Adults

You are currently browsing the archive for the Adults category.

Julia’s Rules for Medical Professionals

January 28, 2010 in Adults by J | 5 comments

Simon and I have both had more than an average number of medical appointments in the last eighteen months. Between pre-natal visits, gastroenterology, well-baby checks, and the cleft-palate team, I would say we’ve seen our fair share of medical professionals. Many times (but not all — we have some fantastic providers), I leave an appointment feeling vaguely irritated, but have had trouble putting my finger on why. It’s taken me eighteen months to figure out that it’s because one of the four following rules has been broken. (But now that I know why things bug me, I can let them go more easily, at least in theory.)

1. Introduce yourself.
It takes about five seconds, tops. It’s something our culture thinks is polite. Are you going to touch me or my child? When all is going well, only people I know do that, so it would be nice if I knew your name.

2. Read the chart.
It will save me from having to repeat myself. It will make you look like a genius with a really good memory. It says “I care.” Asking someone for information on their chart looks lazy.

3. Take two minutes to determine how smart I am.
This will keep you from wasting your time explaining things I already know or things I have no chance of understanding. A good way to do this is to ask what I do professionally. From this you can discern my general level of education and my familiarity with topics we are going to discuss. High school science teacher? Can probably read graphs and very likely knows some basic anatomy vocabulary.

4. I should leave feeling as though I’m doing something right.
Because if all I get is messages about how I need to change what I’m doing, it’s depressing, and doesn’t empower me to change anything. Likewise, leaving with a list of things I need to do (say, for my child) is overwhelming if I don’t feel like what I’ve been doing is adequate. Now, maybe it hasn’t been, but if you can find one tiny thing to affirm, I have somewhere to start.

The next step is learning how to firmly and courteously assert myself when I get irritated. Saying “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name…” or “Hmm, I think that’s in my chart,” in my head is one thing, but actually saying it to a person is quite another.

My rich inner life

December 18, 2009 in Adults, Progeny by J | 1 comment

We make up a lot of songs at our house. I often find myself pondering how the lyrics would translate to prose. To wit:

Great Big Belly
Your belly is large, and your tush is small. Your nose is smaller than the rest of your head. For the small size of your baby toes, your toenails are larger than I would have thought probable. These things, and others, make you my special baby.

The Burping Song
If you have air trapped inside, and I think you do, now is the time to let it out. No matter if you think your burp is too small to matter, or too large to release in mixed company, I assure you we will all feel better afterward. I know because I’m your mom.

The Stink Police
The stink police are surveilling our residence and will probably find you out. But don’t worry. They don’t give citations, just baths, which you like. Also, Papa and I are the stink police.

Tell Your Mom
If you see a mouse in the house, don’t take matters into your own hands. It won’t go how you are expecting. No, tell your mom and she will kill it.

The Barium Ingestion Club

August 7, 2009 in Adults, Progeny by J | 1 comment

Several weeks ago, I got to do an upper-gastrointestinal-and-small-bowel X-ray. While I can’t say that it was “enjoyable,” it was interesting from a scientific point of view — my being, you know, a chemistry teacher and all. Seeing pictures of your insides is both macabre and fascinating, and it was nice to be told by the technicians (two of them, separately) that the curlicue pattern of my small bowel is “unique to me.”

The worst part of the whole process, aside from the slimy and gelatinous barium sulfate emulsion I had to drink, was the waiting. The technician would take a picture every thirty minutes, and my job was to help speed the barium through by walking up and down the twenty feet of hallway in the middle of the building. I had taken my crossword puzzle along, but I’m not very good at those, so it didn’t relieve the boredom very much.

Now, since infants aren’t allowed in the exam room with their moms (and really, I can understand why), Todd stayed at home with Simon that morning. And while Todd is an excellent father and I knew Simon was probably enjoying the change of pace, it was frustrating not to get any cell phone reception as I was pacing the halls. I wanted to call every ten minutes to report things like “barium sulfate: disgusting!” “I just got 39-across!” and so on. I lamented about this to the technician between pictures, and she sent me out onto the balcony in my hospital gown. It felt weird, but I was desperate for news from home and a friendly voice, so I did it. She asked me lots of kind questions about my baby and was generally very nice about it.

After about two and a half hours, they did the upper-GI exam, which involved drinking Pop Rocks (or a very close equivalent) and more barium. I must have looked like I was going to kill someone about the barium because the technician tried to calm me down. “It’s not as bad as the other stuff! It’s thinner!” I must have looked dubious. “You know who really likes this stuff?” she continued. “Babies! It’s because we don’t let them eat for several hours before they have to drink it, so they just suck it right down.”

