csziggy
csziggy's JournalOFF TO THE VET (FULL FILM) - A Simons Cat Special!
Spider Cat - Simon's Cat
I'm BACK! With a new aortic valve!
The TAVR went great. I checked into the hospital at 5:30 AM Tuesday, taken into surgery about 7:30, into Post-Op about 9:45, and into my hospital room by 11 AM.
The anesthesia was the conscious awareness type - while I did doze off for part of the procedure, while they were placing all the lines going into me, I woke up while the surgeon was explaining to the team what they were going to do. There were five things in my blood vessels - an IV in each arm, a port for a blood pressure monitor in the right wrist (that directly measures the blood pressure in the artery), the port for the TAVR in the right femoral artery, and another one in a vein on the other side of my abdomen that I never got the purpose of.
When the surgical team (there were five of them) briefed my husband they said everything went smoothly, no complications. For me the worst part of the entire thing was at the end when I was coming out of sedation and they were using pressure to make sure there would be no bleeding - on each side of my very full bladder! They don't like to use catheters because of the chance of infection, so I just had to suffer.
The next most painful part was the next four hours - to prevent bleeding I had to keep my legs and hips straight. My lower back didn't like that and after the first two hours started spasming. Meanwhile I got my first experience using a bed pan.
As soon as I was permitted to move, I had the nurse help me to the bathroom. This turned out to be a mistake. I took care of my business and started to feel woozy. The nurse had stepped out so I called my husband in. He came in, reached for my hands, asked why I was so pale. The next thing I knew, there were five people in the bathroom, none of them my husband, and a whole crowd more in the entrance and in the hallway.
I had had a "vagal" or vasovagal syncope and the heart monitor had sent out the panic signal to the entire hospital! Most likely there was an electrical disruption so my heart momentarily stopped. Fortunately I was seated and my husband was right there so I didn't fall and get other problems. Until yesterday morning, I used the porta potty chair that we put next to the bed so I didn't have to move very far.
Yesterday my goal for the day was to go to the bathroom without fainting and to get a shower. I managed the first goal very early. Then I sat up as much as possible, walked up and down the hall, and tried to do as much as I could to get back to normal. I did so good they checked me out mid afternoon. I was tired when I go home and have been mostly sleeping. I took a nap, had a shower (our shower is much larger and better for when help is needed than the one in the hospital), and had dinner, all in between more naps.
I am not running out of breath like I had been. I am tending to list to the left when I walk but I am getting steadier. Before they approved my release they did the basic tests for stroke and I was cleared on that score. The sleeping is my normal reaction to injury and surgery, the way my body heals.
The week after Thanksgiving I should have the next two procedures - taking out the kidney and repairing the hernia. After that my husband an I have a goal - New Year's Day we want to go to St. Marks Wildlife Refuge and go birdwatchin!
Question about binge watching on Netflix and Hulu
I just got a Roku Express thing. So far the only channels I have signed up for are Sling (for the news channels), Vudu (because it was a free offer), and Roku (free).
I haven't used it much but did watch the second season of "People of Earth" from Sling. I found their method of watching a series annoying. After each episode, I had to drop back to the main series menu, scroll back through the list, hoping I remembered which episode I was on, and start it.
I guess I am too used to the DVR I have with my Prism TV that once you record a season of shows when you watch an episode and stop at the end, it gives you the option of watching the next episode. It also dims the titles of the episodes you have watched so even if you don't go back to that series for weeks you know where you left off.
How does Netflix handle series binges? How about Hulu?
(I've got offers for free trials of Netflix and Hulu but haven't signed up yet. With my operation on Tuesday I wanted to hold off signing up for anything else.)
VIDEO: Andy Borowitz: The End of Trump The New Yorker
Simon's Cat & Ellen Degeneris - Together!
Next Tuesday by this time I will have a new aortic valve
At least that is the schedule - next Tuesday morning I go into the hospital for a trans arterial valve replacement (TAVR). They will put a wire up my femoral artery to my heart, then a balloon which will be inflated in the old valve to open it up, then insert the new valve. I'll spend probably one night in the hospital so they can monitor my heart to make sure everything is working, then I go home the next afternoon.
About a month later when they can get me off the blood thinners, I have to go back to have a kidney removed - they found a mass when doing the tests to get me ready for valve replacement. In addition I have a hernia that they will fix at the same time.
I stressed all weekend since I had not heard anything as of Friday what the plan was. They had to get the TAVR surgeon, the kidney surgeon and the internal medicine surgeon together to sort out a plan of action. No wonder there was a delay!
