Author Archives: Mark P

Highlights of my day

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i’m going to skip capitalization and might leave more misspellings than usual in this post. i will explain .

friday was the day of my rotator cuff surgery. i walked the dogs just before dawn, and we were waiting at outpatient registration by 8 am. after they took me back for prep, they injected about a dozen different medications. prednisone for nausea. a couple of pain meds. antibiotics. some other stuff.

they gave me this stylish cap because i was getting the special on hair highlighting, or so leah told me. i recently got a haircut [yay second vaccination!], so there wasn’t much hair to work on.

despite my expression, this was before all the injections.

after they injected the sedative and stuck a mask for oxygen and anesthesia, and i was out, they stuck a syringe into my neck and gave me a block that paralyzed and numbed my right side from the rightmost part of my diaphragm to the tips of my fingers.

shortly after that, by my own perception, i woke up dazed and confused. i couldn’t understand why they had me carrying around a bag filled with someone else’s arm, but it turned out that they had placed my right arm in a sling.

after freely emptying my bladder, a requirement for release, and a few other adjustments, leah drove me home. there i was able to explore the effects of the block.

my arm felt cold and dead, until i touched my hand and realized it was still alive, at least in some cruel parody of life. at this point as i write this, about 12 hours after the block, i can make weak grASPING [dang. hit the caps lock] motions with my fingers, but have absolutely no ability to extend my fingers in the opposite direction. see below.

you might hear zoe whining in the background. she likes peanut butter and was afraid i wouldn’t be able to open the jar. leah came to the rescue.

as to my rotator cuff, i have no doubt that if and when my power of movement returns, and my shoulder heals, i will have a fully functioning shoulder. the same surgeon who did my left shoulder did this one, and my left rotator cuff has been operating at or near 100 percent for more than a decade. he’s a good surgeon, and the ladies agree that he is “cute” as well. the ladies keep asking whether i agree. he’s certainly passable in a surgical mask and cap.

he told my wife that operating on my shoulder was much easier than some he works on [probably including the strapping young man who waited in line after us] because i have no fAT [what, again?] on my shoulder. so, collecting all my body fat around my waist finally paid off.

aside from an arm that feels literally dead, or in its death throes, my only after effects have been slight nausea, lack of appetite and a terrible taste in my mouth, that, i assume, comes from all the chemicals my body is trying to eliminate. the block will wear off in a matter of hours, maybe by the time anyone happens to read this post, and i expect to have some level of pain. i have been supplied with drugs for that eventuality

in the meantime, i expect to have my first night’s sleep in weeks that isn’t interrupted by shoulder aches and pains.

Black and white and bluets all over

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One of the things I like least about cats is that they are little killers. Mollie regularly brings lizards into the house, either previously killed or saved for later killing. Chloe brought a young squirrel onto the front porch, which after allowing it to age a little, she began to eat from the head down. Sylvester has brought several killed animals into the garage. This is what he brought us Tuesday.

It’s a black and white warbler. They are ground nesters, which probably explains how Sylvester found and killed it.

I know that cats are hunters and killers by nature; it’s what they do. I still don’t like it. The cats are lucky Leah is here.

I am not a birder, so I had to look this bird up. Cornell University has some nice resources for bird information. I found some audio files for the pileated woodpeckers we have around here. Now they have an app for identifying birds from photographs. I had already figured out that the bird was a black and white warbler, but I downloaded the app and the bird database for the Southeast to recheck.

On a more pleasant note, I saw some tiny flowers on my morning dog walk.

It looks kind of like the Milky Way.

These are bluets. I see them fairly often around the mountain, but this was a large enough patch that it caught my eye from a distance. They can be propagated from seed or by transplanting. I think I’ll try to bring some into our yard somewhere.

And, on the pain and suffering front, I had pre-op visits to my orthopedic surgeon and the hospital on Tuesday. I am scheduled for rotator cuff repair Friday morning. I have mentioned this to a few people, and everyone who has had rotator cuff repair has warned me that it’s the worst, very painful. I had my left rotator cuff repaired about 11 or 12 years ago. As I recall, it was not particularly painful. I needed pain medication for a couple of nights immediately after surgery, but after that, even the physical therapy was not bad. I hope to repeat that experience with my right shoulder.

Unfortunately for me, I am right handed, so hanging my right arm from a sling for weeks is going to be an inconvenience. Leah and I have not figured out yet how the dogs are going to get their walks. Zoe is a real plow horse on our walks, and Sam likes to tie me up with his leash by walking circles around me. Neither of those is a good fit for someone with a healing shoulder injury.

I’m sure everything will work out just fine. One way or another.

Spring in Georgia

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Spring weather may be variable in Georgia, but one thing is going to be pretty consistent — pollen.

I walked around in the front yard on Tuesday. Later in the evening, when I was sitting with my feet on a pillow on our coffee table, I noticed some yellow smudges on the pillow. It was pollen off my socks. This is what my shoes looked like. I brushed the pollen off my left shoe for comparison.

The pollen count here was 3336 particles per cubic meter, high, but nowhere near as high as the record. Atlanta’s highest recorded pollen count was 9369 particles on March 12, 2021.

They say that tree pollen is the highest contributor now. That’s mainly pine and oak. Around here, it’s mainly pine that produces the billowing clouds of fine, yellow particles that coat everything. I have to rinse my truck windshield with a hose every time I go anywhere. We park our car in the garage, so it stays relatively clean, but an hour outside leaves a fine layer of yellow particles over the entire car.

It’s really quite annoying. A locally well-known gardening expert recommends avoiding painting outside from mid-March to early April. It’s early April right now, and I wouldn’t paint anything outside that I didn’t want yellow.

