What's Happening with Us

I'm sitting here typing in my netbook while Rick has his first dialysis.
First I must thank everyone for all the love, support, prayers, and good wishes sent our way the last few weeks. We have felt upheld and loved, and we appreciate all of that.
Thank you.
It would be difficult to write about anything other than what we're going through now. It's as if someone has slammed us both between the eyes with a two by four. Wham! Life as you knew it is over, and renal failure is what is important to you now. You cannot argue with this.
You may wonder why Rick's kidneys have failed. If you think you know, tell his doctors, because so far they haven't been able to pin down a cause.
We think it's life. Life can cause of kidney failure.
It's a shock to have everything stop suddenly and realize that your life is in danger, or your spouse's life. Really gets your attention. At the same time, you start hanging around people and places that make you realize that you are not special – there are a lot of people fighting for their lives at any given time, which is a humbling realization. It's a part of life that is usually out of the public eye.
Watching medical shows on TV is not going to tell you anything about what it's like to have a medical crisis. Those people are actors, those situations are scripted, and as Rick's nephrologist says, those shows are phony.
A nephrologist, by the way, is a kidney doctor, and nephrology has nothing to do either with Egypt or having sex with dead people. I know how you people think.
I observed the difference between reality and TV the first night Rick went in to the ER. He was given a blood pressure medicine which may have worked a little too well, and every time he made a rash move like, say, raising his head slightly, his blood pressure would plummet down to, oh, 49 over 29.
If you watch “House” you know that at least once in every show, someone cries out, “He's crashing!” and then three or four doctors are running around the bed like a Chinese fire drill, yelling at each other to do this, do that, and then someone delivers a shot of epinephrine, or shocks the person back to life with paddles, and then the show goes on with the temporarily dead person revived to suffer more camera-friendly, viewer-manipulating drama.
That is not how it happens. The spouse (me in this case) notes the patient is looking punky, goes out in the hall and grabs Jeff, the nurse, and says, “He's not looking good,” and then Jeff calls for help and a contingent of nurses, aides, and one (count him, one) doctor come in and they move swiftly, quietly, intensely, professionally, and efficiently, to take care of the problem, because, guess what, this has happened before and they have a protocol.
So they pulled Rick's blood pressure out of the basement a couple of times, and by the next morning the drug he'd been given had cleared his system, and they went to a less drastic blood pressure medication.
That was the first and only time I'd ever seen a nurse wrap a blood pressure cuff around an IV bag and pump up the cuff so the fluid would flow faster. I wish I'd taken a picture to send to the “There, I fixed it” website, but I didn't. Still, if you want that IV to drip faster, there's your methodology.
Rick made it through a week in the hospital with the doctors and nurses keeping him alive and watching him for signs that his kidneys would kick back in, but alas, his kidneys are done. Renal function has left the building.
So here we are at the Northwest Kidney Center, with Rick starting dialysis. This is what we'll be doing for three days a week for the foreseeable future.
We are walking a well-worn path. Many before us, many with us, and many after us will be dealing with this particular medical crisis. We are hanging in there together, with the support of friends and family, taking one step at a time, one day and sometimes one minute at a time. One of the paradoxes is that there is nothing like having mortality stare you right in the eye and breathe on you with breath more fetid than that of a 12-year-old black Lab to let you know you are fully, completely alive.
Funny, that.
We're still here, still fully, completely alive, still cracking wise and thanking God. Stay tuned for further developments.
Photo: that's Rick in the dialysis chair, with his nurse, Jean, looking on. Rick says he's getting pretty fed up with pictures of himself laid out in bed. Don't blame him. You can send him a get well card at: Rick Tuel, P O Box 238, Vashon WA 98070.

William DeWolf Hopper, actor

I had planned to pay bills this afternoon, but the bill-paying desk is in the living room, and Rick is in there watching “20 Million Miles from Earth,” a cheesy space-monster-from-Venus flick made in 1957. Rick says that all the questions posed by this movie have one answer: it was made in 1957. The stop-motion Venusian starts out as a peace-loving vegetarian, but is driven to rage by the dumb people who corner it, poke it, hit it, stab it, and shoot it. After a few minutes of that treatment the Venusian gets pissed off. I found myself rooting for this beleaguered alien, then I realized I wasn't going to get the bills paid and left the room.
Monster movies aren't really my thing.
The big dumb handsome lead is played by big handsome William Hopper. I don't think the man himself was dumb. His parents were an actor named DeWolf Hopper, and Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist, whose maiden name was “Elda Furry.” Wow.
He was in many movies in the 1930s, served with distinction in World War II, sold cars in LA after the war until he took a role in “The High and the Mighty” in 1954, and after that worked regularly as an actor, and is probably best known for playing Paul Drake, a private investigator on the Perry Mason Show, from 1957 to 1966.
He died young, in 1970 at the age of 55, of pneumonia following a stroke, and is buried in Whittier, California.
William Hopper, ladies and gentlemen.