Most early immigrants to the Western hemisphere were NOT white
As a response to this thread: Thank God white people populated America
From 1493 by Charles C. Mann:
The movement was dominated by the African slave trade. . .For a long time the scale of slavery in the Americas was not fully grasped. The first systematic attempt at a count, Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, did not appear until 1969, more than a century after its subject's extirpation. Partly stimulated by Curtin's study, David Eltis and Martin Halbert of Emory University, in Atlanta, led a remarkable effort in which scholars from a dozen nations pooled their work to create an online database of records from almost 35,000 separate slave voyages. Its most recent iteration, released in 2009, estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas - a massive transfer of human flesh unlike anything before it. Roughly speaking, for every European who can to the American, three Africans made the trip.
The implications of these figures are as staggering as their size. Textbooks commonly present American history in terms of Europeans moving into a lightly settled hemisphere. In fact, the hemisphere was full of Indians - tens of millions of them. And most of the movement into the Americas was by Africans, who soon became the majority population in almost every place that wasn't controlled by Indians. Demographically speaking, Eltis has written, "America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century."
<SNIP>
This great transformation, a turning point in the story of our species, was wrought largely be African hands. The crowds thronging the streets of the new cities were mainly African crowds. The farmers growing rice and wheat in the new farms were mainly African farmers. The people rowing boats on rivers, then the most important highways, were mainly African people. The men and women on the ships and in the battles and around the mills were mainly African men and women. Slavery was the foundations institution of the modern Americas.
pp. 366-368.
Mann goes on to say that it was not until the nineteenth century that European immigrants dominated the Americas. May take: It is not surprising that this latter wave of immigrants were ignorant or uncaring of the vast contributions of their African predecessors. It is also not surprising that the eugenics, KKK, Nazis, and white power movements all seem to be dominated by the descendants of that later wave of immigrants to the Americas.
Americans (even white Americans such as myself and NOT just US Americans) should be fully aware of our history and of the massive contribution that the involuntary immigrants have made to creating our cultures. Without the slave trade this hemisphere would be a completely different place. In fact, there are areas where European incursions might have been completely unsuccessful without their African slaves. I wonder if in those locations the Indians might have been able to better survive?
More on my quest for aortic valve replacement
There is good news and bad news - and maybe good news.
Last Thursday I got the last test to get submitted for the clinical trial (Medtonics is trying to get approval to do trans arterial valve replacement on low risk patients), a CT scan of my arteries and to measure the size of my valve. The cardiothoracic surgeon called Monday. My arteries are great for getting the TAVR so that part of the test went just as we hoped. But the radiologist reading the CT saw a mass on one kidney. The surgeon referred me to a urologist.
I saw the urologist this morning. Although we had gotten a CD with the images from the CT scan, he was not able to load them. But from the written report he was of the opinion that I need to have that kidney removed. The mass is large enough that if it is cancer, they don't want to take any chance of leaving any cells. We tried to get another copy of the CD, no go, but we went back to the urologist's office this afternoon to talk more. He'd been - after a lot of effort - able to open the images and look at them.
In addition to the kidney I have an inguinal hernia. I knew about it and had planned to have that repaired once everything else was done. The urologist says that since the kidney surgery would go through that area of the abdomen, the hernia could be fixed at the same time. He does not want to do that extensive surgery until my aortic valve is replaced. On the good side he does not want me to get open heart surgery - the stress of that kind of surgery and the time involved in healing would delay the kidney surgery too long in his opinion.
The plan now is to get me reclassified to an intermediate risk for open heart surgery - that makes me eligible for TAVR without having to be in the trial. As soon as possible after that (weeks rather than months) I'd get the abdominal surgery.
I actually feel very lucky - if I had not been going through all these tests, that mass on my kidney would not have been found. The urologist said that undiscovered kidney cancer has a pretty good chance of metastasizing - once it goes there is no cure.
I'm trying to look on the good side here and I think there really is a good side. I get the TAVR which I wanted. I get that darned hernia fixed. I don't die from kidney cancer that wasn't discovered early enough. That's pretty good for the way my life has been going!
The Biggest School Massacre America Forgot
By Annie Garau on September 28, 2017
When a terror attack hits the headlines, you can usually expect it to remain there for weeks. Media outlets revisit the biggest of them — 9/11, Sandy Hook, Pulse Nightclub — frequently, even as months, years, and decades go by.
It’s surprising, then, that the largest school massacre in American history is one that most of us have never heard of. It’s called the Bath School disaster and it took place on May 18, 1927 in Bath, Michigan.
Seven adults and 38 children died on that day, because a man named Andrew Kehoe was upset about his taxes.
<SNIP>
He tightly packed hundreds of pounds of dynamite into the school’s basement, surrounded the explosives with gunpowder, and then wired the setup to a battery and an alarm clock set for 8:45 a.m.
More: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/bath-school-disaster
In addition to blowing up the school filled with children, Kehoe also blew up his house - with his wife inside - and his truck as he drove it past the destroyed school, killing himself and more people.
All because he did not want to pay taxes to pay for the school in his community.
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