All I could think of right then was what a terrible thing that was to mention, not because this is true, which I discovered later, but because the idea of withholding food from your baby only to feed him something completely non-nutritive seemed, well, repulsive. And I had just gotten done telling her how much I missed my baby. Fortunately, the whole experience was over shortly thereafter, and I got to go home and everything turned out fine.

Then a few weeks later, Simon decided he didn’t want to finish bottles anymore. His intake dropped precipitously, and he lost a little weight, which concerned us and the good folks who see him at Doernbecher. There was no obvious reason for him to not want to eat. We went in for a feeding evaluation, and he totally lost it in front of the feeding specialist, screaming and squirming. It was the opposite of taking your car in to the shop. So, the specialist suggested we do a barium swallow study to make sure no food was getting in his airway.

Of course, this involved waiting several hours for Simon to get hungry again, which we spent in the Starbucks at the base of the elevators (for reasons I won’t go into, don’t buy items from the pastry case at the Doernbecher Starbucks). When it was time for our appointment, he was very very ready to eat, and we set him up in the X-ray video machine. I was handed a bottle of the familiar-looking goo and told to go for it. So, feeling kind of deceptive and mean the whole time, I fed my baby an inorganic salt emulsion while the radiologist videotaped his head. And amazingly, Simon didn’t mind. In fact, he
kind of liked it, which makes me question his judgment about food, and which I will remember when he is a toddler or teenager refusing something delicious at our dinner table: “You can’t talk about not liking that. You don’t know anything, you like barium sulfate!”

The X-ray video itself was pretty amazing. They played it back for me later, and I could even see the food dripping down his chin. Next up: Todd? Want to join the Barium Ingestion Club?

Just to tie up narrative loose ends, although this is not the point of the story, we’ve made some adjustments to his feeding routine, the most notable of which is an increase in his antacid medication, which has done wonders for his intake and attitude about eating.

Mother’s Day

May 10, 2009 in Adults by T | No comments

Like many of you, I have a mother. In fact, I’ve recently gotten to spend a lot of time with her and my father, both of whom have been in town for a few weeks to help out after Simon was born. (Julia’s parents were in town before that to also help out. It’s been sort of a parental torch-passing, really.)

I love my mom, and she’s a wonderful parent (same goes for you too, Dad, but I’m not supposed to say anything for a month — you know, legally). Loving, giving, patient … all that and the proverbial bag of chips, to this day, even now that I’m old enough that I don’t feel like anyone’s baby.

But this year, on Mother’s Day, I find myself with more than one mother figure to contemplate. Because, you see, my wife has somehow managed to — while still remaining fully my wife — also become a mother. Now, at some level, this was fully anticipated — I’ve read up on all the biological underpinnings of this transformation and all. But it’s still something of a shock that this beautiful, fun woman I’d known for many years had all this mothering inside her. Who knew?

In times past, I had always considered myself the tough one. When hiking up a mountain (or its Scottish equivalent), I was usually the one in the lead. I was the one, say, who went on a bonus hike to the relatively creepy garden of carved wooden objects while Julia rested up from the morning hike to the waterfall. And so forth.

And then Julia told me that she wanted to have a drug-free childbirth for Simon. Now, I will admit that I initially took this in the same way that I might say that I want to have a chocolate milkshake appear in my hand: it would be nice, if not terribly likely. But Julia kept saying it. More importantly, she said it to the nurses when we checked into the hospital the night Simon was born.

And after seeing her go through that labor without any drugs, I relinquished the title of Toughest Stadler. Which title, you know, technically, I had never actually won. But Julia certainly did, that night.

But it wasn’t just some extraordinary burst of strength on the occasion of Simon’s birth. No, her amazing abilities have continued the whole month-and-change that is Simon’s life. It hasn’t always been easy — there have been challenges for both Simon and Julia — but through it all, she’s just kept going. And doing amazingly well, no less.

It’s like finding out that you’re married to Wonder Woman after years of thinking you’d been living with a very nice Diana Prince … only without the invisible plane and so forth. (And yes, I did have to look up Wonder Woman’s non-secret identity on Wikipedia. What the heck, Wonder Woman can fly? I mean, without the invisible plane? What?)

Point being, my wife — and, more to the point on this day, my son’s mother — is amazing. She’s tough, she’s loving, she’s beautiful. And I love her.

