After nineteen inches or so of snow back on December 19-20 of last year, most of us Washingtonians had figured we had seen the last big snow dump for a while. Based on my experience we could expect to wait another five to eight years before we would get a snowstorm that would exceed a foot.
And here it is less than two months later and the snow is back, but even worse. I will let the meteorologists tell us what the official tally was. Based on trying to shovel out our driveway late this afternoon after the storm ended (and getting only about a third done) it is clear that this storm will exceed last December’s storm. Based on my shoveling, I’d say we received somewhere between twenty four and twenty seven inches of snow. Washington Dulles Airport (just a few miles away) reported received 32.4 inches of snow so maybe our actual total was higher. Areas north and east of us reportedly received more snow. So it is a good bet that this snowstorm will go in the record books, actually exceeding the crippling snowstorm that dumped twenty eight inches back in 1979 on Gaithersburg, Maryland, where I was living at the time.
As with the December storm, this one I got to ride out in the comfort of my house. Our electricity stayed on but many Washingtonians were not so lucky. No property damage for us, as best I can tell. Our next door neighbor’s purple plum tree though fell to the ground under the weight of the snow.
The storm was preceded by the usual frantic preparations that clogged roads and emptied store shelves. Friday found me nervous, because I was expected in Georgetown to have my sutures removed and the snow was to start around 10 a.m. Fortunately, we could be seen early and the snow when it did start came down wet and for some hours did not stick to the pavement. For a few hours, the storm actually made getting into and out of D.C. a breeze compared to a normal Friday. Most people just stayed home. We were able to buy food without too much trouble before the storm hit as well.
As usual, we expect it will be a few days before we see a snowplow on our street. More than likely they will do what they did last time: plow one lane and throw some sand down. This means of course that our driveway will temporarily extend six to twelve feet into the road, which we of course will have to shovel. Ah, the paradise of living in a low tax state! We are learning more of that good old American self reliance!
No question about it, it was a lot of snow and perhaps I will not live to witness a larger snowfall. Look at how the snow accumulated on our deck and you will get some idea of the volume of snow we received. I will let Mother Nature take care of the back deck. Hopefully it will be melted by spring.
February 6th, 2010 at 09:19pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Snow, Snowmageddon, Weather
I wonder what the criteria are these days for an overnight stay in the hospital. They must be high. Many years back my wife had a hysterectomy and to save money the HMO sent her home the same day. She gritted her teeth and wailed all the way home from her many jostling sutures. It seems just about everything is being done outpatient these days, but if it is helping to control health care costs, it is hard for me to tell.
My relatively minor surgery yesterday certainly did not qualify for a hospital stay, which is just as well. I am more comfortable at home anyhow and Georgetown University Hospital is so far away from where I live. It took close to two hours just to drive there from our house near Dulles Airport. Much of that time was wasted creeping onto the ramps for the Dulles Toll Road and then trying to merge onto the traffic. It’s insane but just to make it more annoying they upped the tolls with the start of the new year. The Silver Line is going in, Metro’s latest controversial extension that will go through Tyson’s Corner and eventually to Dulles Airport and beyond. Money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from commuters on the toll road that have no other alternative. I am grateful I have to navigate the traffic on it so infrequently.
Parking at Georgetown University Hospital is always a hassle, but fortunately, my surgery was not. They must have finished patients ahead of me early. I had barely walked in the door and they were moving me back. I had doctors and nurses competing for my attention. They even skipped the traditional gurney ride into the operating room. My surgeon, anxious to get the procedure done with, had me walk into the operating room where the anesthesiologist hurried with my IV. One moment I was looking at the bright lights on the ceiling and suddenly it was ninety minutes later and I was in recovery. Huge bandages now cover my right foot and leg. Somewhere under all that dressing is a three-inch scar near my ankle where the tarsal nerve repair was done. Somewhere on my leg are three other incisions that helped release the pressure on those nerves. By 2 p.m. I was in crutches and on my way home.
