the condominium and may not know all the by-laws, but if there are questions, please feel free to ask.
Attached is the deed restrictions and rules and regulations booklet you should have in your possession. We ask that you please remove your flag immediately.
Thank you for your cooperation,
R--- & S--- [property managers]
Hmmmm . . .
I went through the documents he sent me and sent this reply:
Hi, R--- & S---!
I'm afraid I don't see where the bylaws state that ONLY the American flag may be flown. The bylaws state:
"Co-owners may display the American flag, in accordance with US Code & Michigan State Law upon their exclusive use limited common element." (The rest of the paragraph is devoted to the display of a flag on common elements.)
So the bylaws say an American flag may be flown on our exclusive use limited common element--in this case, our balcony. The bylaws do not say no other flag may be flown. Thanks for your attention!
--Steven and Darwin
All nice and gentile.
But Darwin got royally pissed:
R-- and S--:
I left a voicemail message for you at your office today. As I inquired in my message, did you also request our next door neighbor to remove his Blue Lives Matter flag from his pontoon boat? If your company and Hidden Harbors Condominium Association insists on pursuing this matter, we intend to file a fair housing sex discrimination complaint with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, since we believe that your company and the condo association are targeting us due to our sexual orientation. We do not intend to remove our flag absent a court order to do.
Darwin D. P. McClary
We haven't heard from them about the matter since. The flag continues to fly.
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July 9, 2021
Steven and the Backgammon Tournament
A group in Burton (near Flint) holds a weekly backgammon tournament at a local sports bar. I heard about it over a year ago and wanted to go, but never got around to it. Then the pandemic hit and shut it down. But it's back now, and I decided to go.
I learned to play backgammon from my mother and my aunt when I was a teenager. Aunt Lynne and I had deadly duels over stones and dice. I never really played against other people--I never knew anyone else who played. These days, I play against a computer. I've never played in an actual tournament.
So I went to learn something about it.
The first thing I learned is that Sharky's Bar is COLD. I mean arctic. It was a warm night, and I was wearing shorts. I froze inside the bar. We patrons complained loudly to the staff about it, but nothing changed. Note for next time: sweatshirt and jeans. And a snowsuit.
The tournament was run out of the bar's back room, past the pool tables. I found the registration person and paid my $10. When the associated people learned I had never done a tournament before, a very nice man sat down with me over a board and went through tournament rules. Double-elimination, so you play until you lose twice. Crawford rule, which has an impact on the doubling cube. You have to roll the dice with your right hand into the right-hand section of the board for the roll to count. Your turn is over when you pick your dice back up. And so on. It was actually way more straightforward than a chess tournament, which has etiquette on par with tea at Buckingham Palace.
I don't own a full-size backgammon board, but that was all right--everyone else there had one.
I sat down to play my first game with a guy who liked to narrate his thinking in a low mumble, which was interesting all by itself. He won the match, but just barely. The score was 6-7.
My second game was with a much quieter, more intense man who nonetheless tried to distract me by asking me questions just after I rolled the dice. "Where are you from?" "Where did you learn backgammon?" I fell for it the first time, but on the second, I caught what was going on and only answered after I made my move. I won that game 7-5.
I played my third game against a guy who I quickly noticed had a bit of a temper. He became noticeably agitated when the dice didn't go his way, or they showed me a bit of advantage. When he was annoyed, he made his moves faster, without thinking as much as he should have. I took advantage of this to needle him while pretending to be sympathetic. "Oh! That's too bad" and "Yeek. Well, =that= didn't go well for you." "Sorry, man--I have to blot you." I won the match 7-5 also.
My third game was with a guy who had a weird board. The base was made of cork and leather, and it made the dice land funny. Often one of them would spin like a top for several seconds before finally coming to rest. It drew out the game. I was doing pretty well, but was also getting tired, and I made a major--and obvious--error on a play that cost me the game, and ultimately cost me the match. I lost the game 4-7.
I was out!
Actually, I did pretty well, considering it was my first tournament and I had no idea what was going on. I made it all the way to quarter finals, in fact. Go me!
