Google, TAVR, A Borderline Hypochondriac, Giving Ulcers

The newspaper print is virtually unreadable. Shit, my eyes are going; blindness is on its way. 

That reaction, when the newspaper is unreadable, is a normal part of life for a true-blue, 90 year old borderline hypochondriac. Then comes the realization that the wrong set of glasses is perched on my nose.

Put my reading glasses on and voila, the print becomes readable. Clear as a bell; great relief. Not going blind yet. Sadly that fucking routine happens too often.

Like scouring my apartment for my keys for 5-10 minutes until finally waking up to the fact that the fucking keys are in my pant pocket with my ever present pedometer, a really important part of my fitness oriented life. If I could re-claim the time I have spent looking for my fucking keys I'd be good for an added several years to my life.

Decided that jelly beans and fitness don't work well together. Giving up the beans for homemade, butter free popcorn. Not as soul satisfying as jelly beans but the popcorn does keep my mouth in motion, a movement which is really important to me. Jelly beans would be bad for my teeth, if I had any real teeth. (The beans are sure as hell bad for my glucose level.) Putting 'stick um' on my phonies every morning ain't too swift. Really annoying. Every six in the morning my 'stick um’ routine reminds me that I’m 90 and a dummy for ending up with false teeth. But the alternative of having either my uppers or lowers drifting around in my mouth surely ain't too swift. So 'stick um' it is.

TAVR (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement) was strongly suggested to me.This 'minimally invasive procedure' was to be my silver bullet to improve my life style. But it doesn't take a Phi Beta Kappa key candidate to know that at 88 years of age there ain't no such thing as a 'minimally invasive procedure'.

'Minimally invasive'? Compared to what?

Saying goodbye to life with a tube being shoved up from my groin into my heart with a new aortic valve at the end of the tube didn't sound very fucking minimal or appealing to me. And the lead up procedures were equally scary, particularly the one to test my kidneys, which would put me out of commission for only a week if I was 33 years old. At 88 it would be at least a month.

One outgrowth of two serious bike crashes at 88, each of which landed me in ICU at Stanford Hospital and at the Vet's, was learning to turn my hearing aids off when the 30 something newbie doctors started doing their real specialty, which is to scare the shit out of patients.

Yeah teaching hospitals, like Stanford, are more for the students than the patients. Gotta have a doctor with miles on his odometer. Newbies are for the birds. You become, as a dumbass patient, an important part of their learning process.

At the Vet's I was required, for the TAVR, to talk with a social worker named Mrs. Cottle who has a great reputation at the Vet's but was a major league pain in the ass for me. She convinced me that she was a frustrated shrink whose questions always started with 'What if...?', with the rest of the sentence referring to a disaster happening to me while doing the TAVR or otherwise.

All she did was call my attention to the strong possibility that the TAVR could result in me looking up at the grass sooner, rather than later.

An echocardiogram, which literally shows your heart pumping away, showed my aortic valve not opening fully. What I thought for 50 years was a 'heart murmur' was, according the 30 something geniuses, life threatening to me. TAVR became the focus of my life. A lesson learned, again, was that my doctors should always be gray headed or at least 40+ years old.

That's also when I learned that Googling every kvetch and reading Wikipedia for the same kvetches was moving me from being a fucking borderline hypochondriac to a full blown, fucking maniacal, hypochondriac. Googling all the bullshit had a negative effect on my life and was consuming me. So, I quit Googling any question about my kvetches and TAVR. I still use Google but never for a kvetch.

John Fox, coach of the Denver Broncos, had a TAVR. It took him a few months to recover and he's in his 50's. So much for the assurances that my recovery would take but a few weeks. But that assumed that my 'minimally invasive' TAVR wouldn't kill me first.

I'm not too fat from head to toe. Only really fat from shoulders to head. The Princess had a mantra, "Bernie doesn’t get ulcers. He gives them". Thinking that I could convince the Princess that I wasn't all bad or all that stupid was like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Dumb persistence is one of my frailties. But smart persistence is also one of my hallmarks. Easy come, easy go.

As the Queen said to Alice 'Think the Impossible'. A mantra for me and one optimistic reason that I'm still around at 90. I am really busted on my Bronx Jewish ass but very rich in friends, swagger and with full faith in my long term future.

I’m still in the race between looking down at the grass and looking up at the grass with a fuck 'em attitude...and the horses that they rode in on.