One with the Puppet
Yesterday, Jessie was in her room, writing on a piece of paper. When Laureen asked her what she was doing, she said “writing to God”.
Below is her letter. To explain a bit, in her class, if you get in trouble, you get a “color change” and have to be in a different group.
As some of you read on Facebook and other various places, I had a bit of an experience last week. Here’s the details.
Tuesday before last (Nov. 30): I go to bed and start shivering uncontrollably. Somehow I get through the night.
Dec 1: Fever. Still shaking. Call in sick.
Dec 2: I ran out of medication for cholesterol, so I had to go see the doctor and have blood drawn. Yay. No fainting. Still feel lousy.
Dec 3: Sick. At home. Sleeping a lot.
Dec 4: Doctor gets hold of me and says that according to the blood work, I really should go into the ER.
Let’s talk a brief bit about normal kidneys. The way your “health” of your kidneys is measured is in how much creatinine is in your blood. Healthy adults usually have a creatinine level of below 1. When my blood was tested in May, the level was 1.2. Yes, I have high blood pressure, and I’m fat. Those affect the score, but not enough to scare a doctor.
However, the level of creatinine in my blood (6.3) was. If the number gets up around 10 (representing about 10 mg of creatinine per deciliter of blood), then you’re going to need dialysis.
In short, my kidneys were failing, and it wasn’t until Saturday that we realized this.
So, off to the hospital, where I get admitted to the level that isn’t quite ICU, but is more frequently checked than regular patients. Intermediate Care means your vitals will be checked every two hours, round the clock, and that’s where I went.
As some of you know, I’m needle averse, especially when it comes to drawing blood. I’ve fainted before, although I think I’m getting better at responding to it. Thus, when the nurse wasn’t able to get the IV started for the first three sticks, I wasn’t terribly happy. However, they finally succeeded in hitting the vein in the top of my hand. After securing it with enough tape such that I thought I was wearing an old-school Nintendo Power Glove, they started the IV. Why did it take so many tries? Dehydration. If you’re not hydrated, it makes it harder to find a vein.
So I spend Saturday through Tuesday at the hospital, watching the creatinine get flushed out of my body. The case perplexed my doctor and new best friend the nephrologist, simply because the only thing that was used to fix me was saline solution. The assumption was that due to the virus (which wasn’t flu) and sleeping the better part of three days, I simply didn’t get enough fluid in me to make up for what was going out, and I wound up being extremely dehydrated to the point of renal failure.
Given all this, it’s pretty easy to see this was a wakeup call of the largest magnitude to do something about my health. I have to lose weight; there aren’t many other options for me. I have to exercise. It’s no longer an intellectual stumbling block. It’s my life, and unfortunately, it’s affecting me in another way.
The other weird thing that’s happening in my health is this condition called pseudotumor cerebri, where there’s elevated cranial pressure without any real reason. The medicine I was taking to control that has the potential to hurt the kidneys, so I had to go off of it. The consequence of that is swollen optic nerves from the cranial pressure.
Hopefully I’ll be able to go back on the medication, or another medication will work. If not, there are some unpleasant choices that I’d have to make, and I’d much rather lose weight and live a normal life rather than go through surgery.
So, that’s it.
Time to think a bit about what’s been going on and what it means.
First off, there’s a certain mindset about the people behind Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy locations: namely, they’re a bunch of filthy hippies with nothing better to do. Well, if they don’t have a job, then at least this is doing something, namely, exercising their freedom to assemble and speak. I have no issue with that, and neither should anyone else.
To try and capture the mindset of this group of people, you have to look at some facts and figures. I know, numbers are boring and hard to comprehend. But if you want to understand the frustration in America right now, you have to look at these:
Now, please pay attention to the fact that this chart only goes up to 2006. That’s before the housing crash and the major recession that came along with it.
We’re taught to invest in stock and mutual funds. Do we?
Nope.
What about income relative to inflation? How have we done there?
