What Paradise Looks Like

Photo taken by jaq when she was in Phoenix this March, and slightly doctored by me. (This post is tagged “Texas”  because Bluebell is a Texas thang.)

Health care at its finest

For months, my primary care physician has been nagging me to get an appointment with a urologist. I’ve had three kidney stones, and even though I haven’t had one in four years—four years!—she tells me I have to have a urologist in Chicago. They’re hard to get into, she says. You have to have one in case you have another kidney stone. Blah blah.

So the morning of my last doctor’s appointment, I made the appointment with the urologist so that she would stop nagging me (she called it persistence). And that appointment was today at 3pm.

I always hated going to my old urologist in Indy. I was the youngest person in the waiting room by 50 years, and the only woman. All the old men put their golf magazines down when I walked in. And really, I’m so glad I could give them that breath of fresh air, but I’d rather be in just about any other doctor’s waiting room.

There was a little more diversity in this waiting room (though I was still the youngest by a few decades), but it had a few strikes against it before I even saw the doctor: it shared a waiting area with the Alzheimer’s Disease Center, so I picked a chair facing the other direction because I really can’t deal with sad. The lights kept flickering, and I kept imagining that some poor Alzheimer’s sufferer was confusedly flipping switches somewhere (your mind goes to funny places when you have nothing to read but Money or Golf magazines). The receptionist had given me a pager—the large blinking kind you get at some restaurants—and mine finally went off 20 minutes after my scheduled appointment time, just as my brain was turning numb from reading about investment strategies.

I met a nurse in the hallway who introduced herself by way of giving me a cup to pee in. She showed me to an exam room, where a toilet was sticking out from a cabinet beneath a sink. Like this:

After another 25 minutes—this time I read an Esquire article about experimenting with steroids, which at least was interesting—a woman came in and introduced herself as a physician’s assistant. My doctor had gone home sick (which I hope explains the 45 minute wait—that had better not be the norm around there). She looked through my files and gave me some photocopies about low oxalate foods, which list pages of nutritious and delicious foods to avoid, including sweet potatoes, squash, and spinach. Clearly they are smoking crack if they think I am giving up sweet potatoes. (On the plus side, most berries appear on the list of bad foods, which means I can now tell people that I can’t eat them for fear of kidney stones, not because I think they taste disgusting. Yes, all berries. Yes, I know they’re different.)

So finally a doctor came in and explained that he wanted to determine my risk level for kidney stones. They’d do a CAT scan and then my favorite, the 48-hour pee test, in which you save all your urine in bright orange jug—in the refrigerator, mind you—for two 24-hour periods. The physician’s assistant emphasized that they’d like me to do this during the course of a normal day, when I’m working or at home. Yeah, no way in hell am I putting my pee in a biohazard jug in the work fridge. Are people who work in urologists’ offices really that far removed from reality?

The doctor, a young smarmy guy, told me that they’d have to do a pregnancy test before the CAT scan. Me: I’m not pregnant. Him, smarmily and patronizingly: Oh, I know you’re not pregnant. I just have to do the pregnancy test.

So a nurse comes in to take my blood (I can’t just pee on a cost-efficient stick?), and I assume that I’ll get sent over to the CAT scan lab afterwards to wait in a long line with other grumpy people who need to have pictures taken of their insides. Except… I have to wait a week to call just to schedule the scan. And… why the fuck are they taking my blood one to two weeks before the scan? That is plenty of time for me to go and get knocked up, and for them to harm my unborn child.

All that, and they didn’t even have fun band-aids.

2:42

I am lazy, exhausted, and freaking out about a presentation I have to give next week AND the half-marathon that will be fueled entirely by adrenaline. So to procrastinate/take my mind off things, I’ve been scanning iTunes for music I’ve forgotten about or just haven’t listened to in a while.

Not too long ago, I read Joshua Allen’s determination that 2:42 is the perfect song length. Not a bad argument: he points out that the Mamas and Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” both clock in at 2:42 (although in my iTunes, “This Charming Man” is 2:46. But he makes his point.).