I'll have to try it again next week.
comments
I learned to play backgammon from my mother and my aunt when I was a teenager. Aunt Lynne and I had deadly duels over stones and dice. I never really played against other people--I never knew anyone else who played. These days, I play against a computer. I've never played in an actual tournament.
So I went to learn something about it.
The first thing I learned is that Sharky's Bar is COLD. I mean arctic. It was a warm night, and I was wearing shorts. I froze inside the bar. We patrons complained loudly to the staff about it, but nothing changed. Note for next time: sweatshirt and jeans. And a snowsuit.
The tournament was run out of the bar's back room, past the pool tables. I found the registration person and paid my $10. When the associated people learned I had never done a tournament before, a very nice man sat down with me over a board and went through tournament rules. Double-elimination, so you play until you lose twice. Crawford rule, which has an impact on the doubling cube. You have to roll the dice with your right hand into the right-hand section of the board for the roll to count. Your turn is over when you pick your dice back up. And so on. It was actually way more straightforward than a chess tournament, which has etiquette on par with tea at Buckingham Palace.
I don't own a full-size backgammon board, but that was all right--everyone else there had one.
I sat down to play my first game with a guy who liked to narrate his thinking in a low mumble, which was interesting all by itself. He won the match, but just barely. The score was 6-7.
My second game was with a much quieter, more intense man who nonetheless tried to distract me by asking me questions just after I rolled the dice. "Where are you from?" "Where did you learn backgammon?" I fell for it the first time, but on the second, I caught what was going on and only answered after I made my move. I won that game 7-5.
I played my third game against a guy who I quickly noticed had a bit of a temper. He became noticeably agitated when the dice didn't go his way, or they showed me a bit of advantage. When he was annoyed, he made his moves faster, without thinking as much as he should have. I took advantage of this to needle him while pretending to be sympathetic. "Oh! That's too bad" and "Yeek. Well, =that= didn't go well for you." "Sorry, man--I have to blot you." I won the match 7-5 also.
My third game was with a guy who had a weird board. The base was made of cork and leather, and it made the dice land funny. Often one of them would spin like a top for several seconds before finally coming to rest. It drew out the game. I was doing pretty well, but was also getting tired, and I made a major--and obvious--error on a play that cost me the game, and ultimately cost me the match. I lost the game 4-7.
I was out!
Actually, I did pretty well, considering it was my first tournament and I had no idea what was going on. I made it all the way to quarter finals, in fact. Go me!
I'll have to try it again next week.
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July 7, 2021
Bad Storm
Today I had a doctor's appointment in Orchard Lake--but today was also the Day of Storms. When I got to the area where the office is, I found the traffic lights on Orchard Lake Road were all out, causing massive traffic backups. The area has new roundabouts, though, and that helped! The doctor's office still had power, so I finished the appointment, but the lights were still out on OL Road, so I hopped onto Middlebelt, a different major artery. In two places, trees had fallen and blocked the road so everyone in both directions had to take turns going around on the berm. But then I came across a cop car blocking Middlebelt entirely (I assume because lines or more trees or both were down), and everyone was shunted into this maze of subdivision streets. In the end, I had to backtrack to Orchard Lake Road to get home. What's normally a thirty-minute, easy drive changed into over an hour's worth of difficulty.
This was a bad, bad storm.
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This was a bad, bad storm.
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July 4, 2021
Kidnapping the Flag
The right-wing kidnapping of the American flag is disgusting, as this article points out. I don't feel comfortable flying an American flag at my home because I'm afraid people will think I'm a conservative nutbag.
And I don't feel comfortable visiting a place that flies the American flag (except a government building) because I'm afraid they'll BE conservative nutbags. And that's wrong in so many ways.
https://news.yahoo.com/fourth-july-symbol-unity-may-151636825.html
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And I don't feel comfortable visiting a place that flies the American flag (except a government building) because I'm afraid they'll BE conservative nutbags. And that's wrong in so many ways.
https://news.yahoo.com/fourth-july-symbol-unity-may-151636825.html
comments
June 29, 2021
Steven and the Biopsy
At a relatively recent appointment with my urologist, he voiced concern about my PSA levels. He ordered a couple of other tests, including an MRI, and said the chances of cancer are very low, but also decided I should have a prostate fusion biopsy "just in case."