We won Science Olympiad

March 16, 2009 in Adults by T | 2 comments

So I did my best to avoid this story in the previous entry, since I’m insane and writing two entries in as many days about current events — take that, my former companions in lazy blogging, he said ironically before lapsing into silence for another few weeks! …

Uh, that opening got too complicated. Here’s the upshot: J’s Science Olympiad team won yesterday for the third time in as many years, earning them the right to advance to the national Science Olympiad competition this May in Augusta, Georgia — which competition the careful reader will note J is not attending (somewhat sadly) for the first time, since we will almost certainly have a beautiful new baby to care for and teach simple ion formulae and basic music theory to and whatnot.

But eyes on the prize(s): we won! Huzzah!

Actually, this is a somewhat tricky thing for me to exult in (to be cockahoop, if you will). First off, while winning any competition is reason for happiness, it should be noted that there aren’t a lot of schools competing in Science Olympiad in Oregon — five this year — so the state competition is a bit more like a regional event in more competitive states (like just across the Columbia in Washington, where there are over 100; this also makes hobby shops in Portland suburb Vancouver, Washington much more likely to be able to offer advice on whether you want to use balsa or bass wood in building your elevated bridge for Science Olympiad, say).

Second, there is the awkward nature of being associated with a team that has won first place every year it’s competed. I don’t want our team to become the Yankees, if you will, of Oregon Science Olympiad. The other schools also worked hard, were worthy competitors, won many medals, and I hope will continue to compete for years to come. I was especially impressed by the newcomers this year from Sunset, which fielded only half a team (in terms of the maximum possible), and yet won third place and no small number of medals, including several golds.

But in the end, our team did better across the board and won, and I can’t help but be happy for them. While there were times I was worried they weren’t working hard enough, in the end they worked really hard and pulled it off. And, thinking back to my own very, very late nights (occasionally becoming mornings) of last-minute work in high school, I can’t really fault them. Too much.

And now, some notes from the Science Olympiad.

As can be seen at the national Science Olympiad site, www.soinc.org (pronounced “soink!”), there are corporate sponsors, most of whom are what you might expect in the whole “promoting science and engineering among the youth” milieu: DuPont, Texas Instruments, 3M. There are, however, two sponsors I find a bit … odd, if nonetheless appropriate. One is the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, sponsoring It’s About Time, a competition in part about building a functional time-keeping device. I guess I’m just surprised that such an association has apparently as much largesse as your corporations that I assume are generally much better funded. Also: watch and clock collectors? Really? The association of, you know, clock builders was too busy?

And then there is Egg-O-Naut, an event in which the competitors build water-powered bottle rockets, with the intent of having an egg-bearing capsule separate from the main rocket in mid-flight and make it safely back to earth as slowly as possible. Perhaps you saw this coming, but that event is sponsored by none other than the American Egg Board, the people who brought you “The Incredible, Edible Egg” campaign. Actually, they’re still bringing it to you, it turns out — and brought several bright-yellow “Incredible!” egg-picturing t-shirts for the winners of said event, which was our team. I will refrain from speculating as to whether the t-shirt or the gold medal was the better prize.

Regarding Egg-O-Naut, that was a rather difficult event at the tournament, given the strong wind and rains that plagued the area. But the Egg-O-Nautery must go on, as they say, and so most of the rockets, designed for much more favorable conditions, were, my friend, a-blowin’ in the wind after a prematurely short ascent. The winning rocket faced even more difficult conditions, as one section of it — thankfully, not the egg-bearing part — was also run over by a car, what with the event taking place in a parking lot, the winds having carried it beyond the car-free section of said lot. Regardless, the egg survived.

The events at such tournaments are supervised by volunteers, who, in addition to coming from the various competing schools, are also pulled from local Industry, as the academics say. This year, J also managed to snag some of our friends (who do, after all, work in Industry) to supervise, and it was really fun to see them working with the events and kids we’ve come to know so well. Even more fun was hearing that they enjoyed preparing tests or seeing what the kids had come up with. What can I say, we’ve got good nerd friends.

Our team is also, not surprisingly, blessed with many good nerd parents, several of whom helped out over the season as assistant coaches of sorts. Given that these parents come from engineering backgrounds, it’s not too surprising that our team did especially well in the engineering events this year (in previous years, we had been stronger at the knowledge-based test events). And yet this was no case of overbearing parents doing all the work. On the Trajectory event, involving the construction of a launching device that can hit any target within certain parameters, made her own unique mark on the event — she enjoys sewing in addition to Science Olympiad, and I couldn’t help but notice that her device’s launching mechanism involved a Rube-Goldbergian use of fabric scissors to cut through embroidery floss to send her projectile flying. It’s all very clever and endearing, frankly.

I’d write more, but frankly, editing this post has already prevented me from posting twice in one day. I’d hate further writing and editing to prevent me from a still-unprecedented twice-in-two-days series. So, yeah: Science Olympiad! Huzzah!

