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Tuesday

Feeling better about chasing ourselves

Our cat acts like a kitten.

We played for a long time today, until she finally chased me around the house at a walking pace a few times — you know, the game kids love but cats can’t figure out. I didn’t get the chance to change directions. And Allie didn’t realize that if she only stood still the green ribbon thing she loves would come back around from the other doorway in just a moment.

“You look like you feel better today,” The Yankee said.

And she was right.

The cat and I started playing because, as I was minding my own business, she started attacking a string she found on one of my socks.

After two or three strafing runs I decided to find a string I could tie to my toe. This would be great, I thought, because now she can scratch up my feet! So I looked around the house. There was not a string or thread or cable to be found. Everything has a use already, you see. Congratulations to us, two people who seem to have all of their long strandy things well accounted for.

I’m sure if I flipped over the sofa I’d find that Allie has stashed every loose string in the house there.

And so it was that we played with one of her long chase toys. It is a red stick with a red string that leads out to a green ribbon:

Feel like I’ve turned a corner today. Not quite a million bucks, but I’ve got titanium inside me and inflation is upon us, so who knows, but I could be like Lee Majors by the end of this update.

We went out for lunch today. I had a sandwich at Niffer’s Place and then settled back in for a day of reading and writing. Now here we are.

So, here. Have a look at some of the things I’ve been reading today, including Doug Mataconis walking through ABC’s poor reporting from the Colorado shooting:

First, soon after the Aurora police revealed the name of the man they had in custody, there was Ross himself on the air with a report claiming to link James Holmes the shooter with a man named Jim Holmes who happened to be listed on the website of a Colorado Tea Party group. That was later revealed to be untrue, and ABC News was later forced to issue an apology:

Editor’s Note: An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.

Properly vetted? It strikes me that there was no vetting of the information at all. There’s really only two ways that Ross could have stumbled across this, either he went directly to a Tea Party site and looked to see if he could find a James Holmes listed. Or he did a Google search of something along the lines of ” “James Holmes” and “Aurora, CO” ” and looked to see what would come up. Neither one is really responsible journalism, and if it was the first one, if he just decided to go to a Tea Party site and look for Holmes’s name even though there was no evidence that anyone affiliated with the Tea Party was involved in this, then it wasn’t just irresponsible it was potentially malicious.

You could say worse. Many have.

Karol Sheinin immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union 34 years ago today:

It’s hard for Americans, even the ones who see America’s greatness and love this country for it, to understand the lack of opportunity that my family left. As Communism retreats into the rear-view mirror of history it’s easy to gloss over the everyday ways that Communism is meant to crush the individual and make everyone equal–equally poor, equally scared, equally hopeless.

Great essay, go read it all.

Surprising exactly no one, the Affordable Healthcare Act just got a lot more expensive:

“According to the updated estimates, the amount of deficit reduction from penalty payments and other effects on tax revenues under the ACA will be $5 billion more than previously estimated,” the CBO reported today. “That change primarily effects a $4 billion increase in collections from such payments by employers, a $1 billion increase in such payments by individuals, and an increase of less than $500 million in tax revenues stemming from a small reduction in employment-based coverage, which will lead to a larger share of total compensation taking the form of taxable wages and salaries and a smaller share taking the form of nontaxable health benefits.”

In short, CBO revised the Obamacare tax burden upward by $4 billion for businesses and $1 billion to $1.5 billion for individual workers.

While we’re on the subject, employers get ready to drop their health coverage:

Around one in 10 employers in the U.S. plans to drop health coverage for workers in the next few years as the bulk of the federal health-care law begins, and more indicated they may do so over time, according to a study to be released Tuesday by consulting company Deloitte.

Those employer numbers dropping health coverage is likely to continue in the coming years. And so we’ll go, chasing this shiny thing. And like the cat, we’ll go around and around, never realizing we could just turn around.

collarbone / cycling / iPhone / photo / Tuesday / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
17
Jul 12

Fall risk: a warning, a memento

I woke up at 6:26 this morning. I know this because at 6:30 it was time for another dose of Lortab. My lovely bride had woken up punctually every four hours to give me the good stuff. We ignored the Ibuprofen dosages during the overnight, because that would have meant waking up every two hours. And one of us, we figured, should get some sleep.

Clearly my collarbone and greater shoulder area were ready for their next painkiller before the clock said I should be. But that’s OK. I had the chance to open the blinds and watch the sun play on the tangerine bonsai tree that Kelly sent us.

I considered the fate of my medical bracelets.

The white one, with the names and hospital UPC codes, is coming off. So is the red one, which warns the medical staff of allergies. The yellow one though … considering how I got here … well it seems appropriate.

The nurse told me yesterday that everyone that gets sedation gets the yellow bracelet. I think I’ll put it on my bike when I can finally hit the road again and wear it with pride.

The surgeon was right: I’m hurting today, but I feel a bit better today than I have since I broke my collarbone. I’m taking painkillers precisely on schedule, don’t get me wrong, but the post-operation pain is less and different than the post-accident pain.

