The Doctor Is In

Yesterday was my semi-annual (?) bi-annual (?) let’s go with “twice yearly” neurology appointment for multiple sclerosis.  The visit in a nutshell?

1. The doctor asked how I was doing.  I said fine.
2. The doctor read the sheet I filled out when I arrived for the appointment, on which I stated that I was having no problems.
3. The doctor asked if I was having any MS issues.  I said no.
4. The doctor said I was in good shape.

And how many years did he have to go to med school?

OK.  So maybe I’ve oversimplified.  Left out a few things.  Such as:

Sobriety testing. I walk in a straight line, touching my heel against my toe for each step.  Also, I close my eyes and touch my nose.

Pain tolerance study. Also known as “We have ways of making your talk.”  He drags a sharp object against the bottom of my bare feet to see if I cry out in agony.

Clown school curriculum. He hits various parts of my body with a rubber hammer.  One of these days I’m thinking that because of my uber-strong reflexes, I  might kick the guy (shades of the Three Stooges), but he’s pretty careful about standing back before he whacks.

Strength training. Like arm wrestling but for assorted muscles.  He pushes and I push back.  I’m thinking about enrolling in some intense boot camp training so I can amaze him by pushing back with super power force.

I guess I passed all the tests, because, as he said/I said, I’m in good shape.

(I’m actually very fond of my doctor.  Because he’s so nice whether things are going well or not.  And because he’s so knowledgeable when he needs to be.)

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That is really just part one of my HEALTH ASSESSMENT which involves evaluating what a person can judge just by looking.  But that’s like seeing a nice, red, blemish-free apple.  Can you really say how the apple looks on the inside?

Hence, part two, the MRI of the brain and spine, which can reveal nasty white lesions, the hallmark of multiple sclerosis.  I haven’t had one in two years, since I changed my medicine.  Does that make it bi-annual?  Semi-annual?  Let’s just go with “once every two years.”  He suggested doing it in the fall.

Ideally, part one, the general assessment and part two, the MRI, both show that a person is doing well.  On the other hand, if they both say there’s trouble, well, that’s bad news but at least the two methods agree.

The ultimate frustration comes when a person knows he’s having symptoms but the MRI comes back clear.  People start looking at him like he don’t know what he’s talking about.  Like he’s full of hot air.  Like it’s all in his head.

It’s not a good thing.

Required Reading

Remember when “text” was not a verb?

This week my son and I are all worked up over college textbooks.  But we’re coming at our issues from different sides.

In the process of sorting through some stuff in the basement, I ran across a box of old college textbooks.  I found volumes on math, chemistry, sociology, accounting, and education.  You don’t get out of William and Mary without being liberally educated.

But there’s one book I can’t remember at all.  It’s by Arthur Schlesinger and it’s on “The Newspaper War on Britain: 1764-1776.”  I can tell from the price tag that it’s from the college bookstore and that it’s VERY old–$4.98 for 318 pages!  My immediate assumption was that it must have been my husband’s because if it had been mine I would have highlighted it (not those awful pastel markers; I always underlined in pencil, neatly, using a flexible plastic six-inch ruler.)  Plus, he was a history major who became a newspaper reporter when he graduated.

But he looked at the book and noted that it was published the year he graduated.  So I don’t know; either way, it’s going in the DONATE pile.  I’m sure somebody wants to learn about the newspaper war on Britain, but they don’t live in this house.

My son, on the other hand, is looking to acquire a college text.  He decided to take Spanish I this summer at the community college.  The required textbook goes for $150 new.  For a Spanish textbook?!?  I can barely fathom that for an art history book, with all those photographs, or an organic chemistry book; that weighs a ton.  But for first year Spanish?  Perhaps equally astounding, he found it online for $15.  How can a $150 book be selling for $15?  Is it missing, say for instance, all the pages?

Anyway, after four years of exploring all the angles, my son is the expert on minimizing textbook costs, though sometimes my husband and I do have to insist that when taking a course it is expected that he actually have access to the reading material.  So I trust he’ll figure this out as well.

Buenos Dias!  (Did I say that right?)

OCD:Obviously Completely Dysfunctional?

I don’t think it’s a big deal that I always put on my right shoe on first.  Or that I always floss starting at the upper right back.  Or that I always insert my left contact before my right.  I’d call those  habits, not examples of obsessive compulsive disorder.

