Category Archives: Personal

Mountains, horses, railways and uniforms

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When I posted about our vacation to Colorado I mentioned that my mother and father had gone horseback riding at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs during World War II. I thought I remembered some pictures of when my father was stationed at Camp Carson (now Fort Carson), and I found a few.

Here is a not particularly good photo of my mother on horseback.

My mother on horseback

My mother on horseback

I’m not certain this was taken at the Garden of the Gods. I seem to remember other old photos that show the location better, but I couldn’t find them on my laptop. Maybe they’re on our home computer. But the only place my parents talked about riding horses together was at the Garden of the Gods, so maybe that’s where this is.

Here’s my father at the top of Pike’s Peak, where the Manitou and Pike’s Peak Railway stops.

My father at the Pike's Peak cog railway

My father at the Pike’s Peak cog railway

There’s no question about where this one is. The Pike’s Peak elevation shown on the sign is a little lower than the 14,114 or 14,115 feet given in most sources today. Here is my mother at the same place.

My mother at Pike's Peak

My mother at Pike’s Peak

The cog railway still operates at Pike’s Peak, although they no longer use this type of engine and car.

The old steam engine

The old steam engine

Here it is at the top.

Train at the top of the mountain

Train at the top of the mountain

I wasn’t sure the pictures of my mother and father were at the top of the mountain until I found the photo of the engine and car at the terminus.  You can see the Pike’s Peak altitude sign at the upper right in this photo. Leah and I took the cog railway to the top a few years ago. The current train stops at a structure with a snack bar and gift shop. It wasn’t there 70 years ago.

My father’s uniform includes a Sam Browne belt, which the Wikipedia article on Sam Brown belts says the Army eliminated in 1940. I don’t think the article is correct. My mother looks like she might be at least a little cool because she’s clenching her fists, but she’s not doing anything obvious like pulling her coat tighter or hunching her shoulders. So I assume the weather was perhaps cool, but not cold. My parents were married in November 1943, and after that my mother accompanied my father during his training in the western US. I am pretty sure she didn’t go out West prior to that. It would have almost certainly been pretty cold in Colorado Springs in November or later in the winter, and the 104th Infantry Division left for Europe in late August 1944, so my guess is that these pictures were taken in the summer of 1944 before my father shipped out for Europe. And here he is, wearing a Sam Browne belt, part of which we still have.

My father is wearing a garrison or side cap here with his dress uniform. This particular military headgear has a vulgar slang name that I won’t mention. My father never used that term, and I’m not sure where I heard it.

We have other pictures of my father in uniform in the 1940’s, as well as some of his actual uniforms from the 1960’s when he was in the Army Reserves. I think Army uniforms from those days are much sharper than modern uniforms, with or without Sam Brown belts.

Did you know that the US Army is going to a blue uniform? Blue, not green or tan or khaki. Blue, like the Air Force and the Navy wear. An Army website that’s full of the jingoistic jargon common in the Army today says that the blue uniform “links today’s warriors to their heritage and connects them to warriors past.” I think a blue uniform, and the jargon that accompanies it, would have disgusted my father and the soldiers he served with. I’m pretty sure they didn’t consider themselves “warriors” and I don’t think they would have felt it necessary to boost their egos by calling themselves that. I suspect that “GI” worked just fine for them. Did you know that theater missile defense systems are not meant to protect front-line soldiers? They’re intended to protect valuable assets in the rear, like supplies, air bases, and, coincidentally, generals, who typically sit well to the rear of the action. One of the very first Allied deaths in the D-Day invasion was a general. That wouldn’t happen today, so I imagine the generals need something to convince themselves and others that they’re really soldiers. I mean warriors.

Well, I don’t know where that came from, but I feel better now.

 

 

 

We went to Colorado

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We have been out of town on vacation for the last two weeks. We went to see some old friends in Denver, and had hoped to drive over into Utah to see Arches and Canyondlands National Parks. We saw our friends, but not the national parks. (Thanks, Tea Party. I hope your shutdown didn’t inconvenience any of you.)

We drove and towed a travel trailer. I know a lot of people look down on RVs. It’s not really camping. Some even consider it irresponsible. RVs use too much fuel. But I have some very fond memories of traveling with my parents in their RVs. I would love for Leah and me to have the same kind of experiences that they had.

I start out with a natural inclination to like this mode of travel. Leah, on the other hand, never did it until we got married. OK, twice before we got married. But still.

We had a small motorhome that had all the necessary conveniences. I stayed in it while working in Huntsville. It was a little small for me, and way too small for Leah. So we decided to sell it, and my one-year-old Nissan pickup, and get a decent-sized trailer and a used truck big enough to tow it.