In case you've never heard of this phenomenon, a prostate biopsy is a special procedure in which a probe the size of a drinking glass is inserted into the rectum and pressed against the prostate. The probe takes a sonic image of the prostate, which is overlaid with an MRI which has been marked with places of interest. A computer moves the probe, using the MRI and the sonic image as guides and it snaps a thin needle through the rectal wall into the prostate, then rotates itself and snaps another needle through--twelve times in all. Although the procedure is supposed to be "tolerable" to aware patients, it's much more common these days to use general anesthesia.
My own appointment was set for late July, then I had the chance to move it up to late June, and I took it. This way, the appointment wouldn't be hanging over my head most of the summer.
Regular readers of the this blog know what I went through with the great kidney stone horror a couple years ago that left me a near basket case of anxiety and PTSD. I've gone through a great deal of therapy since then, and I thought I would be pretty okay with this procedure. I was wrong. As the day got closer, I became more anxious, to the point where I was going into the closet to sit with my head between my knees multiple times per day. At bed time the night before, I was crippled with anxiety so bad, I couldn't do anything but curl up on the bed and shake.
If it were a liver biopsy, or a lung biopsy, or even a marrow biopsy, this wouldn't bother me in the slightest. It's the combination of being anesthetized and the unavoidably sexual nature of the procedure that set off the triggers. A ball of fear forms in my stomach and paralyzes me, and no amount of self-regulation seems to stop it. I know that to the medical team, this is a dull, routine procedure they do a dozen times a day, hundreds of times a week on an endless parade of faceless patients. I know that the moment I leave the room, they'll completely forget me, much like a grocery store clerk forgets customers the moment they walk out of the store. I know that the team is there because they want to help me, not hurt or mock or judge. Not one bit of that knowledge changes the way I feel.
On the day of the procedure, Darwin drove me to the hospital in Mt. Clemens, an hour away. It took me a long time to make myself get out of the car, and when we walked in through the sliding doors, I couldn't lift my head. I stared down at my shoes and followed Darwin inside.
Somehow, I got through the intake process and the nurse took me to a prep room while Darwin stayed in the waiting area. The nurse assured me Darwin could come back to see me once I was set up. I answered the same sets of the questions from multiple questioners. Then the urologist came in. He wasn't =my= urologist, who doesn't do biopsies, but was part of the same practice. After he went through the spiel, he asked if I had questions.
"This isn't a question," I said, in a canned speech I keep handy. "It's more of a statement. I'm a survivor of sexual assault, and this kind of operation sets off all kinds of alarms and triggers. I cope by demanding a lot of information and requiring everyone to tell me every single thing that happens. I need you and the rest of the team to keep that in mind for me."
He nodded sympathetically and said the team would be sensitive. He also rather awkwardly patted me on the shoulder. I felt a little better.
Darwin came into the room at that point, and we waited together for about an hour before my turn came up on the rotation.
The nurse injected me with Versed, which I don't like because it messes with my memory, and wheeled my bed down to the OR. I'd already done some recon about this procedure and, as I warned, asked a great many questions about the equipment and commented on how it worked, somewhat to the team's surprise. The procedure is performed with the patient on his side, but the last thing I remember is getting an oxygen hose affixed under my nose and how it got momentarily tangled in the EKG lines.
But I have clues.
Here's the other thing, the odd thing. I recorded the procedure.
I bought a finger splint and a small voice recorder, thin and flat and the length of a finger. Before we arrived at the hospital, I put the splint on and slid the recorder under it so it looked like part of the splint. The nurse who put my IV in noticed the splint, in fact, and asked about it.
"I hurt my finger," I said. "Need to wear it for a few days."
"Ouch," she said, and went on with her work. No one else noticed it or commented on it, though one team member pointed out that I'd forgotten to take off my wedding ring and had me give it to Darwin. Just before the procedure started, I flicked the recorder on with an unobtrusive gesture. Later at home, I downloaded the sound file it had created and listened.