As a matter of fact, when you adjust for inflation, wages essentially haven’t gone up in 50 years.
What about “upward mobility”? We believe in that in America, right?
A small one at best.
Well, what about taxes? Everyone has to pay their fair share, right?
They may pay more dollarwise, but as a ppercentage of what they make, it’s nowhere close to what it has been. And that chart only goes up to 2004.
Where is inequality the worst in the U.S.?
Yup. Wall Street. Texas is close behind, though.
What the protest is about is simply this: the rich have bought their way into government, into great tax rates (and if you’d like to see how the rich are able to not pay taxes, give this link a read), and basically benefit while the rest of us struggle. And frankly, I don’t really struggle right now. I have a great job that I enjoy doing, and as long as that holds, everything’s great. If I lost my job, however, I’m not entirely sure how long whatever savings we have would last. Money gurus advocate at least a thousand bucks in a savings account. Others advocate 3 to 6 months worth of expenses. Let’s just say I’m not there.
What was the government’s role in this? When the mortgage-backed securities market completely crumbled under the weight of greed and misguided belief that the default on home mortgages would be constant even as new and ridiculous loans popped up, the government had to prop up the banks. However, nothing came under scrutiny as to why the propping up was necessary. No traders, no dealers, no people who created the securities or rated the securities were investigated for ruining not just the economy, but also people’s lives. One of America’s greatest traits to me is our ability to always blame things on other people. The JFK assassination? It was Oswald, unless you want to blame the Communists and the mafia in conjunction with the Freemasons.
So this time, it’s blame the people who have successfully purchased the system. They’ve used money for quasi-political purposes (google the Koch brothers) to benefit themselves. They have resources. The people who are sleeping in tents have voices. They also have votes, but the issue quickly turns into “which is less bad?” We have a government right now in Washington that is literally doing nothing of importance, because it’s a political game. The Republicans want to blame the lack of progress on the Democrats. The Democrats want to do the same to the Republicans, but Obama has always wanted to try and work with the other side, because he still believes that compromise is the way to move forward on divisive issues. This is where I differ from Obama only in the sense that you can only compromise with people who are like-minded and have the same goals as you. That is not the case for the Republican leadership. Their goal is to get Obama out and push through their agenda (which, if they get the chance, they should do. After all, winning has its privileges).
So we can blame the super-rich, we can blame the government, we can blame corporations who move jobs overseas and offer training in services that are approaching glut-levels of people, or better yet, blame all of the above. I’m okay with that.
The big question is, what’s the next step? How do you change a system that appears to be broken and resistant to fixing? The recent raid on Zucotti Park in New York gave us a hint of what the powers-that-be care about: order. Not the rights of people. Not the rights of journalists. Just–order. Bloomberg’s move may well be the tipping point that forces the rest of the nation and my generation to have their Vietnam, or Equal Rights, or Suffrage.
If you don’t think about this, please start.
I don’t know if many of the people who read this would consider themselves fans of “just one book”. Usually, it’s an author, series, or genre of which we become fans, but for my wife, there’s been one book that’s had a lasting impression: Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”.
Go look at the precis on Amazon, maybe check it out at your library if you can. It’s a complete fusion of the nanotechnological future and the styles and mores of a Victorian time. It’s a wonderful read, and surprisingly enough, it’s been relatively accurate in predicting what might become true future technologies. Those of you more well-read in SciFi than I can go ahead and smirk, basking in my ignorance, but I really liked the idea of having chopsticks that could essentially be displays for advertising, or the idea of creating items simply by interacting with a piece of paper.
One of the more unique items in the book is the Primer, a wealthy man’s gift to his daughter. It essentially is a textbook that opens new worlds for the reader, doing so through stories and interactive play. The idea that technology will not only enable us to learn but will, in essence, save us as a race is not new, but the desire to outfit every child with a laptop seems to be the latest incarnation of this trend.