Most of the pine pollen should be gone by May. I hope.

Three years

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My brother Henry died three years ago today, April 6. He was 70, my older brother, now younger than me.

When I thought about writing this post, I expected melancholy, but when Leah and I went thought a collection of photos to choose a few to post, we ended up with laughter instead. Here are a few we liked.

The first is shortly after May 18, 1950, when I was born.

Helping his little brother keep his balance.

Henry was almost three years older than me, so he started out not only my older brother, but also my bigger brother. He was a serious little boy.


He was smart from the very beginning. He angered his Cub Scout den mother when he corrected her about how many planets there were. Although Pluto was known since around 1930, apparently the Cub Scout material never updated, so his den mother thought there were only eight. Henry informed her that there were nine planets, including Pluto. She complained to my mother. Henry decided that the Scouts were not for him.

Henry was born in Akron, Ohio, where our mother grew up, and where my parents moved after my father came back from World War II. That explains this t-shirt.

I eventually caught up to Henry and pulled ahead as we got a little older.

We were both clean-cut because we attended a boys’ prep school that had strict grooming requirements, not that our mother would have let us get too shaggy.

Henry started at Georgia Tech in the summer after he graduated from high school. He attended classes straight through the summers until he started the co-op program. So, he was either in school or working throughout the year. He was seldom at home after he started at Tech.

Tech was a conservative institution at the time, and so were the times. Henry kept his conservative haircut in the early days. He would have been around 18 or 19 here.

Once he was in graduate school, he started to get a little more liberal with his hair and his politics.

Some time after 1973 when I started working at a newspaper in Augusta, Ga, I took a trip with Henry and one of his fellow grad students to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. I don’t remember his beard being quite that exuberant.

He got married while in grad school (not to the cat), but here he is with the cat and, just off screen to the right, his first wife.

Henry’s judgement with respect to women was not particularly good. That marriage did not last. Later, he married again. He and his wife lived in New Kensington, Pa, near Pittsburgh, where he worked for Alcoa. He had been a runner since high school, and continued for years afterwards. He ran the Buffalo to Niagara Skylon International Marathon sometime in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. Our parents, who were visiting, went up with him. My father took this photo.

Henry was a better runner than me. He was also smarter than me, more responsible than me, and more successful. The only advantage I had over Henry was that I was taller, and maybe a little more lighthearted.

The last photo I have here is from when Henry was still working at Alcoa, which was quite a long time ago. The photo was taken when he received an honor from the company for his accomplishments. He looks very establishment here.

I didn’t find any photos from later in Henry’s life, at least none that showed much of him. He did a lot with his life, but of all the things in his life, he was most proud of his sons

In the end, he turned away from science and technology. I have mentioned before that he went to a seminary and became an ordained Presbyterian minister, a path I could not have followed. I believe that he enjoyed preaching; it was second nature for him from a long, long time ago. But he was not remembered at his memorial service for his preaching, he was remembered for the things he did to help people, particularly the homeless.

I was lucky to have a brother like Henry. The world is a poorer place without him.

Spring creeps up

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Our little mountain is not too high, maybe 500 or 600 feet above the surrounding lowlands, but it’s high enough that spring reaches the top just a little later than the bottom. Here is the recently scalped area at the bottom of the mountain, where all the pines were removed. The hardwoods in the undisturbed area are pretty green now.

Up top, the hardwoods are just starting to show new leaves.

The very few dogwoods left on the mountain have also opened their blooms more than at the top, but they are so ragged and sparse these day that I don’t have good photos of them.

Although spring is nice, we are having some health issues these days. Leah had surgery, a laminectomy, on December 21, to try to resolve some nerve pain. It was not successful. Now her surgeon says that she needs a spinal fusion because the condition of her spine poses a risk of weakness and numbness in her leg, which poses a risk of falling. Understandably, Leah is not thrilled to have surgery again so soon, especially since spinal fusion is a more serious surgery than a laminectomy.

I also need surgery to repair my torn rotator cuff, and my surgery is already scheduled for April 16. I don’t look forward to the surgery or the recovery, but I do look forward to having two working arms again. In the meantime, I will need Leah’s help for things like driving me to physical therapy and possibly putting on my socks. So her surgery will have to wait until my arm to closer to normal. Then, once I’m better, she will need help during her recovery, which is likely to be more painful and longer than mine.

But wait, there’s more!

A little over a month ago our newer dog Zoe started vomiting in the mornings. Now, dogs do sometimes barf for various reasons, so one time in the morning is an inconvenience, not too much to worry about. Three days in a row is worth worrying about. So, off to the vet, for a diagnosis of pancreatitis. That’s not good. In fact, it can be life-threatening. There was no obvious cause for the condition, and not a really well-defined treatment. She got a course of antibiotics, and the vet wanted her to have a special diet, part of which no longer includes any table scraps He also put her on omeprazole every day. Omeprazole is a generic Prilosec, the same antacid Leah takes.

So, Zoe was getting a little dab of peanut butter with a hidden capsule every evening, and she was no longer throwing up.

And then she ran out of omeprazole. The next morning, she threw up again. And then the next morning she threw up again. And then the next morning she threw up again. And then that afternoon, she went back to the vet, who put her back on omeprazole. And the next morning she did not throw up. It’s seems pretty clear to me that Zoe will be on an antacid for a while.

So far, that’s about all we’re facing right now, although I may have an issue with a painful spot on my leg, which hasn’t been diagnosed to my satisfaction. Our health problems are going to have to start taking a number.