So instead of a blog post, I give you a list of my music that is precisely 2:42. I don’t have all my CDs loaded into iTunes, but here’s what I’ve got, even the embarrassing stuff:

• “Will Tomorrow Ever Come,” Dance Hall Crashers
• “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’ Anymore,” Travis Tritt
• “American Made,” Oak Ridge Boys
• “Felicia,” Quartet San Francisco
• “Emily Kane,” Art Brut
• “The Nights Are Made for Us,” Richard Hawley
• “The Real You,” Dance Hall Crashers
• “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off,” The Magnetic Fields
• “Like a Rose,” Lucinda Williams
• “The Tigers Have Spoken,” Neko Case
• “You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun,” Sleater-Kinney
• “Dreary, Dreary,” The Gothic Archies
• “Ojitos Traidores,” Los Super Seven
• “Tonight We’re Gonna Tear Down the Walls,” Randy Travis
• “Crows,” The Gothic Archies
• “Better Class of Losers,” Randy Travis
• “Leave the Biker,” Fountains of Wayne
• “Juanita,” Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris
• “Legal Man,” Belle & Sebastian
• “Lovely Rita,” The Beatles
• “How Blue,” Reba McEntire
• “Center of Gravity,” Yo La Tengo
• “Child of the Fifties,” Statler Brothers
• “Anymore,” that dog.
• “Pink Padded Slippers,” Blitzen Trapper
• “Counteraction,” Cornershop
• “Michelle,” The Beatles
• “Always Will,” Nanci Griffith
• “The Book of Love,” The Magnetic Fields
• “Murder Ballad,” Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
• “Sol y Sombra,” Fugu
• “Sister in Love,” Envelopes

What do you have that’s 2:42?

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current book: Oh God. I’m pages away from finishing Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Kavalier & Clay, which I really really really will read.

current music: The spectacular Jasper Rose Silbert Mix. Oh. I should maybe write something about that… stay tuned… I’m so tired right now it’s hard to type, but maybe tomorrow.

current socks: Today’s are white with red toes, heels, and polka dots, but yesterday’s are worth mentioning. They are my absolute favorites from The Sock Shop in London: stormy clouds, weather pattern arrows, and the words “wet & windy.” It was in fact quite wet and windy yesterday.

Retro: Bershon

I still don’t understand the etymology of bershon (anybody?), but I shore do understand the attitude. [Definitions/illustrations: Dooce, Que Sera Sera] My dad recently put a folder on my hard drive called “Personal Photo Collection,” which basically includes every photo my dad ever took ever, including several rolls of Christmas trees (all on slide film). It is also a goldmine of bershon.

Because it’s not quite Friday yet and because you might need a laugh, I give you… the eighth grade.

Seagull in Flight

Took this during a break from my bike ride along the lakefront this afternoon. I love that you can see how his feet are tucked up beneath him.

Sunny Day, Sweepin’ the Clouds Away

Last week in Millennium Park, I watched these two girls have jump rope races back and forth across the pavilion.

Basic Grammar Lesson

A pronoun is a substitute for a noun, like “she” or “it.” An antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause to which the pronoun refers. Easy, right?

It helps if your pronoun has something to refer back to. From this morning’s Redeye, the Tribune’s free daily crap newspaper:

So, David—about those Armani underwear ads.

Soccer superstar David Beckham said he had some explaining to do after agreeing to be photographed in his skivvies for a new, sex-drenched ad campaign for Emporio Armani. The black and white ads show Beckham reclining shirtless.

“When the photos came out out, she was the first one to call me and say, ‘What are you doing?’” he told Jay Leno this week on the “Tonight” show, according to The Associated Press. “I had to try and explain it to her and it didn’t go down that well.”

That was the whole article. All of it. And who do you suppose she is? The headline says, “Ssh! Don’t tell mom and dad! Even superstars have to consider their parents’ wrath.”