But I exhibit a few behaviors that might raise eyebrows in the psychiatrist’s office….

When I buy eggs, I don’t just pick up a dozen and plop them in the cart.  I pick up a carton from the back, where it’s nice and cold, and also check to make sure I’m getting the most distant expiration date available.  And then I open the carton and eyeball each egg.  But even then, I’m not satisfied.  I have to touch EACH EGG to make sure it wiggles in the carton.  Why?  Because some time in the distant past I got home and discovered an egg that looked fine but was actually cracked on the bottom and, due to the dried leaking yolk, glued into its little compartment.  How much time have I spent over the years making sure THAT never happened again?!?

My three-month supply of Copaxone medication arrives in three boxes, each secure in its own plastic bag.  I open each bag, remove the box, and open the box.  One might think that seeing all the syringes lined up would be sufficient.  But no, it would be possible–would it not?–that underneath that top row of syringes I might find–I don’t know–string cheese.  So I dig down to the bottom of the box to verify all the shots are present and accounted for.

On more than one occasion I’ve been known to retrace my steps halfway across a parking lot.  While I pretend I need to get something out of the car that I’ve forgotten, in actuality I am checking to see if I’ve remembered to lock the car doors.  (My auto-clicker has long since died.  Actually that would be my automatic-automobile-clicker.  An auto-auto-clicker.)  And I don’t just check the driver’s door and leave it at that, I also check the back seat driver’s side and maybe even the trunk.  But no, I don’t walk around and yank on the passenger side doors also, though I’m tempted.  I trust my eyes.  If the door looks locked, it must be locked.

I am an aficionado of all things paper, and so with my various card stock, newsprint, posterboard, and stationery projects, I spend a fair amount of time with an X-acto knife.  I never studied the experts’ advice on how to sharpen one using a sharpening stone, so I developed my own technique.  First eight times on each side of the blade, the four times, then two, then one.  To vary from this proven technique would surely be courting disaster.

You be the judge.  Normal, if slightly eccentric, behavior?  Or is it time to call in the professionals?

Food for Thought

I’m not the CEO of a fortune 500 company.  I’m not an air traffic controller at a major international airport.  I’m not a brain surgeon or a police officer.

But some days I think that during a simple trip to the grocery store, I’m faced with making as many decisions as these people make on a daily basis.

For instance…

Yesterday I was shopping for three people, myself, my husband, my elder son.  We each have different favorite things.  And different tolerances for those things we’re not so crazy about.  And different attitudes about what qualifies as healthy.  And different interpretations of the food pyramid.

I had to consider what dishes I might prepare in the week ahead, and what ingredients I already had on hand for those menus.

I know two families that are facing considerable stress and could probably use a meal or two.

And then there’s the coupons.

When grocery stores started issuing shopper’s club cards, they largely eliminated the plethora of store coupons we had been inundated with.  Well, the club cards are still here, but the store coupons are back.  I had some from the newspaper as well as some that I had received in the mail.  I also had standard manufacturer’s coupons from a variety of sources.

I might add that some of these coupons are incredibly complicated regarding the purchase of multiple items in specific sizes and flavors.

And for any given product one has to decide whether the national brand is really better, or if the store brand is acceptable.  And unit pricing must be considered.  If I can get four times the cheese for twice the cost, should I buy the larger size?

I’m always annoyed that my Safeway has all the frozen foods right at the store entrance.  So that for the majority of my shopping trip, I’ve got ice cream and frozen peas melting in my cart.  Should I wait till last to get those items, making a special trip back through the store to pick it up?

And now there’s no longer just the question of paper or plastic.  Now I’ve also got to consider the eco-friendly reusable bags.

Is it any wonder that by the time I get home, I’m too tired to cook?

When History Happens in Your Front Yard

I’m beginning to think my nephew is a real-life Forrest Gump, the original right place/right time guy.

Then again, he may be an undercover CIA operative.

(Photograph, quotations from Forrest Gump.)

When Adam was a little tyke we called him WW.   It stood for WhirlWind.  A typical afternoon?  His mother put him down for a nap during a visit to grandmommy’s house.  An hour later we discovered that he had found a lipstick and used it to cover every square inch of his face in bright pink (except possibly his lips.)  And when he finished with that he shredded a window shade into lots and lots of long skinny pieces.

