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Saturday, May 26, 2007

saturday report

While Maureen and I were getting ready to go to the hospital to see Stanley, we got the call that our cousin Keith died this morning. We knew it was coming but it was still like a knife twisting in my heart. Just 42 years old. I feel so bad for my aunt and uncle and his wife and their son and Keith’s brother and sister. I wish I could have known him better as an adult.

Stanley is still in the ICU. Mainly, I was told, so they can get his blood pressure and heart rate under control. His “normal” blood pressure is about 100/60 and it’s been ranging from 145-165/90-100+. Same deal as last time. He also got some beta blockers and many other things. He said the pain from his “incision” hurts worse than he remembers from the last time—we figure it’s because they had to dig the wires out of the bones or something.

He thinks he’s doing worse than the last time—I told him he’s doing better, because he is. His nurse today, Ben, started giving Stanley the “pain is good” spiel and I could see the look on Stanley’s face—I know he was thinking “look you asshole, you get your chest ripped open and fifteen tubes stuck in your body and THEN tell me pain is good ... ” I pretty much agreed. Ben later admitted that he’d never had surgery of any kind. He’s young. But he told Stanley he wanted to keep the pain level at around 5 (out of ten). Why, he didn’t specify. I told Stanley to just lie. I know you have to be at least somewhat aware of what’s going on in your body—but 5? Why?

Ben also told us Zane Saul is the infectious disease doc charged with figuring out the source of the broccoli. Oh great—the one doctor we both detest. He’s the guy in charge of preventing infections and it was under his watch that Stanley got the staph infection. Then he was exceptionally rude to us when we had to go to his office to get the infection checked—kept us waiting for two hours and nasty to us when we complained. Ah well. (Also encountered PA Ryan again, but I was polite.)

Maureen went home so she could make arrangements to go to Detroit for Keith’s funeral, which Dad said is on Tuesday. What a nightmare this month has been.

I’m hoping Stanley gets moved to a regular room on Sunday. Early.

posted by lee on 05/26/07 at 08:19 PM
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quick update - the tube is out!

Stanley is now breathing on his own—it took several attempts to get it out but it is now. He’s still in intensive care and we won’t know if he’s being moved to a “regular room” until his doctors make the rounds after they get out of surgery this afternoon, which should be around 2 or 3 this afternoon. The nurse said his vitals are fine but he’s still in a lot of pain so he is mostly sleeping as she gives him his pain meds. So Maureen and I are headed up to Bridgeport Hospital in about an hour. I need to hear his voice.

posted by lee on 05/26/07 at 08:53 AM
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Thursday, May 24, 2007

another valve job

Stanley was transported to Bridgeport Hospital because he needs to get his valve replaced. When they did the weird echo where they looked at his heart from behind via the esophagus (I just remembered: transesophageal echocardiogram) they found that there was a vegetative growth hanging from the bovine valve he received two years ago. This is what is throwing the clots. So Friday morning bright and early, open heart surgery again, new valve. And they’ll probably fix the calf artery as well (removing the clot).

The same surgeon, Dr. Robinson, as did the first valve job was on hand, along with a cardiologist and an infectious disease doctor (Dr. Lobo, whom I remember from last time and like very much). We are glad Dr. Robinson is handling the surgery—we both trust him a great deal. And they’re being super cautious about making sure Stanley doesn’t pick up any staph infection this time. He will go in for the surgery after they do an ultrasound on his carotids to make sure there are no blockages there—he went tonight, but the doctor who tried to do it because the techs go home at five just threw up her hands—she reads them, she doesn’t do them. Can’t say that I blame her.

I saw the growth this afternoon when they did an echocardiogram. It looks like a piece of string flapping in a strong stream. It’s about 4 centimeters (about two inches) in length. At Norwalk Hospital, they don’t think it’s bacterial, but maybe fungi. At Bridgeport, the leading theory is that the kitty did it—that Stanley got a bacterial infection when one of the cats scratched him. Another theory is that it was left behind after the staph infection two years ago and just recently got ugly. Or it could’ve been from a sinus infection. After they get it out they’ll do what they do to figure out what it is.

When they transported Stanley to Bridgeport, they did not send along the trans. echo CD with him. I don’t know why. So Dr. Robinson sent me off to go get it from Norwalk Hospital. Getting back to Bridgeport during evening rush hour took me a little over an hour for a less-than-20-miles trip.