Given a choice in the future, I would definitely consider Georgetown University Hospital again. The whole experience felt much faster and more professional than other hospitals we have used. The staff was excellent from the moment I arrived until the moment I left. I could not have asked for more professionalism and courtesy. Some years back after some back surgery, Reston Hospital wanted to give my wife some crutches, for which they wanted to bill her $200. What an outrage! Reston Hospital is a for profit hospital partially owned by Senator Bill Frist, one of the major stockholder of HCA. Georgetown, as a non-profit Catholic hospital (as well as a teaching hospital) charged me $44 for the crutches with no markup. It will take a while to see what my net bill will be but I suspect it will be lower than if I had the procedure performed locally.
Anyhow, I am home, and home is where I will stay for three weeks or so. My leg is bandaged in such a way that driving is impossible. Fortunately, I am reasonably mobile. I use crutches but due to all the gauze covering it, I can put some weight on the right leg. Nor really is there any pain. Yesterday I felt only numbness. It is clear that the surgeon wants the sutures to stay in place because the foot is wrapped so tightly that the whole foot feels numb, and it was the numbness (and pain) that I was trying to get rid of. At least one is down.
Home is where you heart is supposed to be but in truth, I am not much of a homebody. This means that three weeks at home will be something of a minor trial for me. I dread retirement because I feel like I need a place to go to during the day. For as long as I can remember it was always work or school. Even if I was having a stay-cation, should I feel the need to escape there was always the car. As I heal, I may be able to hobble around in my crutches up and down the block. This will be the extent that I will be leaving home.
To fill up the time I will first keep the foot propped up most of the day. Long naps do not seem necessary. I have a stack of DVDs I can work my way through, and there are books to read. There is also the web to surf, but for me surfing the web is always more fun after I have dodged and parried with the real world the rest of the day. Thanks to 21st century technology, I can effectively do 90% of my work at home, at least for a few weeks. So I plan to resume working next week, although my kitchen table is a poor substitute for the office. It has no becalming view of the Shenandoah Mountains, nor the convenience of the cafeteria and snack bars, nor the social life one can find in the office.
Somewhat begrudgingly, I think what I will miss most of all these three weeks at home is my office social life. I am no social butterfly. There have been consecutive days when the only one I spoke to was the guy who removes my trash. Still, it is nice to interact with people other than my immediate family. Here I have my wife who for a while will have to cater to me and who is always nice to have around, but she is a well-known commodity. There is also my daughter who sleeps during the day and who generally ignores me anyhow. There is also one friendly cat. To the extent I have a social life these next few weeks, it will be with my cat.
There are still bills to pay and work for clients on the side to do. That will help. I best double my dosage of Vitamin D because it will be awhile before I will feel the sun shining on my skin again. Being laid up is a part of life, and one I should get used to. It is perhaps something to be welcomed rather than feared. As for being one of life’s trials, it will be a minor one. Come early February, I expect I will be sick of it and will look forward to returning to the office. Until then, I must be a homebody.
January 15th, 2010 at 10:18am
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Georgetown University Hospital, Health Care, Plastic Surgery
For every Walter Cronkite who passes on, there are thousands of prominent people who warrant obituaries but rarely make the national news. Two notables in the Washington region passed recently, both of them developers. Abe Pollin was perhaps best known as the longtime owner of The Washington Wizards, but he made his fortune in the construction business. Pollin’s most notable achievement was probably building The Verizon Center in downtown Washington where his beloved Wizards played. Robert H. Smith though probably made a larger architectural impact. His buildings were rarely noteworthy, but he built so many of them (mostly look-alike upper end office buildings with marble faces, large windows and with adjacent multilevel parking garages) that they became ubiquitous. They house lobbyists along K Street and beltway bandits out in McLean, Virginia and Bethesda, Maryland. Crystal City (which is not an incorporated city) is perhaps his best-known creation. The huge complex of office and residential high rises goes on for more than a mile. It frames the west side of the Potomac River and offers prime view of our federal city.
Of course, for every prominent obituary, there are many other thousands whose lives do not seem to merit an obituary. Sometimes the family will not even bother to pay for a death notice. Dying is rarely a tidy business. Fortunately, there is usually someone around responsible enough to do the hard work of caring for someone nearing the end of life. They are usually family. This is true in the case of my friend Lynn (not her real name).