I work in the embedded space, but by no means would I call myself a predictor of technological trends. However, there has always been this dream of making a laptop that was priced at under $100. Much like the Primer in the story above, it would be used to enhance learning for all of its students. Suddenly, the idea of giving every child access to the world’s data and allowing them to learn through it seems noble, almost virtuous.
I ask that we take a few steps back from that perch. Right now, technology is at a remarkable tipping point: you can, given enough volume, produce a tablet that can be drawn on with a stylus. It can use an open source operating system, thus driving the costs down even further. Admittedly, the lower the cost, the less technological you can go; you can’t get a capacitive touch screen (think iPad) for cheap, but resistive touch screens (think the old style poke-at-a-screen displays at airports and malls) are getting cheap enough where you could make a decent device that could connect to the internet for under $100.
But is that enough to give to a child? Great! You can access the net. However, is your network at school equipped to handle that traffic? Do you have the right software to open and utilize that online textbook? Here’s a case in point: Adobe Flash. If you want to integrate Flash into your system, it’s got to be “beefy” enough to handle it. Flash is a resource hog, and currently, the less expensive tablets that would fit our cost criteria just simply can’t run it well enough to provide acceptable performance. The same is going to be true of any other next technological leap, whether it be HTML5 or video or whatnot. We’re always going to have a barrier that people will want to cross, simply because they’ve invested a ton of money getting to this point.
This entrenchment is ultimately why any attempt at OLPC will fail.
The textbook companies have reasons for keeping their materials copyrighted and not in the public domain. Different electronic book formats with varying levels of copy protection can’t be negotiated down to one standard. And what body is going to start trying to impose order on that, especially when different states have different requirements for educating their students?
Countries like Korea and Greece — yes, that troubled financial mess of Greece — are planning to invest billions of dollars into tablet technology for students as a way to reduce other educational costs. Those countries may be able to make it work, but in America, with our firm belief in the power of the free market, there will never be a consensus as to what is best.
Even if by some miracle we’re able to reach that standard, what about students who have disabilities? Let’s say you want to learn Urdu, but you’re blind. What kind of textbook, written or electronic, will help you there?
Worse yet, what if you’ve already given up on your school system? If we’ve lost a sense of right and wrong and have nothing in the way of civics, what good will throwing a technological toy at a kid do? Especially one that’s less useful than their cell phone?
Again, much like NCLB, the OLPC effort is one that is noble in thought and goal but impossible to achieve. Pragmatically, I believe we should make technology accessible, but not make it the sole path to success, but until then, we’ll keep trying. And failing. And wondering why.
Yes, it’s another Wal-Mart rant.
1. I’d like to know how much shelf space Wal-Mart gives in its grocery aisles to pre-processed foods–cookies, crackers, frozen meals, etc. I’m afraid the number would be staggeringly high.
2. Good luck trying to prepare an Indian dish when shopping at the big W. No curry paste (yes, they have curry powder, but no, I’m not feeling like figuring out how to transmogrify it), no mango chutney (the jellies and jams section is reminiscent of Henry Ford’s color choices for the Model T), and no mincemeat filling. Actually, I don’t think I needed the mincemeat for the Indian dish (yes, I’m trying to broaden my horizons beyond naan bread), but still…. If you’re Hispanic, you’re covered pretty easily. If you’re Asian…. eh. It’s much like Chinese restaurants. They don’t serve authentic stuff but more Americanized versions of Chinese dishes. Italian? Again, Americanized, but you can find a decent variety of pastas there, some of them not made by Kraft and containing a packet of cheese sauce. Other cuisines? Let’s sing:
It’s a Small World
If I earwormed you with that or you managed to make it through the entire video, my deepest condolences.
3. The modern man has become a nocturnal hunter-gatherer at the big W. While the wife and kids are back in the cave, then men grab their steel chariots and move in synchronized chaos, consulting shopping lists, occasionally trading the knowing glance of “you too, huh”, as they waltz from the back of the store to the front. We forage mightily, searching for camouflaged prey (“store brand? What?”), always consulting the sacred parchment with the order of the hunt.
