Tag Archives: recovery

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It’s A Miracle

If you don’t believe in God, how do you explain miracles?

On a case by case basis.  The above question was asked as a Christian ‘gotcha,’ by a person who presupposed that miracles occurred.  Many of them didn’t happen.  Many of them did not occur as believers believe.  Some have a very naturalistic explanation.  Being touched with a piece of wood from a Saint’s coffin, and recovering from smallpox, is more likely from natural resistance and remission and placebo effect, than from any supernatural intervention.

Let’s look at one of the biggest and best-known – The Miracle of Fatima.  I debated with a Christian one night, and wrote that 30,000 people attended.  He ‘corrected’ me, and insisted that there were 40,000!  Another Christian Apologist online recently upped the ante to 70,000!  The number of people who believe something, in no way affects the truth of the claim.

Three young children were not where they were supposed to be – at home, doing chores.  In fact, they may have been where they were not supposed to be, doing things they weren’t supposed to do.  When their parents called them on their absence, they made up a story about being delayed because they had seen a vision of the Madonna.

No-one would doubt a religious vision – would they??!  But when the questioning continued, they doubled down, and claimed that she would return on a specific day.  Remember that!  The “miracle” was supposed to be another vision of the Madonna.

Soon, word spread, and people from far and wide walked to get there.  Who was milking the cows, and feeding the livestock?  The day was heavily overcast, with the sun barely visible through heavy clouds.  Some of them had walked for days to get there.  They’d been promised a miracle and, by damn, they were gonna see one.

As the day wore on, and the promised Madonna had not appeared, some of the faithful stopped looking at ground-level, and started looking into the sky, and at the obscured sun – never a good idea.  Thirty – or forty – or seventy thousand people were reported to “witness the miracle.”  After the hearsay claims were removed, the only actual, reported, printed, evidence came from two newspapers, who interviewed just six people.

No-one, including the children, was reported to have seen the Madonna.  Two people said that they saw nothing.  One guy claimed that the sun spun like a disc in the sky – a symptom of optic overload.  One guy claimed that the sun got larger and smaller, at one point almost touching the Earth – again, a symptom of neurological excess.  If the sun got that close, it would sear the life off half the planet.  Two people said that the sun jerked back and forth in the Heavens.  This is caused by spasms of the muscles controlling movement of the eyes, from trying to stare at the same spot for an extended time.

If the sun moved, it would break the bonds of gravity, and the Earth, and the rest of the Solar system, would drift apart.  No-one else on Earth noticed any such movement, including scientists at observatories, who were studying the sun.

So….  No-one saw what was promised.  Some people saw nothing.  Some people claimed to see physically-impossible things, who did not agree with each other, or anyone else on the planet, and which have a natural explanation.  I couldn’t get Jesus ticketed for double-parking his donkey with that ‘evidence.’  How do I explain miracles??  Delusion, desperation, gullibility, and self-deception – with a little bit of science and psychology thrown in.

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’24 A To Z Challenge – P

A minor little thing like a heart operation caused me to lose my A to Z challenge sequence, and miss the posts for the letters N and O.  Am I going to go back and fill them in??

N  O

Am I going to forge ahead with a post for the letter P??

POSSIBLY

So many interesting P words – so few functioning brain cells.

Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl in the bathroom??
Because the P is silent.

The same as ptarmigan – surely, an Inuit word, because it means
any of several grouses of the genus Lagopus, of mountainous and cold northern regions, having feathered feet.
But wait, it came from – 1590–1600; pseudo-Greek spelling of Scots Gaelic tarmarchan, akin to Irish tarmanach

TWO P OR NOT TWO P

I leave you with a strange little word with two, different non-P pronunciations

PHOTOPTARMOSIS

Sneezing caused by the influence of light – a minor affliction suffered by my mother and I, and probably many others.  Researchers still are not sure of the exact cause or causes.  One doctor suggested the possibility of thin sinus walls.  The sunlight might penetrate, and cause blood vessels to swell, triggering the sneeze reflex.

😎

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Well Worth 10 Days Of Medical Hell

TDLR

I did not take my doctor’s advice on how to sneak into the little, local cardiac hospital through the emergency department.

I SHOULD HAVE!

Instead, I patiently waited for the cardiac clinic – and waited- and waited!  Days flowed into weeks. Weeks turned into months.

