Category Archives: Last things

Bye bye Five Eyes

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Donald Trump’s nominations for his cabinet and other high offices are looking like a twisted joke, but there is one case where the nomination itself is not the punchline. He has named Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the top intelligence official in the United States. Whatever her qualifications may be, or may not be, she is not the problem. If he names someone else, anyone else, they will not be the problem. The problem is Donald Trump himself.

Sharing intelligence helps everyone. The recent arrest of Iranians planning to assassinate Trump himself is a good example of the type of results that intelligence sharing can provide. Although no officials have said how the US became aware of the plotters, it is exactly the type of information that the US relies on to keep us safe and secure.

The US has had reasonably good relations with foreign intelligence agencies. Probably the oldest and closest relationship is within the anglosphere, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US, the Five Eyes. That relationship started before the US entered World War 2, and has continued ever since. No one outside the secure walls of the intelligence community can know how valuable such cooperation has been, but we occasionally see the results in things like the arrest of potential terrorists. To say that the source of the information that leads to such results is carefully protected in an understatement. If sources were disclosed, sources will likely dry up and lives could be at risk.

Trump has a history of mishandling US classified material while in office, including disclosing intelligence information to Russia, as well as to other foreign officials and to uncleared civilians. Then, of course, there is the matter of stealing classed material, storing it in his bathroom, and showing it to unknown people. No one knows what has been disclosed or to whom, during his presidency or after.

Once Trump takes office, no foreign or domestic intelligence agency can assume that its highly sensitive intelligence information will remain secure. If US intelligence officials are doing their jobs, they have to assume that anything reported up the chain of command will be compromised. US agencies will probably have no choice but to give such information to Trump loyalists in high positions, and thus to Trump himself. Foreign agencies will have a choice, and if they are doing their jobs, they will have to vet any information extremely carefully before they choose to share it with US intelligence agencies.

Thus it is likely that once Trump takes office, US intelligence agencies will be crippled, and the US will be less safe from foreign nations and individuals who wish to do us harm. And there is nothing that any DNI can do to change that.

Goodbye Annie

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My friends in Denver had to put down their little Scottie named Annie on Saturday.

Windblown Annie in the window

Annie was 15, a good, round number for a dog’s life, but not long enough. My friends and everyone else who knew Annie will miss her.

I have had too much experience losing dogs, as have my friends. It’s never easy. I always feel guilty, not just in the cases where I had a vet end a dog’s life, but in every case. We are completely responsible for our pets’ live, and when their lives end, I feel like I haven’t done enough; I have failed them.

On the night back in 2000 when my father died, I felt as if I could step back and look at his life from beginning to end, a perfectly contained living history, separate from his current state and from me. His life was like a pearl on a necklace, and like a spherical pearl, it had no beginning and no end — a little bubble of existence floating away from us.

I can’t accept that my father, my mother, and my brother no longer exist. I don’t believe in god or in an afterlife, but I am incapable of accepting not that they are dead, but that their existence is gone. I feel like they must be back “there’, somewhere in the past, still existing as I remember them, and they would be there if I could somehow go into the past.

I feel that way about the dogs I have lost, and I feel that way about little Annie. She’s still back there, out of reach for us, but still sticking her head out the window to see the sights and catch the scents

Goodbye, little Annie. Hope to see you on the other side.

Divisible by five

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My brother Henry died five years ago on the day this posts, April 6. He would be 75 years old now. My mother would be 100, and my father would be 105.

It’s been long enough for me to get used to my family not being here, but I haven’t. I feel like they are somewhere over there, in some reality next door to this one. There has certainly been enough going on in this reality over the last few years to make me think there must be a better one somewhere.

I no longer think to myself that I need to tell one of them about something that has happened, or something I did around the house, or, more important, a question that I would like to get an answer to. That phase ended a while ago, but the need did not.

As Snoopy* once said, “You never miss the water till the well runs dry.”

So here I am, still with a lot of questions that need to be answered. I don’t know whether they would be able to answer them, but at least the questions would be there, out in the open.

By the way, if you are wondering whether you look old, you know the answer when someone sees you walking your dogs and asks you how old you are, and then congratulates you on being able to walk a dog. “Thank you. Still working at your age, eh?”

But here I am, still breathing. There is a bit of cosmetic damage, and some internal parts are not working as well as they once did. My mind seems to work almost as well as it did, let’s say five years ago. But then, maybe I wouldn’t know.

But I was talking about asking questions.

No one warned me that I would get old, and still not be wise. In fact, no one said a god-damned thing about that, and I want to know why. I thought we were supposed to be able to figure things out about life, the universe, and everything when we got this close to the end of it. Was I standing behind the door when wisdom was handed out? Maybe I was looking out the window, daydreaming, and I missed hearing my name called. Maybe they ran out of wisdom; it does seem to be in short supply today.

However it happened, here I am, needing questions answered. There is no one to answer them, and I’ll be damned if I can answer them myself. Is it like that for everyone?

This is the way I think of my family.

I don’t know when this photo was taken. It looks like the early 1990’s, possibly a little earlier than that. I don’t know where I was, or who took the photo.

Maybe that’s the way they look now, in that other reality.

* I’m pretty sure Snoopy said it once, but the only citation I can actually find was Franklin’s grandfather.

Well, that was interesting

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Early last week when I was walking the dogs, I decided to walk back up the mountain at a little faster pace than normal. Since I had recently had a shot in my knee, I was feeling good. I could tell that it had been a long time since I had done anything more than a slow walk. I was breathing hard by the time I got to our driveway, which is steep. I was breathing even harder at the top of the drive, but so what, I thought, it will be good for me.

I tried it again the next day, and I had to stop once or twice. Well, I thought, it will be a process.