More than eight years ago, she noticed that her sister was becoming difficult to reason with. Her sister has always been somewhat difficult and irascible. She did not take care of herself and smoked like a chimney, which unsurprisingly caused her to also develop emphysema. Still, giving up her cigarettes was unthinkable. Lynn has one brother who has family problems of his own. Since Lynn is sixty something, her parents have long passed on. As her sister’s faculties declined, she started to become a danger to herself. For example, she would forget that she was leaving lit cigarettes lying around.
Her sister also inconveniently lived fifteen hundred miles away in Colorado. Lynn had two choices: to let her sister to fend for herself or to rescue her. Her sister smoked constantly and everything she owned reeked of tobacco. To say the least, taking on the chore of acting as her sister’s guardian was not appealing, but love won out. Largely by herself, she relocated her sister to Northern Virginia, amongst much crying and cursing by her sister.
Her confused sister felt upset and betrayed. She did not want to come to the east coast; the Rocky Mountains were her home. For a while, they were uncomfortable roommates in her modest house. Finally, she found her an apartment in an assisted living facility a few miles from her house. Meanwhile, Lynn grappled to find her sister the medical and psychiatric care that she needed, with few ideas on how to do so other than to call the county’s office on aging. It took months to find her the right social workers and specialists so that her care was adequate and she was safe. For a few months, she visited her sister weekly and relaxed. However, with each visit her sister was more confused.
Recognizing that she could not depend on assisted living much longer, Lynn began searching for a nursing home for her sister. She discovered that most of the nursing homes were not suitable for her sister, or even most of the patients that lived there. Staffing was short. The staff looked hassled, overworked and underpaid. Care was substandard. She finally found one that she thought would work for her sister, but her sister refused to go. So they paid periodic visits until she began to feel more comfortable with the place. The nursing home felt more like home in part because she had trouble retaining long-term memories. Her mind was going. She recognized her sister less and less.
Eventually she settled into the nursing home. For a while, it was like scenes out of the movie Away From Her. She seemed quite happy and for a few more months, Lynn could relax and visit weekly. Yet, with each visit her sister seemed a little more distant. After a while, she forgot her name entirely. Surprisingly, she stopped smoking, in part because she forgot it was something she wanted to do.
She began drawing on the walls and sleeping in until noon. Then one day she fell out of bed. For hours, no one noticed until someone found her on the floor. She was in great pain. Lynn was summoned. Her sister’s hip was broken. She was quickly taken into surgery. The hip was replaced but she immediately made a turn for the worse. Her surgical pain was horrendous. She screamed for hours and no one in the hospital cared. Lynn spent hours trying to get the attention of doctors and nurses and was largely ignored. She stopped eating and drinking. They tried to force feed her but it all came out through her nose and mouth. There was also blood in her urine. By this time, she weighed less than ninety pounds.
Lynn eventually got her sister some excellent narcotics, but the doctors kept wanting to do more invasive tests and force feed her. Lynn retrieved copies of her sister’s living will, but it took over a week before she could convince her doctors that she would not sue them for negligence and that her sister did not want her life artificially prolonged. Tonight, her sister is in the final stages of dying. She hasn’t eaten in more than a week. Her body is rapidly failing.
Lynn chose to speak for her sister. At great personal pain, she made the awful decision to not artificially prolong her life. At great expense to herself, she stood by her sister, the same sister who so often treated her shabbily. There was no one else to do the dirty work. She did it both out of a sense of compassion and duty.
She cried last night in my covenant group while relaying her story. We held her hands, gave her hugs, and made sure she had all the time she needed to share her feelings and her story. It is ironic that at this very time a new man has entered her life, someone she met at the hospice whose wife died some months back. Sometimes moral support comes from the oddest directions.
As drawn out as her sister’s dying has been, her sister is blessed. Despite the odds, she has a compassionate and loving sister who cares for her for years while knowing that her end was destined to be bleak. Some of us die on street corners, others of hypothermia, and some alone in our apartments, unable to dial 911 and with no one to notice until the rent is past due and the landlord busts down the door. Some like my wife’s wayward father end up as an indigent in a hospital room with no one to notice their passing. Lynn’s sister at least had her.
