I wrote about the superstition a couple of years ago… death comes in threes. I suppose I was somewhat dismissive of that belief at the time. And I still really don’t believe it. But with the passing of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson within days of each other, one can certainly understand why people say such things. In some ways, each of these celebrities was an iconic figure and yet it should not be particularly surprising that any of them would pass. McMahon was elderly and had a host of health problems recently, Fawcett fought a well publicized battle with cancer and Jackson, ever the subject of rumor and speculation, had health problems of his own and recently appeared unusually weak and frail (despite planning a comeback tour soon).
The tabloid mill is, I assume, churning out countless stories and far fetched scenarios about each of them… especially Jackson. Celebrity is a strange thing. These people were no better nor worse than any of us. They led lifestyles that most people could barely dream of and they, possibly, did things that many of of would not do. They definitely had talent and each had notoriety and fame to varying degrees. But tens of thousands of people have died within the past few days. Perhaps they were not nearly as famous as our current “three” but I am certain that a good number of them were extraordinarily talented in some way. Quite a few a them may have done things that would they would rather not publicize but many others positively influenced quite a number of other lives. Some of them led exemplary lives and all of them will be mourned by someone.
I cannot escape the thought that there is some common ground here… each of these recently departed celebrities, despite living in the limelight for much of their lives, were in fact individuals. They had privates lives and families and friends and loved ones and aspects of their personal lives that we will never know. The public will briefly mourn their passing and memorialize them with sound bites and slick retrospectives – or or it will examine every flaw, sin and mistake. Meanwhile, their families and friends mourn their passing in relative privacy for months and years to come… just like the families of so many others who have have passed on.
I can think no other thoughts than sympathy and love for all those who have lost family members and friends. Pray for their comforting.
Not much to tell really but I haven’t posted anything in a while so…
Currently I’m sitting in a hotel room in Brentwood Tennessee using the complimentary (and not very speedy) wireless Internet while waiting for Stacie’s break from Annual Conference at the Metho-dome. My official role at AC is, well, no role at all other than the spouse of a lay delegate but as a Lay Speaker, I’ll get officially recognized later this evening.
And they let me roam around and talk to people… I saw Methoblogger extraordinaire, Gavin, earlier but didn’t get a chance to say hi. I did get to meet our soon-to-be new pastor though.
So far the most interesting things to happen were the 45 minute traffic jam on I 24 this morning and getting pulled over by Nash-Vegas’ finest (I was only going 14 MPH over the speed limit – what gives?).
Hopefully, I’ll have some photos to add later…
Seventeen years ago today, I did he smartest thing I ever did – I married my sweetheart.
Happy Anniversary, Stacie. With the possible exception of the non-air conditioned reception hall, I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat!
Things are going pretty well… I guess. I can walk anyway. I’m using the cane only as needed and the dietary restrictions aren’t causing too much of a problem (I do hear the hot sauce calling my name occasionally but so far I’ve resisted). Probably the biggest adjustment I’ve had to make so far is the routine of medications. Taking up to a dozen pills a day doesn’t suite me too well. I actually had to draw out a little chart to keep them all on schedule. Unfortunately, some of them make me feel a little pukey, another puts me in a horrible mood (so I’m told) and most of them make me feel drowsy. On the good side, I’m almost finished with the steroids and one of the stronger NSAID’s. Soon I’ll be down to just the acid inhibitor and the one milder anti-inflammatory drug. I still have a little soreness and some minor twinges of pain in other areas but that’s something I’ve dealt with for a while. More on that in a minute…
One of the strange things about hyperuricemia is that it doesn’t necessarily cause attacks of gout in all people (and not all gout sufferers are hyperuricemic). But as the doctor explained to me the other day, a relativley minor trauma, especially in the extremities, can trigger what is considered to be one of the most painful of all afflictions in a hyperuricemic – gout. The pain of a gout attack has been compared to the pain level of giving birth or of a having a compound fracture.
And I can believe it. I mean I’ve never given birth, obviously, but I have had all kinds of injuries and lacerations and injections and incisions and contusions and all of it – COMBINED – would not even begin to approach the level of pain I was in last week. Not even close! One of the nurses attending me asked what level of pain I was experiencing (on a scale of 1 to 10). I said “11″. She tried to tell me that was impossible… That’s when I asked her if HER foot had ever looked like this:
Yeah… The doctor said this kind of pain is “normal” for someone like me… easy for him to say. But even as he was explaining this, it didn’t dawn on me; that mind-numbing pain and grotesque inflammation, the extreme tenderness, the inability to get comfortable in any position, the profuse cold sweats… none of it registered. It was not until I was over the shock of the most intense pain and I felt that little twitchy bone pain in my big toe again that it all came tumbling down on me… I had had this before. Actually I think I’ve had some minor symptoms for years and I thought it was just what happens when you get older. I am now almost certain that this had not been my first case hyperuricemia induced acute gout.