We survived Science Olympiad

March 15, 2009 in Adults by T | 1 comment

Yesterday was Oregon’s state Science Olympiad competition — a science competition with many different types of events that the clever among you will note is very Olympic in nature — which J coached for the third year in a row for the school where she’s also a science teacher.

(Here’s where I catch my breath from the wreckless pace of this blog entry, what with the writing about events mere hours after the events transpired and all. What do I think this blog is, some sort of newspaper with fancy, fact-filled ledes? No, really this entry is less about describing our lives and more about shaming our friends with their new blogs but less-recent posts — less about information, more about competition, as it’s meant to be on the Internet.)

In any other year, this would be just another story about how J coached and I helped (occasionally even assistant-coaching) and the girls worked hard and so on. But those paying attention or otherwise in-the-know know that, in addition to coaching an award-winning team, J is also 37 weeks pregnant. And we’re moving into our new house next week. Oh, and J was also one of three people running this year’s Oregon Science Olympiad competition.

In short: [mild exclamation of your choice]! What were we thinking? What? Were we thinking?

Yes, well. I won’t say it hasn’t been one of the most stressful periods of our life together — indeed, while I usually consider myself a fairly laid-back kind of guy, I haven’t been this stressed since late college. Which is exciting, because perhaps it means that my time of stressful-college-nightmares-as-dreamworld-metaphor has come to an end, henceforth to be replaced by nightmares about hiring contractors, packing boxes, and working twelve hours at a science competition.

All of which sounds far too whiny. With the competition now over, and one fairly major item on our checklist now largely checked off (for simplicity’s sake, I will simply ignore any preparations needed after the competition … but more about that in the next entry), I’m already in “happy retrospective” mode vis-a-vis Science Olympiad: “It was all worth it, to see the team having competed and worked so hard!” And so on. Hopefully, the following weeks will see similar shifts in opinions about buying and moving into a new house, and the final days of pregnancy.

And while it can be trite, after a endeavor has been successfully completed, to thank God (I’m thinking here of the occasional televised award ceremony winner), I really can’t see how we could have made it this far without him. It’s easy enough to ignore his blessings when I feel in control of things, when I have a plan, when I know how everything is going to play out.

But in times like this, when I come home from a stressful time at work to a house that is full — but not yet full enough — of boxes and calendar full of activities that do not lend themselves to filling more boxes, not to mention the occasional, looming feeling that I am ill-prepared for my imminent parenthood and thus already a bad father … well, there’s precious little else to lean on besides God (and the blessings he puts in our lives, namely family and friends). At times like this, trusting merely in my own abilities leads me to lying awake two hours before I’m supposed to get up, quietly freaking out. And while I’ve certainly tried that approach a lot lately, it hasn’t generally been one I would dub successful.

Anyhow, that’s done. Phew. Thank God.

The winter of our Web content

December 23, 2008 in Adults, Weather by T | No comments

Since I last blogged about Portland’s winter storm, the snow and cold temperatures have continued (and continued), resulting in the longest spate of winter weather I’ve ever experienced.

I realize “bad winter weather” is all relative, and many from points north and east of here would scoff at what we’ve been going through. Still, you can’t argue with the effect the weather has had on Portland, shutting down various aspects of it because, well, we don’t get feet of snow very often!

Anyhow, things were actually looking pretty good through the end of last week, such that, while Julia was off every day due to school being canceled, I made it in to work along with everyone else in my office. This was mildly disappointing, not only in that I begrudged Julia’s ability to stay snuggled in a warm bed while I went off to work, but also because, after walking over the ice and snow and then hopping on a bus with chains, I was kind of hoping to find the office empty of less stalwart folks who weren’t nearly as brave as I’d obviously been. Turns out everybody who rides the bus was equally brave, which is to say that it wasn’t that brave after all.

They’d been forecasting bad weather over the weekend, so we weren’t surprised when the predicted snow hit Saturday morning. In fact, the heavy snow was charming in the way only that ironic things that you’ll later come to fear/loathe can be.

But all the nearby restaurants — or at least the ones within a shortened walking distance — were open, and I consider this a win for local businesses. The employees could walk or bus to work, and so could we. And boy, were we happy to see them open! Given that we were flying out on Monday (he said, ironically foreshadowing … perhaps), we hadn’t stocked up a lot of food at home, so our food options were a meal at Sckavone’s or Detour Cafe, or … whatever odds and ends just happened to be in our fridge or pantry, the true details of which I am too embarrassed to admit.