I still have a love/hate relationship with Wal-Mart. Check that: it’s more tolerate/hate.
When Pink Floyd made that part of their album “The Wall”, it rang out as an anthem. Many people thought it was simply a rebellious streak against conformity, but it seems at least to me (and yes, I’m willing to be wrong) that the rebellion isn’t against education and learning itself but against the brainwashing done by countries to remake history according to their own liking (e.g. Tianamen Square).
There’s a part of me that wonders if the direction our public schools are heading isn’t simply another case of brainwashing, but this time the repressive forces are those of economics.
Everyone can consider themselves to be an educational expert; we’ve all been to school, right? We all have opinions on the subject, but it’s only those who enact legislation and approve textbooks that really affect schools. The biggest issue that I have with modern education is twofold: we’ve tried to replace the traditional model of school with that of running a school as a business, and improper use of evaluations has completely damaged the whole system.
First, let’s examine the whole running a school as a business. A lot of this started with Ross Perot’s reforms in Texas back when you had to have passing grades to be eligible for extracurricular activities. Like most good ideas, in theory, this made sense. Kids don’t pass their basic subjects, they don’t play football or be in band. In reality, while a lot of students were forced to study harder, for some, it became another way to figure out how to game the system. Take, for example, the Carter Cowboys of Dallas described in the book “Friday Night Lights”. There, cheating scandals and grade changes were made to keep star athletes on the field.
Even today, with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), we rely on evaluation of all students to determine federal and state funding. In some cases, it’s used to determine teacher effectiveness. Larger districts are also hamstrung with layers upon layers of bureaucracy. Take a look at this list of departments of Houston ISD and try to determine how many have to do with core academics. Now imagine being in the system and being a teacher. You have a disruptive, unruly student–one who consistently is set on making it impossible for anyone to learn anything. This same bureaucracy will oftentimes prevent a teacher from being able to do anything meaningful about getting this student to change direction. It’s too much hassle and documentation, and there are so many students who need individual educational programs already. And what about the teachers themselves? How many of us remember Fridays in the marginal subjects of History or wherever they stuck the assistant football coaches where we watched films so the coach could prepare for the game? Or worse yet, you had a teacher who was just bad? One that either didn’t care about their subject, wasn’t an effective teacher, did a lousy job managing records and whatnot, but because of the threat of legal action is more frightening than taking a stand you can’t remove him or her?
I’m rambling around the point a bit. Bureaucracy in any organization can lead to stagnation and frustration, but when you add the relentless standards-based evaluation that NCLB has led us to do, it makes real meaningful education nearly impossible. NCLB itself is a noble goal, again like pass-to-play was, but it too suffers from overbroad execution and also what I believe is an attempt by those who stand to benefit the most from these standards (textbook publishers and educational consultants that can “improve” a district) to funnel money away from things that just might make a real difference in the educational system.
Compare the modern high school to that of 30 years ago, or even as late as “The Breakfast Club”. Does Shop even exist anymore as a class, or have we sacrificed it for economic and standards reasons? It’s not what a student is tested on, so it must not matter to those who insist on driving the schools by numbers. Those numbers completely ignore what I’d call the dangerous reality of education: it can’t be done by just teachers alone. The student has to be a willing participant, and their parents have to be committed to it as well. More often than not, where schools are failing, you may only have one of these three items in place, and if a teacher is the only social service a child ever sees, what does that imply? That being a teacher alone, documenting your work, creating and following lesson plans, trying desperately to reach students who may or may not be willing to listen because the distractions are much greater these days, working with special needs kids who’ve been mainstreamed because NCLB doesn’t allow for any exemptions (except when states realize that the majority of their schools aren’t making enough Average Yearly Progress. (For fun, google that term and any state. Read the articles)… it all isn’t enough. Now they have to spend more out-of-school time tracking down parents to try and get them involved in their kid’s education.