The reason I did this wasn't to play Gotcha! with the medical team or hope to hear something I could use in a lawsuit. It's so that I =know=. It's a way to maintain control.
As I said, the last thing I remembered in the OR was the oxygen line tangling in the EKG wires. But later, when I listened to the recording, I heard myself say things, and I abruptly remembered saying them. I said at one point that I wasn't feeling the first shot of Versed, which is normal for me, and the nurse saying she'd give me a booster dose.
"Don't you worry," she said cheerily. "The drug always wins!"
I only remembered that after I heard the recording. It was strange, like the memory had been pushed down but was able to emerge thanks to my own voice.
I must have fallen asleep before they could get me onto the table because one of the nurses said, "I need help lifting him," and I don't remember that at all.
The rest of the recording was . . . dull. The team talked very little, and when they did, it was often about stuff that wasn't related to the procedure, which reaffirmed for me that the procedure was routine and didn't require their full concentration. None of the conversation was about me directly, which I also was glad to learn.
One of the more unnerving aspects of the recording was that it clearly caught the SNAP of the needle every time it took a sample.
I also caught the doctor's phone call to Darwin when the procedure ended. Darwin, who also listened to the recording, said it was odd hearing the doctor's end of it.
My memory started up again in the recovery room. A nurse was on the phone talking to someone about how they didn't have any more beds in the area and the other people in the ORs would have to wait. That was on the recording, too, and listening to it helped center where and when I was.
Another nurse asked me if I was in pain. I was. Darwin had said he felt no pain whatsoever, but I was hurting, and the pain was increasing steadily.
"Do you want something for pain?" she asked.
Experience has taught me that when a nurse offers you pain meds, you take them, so I said, "Yes," and she gave me a pill that made me even loopier than I already was, though the pain ended.
I asked when my husband would be allowed to come in, and the nurse said it wouldn't be until I could sit up in a chair. This didn't make sense to me--what difference did it make to the hospital if I could sit in a chair or not? But I was still half-sedated and couldn't protest much. Eventually, Darwin was ushered in, and I felt quite a lot better. (Next time, if there is one, I'll insist up front that he be brought in the moment I'm awake.)
We waited together until I was more awake. "Do you want to wait here longer or go home?" a nurse asked. I said I wanted to go home. I couldn't get into the wheelchair or the car by myself, though by the time we got home, I was able to manage the stairs. I crashed on the bed for several hours.
I have a follow-up appointment in a couple weeks, though I'm sure the results will show up on the patient portal long before then.
Today? Today, I'm still anxious. The ball of fear keeps twisting my stomach. I'm having a hard time concentrating on anything. I can't eat due to nausea. Part of it is after-effects from the anesthesia. The larger part is the emotional side. I can't shake the feeling that I was violated, even though I have concrete proof to the contrary.
So I spent this afternoon looking for a counselor. I need someone to talk to.
comments
In case you've never heard of this phenomenon, a prostate biopsy is a special procedure in which a probe the size of a drinking glass is inserted into the rectum and pressed against the prostate. The probe takes a sonic image of the prostate, which is overlaid with an MRI which has been marked with places of interest. A computer moves the probe, using the MRI and the sonic image as guides and it snaps a thin needle through the rectal wall into the prostate, then rotates itself and snaps another needle through--twelve times in all. Although the procedure is supposed to be "tolerable" to aware patients, it's much more common these days to use general anesthesia.
My own appointment was set for late July, then I had the chance to move it up to late June, and I took it. This way, the appointment wouldn't be hanging over my head most of the summer.
Regular readers of the this blog know what I went through with the great kidney stone horror a couple years ago that left me a near basket case of anxiety and PTSD. I've gone through a great deal of therapy since then, and I thought I would be pretty okay with this procedure. I was wrong. As the day got closer, I became more anxious, to the point where I was going into the closet to sit with my head between my knees multiple times per day. At bed time the night before, I was crippled with anxiety so bad, I couldn't do anything but curl up on the bed and shake.