Anyhow, Saturday passed without problem. Julia went to a prenatal yoga class, we had lunch nearby, and then we went over to the Kunze’s for the night. Not the sort of stuff I’d usually blog about, except that every trip, every meal seemed exceptional, hard-won, a victory over the snow continuing to pile up outside.

Church was canceled Sunday morning, which was not at all surprising, but frankly a tad welcome, given the previous week’s adventure. With the extra free time, I engaged for only the second time in my life in shoveling the walk. After only a few minutes of this activity, I was glad I’d only done it twice so far — that is hard, aerobic activity. Nothing like sweating while cold! I was even feeling so charitable that I shoveled most of the neighbor’s sidewalk, too, though this was only marginally useful, given that most of our neighbors did not clear any snow away. Heck, I had to borrow one of our neighbors’ snow shovels just to do my bit.

Lacking any other plans besides sitting inside and looking at a computer screen, I decided to light a fire — another surprisingly rare activity in my life. In our house, the fireplace is somehow designed to completely fail to heat the room, so we only light them when it really suits the moment. Basically, it’s the thermal and visual equivalent of one of those fireplace DVDs.

We’ve never bought any firewood because whoever rented the house before us left a few dozen logs in the garage (along with other things — there were dishes in the dishwasher and clothes in the dryer; one wonders exactly how quickly she left and under what circumstances). There were also a few pieces of scrap wood which we used for kindling.

But, to be honest, one of the main reasons I wanted to light a fire was to destroy documents. See, we’ve had this ever-increasing collection of papers with sensitive data we’ve meant to shred for several years. At one point, it would have been manageable, but as it grew, it became obvious it was simply too much for our dinky shredder to complete in a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, why shred things when you can spend an hour balling them up and throwing them into the fireplace, I always say? With a soundtrack of Mussorgsky playing in the background, I felt legitimately sinister, as if I was nefariously destroying crucial evidence of my own malfeasance. In reality, I was burning tax documents from 1990, when I didn’t even have a job and hadn’t graduated from high school. If the IRS wants those, they can now piece them together from the copious amount of ashes in our fireplace. Along with too many credit card offers to mention.

And while Julia got no warming benefit from the fire, I, seated mere feet from the flames while I tossed paper wads in, found myself sweating for the second time that day. I sweated more on December 21st than possibly the whole month of November.

We woke up on Monday to see that even more snow had fallen, rendering the previous day’s shoveling largely undetectable, and the previous day’s shoveler a bit cynical about the whole process. “Well I’m not going to bother doing that again!” Everyone was trudging through the compacted snow of the street, anyhow, the sidewalks being slow-going due to the deep snow.

It’s not the most exciting story ever, but given the relatively historic nature of the weather, I wanted to have some documentation of it. Other, of course, than the hundreds of largely-white photographs I took, which I will inevitably upload to my Flickr account in, say, several months.

Winter wonderland, my (cold) foot!

December 18, 2008 in Adults, Weather by T | No comments

Since sometime last week, we’d been hearing about the forthcoming winter storm, due this past weekend.

Of course, living in Portland, there is no such thing as an uncapitalized winter storm. When you have generally mild (if damp) weather year-round, cold plus snow gives you, at a bare minimum, a Winter Storm. To hear the news folks tell of it, it yields more like a Winter Storm Death Blood-on-the-Ice Mayhem Catastrophe 2008 Snow-Zombie Apocalypse.

Now, I know you folks from more wintry climes are laughing at such hysteria, but deep down you’re jealous that we can freak out so easily about what is, to you, just normal winter weather. It just shows how nice it is here normally, so you “win” by having your weather be suckier. I happily concede.

Anyhow, by Saturday, things had gotten cold, but the forecast snow had yet to materialize. Not a surprise, of course — like I said, often the only thing blowing hard in winter is the weather talk. So when I woke up Sunday and peered out through the window condensation at the yard, only to see green grass*, I figured there was no reason not to drive to church.

However, while we were showering, dressing, and otherwise not looking, the snow suddenly launched a sneak attack. And how! Not merely coming down in the way where you have to look closely at a really dark tree for a few seconds — heck, not just coming down, but actually sticking and blanketing the streets in white!

Even in Portland, this isn’t that unusual. What was unusual was that I was considering driving in it. As little as we drive these days, my experience with driving in snow is pretty much near-zero — I may have driven once or twice while a few flakes were coming down, but without actually threatening to get between my tires and the road.

So I called our pastor, just to see what the story was out in Hillsboro (a suburb 15 miles or so to the west where our church is). As much as I enjoy our church, I was secretly hoping our pastor would say something like, “Are you crazy? Drive out here in this weather? Dear me, no!” Even though he doesn’t really talk like that — such is the power of winter weather. Or so I’d hoped.