Oh, I forgot to mention. Having broccoli growing out of a prosthetic heart valve, or even a real one, is rare. So yet again, Stanley makes himself into a publishable subject. Again, go look up “aortic valve vegetative growth” and see if you can find any articles in layperson English about it. I couldn’t (and if you do, please send me the link, I really want it).

Stanley, by the way, loved getting the cheergrams during his last surgery two years ago so much I’m asking folks to send one again: http://bridgeporthospital.org/CheerGram.asp—his full name is Stanley Thompson. I hope this is the last time he’ll need them.

More later, have to get up very early so ...

posted by lee on 05/24/07 at 09:19 PM
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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

more bad news

Tuesday, I had to take Stanley to the ER at Norwalk Hospital. He had an agonizing pain in his lower right side, front and back, which occurred about 5am after he spent the night in pain from a calf muscle and a foot that went to sleep (went numb). He didn’t want to go to the hospital then—he wanted to see his doctor, Jay Horn. I got him in there about 11:45 and Dr. Horn spent about two minutes assessing Stanley’s abdomen and told me to take Stanley to the ER and he’d phone ahead to set things up. Might be appendicitis, he said.

So off we went after stopping by the house to let the dog out to pee and grab the cell phone. They did a CAT scan and found kidney stones lodge high in his kidney, so the theory was he passed a stone. Only, if the stone passed, why was he still in pain? The ER doc, I forget his name but it started with an A I think, was thinking of doing a contrast CAT scan, but I guess decided against it and said he was going to send Stanley home with instructions to come back if the pain shifted or got worse along with some pain meds. I immediately wondered how Stanley would know if the pain got worse or shifted if he were on pain meds ... but it didn’t matter because I, and Stanley, pushed for a diagnosis, telling Dr. A that Dr. Horn said it should be checked for appendicitis. Turns out Dr. A never saw the message from Dr. Horn—called him and then he ordered up a contrast CAT scan. The first scan didn’t take because the contrast stuff didn’t go down. The second one also didn’t go down—Stanley ended up having to get it done the hard way.

The contrast scan showed a blood clot in the kidney, which had killed a piece of the right kidney. Apparently, it’s pretty rare (go ahead, Google “renal infarction”—there isn’t that much there about it.) They don’t know what caused it, and did another contrast cat scan of his chest area to rule out a dissected aorta (a tear in the artery) or an embolism. Neither were present (relief!), and on Thursday Stanley’s cardiologist, David Lomnitz, is going to do an, um, ultrasonography? Kind of an echo-cardiogram via the esophagus instead of through the chest wall, gets a better picture of the heart close up. He will look for blood clots in the heart, especially to see if there are clots around the moo valve (the valve job Stanley got two years ago). If so, then it’s warfarin for Stanley, which is scary for both of us given the problems he’s had with the stuff. If not, a dna test will be done to see if he has weird alleles that are markers for ... and here it has slipped out of my brain—first things first.

But wait, there’s more. The doctor attending on Wednesday for Internal Medicine (our doctors’ group practice) FINALLY listened to our tale of the events that led up to the kidney clot—I think we told that story to doctor after doctor, but nobody seemed to think much about it until the doc from IM (I can’t remember his name, damn it) listened. Whereupon he wrote an order for a vascular consult and possibly a vascular cat scan of Stanley’s legs. Dr. Paul Gagne came in around 6:15 to assess Stanley and told us that it looks like there’s a blood clot in Stanley’s left calf, kinda below the knee, and that what Stanley thought was a bad sprain a couple of weeks ago was actually a clot and the clot cut off the blood supply to his foot, which caused the foot to go numb, and that the events are almost definitely related and might indicate that it is a cardio problem. I KNEW it has to be related—it doesn’t make sense any other way.

So, Dr. Gagne says Stanley’s calf artery will have to be roto-rootered to clear the clot, or bypassed if the whole thing is clotty. This will happen Thursday or Friday.

We are in shock. Stanley got a clean bill of health from Dr. Lomnitz on his April 27th checkup—not even a month ago!

Oh, I forgot—also, Stanley is anemic. Where the anemia came from is also a mystery right now. It explains a lot, like why he’s been sleeping so much over the past few months, and coming home and drooling on his keyboard when he dozes off while checking his email. I guess that’s the next thing to tackle.