Lynn’s hard work these last years is as notable as Robert H. Smith and Abe Pollin’s building and stadiums, if not more so. If no one else will do it when it’s Lynn’s turn go, I will do my best to be there for her, for she is childless and will likely be the last of her generation. Compassion should always be given out indiscriminately, but even with family, it is hard to summon the courage and make the commitment. Lynn has earned the compassion she too will need some day. I and the other members of her covenant group will make sure she receives it.
January 12th, 2010 at 09:50pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Compassion, Dying
When I turned fifty a couple of years back, I was okay with it. Yet for some reason now that it is 2010 and we’ve started a whole new decade, I am not okay with that. Just slipping into this new decade has made me feel old.
As if I wasn’t feeling old enough, I spent Sunday night having a discussion about the last decade with a group of youth. I am helping to oversee a youth group at my church so a look back at the last decade seemed an appropriate topic. For us rapidly aging still technically middle aged adults, the 2000s was just one decade of many. However, the youth are of high school age. For them the 2000s was the decade they began to retain memories. They sort of remember September 11, 2001 (they were in elementary school) but did not quite understand what all the fuss was about, why some of their classmates were abruptly pulled out of schools and their teachers were whispering in the hallways. Of the 1990s, they have fragmentary memories at best. Having finished their first proper decade, since they had nothing to compare it with, the last decade seemed all right. Whereas to the other adult leader and me it was, what a rotten decade! Good riddance! Of course, these youth were kept well insulated from reality by school, family and friends. The dramatic swings in the stock market never bothered them. Neither did the high unemployment or mortgage foreclosures. Their parents had stable enough jobs where they were not impacted.
For me personally, the last decade was a blur. I was busy being a working adult and I had my hands full. The decade felt like it was squeezed into two years or so. I keep asking myself, can it really be 2010 already? Where did the hell did the decade go?
One thing is certain: I feel ten years older. As readers know, my body has been complaining about this aging thing for a while. I had two relatively minor surgeries last year and will have tarsal tunnel surgery next week. Despite valiant efforts, my body is definitely moving toward decrepitude. I know none of us escapes this world alive. In the 2000s, I sort of lived on the illusion that I might be an exception. “I am not planning to die,” I would tell people who asked, and sometimes even those who did not.
Tackling the unpleasant business of creating my will last year was the extent that I planned for death. I am much more engaged in planning for a happy retirement, which I hope will have most of the joys of living minus the long workweeks and other family responsibilities. Now that it is 2010, old age, which used to be an abstraction, feels uncomfortably close. If nothing else, I can technically retire from my job in two years, though I am unlikely to do so.
One way I can get a sense of time passing is to simply add up the decades on my fingers. For me five decades are in the past so there is one whole hand accounted for. I hold up my other hand. Will I live another five decades? The odds are stacked against me. Living to a hundred is almost certainly out, barring some miraculous drugs or medical procedures that I probably could not afford. If I manage to make it to ninety, I will likely be in a nursing home or assisted living facility somewhere. If I am lucky, I will make it to age eighty and still be in good health, like my father. Yet if, like my father, I manage to live that long, I will likely end up in somewhere like where he is, a retirement community.
A retirement community has many great features but is also your easy gateway to an assisted living facility, which in turn is a gateway to a nursing home. There (if you are lucky) you probably leave this life reasonably well tended but not pleasantly. I imagine I will leave it like my mother did, unable to control your own bowels or get out of your own bed unassisted. In a retirement community, death is not an abstraction. It is all around you. People you see bounding down the hallways one day are in intensive care the next, and planted underground a few weeks later. You can see it in the hallways where many of the still mobile are pushing around walkers with little tennis balls on their feet. Many of the rest are in wheelchairs. Their bathrooms come with sturdy stainless steel railings on the sides of the tub and extra wide doors. That’s why the bathrooms have convenient pull cords to summon help in an emergency. You can count on someone on your floor passing away during the year, and chances are there will be two or three more. The most popular activity at my father’s retirement community is not dipping in the community whirlpool tub, but checking out the death notices in the lobby.