If it were a liver biopsy, or a lung biopsy, or even a marrow biopsy, this wouldn't bother me in the slightest. It's the combination of being anesthetized and the unavoidably sexual nature of the procedure that set off the triggers. A ball of fear forms in my stomach and paralyzes me, and no amount of self-regulation seems to stop it. I know that to the medical team, this is a dull, routine procedure they do a dozen times a day, hundreds of times a week on an endless parade of faceless patients. I know that the moment I leave the room, they'll completely forget me, much like a grocery store clerk forgets customers the moment they walk out of the store. I know that the team is there because they want to help me, not hurt or mock or judge. Not one bit of that knowledge changes the way I feel.
On the day of the procedure, Darwin drove me to the hospital in Mt. Clemens, an hour away. It took me a long time to make myself get out of the car, and when we walked in through the sliding doors, I couldn't lift my head. I stared down at my shoes and followed Darwin inside.
Somehow, I got through the intake process and the nurse took me to a prep room while Darwin stayed in the waiting area. The nurse assured me Darwin could come back to see me once I was set up. I answered the same sets of the questions from multiple questioners. Then the urologist came in. He wasn't =my= urologist, who doesn't do biopsies, but was part of the same practice. After he went through the spiel, he asked if I had questions.
"This isn't a question," I said, in a canned speech I keep handy. "It's more of a statement. I'm a survivor of sexual assault, and this kind of operation sets off all kinds of alarms and triggers. I cope by demanding a lot of information and requiring everyone to tell me every single thing that happens. I need you and the rest of the team to keep that in mind for me."
He nodded sympathetically and said the team would be sensitive. He also rather awkwardly patted me on the shoulder. I felt a little better.
Darwin came into the room at that point, and we waited together for about an hour before my turn came up on the rotation.
The nurse injected me with Versed, which I don't like because it messes with my memory, and wheeled my bed down to the OR. I'd already done some recon about this procedure and, as I warned, asked a great many questions about the equipment and commented on how it worked, somewhat to the team's surprise. The procedure is performed with the patient on his side, but the last thing I remember is getting an oxygen hose affixed under my nose and how it got momentarily tangled in the EKG lines.
But I have clues.
Here's the other thing, the odd thing. I recorded the procedure.
I bought a finger splint and a small voice recorder, thin and flat and the length of a finger. Before we arrived at the hospital, I put the splint on and slid the recorder under it so it looked like part of the splint. The nurse who put my IV in noticed the splint, in fact, and asked about it.
"I hurt my finger," I said. "Need to wear it for a few days."
"Ouch," she said, and went on with her work. No one else noticed it or commented on it, though one team member pointed out that I'd forgotten to take off my wedding ring and had me give it to Darwin. Just before the procedure started, I flicked the recorder on with an unobtrusive gesture. Later at home, I downloaded the sound file it had created and listened.
The reason I did this wasn't to play Gotcha! with the medical team or hope to hear something I could use in a lawsuit. It's so that I =know=. It's a way to maintain control.
As I said, the last thing I remembered in the OR was the oxygen line tangling in the EKG wires. But later, when I listened to the recording, I heard myself say things, and I abruptly remembered saying them. I said at one point that I wasn't feeling the first shot of Versed, which is normal for me, and the nurse saying she'd give me a booster dose.
"Don't you worry," she said cheerily. "The drug always wins!"
I only remembered that after I heard the recording. It was strange, like the memory had been pushed down but was able to emerge thanks to my own voice.
I must have fallen asleep before they could get me onto the table because one of the nurses said, "I need help lifting him," and I don't remember that at all.
The rest of the recording was . . . dull. The team talked very little, and when they did, it was often about stuff that wasn't related to the procedure, which reaffirmed for me that the procedure was routine and didn't require their full concentration. None of the conversation was about me directly, which I also was glad to learn.
One of the more unnerving aspects of the recording was that it clearly caught the SNAP of the needle every time it took a sample.
I also caught the doctor's phone call to Darwin when the procedure ended. Darwin, who also listened to the recording, said it was odd hearing the doctor's end of it.