Unfortunately, our pastor, like many Lutherans, spent quite a number of years out in die lutherische Mutterland, if you will, and as such had no apparent sympathy for a pair of native Texans looking fearfully at the falling snow. I believe his most comforting words were, “If it gets impassable or you start sliding, then turn around.” See, this is why I don’t talk to you people with experience in Midwest winters. If our car starts sliding, then owing to my Texas-bred inability to automotively deal with anything remotely slick, we will necessarily careen over a ledge and explode in a ball of flame — even if we are on a completely flat plain!

But the damage had been done. Namely, to my machismo. “It’s only snowing a bit — in fact, it had only started snowing recently, right? Snow itself isn’t so bad, right? It’s the ice that causes cars to crash and burn! I see no ice out there! We can do this with minimal automotive damage!” And so forth.

So it was that we ventured boldly out of the driveway. And, observing that we not only hadn’t died but hadn’t even hit any cars or trees, we kept on going. All the while muttering “I can do this” and “This is, of course, crazy” in equal measure.

Now, those of you who are familiar with Portland and its western suburbs know that to get from the former to the latter, one has to take Highway 26 over the West Hills, which entails a climb from near sea level to several hundred feet above sea level (the best estimate I could find was 400 feet). And while the West Hills are normally a pleasant spot, full of zoo animals, Japanese gardens, and the luridly well-to-do, in wintry times, they are also rather intimidating.

There’s nothing like snow to make you suddenly aware of your city’s topography. Not only does the snow become thicker (both in the air and on the ground) at higher altitudes, but that uphill drive you’ve done hundreds of times suddenly seems to be taking a much longer time than you remember.

Of course, in part, this was because we were driving a lot slower than normal, which I counted as a good thing. But then there was the general confusion of driving in the snow, which for me entailed following the relatively clear tracks made by previous cars. As opposed to any official notion of lanes, which had by apparent mutual agreement been abandoned by those on the highway. Every so often, I would catch a glimpse of the actual lane dividers in the tire tracks, though the two did not always run parallel.

Not that we had all lanes open to us. At the top of Sylvan Hill, there was more than one accident, with flares closing off the surrounding chunk of highway. In a way, I was thankful for those who had gone before, as they served as an suggestion to my fellow Portlanders to try and drive less foolishly — it has been noted that, in any wintry weather, it is Portland drivers’ stupidity that is the most dangerous element.

The view from west of Sylvan Hill, heading westbound; notice the very safe distance and speed!

And then, somehow, we arrived at church. Fifteen minutes late, but completely unscathed — even mentally. Who knew I was capable of such capable driving?

Indeed, on the journey back home from church, I was remarkably at ease. The human mind is a fantastically plastic machine, acclimating with incredible speed to different situations. Somehow, it seemed like I’d always been driving on white-covered roads, and adeptly, at that. “Ha ha!” I laughed at the dark gray clouds — not literally, as such, lest Julia think I was actually going snow-mad or whatever people do when it’s actually cold for long stretches of time.

Of course, scoffing at the weather is never a wise thing to do, even in mild Portland. So it was that, as we again neared Sylvan Hill, this time on the way home, we noticed the electronic highway sign that told us that chains were required in the Portland metro area.

Um. Well. That’s all well and good, of course, but we don’t actuall own any chains, you see. It’s sort of a matter of principle. If chains are required for driving, then I shouldn’t be driving in the first place! All very logical. Except for the part where I was somehow able to leave home without chains, only to be told I needed them to return.

At this point, we were left with several less-than-perfect options. We could exit the highway and hope to find a nearby store selling tire chains that happened to be open on Sunday while it was snowing enough to require chains. This one seemed pretty dubious from the start.

We could try to park somewhere that was both free and close to a public transit line, and come back at some later date once the snow had abated. However, given that the now-vindicated forecasters had called for up to a week of this weather, I wasn’t keen on the possibility of leaving my car in Beaverton for days on end.

This left, as best I could reason while still trying to drive safely, the option of driving back to Portland without chains and hoping for the best. Which presumably would involve minimal traffic tickets and/or death.

Rather than attempt again the relatively high altitude of Sylvan Hill that Highway 26 traverses, I decided to take the rather long way around, south on 217 and then back north on I-5. The only flaw in my plan was that, for whatever reason, I’d never actually driven this route in my life, and so I was unsure if, in fact, I’d be driving at lower — and therefore presumably less treacherous — altitudes. But my hunch seemed correct, and that’s as good as reality in these crazy postmodern times, right?

So yeah. We headed south, slowly, though safely. And then turned north onto I-5. Where we were again treated to electronic billboards alerting us to the need for chains, and possibly the certain death that awaited us if we ignored the part about the chains.