I’ve done the drive from Georgia to Denver a bunch of times, including on my motorcycle, back when I rode. I always did the 1300 miles in two days. But towing a trailer is different, especially with two dogs along for the ride. We took four days.

On the third day, my outside temperature monitor showed 90 F early in the afternoon. By that evening it was 55 F. With that kind of temperature gradient, you can expect a strong wind, and that’s what we got. The last day before we reached Denver the wind blew strong and steady pretty close to directly into us. My fuel mileage dropped by about a third for that day, and when we stopped, it was hard to open the truck or trailer door.

The wind had moderated by the time we reached the Denver area. We stayed at Chatfield State Park, which is just a short drive from where our friends live in Littleton. It’s a convenient but not particularly pretty park. The sky compensated. This is what we woke up to one morning.

Sunrise at Chatfield

Sunrise at Chatfield

Here’s the view in the other direction, with the Rockies illuminated by the red morning sun. These are the best shots we got of the sunrises and sunsets.

Sunrise on the Rockies

Sunrise on the Rockies

There were some pretty skies in Colorado but most of the time it was impossible to get decent pictures because of utility poles, ugly buildings or lack of a good place to pull over while driving.

We arrived on Friday and had planned to leave the next Tuesday morning for Utah. We had hoped that the government shutdown would be over by then, but, of course, it wasn’t. So we stayed a couple of more days and then drove down to Colorado Springs.

We drove up Pikes Peak, but it was so cold and windy at the top that Leah didn’t get out of the truck, and I didn’t get out for long. That afternoon we drove around the Garden of the Gods, which is a park located in Colorado Springs. I have pictures of my mother and father going horseback riding in the Garden of the Gods during the war, when my father was stationed at what was known then as Camp Carson. He learned to ride because when he first went into the Army, he was assigned to the horse-drawn artillery. It’s hard to believe the Army still trained soldiers with horse-drawn artillery in the 1940s. He never went into combat on a horse, but, according to him, he managed to stop biting his fingernails when he worked with horses. Unfortunately for us, it was foggy and drizzling when we were there.

We left for home on Friday morning, a week after we arrived. The forecast was for more strong winds in eastern Colorado and western Kansas, mainly from the northwest. We didn’t feel much of it, and it didn’t compensate for the headwind we had coming out.

If you have never driven across eastern Colorado and Kansas, you can consider yourself lucky. I don’t know who coined the expression “miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles” but it applies really well to Kansas. It’s flat. The highest relief is usually a highway overpass, and I don’t think I have ever seen as many overpasses that crossed dirt roads in any other place. The most common man-made features are grain silos, with churches a close second. I cannot imagine living in the small communities out there, where the closest grocery store might be an hour away.

This was the most dramatic sky we saw in Kansas.

At least something's going on in the sky

At least something’s going on in the sky

This was taken through the windshield so there are some reflections, including the light streak near the top.

The wind in Kansas doesn’t go entirely to waste. It’s hard to see here, but there is a line of windmills that spans the horizon.

Windmills marching across the horizon

Windmills marching across the horizon

They are right at the horizon, which makes them so far away that they’re hard to see. The fact that you can see them at that distance means they are really big. These windmills are huge. They seemed alien and unreasonably outsized in this landscape, which made it hard for me to grasp their size accurately. I estimated a radius of around 80 feet. Based on Wikipedia, I might have underestimated by a significant amount. One article says that one of the wind farms along I-70 uses windmills with a rotor diameter of 80 meters, which would make a radius of around 130 feet. I’m not sure the ones we saw were that big, but they might have been.

I counted a rotation period of about five seconds. They looked like they were rotating lazily, but  If the rotors were 130 feet in radius, the tips would have been traveling at over 110 miles per hour.

We enjoyed visiting our friends and hope to go back before too long, but the trip out and back made me kind of discouraged about this country. The interstate highway system is an engineering marvel. It’s a great accomplishment that took a tremendous national effort at great cost. We had the resources and wherewithal, but, more importantly, the national will to build this transportation system. Now we have the resources and wherewithal, but apparently not the will to maintain the roads. Oh, there is a lot of road construction everywhere, but it never seems to make much difference in the smoothness of the roads. It seems to me that it’s what you get when no one really cares about the quality of the work. I have to assume that the construction companies build to the accepted specification, but why are the roads so rough?

I suppose you could argue that interstate highways are a thing of the past, and gigantic windmills are the future. But don’t tell that to the truckers; according to the Department of Commerce, trucks carry about two thirds of all freight shipped in the US. My guess is that the national highway system is declining because the important people don’t drive cross country; they fly, so rough roads mean nothing to them.

That leaves the unimportant people like me to experience this particular sign of our national decline first hand.