Last summer I travelled to New York state and had a minor fall coming out of a hotel elevator. I twisted my ankle a bit but it didn’t seem to bad… until a couple of days later when I was walking though the airport and I felt my shoe getting tighter and tighter and a pain radiating from the side of my foot like white-hot molten steel running up my leg. By the time I was on the plane, the pain was unbearable and I was sweating profusely. During the plane ride, I felt nauseous and was convinced that I had broken my ankle. Sounding familiar? Of course I didn’t go to the doctor and after a couple of days rest it had subsided. But there was a little twitch in my ankle for several days. It was a sharp pain but not at all as intense as before. Eventually it went away and I didn’t think about it again. Until last week at least… until last week when I was diagnosed with hyperuricemia and gout and the major pain had gone away and I felt that same little sharp pain again… the exact same pain, only in the toe of the other foot. Then it all made sense. It all came together. I hadn’t sprained my ankle at all last summer. I had a hyperuricemic gout attack triggered by a minor trauma. And I hadn’t even known it.
The bad thing is, now that I know I’ve had two attacks – maybe more, I also know more will probably follow. At least next time I will know what it is and what to do about it.
I stubbed my toe last week… It wasn’t a big deal. It’s the kind of thing that has happened dozens of times before. Like all the other times, I said, “Oh crap!” (or something like that) and I walked it off. A couple of days later, though, I noticed that my toe and the side of my foot was still sore. And then I noticed that my big toenail was strangely discolored. I really thought little of it until the pain increased near the weekend. By Friday, the pain was constant and my foot was starting to swell. Saturday night my foot was so swollen I couldn’t put on shoes and the entire side of my foot was bright red. I was starting to think that I had broken a toe. By the wee hours of Sunday morning I was literally crying. The pain was the most intense and unbearable thing I have ever felt in my life. I put ice on it. That didn’t help. I tried to tape my toes together. That made it worse. I elevated my leg. That didn’t help either. I hobbled to church and spent the rest of the day moaning and groaning and occasionally crying.
Monday was some better but I decided to get to the doctor first thing Tuesday morning. I spent the next four hours and fifteen minutes getting checked out, x-rayed, drained of blood and eventually hooked up to an IV. The doctor said that there was absolutely no sign of a broken bone or even a sprain but there was significant indication of osteoarthritis in my feet and crystalline deposits around my toes that was “suspicious of gout”…
Gout?
I’ve just about heard it all by now – “rich man’s disease”, “disease of King’s”, “old man’s disease”, “fat boy’s disease”… and best of all, while I was hobbling along with my cane the other day, probably with a scowl on my face, someone called out, “Hey, Dr. House…”
Funny.
Gout is one of the oldest known but still widely misunderstood ailments to afflict humankind. In reality Gout is a symptomatic condition resulting in extraordinarily painful arthritic attacks on the joints, usually in the feet and hands but it can affect any area of the body. The underlying disease is known as hyperuricemia – an elevated level of uric acid in the bloodstream which causes crystals of mono-sodium urate to be depostied around the cartilage of the joints.
If untreated hyperuricemia can cause buildups of these crystals in the joints, called trophi, which can destroy the affected joints and lead to disability. The condition can also cause kidney failure and a host of other problems – if left untreated. While diet and lifestyle choices can contribute to accute attacks of gout, hyperuricemia is a condition that is primarily inherited and cannot be cured. Fortunately it can be managed with dietary restrictions and drug therapy.
The drug therapy was actually pretty intense. I was hooked up to an IV pumping several potent chemicals into my bloodstream which reduced my acute symptoms within an hour…
I was given a prescription for an anti-inflammatory drug, a pain reducer and a steroid. I went back to the doctor Wednesday for the results of the blood work which showed a highly elevated level of uric acid – thus confirming the doctors suspicion of gout and the underlying hyperuricemia. I was then given a prescription for an anti-arthritic agent and a drug to reduce the blood acid level.
I was also told to lose 20 more pounds, to avoid red meat, shellfish, nuts, dried beans and other legumes, oatmeal, alcohol and spicy foods. I was at the point of wondering “what’s left” when I was told to come back to the doctor in 30 days to do it all over again. The plethora of medications, especially the steroids, will be short lived but I will be on some kind of NSAID and uric acid controller from now on. And the lifestyle changes will be permanent as well if I don’t don’t want to end up disabled or on dialysis. I suppose I should be thankful. Many people with hyperuricemia never develop gout and the obvious symptoms that go along with it. As my wife lovingly pointed out, if this attack had not occurred, it could have gone undetected until I experienced joint degeneration or kidney failure.