Okay, not really, but do you remember that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Roy Neary is driving closer and closer to Devil’s Tower, and the government has spread false reports of a nerve gas spill, so people are evacuating? And even though Roy thinks the spill is a fake, it seems very ominous as he continues on, passing dead animals and such? Well, we kind of felt like that. Nearly everyone had pulled over to the side of the road to put on chains. And there we were, passing them all while chainless. It certainly felt ominous.

And then, somehow, we made it back to downtown Portland, none the worse for wear, except for possibly a tense back on my part. I’d decided to avoid taking the Marquam or Ross Island bridges across the Willamette, since they both went a bit high for me to be comfortable driving on them in the cold and snow. Not that any bridge sounded like a good idea, but at least the Hawthorne could reasonably claim that it wasn’t at a higher altitude than any other surface street — any ice-inspired swerve and subsequent plunge off of it would be mercifully short.

Division Street, where bad drivers go to play

Interestingly, it was in this final stretch of our trip on the surface roads that we saw some of the worst driving. I was heading down Division, behind a pick-up truck whose driver would accelerate so fast after coming to a stop that it would fish-tail. And he either thought that was really fun or he was too stupid to learn from his mistake, because I watched him over-accelerate and then fish-tail six times. I found myself yelling at him, “Idiot! I’m a native Texan and I know how to drive better in this than you!” Not that he could hear me over the squealing of his tires.

Anyhow, we made it home, where I plan on keeping the car in the driveway until there is no sign whatsoever of anything remotely frozen** on the roads.

*See? Our grass was green in December! You “our winters are so bad that half my friends died of exposure last week” types probably had your grass die sometime in October! However, I will actually concede that, in losing (which is to say winning) the Crappy Weather war, you have actually won this battle, as I hate our lawn and wish it was dead pretty much year-round. I have little interest in mowing the lawn in between the frequent winter rains.

**Yes, that’s right, I only plan on driving on molten roads, you chemistry nerds!

Time for T

October 21, 2008 in Adults by T | 2 comments

It’s easy to forget, but this blog is about all of the Stadlers, and not just any wee ones who may happen to be inside other, larger, cuter members of the family. As such, allow me a post about myself.

As you are only all-too-aware if you’re reading this blog, I can ramble and really prolong the resolution to any story I tell, so here’s the ending: I’m fine. Really.

But I woke up around 2am Sunday morning. I’m not sure why, but I was very aware of my heart beating.

This is not unusual for me — several years ago, I went to the hospital because my heart seemed to be racing very fast and getting faster. They ran several tests on me and came to the conclusion that, while I had experienced “mild tachycardia” (an elevated heart rate), there was nothing wrong with me, and heart palpitations (where you become aware of your own heart beating without having to take your pulse) aren’t necessarily anything to worry about, the fear of dying notwithstanding.

In fact, the only thing from that experience I did have to worry about was the bill from the ambulance ride. So that’s two things I learned: don’t freak out about heart palpitations, and don’t ever ride in an ambulance unless you really think you’re not going to survive a ride to the hospital (not that I was at all sure of that at the time — heart issues are like that). It would have been cheaper for me and several of my friends to each take a stretch SUV to the hospital! And then I would have had access to a minibar!

So when I woke up in the middle of the night a few months ago (yes, I still haven’t gotten back to the near present in this story), aware of my heart beating faster than might be expected for a body that had until recently been lying in bed and sleeping, I thought it was odd but didn’t do anything about it. True, my skin, especially on my feet, was clammy, and after some time I began to shiver as if I were quite cold (which I wasn’t), and yet it felt like palpitations again. I was convinced they would soon pass, although I ended up losing a lot of sleep that night. But nothing came of it.

So what was happening early Sunday morning seemed remarkably similar to that night a few months ago. My heart rate seemed high, though only inasmuch as I expected it to be a slow, sleeping one. Eventually, along came the clammy skin and the shivers, too. I know, it may sound scary, and it definitely was to me — all the moreso at three in the morning.

My shivering woke Julia up, and she encouraged me to call the advice nurse. This seemed like a good idea, and I was glad that line is open 24 hours. Not that the nurse had a lot to say to me after I described my symptoms. She told me to be alert for a truly high heart rate or any skipped beats, but other than that, it didn’t sound like anything to worry about.

Of course, I had my own second opinion on that matter, but it was hard to deny that there was a negative feedback loop working here. Everything seems more scary in the middle of the night — knocks on the door, phone calls, and suddenly being aware of your heart beating faster than you’d expected. This, in turn, certainly caused me to worry, which seemed to be verging on panic at times. And at 3am, there wasn’t a whole lot to calm me down.

