Well, barely, anyway.

Third clue: Mystery vacation destination is just over 315,000 square kilometers.

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Thanksgiving was lovely and we did almost nothing to make it so. Our friends, Helena and Sean (and their two kids), hosted us, and did all the cooking, so we made the utmost sacrifice and went back to eating sugar. We had to, since we brought three dessert pies. Irene adored the well thymed stuffing, and the turkey looked really impressive--falling off the bone. I had neither, but ate way too much mashed sweet potato and corn casserole. We didn't leave till almost one, and David didn't even notice how much past his normal bedtime it was.

Irene, who drove up for the weekend, and I saw Stranger Than Fiction, a really charming movie. We wanted to go to two, but I dragged Irene to the yarn store with me first, which took up way too much time. (I've become addicted to knitting, but more on that later.) David stayed home to recover from our late night and to prep himself for a dinner party the next night, but I gushed about it so much that he's decided to go see the movie by himself later this week.

Saturday was the dinner party (I swear we're not really very social), hosted by our friend Heain. She made fabulous Korean food in honor of two upcoming birthday celebrations, I made the second shoofly pie of the week, and everyone had a really good time. And unlike Sean and Helena's kids, who aren't properly appreciative of the Pennsylvania Dutch recipe, everyone at the dinner party enjoyed the shoofly. Or at least said they did. The three of us stayed up past our bedtimes, again, but since the day was otherwise fairly lazy, it all worked out.

And now the countdown to finals begins. Fun!

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Before moving on to less exciting, but more positive, news than David's heart problem, I wanted to say thank you to you all. David and I have really appreciated all the calls, emails, comments and general good wishes from everyone. We can be rather hideously independent in our inability to ask for, or accept, help, but it's really nice knowing so many people care. I'm not terribly sentimental, despite my astonishing ability to cry at the most maudlin commercials, but aww, I'm just so touched!

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I was working on this post Thursday morning before David saw the cardiologist and our weekend plans changed. I've decided to post it anyway, though, since I can.

Our running is proceeding somewhat smoothly, although we won't be continuing for another 2 weeks, or so, when David is all recovered. We're up to 7 minute stretches, with 2 minute walks, but next we jump to 10 minutes and then the plan indicates within 4 weeks we'll be running for an hour. Of course I'm not sure we'll agree with the plan, but so far things have gone quite well, except...

I have always been prone to side 'stitches.' I don't know if my diaphram is in the wrong place or what, but I get cramps fairly easily, which is part of the reason I haven't liked running till now. But with the running program I didn't even think about getting stitches until last week, when at the end of the fifth running set I got a debilitating pain in my side. Ouch! Naturally we did all sorts of research on the web and the next time we went out I tried various things (side stretches, breathing out when landing on my left foot, drinking water 30 minutes before, you know, precautionary things), but I still a got a cramp. So the following outing I tried some more things (like not wearing my cool water bottle-belt) and it worked. I was really excited because much to my surprise I enjoy running and I was worried I'd have to stop if the stitches didn't go away. But, everything worked and I ran the whole set. So of course we had to celebrate, which meant I decided we should go climb the wall at REI.

Continue reading "running, like a rock" »

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1. After consulting with a cardiologist, I had a cardiac catheterization, an invasive procedure where a catheter was inserted in the large artery on the right side of my groin and “floated” to a position above my heart. During the procedure one artery (mid-left anterior descending--the "main" one) was measured to be 90-95% constricted, and a stainless steel stent was placed to re-open the artery.
2. After the catheterization, my femoral artery bled, and two nurses took turns leaning on my groin for 30 minutes. I have never before felt such excruciating pain for such a prolonged time. With genuine concern, the nurses repeatedly apologized, while pushing with all their weight. My organs felt crushed and I imagined my pelvis breaking. (I may take issue the next time a women tells me that I don’t know what the pain of childbirth feels like.)
3. After the bleeding stopped, I lay flat and still for five hours, after which a doctor examined the wound and praised the nurses. The next day, an ultrasound showed the femoral artery was fine and I just had a big honking hematoma, which I was told was a fortunate outcome.
4. Repeated blood tests showed that I did not have a heart attack, not even a small one. In fact, I learned that my heart muscle was strong, my arteries (except the one obvious exception) were large and “pristine,” and after a couple weeks of recovery, my heart will be at 100%. In a year, artery tissue will grow around the stent, completely encasing it.
5. Anti-climactically, the post-surgery EKG was the same as the pre-surgery EKG. I questioned the doctor who signed my hospital discharge: he said this was the reason cardiology is so tricky and I shouldn't really be worried about the EKG results.
6. I was discharged from the hospital yesterday: I feel fine, aside from a tender leg and groin in several pretty shades of violet, which makes me slow and purposeful.