The downside to this injury, I’m guessing, is that it becomes a very boring recovery. You sit and don’t overtax yourself. You rest a lot. You don’t hold things in your hand before rehab. You try not to wear on the nerves of the people around you. So I’m resolved to celebrate every highlight.

We got a Harry & David box, a thoughtful gift from dear friends. (A night we don’t have to cook!)

I received the kindest Get Well email from someone I don’t even know:

Regardless of your topic you are a joy to read. Thus, having learned of your recent accident, I want you to know that I’m thinking of you.

Please feel better soon . . . very, very soon . . .

Wasn’t that thoughtful?

I moved from the arm chair … to the sofa! I’ve been in the chair, even sleeping in it, for a week. (A great half hour of variety!)

I stood up for about 20 minutes. And then my arm insisted I sit down. (More variety!)

The Yankee got me an awesome Get Well gift, a CycleOps indoor trainer. (I can ride while hurt!)

She wouldn’t let me use it today, though.

The final highlight, just like at 6:26 this morning: more Lortab.

Back on Twitter today. Returning to Tumblr tomorrow.

adventures / collarbone / cycling / friends / iPhone / photo / Tuesday — 7 Comments
10
Jul 12

What I hurt in my bike wreck

My South Baldwin Regional Medical Center experience where, aside from the triage nurse, no one ever asked about a head injury and we never saw a doctor.

We wound up yesterday in the emergency room of a small regional hospital. When you can calmly walk yourself in, you think “This will do.”

A kind volunteer points me to the paperwork. The Yankee has to fill it out. In two or three minutes the triage nurse calls me back. Pulse, blood pressure, temperature. I tell him what happened, complain about my pain. He asks if my neck hurts. It does not. He asks me if I hit my head. Yes, I brought my helmet. He asks me if there are any cognition problems? I tell him no. He asks if I want to go to X-ray or wait for the doctor to order it. This decision is apparently up to me, so why wait? Let’s do the X-ray.

Someone from radiology quickly comes along, plops me in a wheelchair and rolls me back to X-ray for two quick shots. I prepare my best Yogi Berra joke. “They did a brain scan. It came back negative.”

I go back to the waiting room.

Soon a room opens up. My guess is that the above has all taken place in 30 minutes, give or take. The Yankee and I go back to the examination room, leaving our lovely friends Brian and Mrs. Brown to sit in the waiting room. We tried to get them to stay at the condo, but you know how concerned, caring people are.

And now the real waiting begins.

A nurse comes and leaves. The administration lady comes. No, I do not have a last rites preference. And I appreciate the protocol, but that’s not happening in here today, thanks.

Later another nurse comes in with a syringe of morphine. She wants to shoot it in my hip, but she can’t find my hip.

She can’t find my hip.

This … nurse … who somehow was trusted with a needle … can’t find my hip.

I was ready to give myself the shot.

A physician’s assistant comes in later to tell us about the X-ray. I have broken my collar bone. She’s waiting to hear from an orthopedic surgeon. Not too long after this I pop a sweat. I get the dizzy, dry-mouth sensation. A passing staffer kindly helps move me from sitting on the edge of the bed to reclining in the bed. I’m in too much pain to do it myself.

The simple act of lying in a bed when you have a broken collarbone is just about impossible, by the way.

The morphine, which the nurse said would provide some relief in 30 minutes, didn’t do anything. And has done a lot of nothing for an hour or so. I suspect that either my metabolism is super-charged or she pumped me full of saline.

I sit up, but soon take another turn to that sweaty, nauseated sensation. Back on the bed I go. I’m on my right side because lying flat is unbearable. Someone comes along and stuffs a pillow behind my back for support. This was, in point of fact, the best thing since sliced bread.

The physician’s assistant eventually returns and apologizes about the no-show ortho. He’s operating. Well, that’s understandable. She said, though, that they pulled him out of a surgery to glance at my film. He suggested we get an orthopedic consult at home this week. After a while we saw the X-ray ourselves.

The nurse who doesn’t know where hips are later brings a shot of dilaudid for the other hip. This painkiller, she predicts, will make me loopy. (It did not, but it did leave me tired, and occasionally left me at a loss for words.)

That same nurse then disappears to fetch something called an immobilizer. Over the long period of her absence we decided that the basement of this hospital is as hard to find as my hip. We’d later come to learn that my discharge papers were equally difficult to find.

After a while the nurse returns and struggles with the immobilizer for a period of time beyond comical bemusement in front of us before finally asking for help on how to use it. The immobilizer is a large elastic band that wraps around the torso. There is a cuff to keep your bicep close to your side. Another cuff keeps your wrist secured to your ribs. The idea is to keep your shoulder in one place. (This is challenging medical technology. There are three strips of velcro on it.)

After five hours — Five hours! — we were given a small prescription and my discharge papers. To my recollection no one ever looked at my road rash. There’s a mildly impressive case on my shoulder and arm. There’s a little more on my hip, knee and leg. Good thing we’d cleaned it up before going to the hospital.

Aside from the cursory triage question no one ever, ever, asked about my head. Ever. The farther away from the hospital I get, the more appalling that becomes.