After three months and a week, I drove to the clinic on a Friday and raised a small amount of hell. I told the receptionist that I was busy dying out here and would appreciate if someone would do something.

On the Monday morning, I got a call from my newly adoptive doctor’s assistant.  I would need to start with an EKG. Someone had cancelled; did I wish to take their appointment that afternoon?

Damned Right!

I must have piqued some interest. That Friday, I got a call asking me to come back in, next Wednesday for an Echocardiogram. The next day I got called to (finally) come back for my stress test and evaluation.

The test is to walk on a continuously inclining treadmill, in three-minute segments. I didn’t last the first TWO minutes. I got home to an email scheduling me for an Angiogram at the hospital in four weeks. The fire has been lit, but the days still stretch.

Two weeks later, I got a phone call on a Wednesday. Someone had cancelled an Angiogram on Friday. Scared the hell out of me! Same guy as the EKG? Did he die? Did I want to take it?

HELL YES!

Ordinarily, they would mail out a requisition for an independent clinic to perform blood tests, urine sample, heart X-ray, blood pressure and an all-out tree’s worth of questionnaires and other assorted paperwork. With no lead time, those would be done in the hospital, after the test.

I arrived at the hospital Friday at noon, to register. I was escorted to surgery prep, stripped, given a backless gown, a hair net, and paper booties. ID was checked and an IV shunt put in the back of my left hand.  About 1:30 I was told to take me and my pal the IV pole down the hall to the washroom, have a final pee, and sit on a chair outside the operating room.

A nurse escorted me in, up onto the table, and inserted an anesthetic line, while the surgeon readied my right arm.  I asked her how long the procedure would take.  If it’s simple and easy – 20 minutes.  If there are problems – 45 minutes.  The doctor nodded to her, and…. she tapped my leg and said that they were putting me on a gurney to recovery.  RECOVERY??!  I looked up at the clock, and wondered where the Hell three quarters of an hour went.  Not a good sign!

When all the procedures were completed, the experts examined and discussed them.  I was later given the copy of my test, above.  It shows four feeder arteries, all clogged, from 76%, to 98%, and blocked both at the top, as well as the delivery end.  My surgeon only had to install four large pieces of vein, but, technically, I got an octuple bypass.  Most hearts only have three feed vessels.  Mine had spontaneously formed a new one to take up the slack.  That was the one that was only 76% blocked.

The doctor most capable of installing stents, took one look, and said, “Too big!  Too Complicated.”  I needed to be kept under medical observation, and had to wait until the next day to shed my anesthetics, so that I could make a (reasonably) intelligent, informed decision.

It came down to either a 15% chance of dying from heart failure within ten years, or allowing some guy to open my chest with a miniature chain saw, stop my heart for a while, so that I was legally dead, attach me to a heart/lung machine, and install new plumbing.   The choice was unenviable, but inevitable.

After getting someone else’s EKG appointment, and someone else’s angiogram appointment, the surgeon I urgently needed, had a Monday afternoon open.  Tough as nails, by 6 PM, the family was informed that I had come through well.  A night in Emergency observation – three days in Cardiac ICU, because there were no free beds in the recovery ward – slowly, I recovered.

Finally, a week after registering, I was told that I would go home on Monday.  On Sunday, a lady doctor told me that she was going to take the wires out of my chest.  I thought that she meant wires holding my sternum together, but she gently withdrew two thread-fine neuro-electronic leads still embedded in my heart and protruding from my chest, that had been attached to the external pacemaker which restarted and controlled my heart.

A nurse/trainee removed the first 25 alternate of 50 tiny surgical staples holding the vein-graft site on the inside of my right calf, as well as 18 of the 36 staples on my chest.  Monday morning, a nurse-supervisor removed two non-dissolving sutures that closed two chest drainage holes.  The same trainee removed the last 43 staples, peeled off the EKG tabs that had been glued to me for a week, and removed the Just In Case IV shunt.  The son went to get the car.  An orderly wheel-chaired me to the front entrance, and I was finally on my way to home and freedom.

The hospital likes to release cardiac patients at the same weight they were when they arrived.  I arrived at least 20 pounds overweight.  Over 10 days, I lost 20 pounds.  I could wish that more disappeared from my tubby tummy, than from muscle and other tissue, but it makes it easier on my rebuilt engine.  It is not a weight-loss program that I would recommend, but the entire experience was well worthwhile.