I hate this. The cats and the dog are upset that Stanley isn’t around—it’s so sad how dejected Ginger gets when I leave to go to the hospital or when I come home and Stanley isn’t with me. Even Twitch is clingy when I’m home. I’m also trying to finish up some store sites that ideally should be done by this weekend—I’m so close to completion it’s ridiculous. I’m way to out of it to work on it tonight so I’ll just go sleep and get up early to put a couple of hours in before I go back to hospital. Stanley gets the echo thingy first thing, so I probably don’t need to get there until 10ish.

There was an old Twilight Zone, or maybe Outer Limits, episode, about these people who were transformed from skin people to people covered in kind of a hard, white, exoskeleton—not all at once, but gradually, a small patch of skin at a time. It ends with the main character, a woman, finding she’d already started transforming by finding a patch on her chest or something. At any rate, stress makes my psoriasis worse. I feel like I’m slowly being transformed into one of those exoskeleton people as the plaque patches spread. I just have to stay okay enough to be able to help Stanley, to deal with it when my cousin dies, which looks like it will be any day now, and deal with maybe bad news about one other person I’m worried about (but I’ll have answers for that towards the end of June—I’m so hoping it’s good news).

To bed, perchance to sleep.

posted by lee on 05/23/07 at 09:01 PM
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Sunday, May 20, 2007

keith

Keith is my cousin. He’s about 40 years old, married, with a 10-year-old son who’s a doppleganger for Keith when he was that age.

Keith is in the University of Michigan hospital in renal failure brought on by liver cancer. The liver cancer is a mystery—nobody knows why he has it because he does not have liver disease—not hepatitis, not cirrhosis, none of the usual suspects for liver cancer. It has metastasized to his lungs. We suspect he was exposed to something in his lab—he is a medical researcher. It came on suddenly—he was diagnosed just last month.

He’s too young to have liver cancer. His son is too young to have to deal with his daddy getting so sick. I hadn’t seen Keith to talk to in more than 20 years until my parent’s golden wedding anniversary in 2004. I moved out of Michigan and then he moved out of Michigan to Colorado and California after he graduated from college. He’s funny, smart, and someone I want to get to know better. I babysat him for years and remember him being so smart he made me feel dumb—came up with the damnedest counter-arguments for going to bed.

I feel so distraught about Keith. For him, for my Aunt Joan and Uncle Ron and his sister Wendy and brother Michael. I’ve lost cousins, one to cystic fibrosis and one to an industrial accident at Ford Motor Company, but that was long ago, more than 20 years ago, and I think I was more resilient then, able to absorb it better. Keith is closer to my age and he is someone I grew up with and his illness triggers more fear, more deep-seated dread. My and my sisters’ and brother’s childhoods were intertwined with his and his sister and brother—we were a close-knit clan when I was growing up—the Dunn sisters and their kids.

I need more time to get to know him. I always think there’s going to be time enough to do all the things I want to do, to get to know all the people I want to know better. I’m hoping he goes into remission so I can visit him this summer when we make our trek to Michigan. I hope he’s not in pain. I wish there was something I could do.

posted by lee on 05/20/07 at 02:31 PM
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Saturday, May 05, 2007

einstein is an avid birdwatcher

... said Dad & Mom when they sent her current photo this afternoon. So, here she is at 10½ months. It looks like she’s sitting in a planter on the windowsill on the screened-in sun porch—yes, that’s where she is. Lots of birdies to watch there—especially those silly hummingbirds.

Bird lovers, don’t worry—Einstein is an inside cat. Here she is (click to enlarge):

It’s going to be interesting to see how she gets along with Twitch and Slink this summer. She already knows Twitch from last summer; Twitch tolerated Einstein biting his tail and trying to tackle him. For the most part. Ginger was fascinated with Einstein, probably because she was so little when Ginger first saw her. I wonder what her reaction will be now that Einstein is larger—Ginger still hasn’t taken to Slink yet and still barks at him to keep him in line. (Doesn’t work very well though).

posted by lee on 05/05/07 at 04:01 PM
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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

at 9½ months

She is back home in Oscoda after wintering in Ann Arbor. She is wondering why her humans are bothering her with that annoying light. She is wondering where that boy is, and sort of misses the face she slept on during the winter months, but is very happy to be back with her chosen humans. They are so much more accommodating. And Einstein just loves being back in her rocking chair. There is so much more room to run here, and the silly birds are starting to show up so she can watch them out the window. She wonders when the hummingbirds will be back. But mostly she’s glad to see her humans, but would never let them know that. (click image to enlarge)