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David is recovering from the procedure this morning with a brand new part. They put a stent in the left descending artery, which traditionally they call the "widow-maker" because of it's history in widowing women until about 20 years ago, when precautionary measures and new techniques came around. I'm so relieved!

When they got in with the catheter and the nifty x-ray pictures, they discovered that that artery was constricted by 90-95%. Oops. So he has to spend the night in the hospital, again, but everything is going pretty well. He's fully alert and hideously uncomfortable from having to lie flat for 5 hours, so the puncture site doesn't bleed. They probably just let him sit up, though. I'm bringing the laptop back so we can watch some movies tonight. We can't use cell phones, but we can watch The Music Man!

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Well wouldn't you know it, it turns out the joke is on David. He saw the cardiologist at noon today, who ran another EKG, really didn't like what he saw, or the fact that today's results aren't the same as the results from Tuesday, and told David he wanted to admit him to the hospital immediately. Sigh.

So, sometime tomorrow morning David will be the proud experiencer of a cardiac catheterization. He might get a stent put in, they might say he just needs medicine, or they may tell him his heart's fine and it's something else entirely. What fun!

Naturally we intend to milk this experience for all the posts we can get, so stay tuned.

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Since the beginning of my new running routine, I've occasionally experienced mild chest pains within the first few minutes of running. Naturally, when my chest hurt, I slowed down considerably or stopped, the pain faded quickly, and minutes later, I could run normally, even swiftly, pain free. I began to associate the pain with scrimped warm-ups. I should add that most of these episodes were before I bought a heart monitor, which Leah still refers to as a "toy." One of the first insights I had with my new toy was how my pulse quickened alarmingly when I started to run too fast near the start. So, I found and activated an alarm on the watch to beep if my pulse exceeds 80% of my maximum heart rate. With care, the pains have become much less frequent, but for the sake of precaution, I still made an appointment last week to get a checkup Student Health Services.

This morning, in a lugubriously designed grey building labeled, "Medical Arts," I saw a nurse and then a doctor, who asked questions and listened to my chest. Everything went well at first: exercise-induced asthma was unlikely; heart disease was unlikely, but an EKG had to be done, just in case. The nurse wheeled the EKG machine into the room and stuck 12 small patches on me (including, what struck me as odd at first, one on each ankle), and then smiled and threatened to shave my chest if the patches didn’t adhere. After a pause, she recanted and said she would only have to shave two small square patches (as though this was a better option! If you’ve seen hilarious film, Forty Year Old Virgin, you should appreciate that I wanted to use the term “Man-o-lantern” here.) Fortunately, the patches stuck despite my chest hair, and the EKG machine ran successfully, but labeled my results "abnormal." Puzzlingly, the nurse said, for this machine, an abnormal result was normal. The doctor thought the results were slightly abnormal, but okay, said the machine was very sensitive (Had I offended the machine?) and would double check the results with a specialist over the phone.

The cardiologist was less upbeat with a recommendation that I immediately be submitted to the emergency room, where, I was told, I would undergo similar tests and then eventually be asked to perform a stress test, probably, the following day. I did not speak to the cardiologist; I was told about the emergency room by the consulting doctor, who concluded in low voice: this is the process. His tone was meek, disbelieving and without a hint of confidence. He even left the room twice to check the recommendation with a supervisor. While logically, I didn’t believe for a moment that I should be taken in an ambulance to the hospital, which by the way, was across the street, primitive parts of my brain heard, “emergency room!” My heart raced, and I briefly worried the phoned doctor's fears would be fulfilled. After the panic passed, I questioned, "what was the emergency?" I had not had pain today, or for more than a week. Wouldn't it be dishonest to go the emergency room without the namesake requirement, and how much would it cost? My questions were met with polite understanding and the ingenious explanation that the cardiologist said so.

After some thought, I decided I would not go to the emergency room. I just wanted a referral to a cardiology office, where I could get a second opinion and the stress test. My refusal was the first time during the office visit that I felt I had any control over the direction of my own health care. Was I being foolish or stubborn? Was the relayed voice of the cardiologist, with whom I had had no consultation, just being cautious with my health? I judged: no. I imagined the doctor’s mortal concern was about losing his or her summer home to a frivolous lawsuit. In fairness, I don’t really blame the cardiologist: unnecessarily cautious doctors aren’t sued, even if unnecessary recommendations aren’t in the patience’s best interest. Because I refused to be taken to the emergency room, I had to sign a form, which removed Student Health’s liability, and left the office, amid grave looks from the staff.

I’ve made an appointment to see a cardiologist on Thursday. If I die in the next two days, I’ll feel pretty silly, and of course there’ll no chance to sue Student Health for lost wages.