 

Getting to the heart of the matter

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The last couple of months have been unusual for me, at least in a medical sense. It seems like I have been going to doctors and having procedures a lot more than I ever have before.

It started earlier in the summer when it occurred to me that a pulse rate of 35 was too low. I have a home blood pressure monitor, and it was showing a reasonable blood pressure, but a very low pulse rate. I looked back in the history the machine stores and realized it had been low for months. There were no normal pulse rates since some time last year. So I called my primary care physician and set up an appointment. That was at the end of July.

At my appointment it turned out that my pulse rate was not low, I was just having some unusual rhythm problems that the blood pressure monitor couldn’t handle. So my doctor put a Holter monitor on me for a day.

A Holter monitor is like a portable EKG machine that records your heart activity. I wore it for 24 hours and then returned it at the end of the week when I got back from working in Huntsville. The doctor sent off the recording and, the next week, on the basis of that, sent me to a cardiologist.

The cardiologist was not too worried. I wasn’t having symptoms. No shortness of breath, no faintness, no chest pain. I have a history of fairly strenuous exercise, although that has tapered off since my knees wore out. Back when I was in graduate school, I was a runner. When someone called me a jogger, I thought, no, I don’t jog. I run. I did eight miles a day at a pace I thought was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. And when my knees hurt too much, I started bicycling. As recently as a couple of years ago I was biking up Fouche Gap Road to our house. That’s not a long climb, but it’s a steep climb. It’s a respectable climb that you don’t do with a bad heart.

The cardiologist said I was having PVCs, or premature ventricular contractions. A lot of healthy people have them with no symptoms and, for the most part, no need for treatment. Of course, I was having a lot of PVCs. The Holter monitor record was pages and pages long, with normal beats in black and PVCs in green. There was a lot of green. A lot. So the cardiologist wanted an echocardiogram, just to make sure my heart function was good.

So I had an echocardiogram. That’s a simple procedure that just requires a little jelly on the chest. I had that test in the middle of August. A few days after the echocardiogram, the cardiologist’s office called and told me that the echo was abnormal and showed a weakened heart, and I should make sure I keep my next cardiologist appointment in three weeks.

So I had three weeks to come up with the worst-case scenario. I started thinking of what Leah should do if I died suddenly. I was thinking that now, at last, I could retire.

Three weeks finally passed and I made sure I went to the cardiologist. He told me that my heart’s pumping efficiency was about 60 percent of what it should have been. He sat staring at the echocardiogram results and saying, “I didn’t expect that.” And neither did I.

According to the cardiologist, 98 percent of cases of compromised heart function are caused by one of two things. The first is blockage of a coronary artery. The second is idiopathic, which means they don’t know what the cause is. So he ordered a heart catheterization to find out which it was.

My cardiologist’s appointment was last Thursday, two days after my colonoscopy. The cardiologist prescribed medication, which I started immediately. Today, Monday, I had the heart catheterization.

When they do a heart catheterization, they stick a wire up an artery in your groin and run it up to your heart, where they look around for blockages. If they find a severe enough blockage, they can do an angioplasty, or put in a stent, or both. If it’s really severe, they schedule a coronary artery bypass.

The idea of wires stuck up my arteries was bad enough. I’m the guy who got faint while watching a documentary that showed a vat of slushy plasma on black and white TV, and plasma isn’t even red. I did not look forward to this.

But my friend Errol assured me it was quick and easy. And it was. I was lucky because they went in through my wrist instead of my groin. Of course they had to prep my groin anyway, just in case. It’s not a full cut, but it’s still scratchy.

The result? No blockage. The cardiologist who did the catheterization, who now becomes my very own cardiologist, said to continue the prescription the other cardiologist ordered and he might increase it in a month. He was pretty upbeat about the whole thing.

Before the procedure, the staff kept asking whether I smoked, did I have a family history of heart disease, was I suffering chest pains, shortness of breath, fainting spells. No. No to all of that. So what brought me to this point, they asked. And I had to explain about the blood pressure monitor and the apparent low pulse rate, and how it wasn’t really low, just hard to count because of all the PVCs.

And that, along with the negative heart catheterization result, is what’s encouraging me right now. After I started taking the medication last Thursday, I noticed a couple of times over the weekend that my blood pressure monitor was able to count my pulse and show a pretty-much normal result. I’m not a cardiologist, but my conclusion is that if PVCs were causing the BP monitor to be unable to count heartbeats accurately, the fact that it seems to count much more accurately now must mean there are fewer PVCs. It makes sense to me, and I’m going with that conclusion for now.