We are America. We don’t want to say that kids won’t shine when we put a spotlight on them, but when we continually blind them with high-beams, when do we say “we need to try something else, because this one just isn’t going to go the normal way”?
Here’s my proposal: bring back shop, but make it function for the good of the students and the school. For Auto Shop, have classes in the morning over subjects that mechanics need to know (science, applied physics, math), and in the afternoon, have an auto repair/oil change facility where the students could work. It might make money, it might lose money, but those kids would have valuable experience without paying through the nose at a for-profit technical school. They could contribute directly after graduation to the U.S. economy.
Restaurants: why not put one on the school campus, or just offsite? Have students come in the morning, do deliveries and prep, go to culinary and other basic subject classes (French, math, Sanitation, Knife skills), then work at the restaurant in the evening? You wouldn’t necessarily have a student doing that all the time, but by the time they’re 16, this type of system could benefit schools, provide almost instantaneous places for reunions, and give kids skills that they won’t have to pay $50,000 for, only to find out that they can only get an $8/hour dishwasher starting job.
Bring back vocations as an option. Let students learn why some parts of school matter (so you don’t do things the wrong way, so you don’t get ripped off, so you learn a work ethic). If a student wants to go to college, there’s nothing stopping them, but they can make that decision on their own time and at their own pace.
Before you think I’ve drunk a bit too much of the political kool-aid, this isn’t about politics. It’s something a bit simpler than that.
We all have an image courtesy of Russell Crowe and tons of imagination about ancient Rome and the gladiatorial fights that happened. Whether it was man vs. man, man vs. animal, or even navy vs. navy (the ancient Colosseum apparently could be flooded for such an event), it was essentially a simple pastime: two things enter, one leaves. Games are a substitute for war, or at least our lust for it. The generalization is back then, people with money would gladly pay to see other men fight and kill each other. These days, we’ve become just a bit more civilized to the point of not actually killing each other, but think about it for a bit.
Isn’t the concept the same? A society that has excess cash is willing to pay to watch professional athletes compete against one another. We watch it, we build hero mythologies around it, and we take civic pride in it. I admit I’m a fan of sports in general, but this part has always, always bothered me. We, as a society, have turned people into slaves to play games for our pleasure. “They get paid well.” Yes, but how long are their careers? Do some research into the number of NBA players who aren’t able to manage their money well after their playing days are over. Look at the number of PTSD-type injuries and twisted arms and legs football players wind up with. Are we killing athletes just so we can cheer, much like gladiators, or people watching a joust?
What bothers me even more than this is the effect it has on colleges. It’s great to have pride in where you went to school, but when you give money strictly to an athletic program, are you doing that school any favors? The biggest and best-known football schools are, for all intents and purposes, minor leagues for the NFL. We can’t disguise this fact. Kids go there for the primary reason of believing they can play in the major leagues. It’s the same with other schools and basketball, except that simply because of the fewer number of players, most dreams of playing professionally are short-lived.
We have a nifty database with which we can play, so let’s look at some data.
Let’s look at the Southeastern Conference and Football graduation rates. You can plug in the search terms as well as I can, so I’ll just give the results.
Vanderbilt’s the shining light on the hill for the SEC, graduating about 90% of their players. The number is adjusted for kids who transfer to other schools, but still, that’s respectable. The other schools? Nothing about 70%.
Compare that to the Big 12:
Texas has a graduation rate of 49%. Oklahoma’s is 44%. And this is just football.
Is it too large an assumption to make that kids that don’t graduate from college aren’t there for the academics? Schools force-feed kids with tutoring and help to get them to pass their classes. Any student who shows the same motivation and discipline in the classroom as on the field should be able to graduate. I know that there are certain circumstances that prevent students from succeeding, but I also know that I don’t have a lot of insight on this. My frame of reference doesn’t include this point of view.
Let’s look at basketball and head to the Big East.
There are some good schools here. Villanova and Notre Dame graduate every player. But look at UConn. 31%. I admit that I was always a critic of John Thompson at Georgetown because he always wanted to relax educational standards for basketball players, but at least his school now graduates 78% of them.