“For no particular reason, I just kept on going.”

Baseball and Boy Scouts were his two main childhood interests.  His dad couldn’t see why anyone would voluntarily spend a weekend every month camping out, particularly during New England winters.  But Adam loved it; I think getting away from the day-to-day provided him with much-needed physical and mental release.

“When I got tired, I slept.  When I got hungry, I ate.  When I had to go, you know, I went.”

On the other hand, the rest of the world may think he, his dad, and his older brother are nuts in their infatuation with all things baseball, but they understand each other perfectly.  Whether played or watched, baseball continues to be not just a hobby, but an obsession.

“That’s all I have to say about that.”

Tragedy struck when Adam was a high school student.  He was a passenger in the back seat of a car.  A sharp corner, too much speed, a tree.  Three people in the vehicle died.  Adam and one other friend survived.  (Seat belts save lives!)

“Mama always said dying was a part of life.”

In the aftermath, he had to deal with the physical pain of his injuries as well as the emotional loss of three of his closest buddies.

“My Mama always said you’ve got to put the past behind you before you can move on.”

His survival of that horrific accident may have been a clue that interesting things lay ahead for Adam.

“What’s my destiny, Mama?”  “You’re gonna have to figure that out for yourself.”

Academics didn’t come easily for Adam.  While some kids breezed through school, he learned to study.  Either in spite of, or perhaps because of, this effort he put into his lessons, he came to love his scholarly pursuits.

“You have to do the best with what God gave you.”

So it was not terribly surprising that after graduating from college with a history degree, he went on to earn a masters in religion and eventually ended up with an education degree from Columbia University.

The spark that academia lit within him worked both ways; he discovered that not only did he like to learn, but he also liked to teach.

“Have you given any thought to your future, Son?”

So now we come to the part of the story where Adam finds himself smack dab in the middle of two truly significant occurrences in recent history.  Which both involve revolutionary power shifts.

In 2004 Adam was teaching English to Ukrainians during a stint in the Peace Corps.  Living in Kiev, he had a front row seat to the Orange Revolution that was sparked by a runoff election between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych.  Numerous news sources as well as public opinion reported that the election was marred by corruption and fraud, favoring Yanukovych.  After days of protests, a new election was held under close scrutiny and Yushchenko was declared the victor.  Adam saw it all, and lived it all.

“Well, now we ain’t strangers anymore.”

After the Peace Corps, Adam taught English to foreign students at a Boston area college for a while, and then he headed overseas again last year.  This time his destination was Osh, the second largest city in Kyrgyzstan.

“Mama always said, God is mysterious.”

In April violent protests led to the departure of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.  Provisional leaders took control.  During this unrest, Adam was briefly pulled away from his home base, but then allowed to return.

A couple of weeks ago, violence erupted again, this time centered on Osh.  Clashes between the two main ethnic groups, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz people, led to a state of emergency and fears of a civil war.  Adam packed what he could fit in his backpack and headed to a safer spot.  Now he’s out of the country and out of harm’s way, but filled with some sad stories about people in a place where education has taken a back seat to survival.

“I’m pretty tired…I think I’ll go home now.”

Life With Father

It’s hard to imagine that my mother could ever tire of spending unending hours with my sister and I, model children that we were.  But nonetheless, Saturday afternoons frequently found us in the company of my father, visiting the Charlotte Nature Museum.  We watched lots of nature movies there.  This was long before Animal Planet existed.

And Sunday afternoons we often ice skated at the public skating sessions at the Coliseum where the hockey team played.  I didn’t realize at the time how self-centered I was, but now as I think back on it I can’t remember if my Dad skated or if he just watched us.  I never had lessons and never mastered much beyond skating forward, but skating endless loops around the rink could entertain me for hours on end.  By the time we packed up to go home my feet would be aching.  (And hopefully Mom, after two kid-free afternoons, would be fully recovered and ready to face another week of stay-at-home parenting.)

Dad always liked to stop for a doughnut.  No matter where we’d been, it seemed like our route home always wound past the Krispy Kreme on Independence Boulevard.  Once he didn’t realize till after we’d snacked that he had no cash.  He went out to the car to see if he could find some change in the seats, but the staff came running after him.  They knew him well enough (and knew he’d be back soon enough) to trust him to the honor system.