She was right… and when you look around at the people everywhere with cancer and heart disease and all manner of horrible things, it’s really hard to have a pity party over something that isn’t all that bad in the big picture of things. I’m going to lose that weight and change my diet. I will take my medicine and follow the doctors orders.
Just don’t call me “Dr. House”… you might get hit with a cane.
Yeah. It’s been well over a month since I’ve posted anything here. I know I said I was going on a break but I also said I might jump back in after Easter… Well, since that time, I’ve considered a number of ways to do that… but I’ve also considered quitting completely. At one point I even thought about deleting the whole thing…
The issue is time and what I want to do with it. Blogging, the way I used to do it anyway, is fairly time consuming. In The Strange World’s heyday, that wasn’t much of an issue. It is now. I’m on a very different schedule now and my various responsibilities have changed considerably as well. People often say they don’t have time to do this or that when, in fact, we all have time to do almost anything we want to do if we are willing to give up something else. And that, I suppose, is the real reason I have not been posting or commenting. What is it that I am willing to take time away from in order to blog? Work’s really not an option and I won’t sacrifice time with my family to blog. For several years, I blogged during the wee hours of the morning or in the afternoon because I worked odd hours and couldn’t spend time with my wife and kids. Now I can and blogging is, quite frankly, an order of magnitude down the list of priorities. Same thing with church. We seem to have a flurry of activity at our little church right now and find myself right in the middle of most of it. That’s a good thing and is not something I’m going to sacrifice either. Any spare time I have after all this, I devote to the vegetable and herb garden and to strumming my guitar.
That is, when I’m not burning up that precious spare time sitting in doctors’ offices for hours and hours and hours. I recently had a pretty significant “personal health issue”. Stacie tried to “make” me go the the ER Saturday. She failed. But I literally spent 4 hours and 15 minutes at the doctor yesterday… and I get to go back today! I’m on a variety of medications which have some weird side effects but they definitely reduced my terrible symptoms. I hinted about this on Facebook but I don’t want to go into too many details until I get the definite diagnosis later today or maybe tomorrow. I will say this - if the doctor’s suspicion is confirmed, it is a serious, extraordinarily painful and probably chronic condition that is not curable - only manageable. It’s not life threatening but it will be life changing… And that makes me want to use my time even more wisely.
Having said all that, I have come to a conclusion about how I can continue to blog – and I do want to continue – without sacrificing much time from my other, more important, interests and concerns. Writing a blog is really not very time consuming for me. But blogging as social interaction is something else entirely. I find that I can write and publish a post in a little as 5 minutes but then spend the next hour or two reading and commenting on others’ posts. The two have always gone hand in hand for me. The times I have taken a blog break have not been because I didn’t have anything to say or because I didn’t have 5 minutes to write a post. The breaks were because I knew I wouldn’t have time to visit my friends’ blogs and comment there. So if I am to continue to blog, I must separate these two aspects of blogging… and neglect one of them. I plan to resume posting but, sadly, I must say that I will not be visiting or commenting on very many other blogs. I plan to continue on Facebook for social interaction. Even though, I have expressed my dislike of FB on many occasions, the truth is that it’s much easier, more convenient and far less time consuming to keep up with people there.
I hope the very few who still come around here will understand. And I hope you will still comment on occasion – your comments are always most welcome. I you don’t, I totally understand and maybe we can keep in touch through Facebook.
I’ll be back in a day or two with a health update and, shockingly, I have a couple of other things on my mind as well. See you soon!
Christ is Risen!
Christ is risen indeed!
Sunday’s comin’!
The famous Good Friday sermon from the late Reverend S.M. Lockridge:
It is only Friday… but Sunday is a comin’…
What more can be said but “Amen”?
AMEN!
I suppose it is obvious to astute readers by now that I am once again struggling to maintain any semblance of a blogging schedule. The reasons are many, some of which I don’t feel comfortable writing about, while others would simply bore you to tears. Rest assured it’s nothing bad – no cataclysmic event has befallen me… Well, nothing worse that tires coming apart, daily dealings with a tween and teen in a still not completely remodelled house, plus the regular day to day effort to live and love and earn and give.
I’m really thinking again about giving up the blog. And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke. It has actually become something of a burden and, in a way, an obligation (as strange as that sounds) and that’s just not something I need or want right now. It’s a bummer really because I miss reading the goings on in the lives of my friends. And I had several half-formed Lenten reflections in the works and I was looking forward to posting some thoughts about music, gardening, wine-making (and maybe even politics) after Easter.
And who knows, maybe I will. But for right now, I’m taking a break. I hope it won’t be as long as last time…
Wishing a happy birthday to Nora Jones, Celine Dion, Ian Ziering, MC Hammer, Eric Clapton, Warren Beatty and Vincent van Gogh (if he wasn’t dead already)…
But seems like there’s someone I’m forgetting.
Hmmm…