Big 12. UT: 42%. Oklahoma: 55%. Iowa State: 35% ????
Big 10. Michigan: 36%. Michigan State: 50%.
ACC. Duke: 83%. Georgia Tech: 36%. Maryland: 31%.
WAC. Fresno St.: 24%. New Mexico St.: 34%.
I look at these numbers, I look at the number of people attending the first football games of the year at colleges, and I wonder whether we’ve collectively lost our mind as a society. Someone in Alabama built a man-cave dedicated to Alabama football that includes 4 TVs, a complete bar, stadium seating, and actual field turf. Yet 3 out of 10 students who leave high school will require some sort of remedial coursework in order to survive college.
Our society has given us enough money and time to pay others to play games, and we’ve translated that into a corruption of a portion of our higher learning institutions. Yet the only thing we seem to care about is which school goes to which conference, because that will mean playing for an automatic BCS bid and will bring in more revenue to schools, thus mimicking our society of haves and have-nots just peachily.
Goodbye, sense. Nice knowing you when you were here.
My kids go to public school. Yes, public school. In Texas. For those of you that may blanch at that statement, consider that their school, Walnut Glen Academy for Excellence, is an incredible school. http://www.garlandisdschools.net/page.cfm?p=2839 shows you the awards they’ve won, and it’s in a vibrant, multicultural neighborhood. Frankly, I have more of an issue with the suburban schools that are almost uniformly upper-middle class, the same color, driving the same minivans or SUVs, etc. But the school where Jacob went to kindergarten was one of those, and it all felt… staged. All the mothers wore the same workout clothes when dropping off their kids, and they all had the same Starbucks cups coming to pick them up. To me, it just seemed like a bland lifestyle devoted to the pursuit of the material as opposed to something that might matter more–designer sunglasses instead of souls.
At Walnut Glen, it’s a melting pot. The school has at least one ESL teacher per grade level, and kids of all nations get in. Jacob and Jessie are exposed to more cultures than I ever was as a kid, and I’m pretty certain that’s a good thing.
Speaking of cultures, I have to state the obvious. Wal-Mart drives me insane. The monopsony that it is just drives me into a state of rage at lowest dollar quality for things. Yes, they’re cheap. Yes, there’s a reason why. I shop there when I have to, but I don’t like it. Part of me gets anxious in crowds, and when those crowds have four-wheeled weapons (some of them motorized)… So I’m a hypocrite. I can’t stand a place, but I go there when I need to because when the quality doesn’t matter, the cheapskate in me deals with the anxiety.
Then there’s Target. Expect a 20 percent markup over Wal-Mart, but fewer people shopping. I did see a really large rat run through the baked goods the last time I was there, though.
I love my wife. She keeps me sane.
Around 12 hours from now, I’ll turn 40. I’ve encountered two schools of thought on this:
1. “It’s just another birthday! Relax!”
2. “You’re old.”
I’m not yet entirely sure how I feel about this. The past couple of months have been eye-opening in terms of my health, my well-being, and my life, and I may as well share what’s been going on for those of you who don’t know.
I went to get new glasses a while back. The optometrist took a look at my retinas and didn’t like what he saw, so he referred me to a retina specialist. The new glasses are Harley Davidson branded. I feel so masculine wearing them… yeah, right. I’m as likely to ride a chopper as Barack Obama is likely to not suggest a compromise to get things done.
I go to the retina specialist who performs pretty much the same diagnostic procedures and says, “it looks like the blood vessels leading to your retinas are getting compressed, but I don’t know what the best thing to do is. I’m going to refer you to a neuro-ophthamologist at UT Southwestern. And you’re going to need to get an MRI.”
Fortunately, the MRI is a simple procedure, done in one of the “open” MRI chambers, and I manage not to faint when they stick the needle in me.