When I was little he worked as an engineer for Douglas Aircraft.  What he actually did during the day was a big mystery to me, but in my mind having heard he was an engineer I thought he drove trains around.

His lifelong hobby was astronomy.  He was probably right near the top of the list of people with the longest Sky and Telescope magazine subscriptions.  I think the first time he got his hands on some money for discretionary spending he used it to buy a telescope, which served him well for MANY years.  Friday nights he headed out to the observatory maintained by the Charlotte Amateur Astronomer’s Club.  On numerous occasions during my growing up years he would awaken my sister and me in the middle of the night and usher us out to the front yard, or occasionally up to the school, to observe something in the night-time sky.  A comet.  Or an asteroid.  Maybe a super-nova.  Some shooting stars.

The most exciting outing happened in the middle of the day.  Charlotte was situated in the path of a partial solar eclipse.  But by driving a few hours we could position ourselves in the region that would experience a total eclipse.  So that’s what we did.  We were in a rural area where lots of astronomer type people had set-ups allowing us to watch the reflection of the sun as it was gradually covered by the moon’s shadow.  It wasn’t safe to look directly into the sun!  At least not until the process was complete and the sun was completely covered, except for a ring around the outside.  Then it got dark.  The chickens went to roost.  For three or four minutes it was distinctly other-worldly.

Our house had a basement workshop that was only accessible from a door to the back yard.  If he was working down there and it was time for me to go to bed, I would go to the heating duct and holler GOOD NIGHT, which always got a similar reply from him.  I thought that was about the neatest thing in the world.  A magic communication port.

(My delight was possibly superseded by the  time we were between kitchen tables so we temporarily used the round outdoor table right there in the kitchen, I guess with a tablecloth thrown over it.  There was a hole in the middle for an umbrella.  Depending on what food item was sitting at the table center, you could stick your toe up through the hole and make the dish jump around.  Which would immediately be followed by howls of laughter.  Oh, but we were easy to please!)

When Mom and Dad visited us in New Jersey after we had kids, they’d stay for a week or so.  While Mom could be entertained endlessly with the grandchildren, Dad needed a project to work on.  On various visits, he installed shelving in one of the bedrooms, added crown molding to the dining room, built a structure to enable us to reach the light fixture installed in a very awkward position in the stairwell, added insulation to the attic, and built a geodesic dome for the kids.

Dad doesn’t remember any of that stuff now.  Alzheimer’s has robbed him of his memories, one by one.  But they live on in a cherished corner of my mind.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

Flashback in the Sandwich Meat Aisle

As far as I know, we were never seriously hurting for money when I was growing up.  We never did without necessities.  There was always food on the table.  Warm clothes in winter.  A car in the driveway.

So I certainly wouldn’t suggest that we were strapped.  But, probably because my parents were children of the depression, we, like everyone else I knew, lived rather frugally.  It wasn’t something we thought about.  It’s just how life was, in “the good old days.”

We always owned a television, but for many years we settled for black and white.

Our telephone service was a party line.

We took regular vacations, but not every year and we always traveled by car.

We got an air conditioner while I was growing up, but it was a window unit and it didn’t do much for the bedrooms.

Coats lasted three years.  A little big the first year, just right the second year, a little tight the third year.

Mom made lots of our clothes, and she often made matching outfits for my older sister and me.  So by the time I had worn my version of the clothes and then my sister’s, I felt like I was living in a broken record.

For a long time we managed with one car, and when we got a second one it was a VW bug.  (My mom had never driven a stick shift before.  We watched her drive up the street and just stop.  We waited and waited.  There was a bit of a learning curve.)

We regularly ate out after church on Sunday, but often it was a trip to McDonald’s.

We had store-bought cookies for snacks, though I’m told that on occasion those were actually crackers standing in for cookies.

For sandwiches, we didn’t have meat and cheese, but rather meat or cheese.  And if it was meat, it was the thin sliced stuff, and we only had two or three slices.

Except when it came to Lebanon bologna.  (Why is it called that?  “It is named for the Lebanon Valley of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania where it is most commonly produced.”  Thanks, Wikipedia!)  Mom must have had a real soft spot for the stuff.  She bought it regularly, and it only came in nice thick slices so there was no way to skimp.

I didn’t even know my local Safeway even carried the stuff, but then I saw it on the shelf yesterday.  I know, I know.  It’s loaded with fat and salt and preservatives and lots of other things that are going to kill me.  But I couldn’t resist.