We never saw a doctor.

On the wall in the exam room there was a note about the hospital’s goal was that we’d recommend them for emergency care needs. That’s a tough sell.

This deserves mention: everyone was courteous.

adventures / history / iPhone / memories / Tuesday / video — 1 Comment
3
Jul 12

Early fireworks

Fireworks are the most temporal of our celebrations. After the fact you’re happy their gone. You can think mean things of the neighbors still lighting them after the calendar suggests they should be stowed for New Year’s Eve.

Never mind that the Declaration of Independence was first published in a newspaper on July 6th. We forget it was shipped to the Brits and read publicly on the 8th. Few recall that Gen. George Washington had it read to his soldiers on the 9th and that it was August before the signings began. The vote was the 4th and that’s when the fireworks retailers really need help getting their revenue in order, so that’s when we buy and light the things.

Fireworks on the 6th of July are just right out. There’s just no ring to that whatsoever.

You can light fireworks early, that’s festive. Unless your neighbors are the type that call the cops. Police officers hate the “shots fired” call which is really Old Lady Eveready mistaking your firecrackers for a revolver. Some cities burn through their pyrotechnic budget before the grand day. Opelika is one of those towns. Their “Celebration of Freedom” was tonight.

They have food and music and inflatables and face painting. The local parachute group leaps into the sky to bring the American flag to the city elders. Kids have scattered out decorated paper plates beforehand, hoping the guy with the flag lands on theirs so they win a prize.

People are sprawled everywhere in the beds of pickups and in lawn chairs. Two teenagers are making out and some old people nearby really wish they’d just stop. People see each other outside of work or school or church, maybe for the first time in a long time. Kids are playing tag over here and blowing bubbles over there. The entire scene is almost perfect and lovely. The only thing missing is John Mellencamp.

Promptly at 9 p.m. organizers throw thousands of dollars into the night sky and hope that, while it doesn’t reach escape velocity, it somehow catches fire and burns in many colors and shapes and sounds. More often than not that is precisely what happens. Here’s tonight’s finale:

For the video I shot last year I wrote “why not make it a several day celebration? A birth of a nation should merit that.”

Why not, indeed.

God bless America on this Third of July.

memories / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
3
Jul 12

Memories of Andy Griffith, who died today at 86

To grow up in a certain time — which was, really a stretch of about 30 or 40 years thanks to syndication — meant a friendly and devoted relationship with Andy Griffith. My generation met him as the kindly sheriff and father from Mayberry.

A little bit later we were all introduced to this other side of Griffith, the brilliant work of the comedian:

And then later we learned of his outstanding early movie work. Suddenly the kind old Mayberry father-figure (He debuted as Andy Taylor a year younger than I am now. So I take it back; he wasn’t old, it was a trick of the black-and-white film.) was young. He was 32 when the hysterical No Time for Sergeants play debuted as a movie:

Did you catch Corporal Klinger in there? Jamie Farr played the un-credited co-pilot in the movie.

Years later we’d see A Face in the Crowd, and it would turn everything upside down. Andy Griffith as a bitter, cynical, hard Lonesome Rhodes? It changed everything. It was hard to process this man playing a role like that when you had the ability to see Andy Taylor (and Matlock, and some of us just assumed we could make Matlock an extension of the Taylor character, sort of an apology for RFD in a new setting) on your television almost every day for your entire life.

He’d say later he’d had exactly one acting class before that film which, by the way, holds up remarkably well, 55 years later.

After a while he could only work those heavy roles, but it was the character from Mayberry that endured, persisted and informed us as an audience. For all of his range, as an actor and generationally, what happened in that fictional little North Carolina town is what everyone thought of this morning when they heard the news.

Several years ago AV Club did a list of wonderfully irrelevant Andy Griffith show conversations. This scene description was fitting for the series:

It rarely makes the list of the greatest Andy Griffith Show episodes, but the first seven minutes of “Class Reunion” should be issued to anyone who wants to learn how to write Southern characters, and how to act them. Beginning with Knotts and Griffith moving a heavy trunk and worrying that one of their pants might’ve ripped, the conversation evolves into a discussion of those “make money in your spare time” ads, and then a conversation about what’s in Knotts’ trunk, starting with a rock that Knotts used to strike a match on to light his father’s pipe.

Here’s that scene, and it is pitch perfect still:

And of course the smartest thing Griffith ever did on that show was to play it straight. Don Knotts was destined to be the comedic relief, but that wasn’t the original plan. Andy Taylor held the town together, but Barney Fife brought the show down through the generations:

Here’s Griffith just after Knotts died in 2006:

Here they are together in 1996, both near 70 years old and 36 years after the show took the air. Griffith says Mayberry, shot from 1960 through 1968, was really about the 1930s. They’re talking about the characters, which is just about the most charming conversation you could imagine two old men having:

Did you know the great theme had lyrics?

Well, now, take down your fishin’ pole and meet me at the fishin’ hole,
We may not get a bite all day, but don’t you rush away.

Makes you want to run right out for an Andy Griffith marathon.