Still, if you glance down at the article, like I did this morning while waiting for the bus, “she” doesn’t refer to anything within the text. And I don’t know about Beckham’s mom, but my mom gets pretty pissed off if she’s referred to as simply “she” or “her.”

Things I Never Knew About MS

[I'm cross-posting again in order to drive traffic thisaway. You can help me be less annoying by adding Riding for MS to your RSS feeds!]

When one of my best friends was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis eight years ago, I knew almost nothing about it—it was simply a name to a vague disease, probably something pretty serious. The name itself doesn’t even mean much. Not like muscular dystrophy, say, which you could probably guess has something to do with muscles degenerating and getting weaker. But MS?

A few weeks after my friend’s diagnosis, I sat down to watch Hilary and Jackie on DVD. I was taking cello lessons at the time, and all I knew about Jacqueline du Pré was that she was a cellist. I didn’t know that she was diagnosed with MS in the last 15 years of her life. I didn’t know that it paralyzed her, or that it stole her hearing, her sight, and finally her life.

This was not a good way to learn about multiple sclerosis. I went through a lot of Kleenex that night.

The good news is that MS is much better understood and more manageable than when du Pré first began losing sensitivity in her fingers in 1971. Today, people diagnosed with MS have normal or near-normal life expectancies, and there are many drugs to help people manage both the disease and its myriad symptoms. That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to live with—but it does mean that it’s not a death sentence.

Multiple sclerosis is an auto-immune disease in which the body attacks myelin, a substance that covers and protects the nerve fibers in the brain. Myelin helps your brain send nerve impulses, so when the body starts attacking itself and destroying the myelin, it disrupts impulses to and from the brain. Damage to myelin causes scarring—sclerosis—and multiple scars in the brain, over time, cause greater nerve damage and greater disruption.*

In ordinary life, this translates to a large number of symptoms, some of which may be blown off or easily misdiagnosed. Things like poor coordination and balance, difficulty concentrating, or depression—all common MS symptoms—might make you think that you’re just slowly going crazy. Most people, including my friend, have a type of MS known as relapsing-remitting, which refers to constant cycle of flare-ups and recovery. There’s no predictability to these cycles, no way of knowing when the next attack will come, no way of knowing how long it will last. The longer recovery time (remission) between flare-ups (relapses), the better. If the cycles get shorter, the flare-ups more frequent, a person with MS could slip into a secondary-progressive stage, in which the symptoms become steadily, increasingly worse.

Multiple sclerosis is incurable. There are several drugs available that work to actually manage the disease, not just its various symptoms (those require a whole ‘nother medicine cabinet). Hopefully this kind of management will help keep exacerbations at bay for relapser-remitters like my friend, and slow the pace of this disease to prevent the kind of degeneration that Jacqueline du Pré suffered.

* I’ve learned a lot about MS these past eight years, but I’m no doctor. I checked my facts here, at the very place I’m asking you to make a donation to!

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current book: If only I could stop doing crosswords on the bus…

current music: Completely obsessed with Pulp’s underrated, Scott Walker-produced album, We Love Life. Have listened to it at least two dozen times in the past few days.

current socks: Dark blue with stylized cats on them. A gift from jaq many years ago.

Retro: Training Begins

This is me at age 3, already starting to train for the MS 150.

I am cross-posting this in hopes of sending some traffic over here.

This Says It All

Taken yesterday in Millennium Park:

Taken today in Millennium Park:

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current book: Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way. Yes, seriously. I’m prepping for this.

current music: Am possibly going to Tift Merritt and/or Kathleen Edwards next weekend.

current socks: I busted out all the good Easter socks last week, including the ones with the chocolate bunnies with their ears eaten off. Right now, though, back to the stripey SmartWools, which are necessary to keep my feet warm. You can’t tell from the picture above, but it was actually snowing outside my 23rd-floor window. By the time it hit the ground, it was more of a wintry mix. Everybody’s favorite.