She knows she’s getting very handsome and her coat is so pretty now. She thinks she looks very alert with her wide-open eyes, but her humans think she looks a little demented. Yes, she’s crazy like a cat, she thinks, ha ha!

posted by lee on 04/11/07 at 05:10 PM
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Wednesday, April 04, 2007

another website launch

This is why I’ve been so busy: ServiClean was launched today. ServiClean is a cleaning service for residential and commercial clients in Western Fairfield County. ServiClean has been in business for some time now, but only recently decided to implement a website.

This site was done in Xhtml and CSS—no content management system needed. It was kind of fun to get back to hand coding html again. What the clients want is a site that describes their services and offers a way to buy cleaning service gift certificates online. We used PayPal as the payment system since the entry fee is pretty much nil and it handles all the major credit cards, echecks, and PayPal account payments.

They also needed a new logo, and while I’ve done logos, any good ones I’ve come up with are a result of blood, sweat, toil, and tears. So I referred ServiClean to Victoria Clement of Chave Design—I like the logo she designed a lot and ServiClean is also very happy with it. (Vicky needs to get her website done so I can link to it!) The plan for the site is to replace the stock photos with photos of ServiClean staff and supervisors, and that will happen over the next couple of weeks. And pretty soon we will add a form for scheduling and estimate. The Google Map is made and uploaded, the verification key for Google is posted and tomorrow I’ll see to Yahoo. I think the gift certificate idea is so cool—I never would’ve thought about getting a gift certificate for cleaning service. I’d love to get that even if it meant I had to clean my house enough to let the cleaning service in to clean. You know what I mean. One more site is almost ready for launch—that one should go live next week. A huge, complicated site which we built on the Expression Engine platform. But more about that one when it launches (a client from another country—the one that makes us an international company!)

posted by lee on 04/04/07 at 02:48 PM
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Monday, January 29, 2007

centernorth launched

Last month, we were contacted by Sharon Horowitz, who needed her website redesigned so she could launch her new business—CENTERNORTH—which is a technology and infotech advisory service (CIO and other C-level executive coaching, business strategy, leadership development, partnership services, and more). She had already spent lots of time and money with one of those web-based companies (Lo ... rks—and by web-based I mean they never actually meet clients face-to-face) that design a logo for you and for a lot more money, will also design a website for you.

I always thought this particular company did decent work, at least on logos, until Sharon showed me what they’d come up with. A logo with a really weak, calligraphic font with a swoosh no less. A really crappy website—the colors were good, but the only images I liked where the ones created with her mother’s artwork, but paired with some strange smoke stuff that in no way complemented the original paintings that were used. It was in no way standards-compliant and the tabbed navigation didn’t line up properly—very odd. The content was all in, but with loads of typos and weird spacings and mystery characters. The site looked dark and heavy, even though there was white space, it just wasn’t balanced. And there was no way to add to the site without having to re-do the coding (the navigation structure was weird, anyway, and not really appropriate).

But what was good is that most of the content was written, which is 75% of the battle in getting a site up.

We met Dr. Horowitz at a coffee shop and talked about what she had in mind, how she likes a more minimal look, and she later sent me more examples of the look that pleases her. Which is a look I happen to like a great deal. Since the company is a start-up, essentially (experienced team members who’ve worked together before, but not necessarily under the umbrella of one consultancy), the site needed to be easily scalable to add more topics, news, clients, and case studies; plus they needed a way to easily add new content as they built out the resources section.

So, of course, it made sense to use a content management system and, of course, the best one for the job is Expression Engine—that’s what we used. We have more content to get in, for the resources section. I love the art on this site, and I love the airiness. I thought about a background treatment, some brushwork or a good pattern, but the artwork is so strong I think anything else would just make it look too busy. Maybe not, but I like how it turned out without it. The content is also interesting, the case studies and research. I’m looking forward to reading the other papers that are going up over the next few days. All in all, it was very easy to work with Sharon on this site—I’m glad she had a strong vision for what she wanted as it made it much easier to put together. I know there will be some twitching and tweaking over the next few days, but the cms makes that fairly easy. It’s going to be fascinating to see how the business, and the site, evolves over the next few years.

posted by lee on 01/29/07 at 07:00 PM
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Saturday, January 27, 2007

surprise call

This morning, the phone rang about 9:30 am. It’s Saturday—nobody calls that early; I sleep in on Saturdays. Who the heck ... so I figured I’d better answer it (no caller id on the bedroom extension—not that I could read it through bleary eyes, anyway).