Aside from the problems of holding my body together (which used to never complain) there are increasingly visible signs that I am aging. My facial skin is sagging. My neck is looking somewhat saggy and wrinkled. The other day I looked at my left knee and the skin on it was drooping. Where did that come from? Age spots have been developing for years, but now my skin in general looks like sand on a beach, blown into drifts by the omnipresent wind. My eyes look more bloodshot than I remember. At least my hair has not gotten more noticeably gray in the last few years. However, that could be due to faltering vision.
Now that I am in a new decade and feel sufficiently aged, I am realizing that dying is actually a very long process. It starts around age eighteen when your first brain cells die off. Part of declining the right way is apparently gracefully accepting your increasing decrepitude. Those aches, pains and surgeries are your war wounds. In my case, they are the result of dodging and parrying with life for five decades. I am fortunate that this is all I am dealing with. Just a few generations removed from mine at age 52 I would more likely be planted six feet under. If I were still alive, I would likely be in a lot worse shape and in a lot more pain. Many of my joints would be inflamed (since anti-inflammation pills had not yet been invented), and I would probably stoop or need a cane. On the plus side, death and dying would probably be a lot less mysterious. It would be common to see your peers go to your reward. Attending funerals would be routine rather than an exception. Perhaps you would be grateful even to be alive in any pained or infirmed state.
In any event, I am still disgruntled that it is 2010 already and I probably will feel this way for a while. Like it or not I am moving rapidly toward an older stage of life. While it may be more painful and infirmed than in the past, at least it is still life. Perhaps time will reveal some compensation for aging that currently eludes me.
I can hope. It’s not like I have any choice in the matter. I am caught in a system beyond my control. It is only now that I am feeling this truth.
January 6th, 2010 at 07:49pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
one comment
Tags: Aging, Time, Worst Decades
As I usually do, I start off a year (and in this case, the decade) posting my annual blog statistics for the previous year. Web traffic is down about 25% overall from 2008. There could be many reasons for this including my posts are not as interesting (at least to search engines) than they were in 2008, a move by many to get content from social networking sites or there is less for me to get riled up about with George W. Bush out of office. Even my most popular posts are down in page views, in some case quite markedly, and likely the fact that these posts are aging and thus less relevant are a significant reason for the loss in traffic.
Overall Statistics
- Total Visits: 56,474 (154 average per day), which is down 27% compared with 2008.
- Total Page Views: 74,088 (average 203 per day) which is down 25% compared with 2008.
- Percent New Visits: 90.71% , which is up a tiny .37% compared with 2008. (This means only about 1 in 10 of you visit repeatedly.)
Most Viewed Posts
- You Porn: A Traveler’s New Best Friend? (7,849 page views, down 76% from 2008, but still #1 overall)
- Sharon Mitchell: Porn Saint (7,205 page views, down 11% from 2008, but still #2 overall)
- Site Home Page: (4,719 page views, down 38% from 2008, but still #3 overall)
- Eulogy for my mother (4,567 page views, up 108% from last year, moved from #5 to #4)
- The Id Unleashed at Craigslist Casual Encounters (3,072 page views, up 15% from last year, moved from #4 to #5)
So overall people are reading largely the same pages they read last year, just in most cases less frequently.
Top Browsers
Perhaps my blog is atypical, but Internet Explorer is losing market share overall, with Firefox, Safari and the new Chrome browser picking up the slack. People are apparently getting tired of IE and it is on the cusp of losing its dominance at last. It will be interesting to see a year from now how browser share stands.
- Internet Explorer: 50.5% (down from 64.2%)
- Firefox: 34.8% (up from 27.54%)
- Safari: 8.04% (up from 5.06%)
- Chrome: 3.5% (now bad considering the browser was only released a few months ago)
Busiest Month: January (8,444 page views)
Slowest Month: September (4,665 page views)
This site is also accessible as a newsfeed, both RSS and Atom. Most of those reading the blog via a newsfeed do so via FeedBurner. Here are a few FeedBurner statistics for 2009:
- Average number of subscribers per day: 37.85 (up from 31.38 in 2008)
- Average hits per day: 158 (159 in 2008)
- Average click-throughs per day: 8 (7 in 2008)
January 1st, 2010 at 10:10am
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Blogging