My memory started up again in the recovery room. A nurse was on the phone talking to someone about how they didn't have any more beds in the area and the other people in the ORs would have to wait. That was on the recording, too, and listening to it helped center where and when I was.
Another nurse asked me if I was in pain. I was. Darwin had said he felt no pain whatsoever, but I was hurting, and the pain was increasing steadily.
"Do you want something for pain?" she asked.
Experience has taught me that when a nurse offers you pain meds, you take them, so I said, "Yes," and she gave me a pill that made me even loopier than I already was, though the pain ended.
I asked when my husband would be allowed to come in, and the nurse said it wouldn't be until I could sit up in a chair. This didn't make sense to me--what difference did it make to the hospital if I could sit in a chair or not? But I was still half-sedated and couldn't protest much. Eventually, Darwin was ushered in, and I felt quite a lot better. (Next time, if there is one, I'll insist up front that he be brought in the moment I'm awake.)
We waited together until I was more awake. "Do you want to wait here longer or go home?" a nurse asked. I said I wanted to go home. I couldn't get into the wheelchair or the car by myself, though by the time we got home, I was able to manage the stairs. I crashed on the bed for several hours.
I have a follow-up appointment in a couple weeks, though I'm sure the results will show up on the patient portal long before then.
Today? Today, I'm still anxious. The ball of fear keeps twisting my stomach. I'm having a hard time concentrating on anything. I can't eat due to nausea. Part of it is after-effects from the anesthesia. The larger part is the emotional side. I can't shake the feeling that I was violated, even though I have concrete proof to the contrary.
So I spent this afternoon looking for a counselor. I need someone to talk to.
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Steven and Physical Therapy
There's something wrong with my shoulder. I blame the pandemic.
See, I keep a bag of masks in the car, and it eventually migrated to the floor in the back seat. After several weeks of reaching behind the driver's seat, my right shoulder and arm started to hurt when I made this particular move. Some time later, this pain spread to other times--when I raised my arm too high, or put my elbow backward, or when my shoulder just decided it would be fun to cause me agonizing pain.
This is no exaggeration. One day at work, a spasm hit me so bad, I had to stop teaching and sit down until it passed.
I made an appointment with a joint specialist, who gave me an x-ray and pronounced that I'd injured my rotator cuff and it was quite possibly the result of reaching behind the car seat so often. He gave me a painful shot of cortisone and sent me across the hall of the office building to sign up for physical therapy.
So now twice a week, I go down to this strange-looking gym, with beds and elastic straps and pulleys and weight machines and medicine balls in it, and a physical therapist puts me through exercises designed to stretch and strengthen the injured muscles and tendons.
I can't say I enjoy them. They're repetitive and tiring and even painful. I work through them for half an hour or so. Then the therapist massages the affected areas, and then I sit with an ice pack draped over my shoulder for several minutes. It's been three weeks and I'm not noticing any real improvement, though the therapist says that's normal.
At least it's all covered by insurance.
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See, I keep a bag of masks in the car, and it eventually migrated to the floor in the back seat. After several weeks of reaching behind the driver's seat, my right shoulder and arm started to hurt when I made this particular move. Some time later, this pain spread to other times--when I raised my arm too high, or put my elbow backward, or when my shoulder just decided it would be fun to cause me agonizing pain.
This is no exaggeration. One day at work, a spasm hit me so bad, I had to stop teaching and sit down until it passed.
I made an appointment with a joint specialist, who gave me an x-ray and pronounced that I'd injured my rotator cuff and it was quite possibly the result of reaching behind the car seat so often. He gave me a painful shot of cortisone and sent me across the hall of the office building to sign up for physical therapy.
So now twice a week, I go down to this strange-looking gym, with beds and elastic straps and pulleys and weight machines and medicine balls in it, and a physical therapist puts me through exercises designed to stretch and strengthen the injured muscles and tendons.
I can't say I enjoy them. They're repetitive and tiring and even painful. I work through them for half an hour or so. Then the therapist massages the affected areas, and then I sit with an ice pack draped over my shoulder for several minutes. It's been three weeks and I'm not noticing any real improvement, though the therapist says that's normal.
At least it's all covered by insurance.
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