Brief aside: I don’t necessarily have a fear of needles. I used to receive allergy shots and even would give myself allergy shots at one point. However, blood draws are another matter entirely. For some phlebotomists, they behave. For others, I go into fight-or-flight mode and faint. This has happened since high school when I was taking accutane. The worst time was a spell out in San Diego when during the course of an ER visit I threw up twice and fainted three times. I can deal with needles putting stuff in me. I just don’t deal with them either staying in me or taking stuff out of me. That metallic under-the-skin feeling goes straight through my parasympathetic nervous system to produce a truly pathetic response. But, I digress.
The MRI used contrast, but it went well. I think I posted pictures on facebook of my brain. If you’re that interested, email me for the link. Just don’t use the phrase “Check out the big brain on Brad!”
So, a few weeks pass, and I finally get an appointment with an N-O (I’m not typing that whole thing again). There are only 4 in all of North Texas, so I’m lucky three of them are at UTSW. We go down there and do a FOUR HOUR examination–everything the previous people have done plus more specialized tests.
The great news: there isn’t a tumor, but I really should see an ENT about the right-side sinuses. I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.
The “huh” news: I’m a bit color-blind differentiating reds and browns. This is livable, except for when cooking hamburgers.
The “er” news: The doctor needs a spinal tap to see if I have increased cranial pressure.
A spinal tap? Me? Yes, I’ve heard the jokes and songs from the movie. It does go to 11. The day of the tap, I get a wee bit worked up about it. I didn’t know they’d need to put in an IV and draw blood, so before they got it in, I proceeded to go into shock and fainted early enough to get that out of the way. While in my throes of thrashing about, I saw the nurse show a vial to my wife, with the unspoken meaning of “we need to get more blood from him.” Sigh.
Have I mentioned lately that I love my wife? Laureen is the most amazing soulmate a man like me could ask for, and I am richly blessed to have her in my life. She manages to keep me from going berserk while the neurology specialized radiologist sets me up with some Versed. The nurse uses this time when I’m not paying attention to sneak the blood out of me. Sneaky, sneaky nurse.
About this time, my wife informs me that my natural reaction to stress is to start singing. It was either that or the meds kicking in because I had this flashback of Homer Simpson singing “Oh when the Saints / go over there / oh how I want to be like that guy / when the Saints go over there” and I thought I’d share this insight while they wheel me back.
The radiologist and I had a great time talking about malpractice and common causes (note: radiologists get hit up in breast cancer malpractice cases quite frequently), and again, I sang him part of Christine Lavin’s “Music to Operate By” from her Shining the Flashlight on the Moon album. It’s good stuff.
The tap itself takes about 45 minutes, and then it’s back to the room to lie flat, don’t let anything that shouldn’t seep out, wait a bit, then go home and lie down for a good long while.
This I do.
The next time we return to UTSW (which shares a parking garage with Parkland hospital and is a wonderfully multicultural experience in Dallas), my N.O. informs me that yes, my intracranial pressure was high. So I have a condition called “pseudotumor cerebri”. The plain English is: “his head’s about to explode, but there’s not a good reason for it”. Maybe that’s a stretch, but the consequences aren’t; if left untreated, the condition would progressively worsen, and I would have to have risky operations to save my eyesight. Or I could lose it altogether.
However, there is a plan. Yay! A plan!
Lose weight. Specifically, lose 15% of my body weight, which, when I started this, was right around 280. That works out to be 42 pounds. If I do that, oftentimes the symptoms go away. In the meanwhile, here’s some wonderfully nasty medicine to take. The brand name is Dimoxx, and it was originally intended as a blood pressure medicine. It didn’t do so hot at that, but lowering pressure in your head? Works great!
I take 6 pills a day, each 200 mg. The known side effects of the pills are: carbonated sodas taste funny, tingling in your hands and legs, nausea, diahrrea, lack of appetite, and sudden urges to do the moonwalk in shopping malls. Okay, maybe not the last one, but the others….