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David was in the middle of redesigning our website last Thursday when the internet connection disappeared and we've been without the internet since. I have no idea what to do with myself without the internet! It's amazing how much time it takes up. Thursday, though, I wasn't too concerned about not being able to access internet because I was doing something a lot more fun. I spent 8 hours at the Braddock hospital being trained to be an "Ambassador" for the BirthCircle.

The BirthCircle is a tiny non-profit in Pittsburgh that started about 5 or 6 years ago to do something about the racial disparity of deaths of pregnant women and their infants in east Pittsburgh (which has some significant economic disparity, too). To do this, the group used Ambassadors, in an informal peer education program to talk to women in their communities about pregnancy and infant health issues, and provided free doula services, to support the birth process itself for low-income women. They've been so successful in East Liberty, the neighborhood they initially targeted, that they've been asked to expand the program to Braddock and Wilkinsburg, two small boroughs that geographically are part of Pittsburgh, even though they have entirely seperate governments. (The East Coast is so weird!)

I heard about the BirthCircle from a friend who volunteers as a doula for them. Since it fits so perfectly with what I'd like to do after I graduate (well, except we hope to be somewhere in Africa), I signed up for the next training session, which was last Thursday. I learned lots of neat stuff, especially about breast feeding! I'm hoping I'll be able to use the information with the Somali women I see through the tutoring I've done, but we'll see how it goes. My astonishing lack of Maay (the language most of the Somalis speak) may limit the information exchange. But then the Somali women probably know a whole lot more about the process of pregnancy and birth than I do.

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Last weekend we went down to Alexandria to help Irene move to her new apartment. It's not at all far from her old one, a whopping 8 minutes, according to google maps, and she doesn't have a lot of furniture, so the move itself went relatively well. However, it may be the last time I help a book lover move apartments without an elevator. David, in an effort to streamline the process, had us each in a "zone" so we handed stuff off to the person in the next "zone" rather like a bucket-line to put out fires, and I ended up on the stairs for a majority of the time. And book boxes are never small! Ooof.

Sunday, though, we had some free time in the morning before I had to start working on a literature review due Thursday, so we went into Georgetown. (I say this as though it wasn't demanded by me, but actually I really wanted to go to Patagonia. I love their pants!) Irene had mentioned offhandedly that we would have to take the metro from a different stop, since the nearest one, Crystal City, was close because of the Marine Corps Marathon, but we were all unprepared for the fact that the race crossed into D.C., meaning the bus into Georgetown from our last metro station wasn't running. We ended up walking, since it's not all that far, and we got to walk alongside the race, which was lots of fun. We came across one of the Marine bands playing YMCA, which we all found hilarious, given the original group to make the song famous; saw one of the runners talking on her cell phone (in fairness, she was towards the end of the pack); and I was enlightened as to how much littering goes on during a race. It's shocking! Not just the paper cups at the water stations, which get swept up, but the clothes! There were shirts and gloves and hats scattered all along the route. Such a pity. At any rate, we had fun watching, David took lots of pictures, and I got to go to Patagonia, so it was a fine morning.

In Irene's never ending determination to make us watch as many Hindi films as possible, she and David were supposed to go see Don while I worked on my paper. Given the activity of the day before, though, they were too bushed to sit through the three hours, so we all ended up at a Barnes and Noble, instead. But fear not, we've been committed to watching a "curry western" from beginning to end in one sitting over Thanksgiving, so we'll get our Bollywood fix in yet.

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Has either of us mentioned that we're taking a yoga class at school? We go twice a week for about an hour and I love it! We started last year with a yoga/pilates class, but we preferred the yoga, so we signed up for Yoga 1, this semester. Susan, our teacher, has all sorts of links on the class site and one of them is to Amazing Yoga, a studio about five long blocks away from our apartment. I discovered this a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to go ever since, but hadn't managed it till this morning.

They practice a kind of power yoga at the studio, which I was looking forward to, but there's an article about the studio that mentions the heat is kept above 80. You'd think this wouldn't faze me, since we've traveled in some hot places, but the only time I've fainted was due to the heat in a hammam in Morocco, so I was little nervous. Well, it turns out the heat wasn't just kept 'above 80' it was actually set at 95. Or at least that's what the gauge on the wall read. I didn't actually pass out, but it was a near thing at one point. I was, however, 'glowing' throughout the entire practice. I have very healthy sweat glands.

I muddled through, though, and actually had a great time. I plan to go back, partly because I really do love yoga, partly because they have a discount for students (30%), and partly because I need to justify the expense of the grip-y towel I bought. I may save $4 a class, but I have to go to 12 classes to make up for the $50 towel so David doesn't laugh at me. Hee.

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