In the end

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I had my decadal colonoscopy on Tuesday. When I had my last colonoscopy, I had diet restrictions only for the day before. This time I could not have dairy products, raw fruits, seeds, beans, or whole grains on Sunday, two days before the procedure. That meant that when we had a Southwestern lunch on Sunday, I couldn’t have beans, cheese or sour cream on my burrito, and I couldn’t eat the cheese dip. I probably shouldn’t have used salsa, since it has tomato seeds, but the burrito was so bland without dairy products that it wouldn’t have been edible without salsa.

On Monday, I was on a liquid diet. All day. That means I did not eat a meal at all on Monday. Popsicles don’t really count as a meal. Neither does Jello. Or even beef broth.

And then Monday night, the “bowel prep” began. If you haven’t done this, it’s really something to look forward to. Mark your 50th birthday on your calendar, because that’s when you’re supposed to start routine screening for colon cancer or other conditions.

My preparation was split between Monday night and Tuesday morning. Monday night I drank a half gallon solution of propylene glycol, sodium chloride, potassium chloride, sodium bicarbonate and sodium sulfate, eight ounces every ten minutes. It tastes every bit as bad as it sounds, even with a flavor packet (lemon lime). There was a slight scent of lemon-lime just as I was bringing the glass to my lips, and then it was gone.

The next morning I drank the rest. By then I was getting to like it. Not really.

In case you’re wondering, and you probably aren’t, the bowel prep is intended to wash everything out of your entire digestive tract. This means that what goes in soon comes out. So don’t leave home during this process.

The most interesting part (The only interesting part? Is any part of this interesting?) was the sedation process. Ten years ago, when I woke up, I was groggy for hours. I barely remember walking down the hall with Leah. I remember standing in line at Wendy’s for lunch, and Leah ordering me to sit down at the table. I must have been drifting. I remember sitting on my bed and telling Leah I didn’t need to sleep. And then I kind of remember waking up some hours later. Everything else is completely gone. I don’t remember the drive to Wendy’s or the drive back home. I have no memory of anything else.

This time, the sedative was just what the doctor ordered – for Michael Jackson. Propofol’s effect is quite different from what I got the previous time. The nurse-anesthetist said propofol would basically put me to sleep. It would enter my system quickly and go away quickly.

When they stuck me I tried to be aware of the sedation process, but all I remember is things starting to whirl, and then I was gone. Then the nurse-anesthetist told me to wake up. And I did. It was just like being asleep. In fact, I was in the middle of a dream when they told me to wake up.

They wheeled me to recovery and I remember everything that happened. I was about 80 to 90 percent normal. There was no lingering grogginess at all. Not even now, after a not-recommended beer before dinner.

It’s a lot easier for me to understand how a doctor could order propofol for Michael Jackson if he couldn’t sleep. It’s also easy to understand how Michael Jackson could have believed there would be ill effects from the drug. It’s not so easy to understand how someone could administer it to a patient and then walk away from him. I had oxygen and my heart and blood pressure were being monitored the whole time. I guess that’s the difference between waking up alert, and not waking up at all.

Oh, by the way, I had six polyps removed. I’ll hear what they were in a couple of weeks.

Ain’t she sweet?

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Leah and I got married in 2005, but I’ve known her for a long time. Leah’s brother Dan was my best friend in high school, and I can remember having my mother drive me over to his house when I was 15. I probably caught a glimpse of her then, when she would have been 11.

Over the years I caught more glimpses. In the summer when I drove over to Dan’s, if Leah was sunbathing in her two-piece swimsuit, she would jump up and run for the house when I pulled up. I always thought she was cute. And she had great legs.

Here she is with that great new Beatles album, Abbey Road. She’s probably telling her cousin about it.

Leah and the Beatles

Leah and the Beatles

Abbey Road was released in 1969, when I was 19 and Leah was 15. Isn’t she cute? Darn right she is!

Although I always liked Leah, we never connected. It turned out that when I went to graduate school at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, she was working there. This is what she drove.

Sharp car! Nice girl!

Sharp car! Nice girl!

That’s a Fiat 124 roadster. A lot of people think old Fiats were unreliable, but I disagree. I got a 1971 Fiat 124 Sport Coupe just before I graduated from Georgia State University in 1973 and drove it for a long time with no problems. It had nearly 100,000 miles on it when I sold it, including a cross-country trip to California and back.

Leah did have some problems with hers, and her mother suggested that she call me and see if I could help. I wonder, was there an ulterior motive there? I regret that I couldn’t really fix the problem.

Leah offered to make dinner for me, but that just never seemed to happen.

Not long after, the poor Fiat met its doom in a close encounter with a telephone pole.

And I went on at Tech, and then later in Huntsville. Sometime in 1998 or 1999, Leah and I got in touch with each other again. And the rest is history

But boy would I like to have that car.