The sodas hit the hardest. I hate to admit that I was a Dr. Pepper junkie, but I was. Free sodas at work kept me hydrated to the point of 5 to 6 cans A DAY. 720 empty calories.
Did you know that going cold turkey off of that much caffeine will give you the delirium tremens? I do now. I was taking excedrin, with caffeine in it, just to get to sleep so my feet would stop moving. So, I revised the plan and worked my way down slowly. No more sodas, but caffeinated tea helped.
The tingling was maddening. I’d wash my hands, and afterwards had this feeling like little tiny sparks were trying to shoot from one finger to another, and not necessarily in a “ooh, nifty” way. It’s calmed down some, thank goodness.
The other side effects… I deal as best I can. Not drinking soda has been a huge step for me. When I stepped on the scale the other day, I was already down 9 pounds. For now, the biggest issue for me is to stop thinking about things and just do them. Just walk. Just. Freaking. Walk. I don’t have to have a point-by-point pro and con list of why I should or why I shouldn’t, and I don’t have to go all “meta” about overanalyzing it. This is another area where Laureen is helping me. I still struggle, but I accept that I am human and a cracked jar of clay. I don’t have to get it right all the time. I just have to do it until I at least get it done once.
Of course, the doctor required another MRI, this one to examine specifically the veins going through my head. This had to be done at UTSW as most places aren’t equipped to handle it. Oh crud. Another MRI, another IV. This was the old fashioned type of MRI chamber, where it’s a tube, and they put you into Hannibal Lecter-style restraints to keep your head from moving. They had trouble finding a vein, but I didn’t faint. The DVD of this one is pretty nifty; it’s got the ability to piece together the images into a complete brain that can be rotated and spun. My coworker upon whose computer we tried to run this (our work computers don’t support DVD+R format) got a picture of the center of my head and used that for a while as his background screen.
When you’re in one of the claustrophobic MRI chambers, they’ll give you headphones or something and ask you what radio station you like. I was too embarrassed to admit my fondness for sports radio talk, so I said 90.1, the NPR affiliate. If nothing else, Diane Rheem could put me to sleep with policy discussions. Alas, the headphones didn’t work, so it was 40 or so minutes of whirr-whirr-whirr-chunka-chunka-whirr-spindown. But the good news from the second MRI was that nothing is “broken”; it’s just pressure, which I have the power to change.
The other big change is an attempt to change the way I think about things. I’ve dealt with depression for 10 years, and I’ve allowed it to keep me tied to old fears about who I am, what I am or am not doing, and how well my relationships are working. I’ve simply had enough of it.
I can analyze stuff to death, or I can live. Tim Minchin in his 9 minute beat poem titled “Storm” talks about “Isn’t this enough?” I think I finally have the courage to admit that even if it isn’t, I’ll be okay with that.
I am loved.
I am forgiven.
I am capable of wondrous things.
I am a man, husband, father, tester, programmer, problem solver, estimator, program manager, issue resolver, procurement agent, game player, avid reader, religious arguer, oddball link finder, provider of care, advice, and wisdom who is just fine with how he is now, but knows he will get better and chooses to do so.
A few days ago, we were visiting some folks and seated around the dinner table in that slightly “all is good with the world” way after a nice meal when Jessie came up and nuzzled Laureen under her arm.
“Mmmmm. Mommy, you smell good. Like flowers.”
I love Jessie, but every day is turning into a battle with her. She must behave perfectly for everyone else, because when she’s with us, it’s an oppositional struggle over everything.
As much as I don’t want to repeat myself, I find myself telling her to do things over and over again. And then there’s the at least once-per-day breakdown into tears and crying. The hard part is remembering that I’m the parent, and that if I give in to her emotions, she wins the war. And for her own sake, that can’t happen.
So it’s fighting through the stall tactics:
“I’m hungry.”
“I want to watch TV.”
“I want to brush my teeth.”
“I want to read a book.”
“I want to read another book.”
If you’re a parent, you’ve been there. Advice or ways to restore my hair that’s been pulled out appreciated.