Many Americans denigrate Canada, and our socialized medicine system.  It’s hard to estimate, but I’d guess that I was the recipient of $500,000 to $1,000,000 of time, talent, training, specialized equipment and supplies – and ten more years of decent life only cost me an outrageous $100 for parking.  If there are any other gory details you’d like to know, feel free to ask.

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CANCER!

Well, that title got your attention!

The wife is going to be on TV – YouTube, actually – opposite a world-famous star.
I’ll send you the link later if you want.
You won’t see her face, just her guts, if you have the guts to watch.

The local YouTube videos are liberally sprinkled with Ontario Health PSA’s.  Middle-aged and older women, some alone, some with husbands/partners, all smiling at the camera, with the printed tagline,
I’m here because we caught it early!  😀

IT was cervical cancer!  Twenty years ago, a pap-smear result had me driving the daughter 75 miles to a specialty-clinic in the London, Ontario University Hospital, for a little nip and tuck, and removal of a small, pre-cancerous – or just-cancerous, polyp.  She’s still here because they caught it early.

THEN THERE’S THE WIFE!
It all started innocently enough….
(How often have I used that line?)

After the wife fell down and banged her head, her doctor started a battery of tests to find out why.  The first thing she discovered was that the wife was mildly anemic.  The cause is often a minor internal bleed, so she ordered a colonoscopy and a gastric endoscopy.  This is the wife’s fourth colonoscopy in 12 years.  She made the G.I. guy promise to do the top end first.

He found and removed several polyps from her stomach, upper intestine, and lower intestine….  Then he found a big, nasty one right exactly where you don’t want to find one – at the narrow bottom of the duodenum, the hardest point in the body to get to, and work at.  The local doctor and hospital have about an 80/85% confidence level, so he referred her to a specialty-clinic at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.  Any of the four surgeons, and the hospital’s high-tech equipment, rate 90/95% confidence.

He sent along color pictures.  We thought that the March 6th visit would be for removal, but this guy wanted to do some more research.  A needle biopsy had indicated no evidence of cancer, but the big-city sawbones felt sure that there were some cancer cells sprinkled through it, that were randomly missed.

Whether cancerous or not, this thing’s got to come out – ASAP!  Already it almost blocks the passage, and getting bigger.  Scheduled surgery in Kitchener would have been mid-September.  Especially if this thing goes cancerous, that would be far too late.  The Toronto-doc could schedule it for mid- April.

This polyp is so large, so nasty, and so inaccessible, that our surgeon had all three of his partners watching the view-screen, offering thoughts and opinions, while he worked.  The best choice for removal was endoscopically, rather than invasive abdominal surgery.  He was pretty sure that he could take it out, but there were potential problems.  It’s a big mushroom.  If he snips it off too high up the stem, it and/or the cancer might regrow.  If he cut too close to the bottom, he might perforate the thin duodenum wall, damaging the liver and pancreas, and necessitating the abdominal surgery to repair the mishap.

One of the reasons that his best scheduled surgery date was mid-April, was that on March 28, 29, and 30th, the clinic and hospital were hosting a world-wide conference of the best G.I. surgeons, including a ninja-Japanese surgeon with a confidence rating of 99/101%.  If this guy is not number one in the world, he’s in the top five

They were watching for problem cases like the wife’s, so that he could show his talents.  If we agreed, she would be part of a video of his work, to train and improve other surgeons.  Two of the benefits were that the operation would be done three weeks even sooner, and it would be done by the world’s best.  Of course we agreed – all that, and for free, under Canada’s socialized medical system.

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Stay tuned.  Murphy got a chance to read the first draft, and has added some plot twists in the next chapter.   😳

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Flash Fiction #238

PHOTO PROMPT – © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

BOTTLED UP

They remove half the tables, stare out that huge window, and complain about being bottled up.  What about me??  I view Nature through two layers of glass, and I’m stuck in this dispenser, like a genie.

Shut up Sugar!  At least your glass is smooth.  Poor Pepper and I are confined in these tiny, faceted shakers.  We see outdoors only as fractals.

Hey!  My plastic envelope is translucent.  I only see shadows until some fat guy grabs me by the tail, jams his thumb up my spine, and squeezes me out onto French fries.  I’d love to be bottled up.

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Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

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I promised myself that I would not do any COVID19 Flash Fictions, but three of the four voices in my head told me to do it.