“Hi Aunt Lee, this is Brian.” My nephew, who is a truck driver for Schneider (those pumpkin-orange trucks), was in Connecticut and used up his hours so was stuck at the truck stop until tomorrow evening. Or so he thought. He was at the TA Truckstop at exit 28 on I-84, which is Milldale, CT (next to Waterbury). He wanted to know if we’d come and get him.

Sure! But he called back a while later to tell us that he misread his timesheets and was only stuck there until 4:00 am Sunday, and since it was so far away from Norwalk, he’d try to see us next time. So Stanley and I decided to head up there an meet Brian for dinner. It really isn’t that far, particularly on a weekend when traffic is usually light. It’s just I-95 to Rt. 8 in Bridgeport, then straight up to I-84 and east a little bit from there—about 50 miles or so. We like Brian a lot and would’ve been sorry to miss him.

So, we had dinner with Brian at the Country Kitchen truck stop. We checked to see if there were any other restaurants around there besides the truck stop and couldn’t find anything that looked interesting, so what the heck. It was cheap at least.

Brian had just come down from Auburn, Maine I think he said, about a 250-mile trip. He said he saw a moose, was eye-level with the moose while he was sitting in the cab of his truck. He said he would’ve taken a picture but he didn’t want to do anything to piss off the moose, which, he said, can do serious damage to even big rigs. He said it’s so dark in Maine that the moon gives more light than his headlights.

Brian went with his dad Kevin to pick up Brian’s brother Aaron from Fort Lee in Virginia a couple of months ago, though they missed Aaron’s graduation ceremony, he said, because they didn’t know what company he was in.

He also told us about trying to get out of the Seattle area before the snowstorm hit there, but got stuck there anyway because his truck broke down. He was buried in 17 inches of snow and he had to sit in his truck for six hours before he got help.

He also told us that it was -38° when he was driving through Montana. When he pulled in to get some fuel, he said he saw signs that warned “Do not turn off engine.” Of course, he noticed them AFTER he turned off his engine and after fueling and trying to start the rig again, he realized why he shouldn’t have done that. He said he had to hit his starter with a hammer to get it going again. It was so cold out that his truck engine never got above 150° and though he had the heater blasting full and was bundled up, he just couldn’t get warm.

Brian also filled us in a bit about news from Michigan—Aaron working as a welder, his dad taking early retirement from Ford Motor Company (Brian said taking early retirement was a better deal for Kevin than the buyout offer or just getting laid off at the end of February). And Kevin’s travails in trying to sell his house so he can move down to Oklahoma (where his wife has family). It’s not at all easy to sell houses in the Detroit area—a lot of people are losing money selling, or have negative equity because of the ridiculous mortgages they were sold—which might have been survivable if the auto industry didn’t tank at the same time as the housing market started tanking. And he doesn’t know if Aaron will get deployed to Iraq to join his unit, which had already been deployed while he was finishing up boot camp—mainly because Aaron doesn’t know yet what’s going to happen.

And Brian’s mom, Carolyn, got rid of her cats! I was really shocked—had we known she was going to dump Lil’ Bits, we would’ve taken her home with us in November since she is such a sweet little cat and Twitch loves her. The orange cat, Uday, a gorgeous but extremely nasty cat, I won’t miss. I miss Carolyn—I wish she’d come and visit us again.

Here is a picture Stanley took of Brian standing next to his truck (and yes, I experimented with what Picasa can do a little—pretty impressive photo processor for a freebie—click to enlarge):

Brian said his truck usually looks better, but was coated with road salt from his trip down from Maine.

Hope we see him again soon. If he gets a bit closer to us, like the Milford or Branford truck stops, we can bring him home where he can shower, do his laundry, and get a home-cooked meal and even sleep in a comfortable bed if he has time. I’m glad he seems to like his job. My cousin Bruce works for the same company, but works out of the Dallas office—maybe their paths will cross sooner or later. Brian said he’s going to see if he can email photos with his camera phone and will send me a snapshot of something interesting if he can—I hope so.

posted by lee on 01/27/07 at 08:47 PM
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