I tried going back to sleep, but I couldn’t. Around 4am, I actually felt pretty calm, though perfectly awake, and I considered just getting up and doing some reading, just to pass the time. But I was more interested in getting some sleep, not that I was terribly successful at it. I remember being mostly awake, punctuated by short bursts of near-sleep, until about 6am, at which point I guess I finally started dozing.

On waking up at 7:30am for church, I expected to be tired, but with the night’s episode otherwise behind me. Not so. Something was still amiss, with my heart still not calmed down, and what’s more, the beat was not the steady four-four rhythm I’d come to expect as a trained drummer. It was going one, two, three, four, pause … one, two three, four, pause.

If I’d been relatively calm when I woke up, I nevertheless lost it after that. Maybe it’s that I’m blessed to have led a rather healthy life to date, but it seems to me that heart problems are an order of magnitude more frightening than the gastrointestinal yuckiness I would otherwise consider my worst illnesses in recent memory. With stomach ailments, the motif seems to be that “this, too, shall pass.” But with my heart seemingly against me, I felt peculiarly helpless.

So we changed plans and headed to the hospital. We live rather close to the hospital associated with my insurance provider, which is nice — not that it made those red lights feel any faster. Upon arriving, there was the question of whether this was, in fact, an emergency or not. I may have been freaking out bodily, but mentally, I still didn’t want to impose too much. You know, hate to be a bother. As it happened, the lady at the information desk pointed out that “urgent care” was at a different address and not open on Sundays, anyhow — causing me to wonder, momentarily, how “urgent” things could be there — so off to the emergency room it was.

Upon explaining my symptoms to the lady at the desk there, I began to feel more and more like a fake. I mean, I walked in on my own power, and was able to describe my symptoms myself (“Any shortness of breath?” “Well, I am freaking out right now, so … maybe?”) — how much of an emergency could this be? This was emphasized all the more by my being asked to sit down and wait for the plastic object they gave me to buzz. Wait, is this actually a Chili’s? Will I get seasoned fries at the end of it all?

Anyhow, soon enough, I found myself, for the second time in my life, hooked up to various monitors via sticky pads and a clip on my index finger. And as uncomfortable and unwelcoming as the whole situation was, I couldn’t help but feel reassured that, if my heart was in fact freaking out on me (and not merely freaking me out), there were few better places for it to do so.

Which, of course, is why I probably started to calm down for the first time since I’d woken up a few hours earlier. This probably helps to explain why there were no skipped beats observed by anybody at the hospital (though I am glad that Julia had confirmed them for me, so as to rule out my being a complete hypochondriac).

The staff were all amazingly nice, and I was impressed by how long the doctor who eventually saw me took to explain everything to me. Though I wasn’t sure if he was exceedingly thorough or just chatty, given that there was little chance I was going to understand everything he was saying in unabashed medical jargon.

Still, here’s what I learned from this experience: first, as I learned several years ago, your heart rate usually has to be impressively fast for it to be considered a problem. Second, I learned the name for the symptom that finally convinced me to go to the hospital: premature ventricular contractions. Sounds serious enough, doesn’t it? And yet, they so often fall into the category of “not serious and don’t require treatment”, as the discharge instructions they gave me say.

As for the clammy skin and shivering? That’s how your body reacts to excess adrenaline. It probably doesn’t seem so odd when you’re, say, running away, or taking a test. But in the middle of the night, your body still has to get rid of the stuff. My doctor pointed out that such side effects are also what meth users experience, though presumably, they enjoy it. (Memo to self: do not take up meth habit.)

I don’t know whether I’m happier or not knowing that these things that seem scary are probably nothing. Part of me wanted them to find something wrong so that they could then, in turn, fix it. With a diagnosis of “you seem fine” — my emotions notwithstanding — I’m left to contemplate the (slim) possibility that something is wrong, but they just didn’t find it. And yet, that’s what I thought several years ago, and in the intervening time I’ve hiked up some serious mountains and generally lived a medically uninteresting life.

I’ll schedule an appointment with my regular doctor, just to be sure, but there you go. Of course, being discharged with a clean bill of health didn’t make me magically less aware of my heartbeat in the succeeding days. I’m still attuned to it right now. I just have to learn to ignore it, since it’s ever so normal. But how odd is it that, merely by suspecting in the middle of the night that something seemed amiss, I could create a feedback loop that eventually made it seem something truly was?

Perhaps, then, it was good that I happened to read this Bible passage at an eminently normal breakfast, after being released from the hospital (from the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians):

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

I especially liked that part about guarding my heart.