Delicious!

It’s a World of Laughter…

We’re ba-a-a-ck!  From Disney World.  And was it the happiest place on earth?  Well, I don’t know about that.  But I’m pretty sure it was in the top ten for

• Hottest Place on Earth and
• Crowded-est Place on Earth.

And to think it’s only early June.

While there I was reminded of a computer game, a book, and a movie.

COMPUTER GAME : SNOOD

This fairly primitive shooting game has a gun at the bottom center of the screen.  You’re trying to shoot little creatures before they hit the bottom of the screen.  After every I-don’t-know-how-many shots the remaining creatures drop down one level.  It’s all about getting the angle right so you can knock out large blocks with a single shot.  As I watched my kids play pool one evening, they lined up their shots and staked out various angles.  I thought, “It’s just like a game of Snood.”

BOOK : 1984

In the classic George Orwell novel, an ever-present telescreen rolls out endless drivel touting the party line.  Our suite had two bedrooms and a common sitting area, and each space had a large television.  You could even watch a television from the bathtub.  And while they carried an assortment of stations, overwhelmingly we kept running into the five or so channels that droned on endlessly about Disney–resorts, theme parks, vacation plans, cruises, sports, special tours, restaurants.  And if you didn’t speak English, you could find the same channels in Spanish.  Unlike 1984, these televisions only went one way.  They weren’t monitoring our thoughts as we sat there glued to the screens…or were they?

MOVIE : THE TRUMAN SHOW

This Jim Carey movie is about a man who thinks he’s living an ordinary existence until he accidentally discovers that his whole life is a reality show in which he is the star.  Disney feels a little like that.

They don’t have employees; they have cast members.  Some cast members change sheets on the bed in air-conditioned resorts (not hotels), while others flip burgers or dole out ice cream.  Still others don furry Chip’n Dale costumes and parade about in 95 degree heat.  (Which would you rather be?)

The bus drivers are also cast members.  One told us if he tries to turn down the volume on the endless cycle of Disney tunes that he listens to all day, and an “inspector” happens to be riding the bus, he gets “written up.”

And it’s not just a coincidence that you never see a cast member in a Tomorrowland costume walking through the Frontierland part of the Magic Kingdom.  In fact, you never see any of these people walking anywhere around the park.  They magically appear at their assigned destinations, thanks to an extensive underground tunnel system.

So Disney made everything just about perfect, except for two gigantic chinks in the armor:

Our last night there we stayed in the Hollywood park until around 11:00.  At which point we caught the bus to head back to our hotel resort.  And then landed smack dab in the middle of a gigantic traffic jam.  It took 30 minutes just to get out of the parking lot.  They were re-paving the road.  Why they couldn’t wait until midnight after the parks closed was beyond me.

And they tout their airline check-in service where by you can get your boarding pass when you check out of the hotel.  We waited over an hour and there were people who were there even longer than us.  If an airline ran in such a shoddy fashion they’d be out of business in no time.   Next time we would just check in at the airport.

Other than that, it was paradise!

Stay “Tooned”

I’m offline now, but I’ll be back soon with an answer to that burning question, “Is Walt Disney World really the happiest place on earth?”

Counting on the Census

WordPress has a feature called Humanize wherein they take the number of visitors to your blog on any given day, and find a location in America which has that population.  I’m sure lots of people are learning about the populations of, say, Indianapolis or Denver, and even New York or Los Angeles.  I, however, am finding out about the small towns and communities of rural America.  I am charmed to find that one can still find an alternative to the craziness of urban life and it’s never quite as thrilling younger sister, suburbia.

And once I was thinking about numbers, I started pondering the various population subsets of which I am a member (and I hunted down a corresponding city/country with a roughly equivalent population):

I am one of 74,000 living alumni of the College of William and Mary. ( Ambalangoda, a beach in Sri Lanka)

I was one of 200,000 drivers on the Capital Beltway yesterday. (minimum average)(Irving, TX)

I am one of 287,137 bloggers on WordPress. (Stockton, CA)

I am one of 400,000 (estimates vary) people who have multiple sclerosis. (Raleigh, NC)

I am one of over 500,000 members of Phi Beta Kappa. (Albuquerque, NM)

I am one of 2.3 million Presbyterians in the United States (PC USA). (Latvia)