The next day I stopped a lot. Not right, I thought. The day after, I could barely get back up the mountain to home. Definitely not right. I called my doctor, and he recommended that I go to the emergency room. That was Friday. I didn’t feel like going, so I didn’t. But Saturday I did feel like going, so I did. And it was a good thing.

I had multiple blood clots in my lungs. They admitted me, and I spent from Saturday night to Monday on a heparin drip. Any time I tried to breathe deeply, my breath caught in my lungs and made me cough, so I was constantly struggling to breathe. I was winded from getting up and going to the bathroom. I spent ten minutes breathing hard to recover. I could barely talk on the phone for gasping for air.

A chest x-ray and a CT scan had shown a lot of little blood clots. Although each was small, they added up to a major load on my heart and lungs. They also found a nodule in one lung. They assured me they would refer me to someone who could follow up on it. They didn’t seem worried.

But I was worried.

I had no pain initially, even when my attempts at a deep breath ended in coughing. Sunday night my back started hurting enough that I asked for acetaminophen, which helped some. But now it was back pain that kept me from drawing a deep breath. The back pain seems to be muscular, rather than associated with the clots. No one in the hospital seemed concerned with the back pain. Maybe every patient has back pain after a few hours in a hospital bed.

By Monday they figured all my vitals looked good enough, so they sent me home with a prescription for Xeralto for the clots and hydrocodone for the back pain. I was pretty much exhausted when I got home. I had not slept well the whole weekend and had missed most of my meals. Plus, getting enough oxygen into my system was hard work. So I took a pain pill and piled up in bed for a nap. Zoe jumped up, gave my face a good washing and laid down next to me. The next hour was a deep, painless, rewarding sleep. I wouldn’t do the hospital stay again for a lot of money, but I would take that nap again just about any time, for free.

I saw my regular doctor on Tuesday. He assured me that I was right to have been worried, because I could have died. He said that since I was active and had none of the normal risk factors, other than perhaps a genetic risk, he didn’t really have any idea why I got the clots. He did say that cancer can cause clots like I experienced. Nice to know that.

He said that the nodule didn’t look like cancer because it was smooth rather than spiculated, that is, looking like it has little spikes on the surface.

Apparently nodules are common in adults. One source said about half of all lung X-rays of adults show a nodule. Also, apparently only a small percentage of nodules turn out to be malignant. Also, nodules smaller than around 9 or 10 mm are less likely to be malignant than nodules that are larger. My nodule is about 10 mm. Not small. Not large. So the nodule is probably not malignant, but there is a smallish chance that it is.

My doctor said that I had weathered the first storm and had come out on the other side. He said taking an anticoagulant reduces my risk of another clot significantly. I am supposed to have an appointment with another doctor soon. They will look at my nodule and decide what to do. A PET scan might show whether it is malignant, and whether there might be other cancers lurking about. They might take a biopsy. They might wait a couple of months and take another x-ray.

I think almost anyone would be at least a little worried at this point. I know I am. I can’t help thinking of my brother, whose doctor discovered his pancreatic cancer when he did an ultrasound on his liver. He found metastases there and in his lungs. I had ultrasounds of my heart, liver and some other abdominal organs. So far no one has said anything about suspicious lumps anywhere but in my lungs, so maybe that’s one worry I should put aside. A PET scan would probably clear that up one way or the other.

I felt pretty good Tuesday, even after visiting the doctor. I can breathe much more easily, I can walk around like a normal person without panting, although I know better than to try to climb the mountain, and I can have a conversation without stopping for air after every word. I can still tell that I’m not getting as much oxygen as my body would like.

In the meantime I have tried to start talking to Leah about what she might do if I end up dead.

I am not a happy person right now. It’s surprising to me how emotional this has made me. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone dies, but not today, right? But this is like feeling a tap on my shoulder, looking around, and seeing a skeletal hand resting there.

Chloë

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Our senior cat Chloë has gone to the great catnip field in the sky.

I have posted before about her lymphoma, and the relative success of steroid shots to help her intestines, but in the last week or so she has declined. She had lost about a quarter of her body weight in the last couple of months. She felt like a furry sack of bones. She was eating sporadically, if at all, and apparently not absorbing any nutrition from the food. Leah spent a lot of time trying different cat foods, but nothing seemed to work. Chloë spent all her time on our front porch. We put a kitty litter box out there because she was becoming careless in her elimination habits.

We finally understood that she was in enough distress that ending that distress was the only humane option. So we took her to the emergency vet clinic, four months after we took her son Dusty for the same reason.

We don’t remember when Chloë showed up at our old house. I think it was no more than a year after we moved in, so around 2006. She came complete with three half-grown kittens. Chloë was a gray tabby/calico. Two of her kittens were orange tabbies, and one was very close to Siamese. I find that cats can have different fathers for kittens in the same litter, a phenomenon called superfecundation.

I do not judge.

We tried to give the kittens away, but were only successful with the Siamese. The two orange tabbies became Rusty and Dusty. Rusty died about six years ago from FIV. Dusty died this January from lymphoma. Our other cats, Zoë, Smokey, and Sylvester, have disappeared. Zoë came with Leah when we married. Smokey and Sylvester appeared in our back yard not too long after Chloë showed up. We presume that Zoë was taken by a coyote. We found good evidence that Smokey suffered the same fate. Sylvester has been missing for nearly two weeks, and we hold little hope that he will reappear. A coyote is the most likely answer to what happened to him.

So Chloë was the last of the original six cats. She has been with us so long that it’s hard to imagine being without her.

Chloë will join her son Dusty and three dogs in our growing pet cemetery. I buried my mother’s little dog Lucy out there, then I buried Zeke. I had his friend Zeus cremated some time ago, and I put Zeus’s ashes in with Zeke to keep him company. Chloë always got along with Zeke. Now they will rest close to each other.