A Short Essay on How It Is

Monday Morning October 12 2009

This date used to be Columbus Day. We used to get a day off from school, I believe, although memory does not serve as well on that score as I'd like.
Rick and I are celebrating momentous things this morning: he's home from the hospital, and he's alive. Yay.
Although, as Rick says, this thing is not over by a long shot.
He went into the hospital a week ago today, in acute renal failure. His kidneys were shutting down.
This has happened before. Back in 1997 he ended up in renal failure when he thought he would “work through” prostate cancer as if it was a cramped muscle. The kidney problem landed him in the hospital, which is where they discovered the prostate cancer.
This time he got bladder cancer first, and then renal failure.
The docs are mystified. They don't know why he went into renal failure, or why he got better, which they said they did not expect. I of course have opinions about both: I think that the cancer surgeries, cancer treatments, and stress from overwork, which he did because he was stressed about money, all accumulated until his weak points – his damaged kidneys – caved in. I think he got better because he has hundreds of people praying for him all over the world, and because he finally got some rest in the hospital.
Sit. Stay.
Rick says, yeah, sure, all of that, but the docs are looking for something “more sinister.” His blood was taken twice a day while he was in the hospital, and they ruled out a blockage, and they sent blood away for some in-depth lab tests, the results of which we're still awaiting. He was released with instructions to have blood work every other day, to monitor his electrolyte levels, and he'll be going in to see Dr. Oliver, the nephrologist, on Wednesday. He's still in renal failure - “underlying kidney disease which has been exacerbated” by something unknown – but he's feeling better and doing better. Except for the cold he caught from our grand daughter, but that will pass, also.
Meanwhile, I've pulled out the Renal Cookbook that I bought the first time we went through this. We have to get religious about his diet now – no fooling. It's a whole new world. The renal diet tends to be in many ways exactly the opposite of what I am told to eat. It's OK for him to eat sugar and white flour, for example.
It is too overwhelming to think about everything right now. We're on the one-day-at-a-time plan at the moment. Rick rests a lot, which is good. I'm trying to get through that “hit between the eyes by a two by four” feeling.
Rick is feeling very happy about quitting smoking this morning. He had cut back to almost nothing before this hospital stay, and of course could not smoke while hospitalized. This morning he is feeling downright sassy about being able to chug up to the paper box and back without huffing and puffing.
We are OK, or as OK as we can be with Rick, as he says, “functionally dead.”
Like it says in the old talking blues about hard luck, I'm just waiting around to see what happens next.
More later, of course.

Tourist

It has been a big week at Casa Tuel. My friend Sonya came to visit, and as often happens when someone who doesn't live here comes to visit, I went to see some of the sights and places I only visit when I'm showing out-of-towners around.
First, we had Big Box Monday: we went to Ikea, and we went to Costco. Normally a trip to either one of these stores would be enough for one day, but I was trying to comparison-shop cheap mattresses.
Recently a friend told me about an internet show called “Ikea Heights,” a mystery/comedy/soap opera that is filmed in the Burbank, California, Ikea, using the store's displays as sets, without the permission or knowledge of the store's management. The show is extremely silly. You have to assume that the Ikea management knows what's going on by now, but fans can hope that Ikea sees the show as free advertising and will not put a stop to filming. David Seger, the man behind the series, says there will be a new episode toward the end of this month. You can see the show at www.ikeaheights.com
Back to our tourism. Sonya and I found the Ikea mattress department, and along with a few other customers tried out mattresses. One or two were okay. Most were for people much younger and more fit than someone our age.
We headed off to the Southcenter Costco, which, like Ikea, is a huge place, but unlike Ikea, with its winding layout that intentionally disorients you, is wide open so you can see how big it is. We learned that there were no mattresses at Costco that day, which was a disappointment. The Christmas decorations were in, but that was just depressing. We walked out without buying a thing.
That shot our energy for the day and we wandered home.
Tuesday we shopped Vashon – Granny's Attic, of course, and various collectible shops. In a bit of shameless booster-ism I will say that shopping on Vashon is much more fun than shopping ashore. Takes less time and energy, you get to see your friends, and you don't have to get in line for a ferry to go home.
Wednesday we went to Seattle because I had a cardiologist appointment. Don't panic. It was just a check up to see how I'm doing, and I'm doing well, thank you. After that we went to Kerry Park up on Queen Anne Hill to have a picnic lunch Sonya had prepared, and soak in the view. The view has changed since I first saw it in 1972 – many tall buildings have grown up in downtown – but it remains breathtaking, looking out over the city and Elliott Bay. It was a warm and hazy day and Mt. Rainier was not visible. You'd think something that big would be a lot harder to hide.
After our scenic picnic I took Sonya to a bead store up on Stone Way. Sonya loves beads, and makes jewelry, so this stop was a hit.
After the bead store I took Sonya to see the troll under the bridge in Fremont, and down the hill to see the statue of Lenin, and then circled around to go by “Waiting for the Interurban,” then across the Fremont Bridge and around Queen Anne on Westlake, pointing in the general direction of the “Sleepless in Seattle” house which can't be seen whizzing by on the road, and from there back to the ferry.
Thursday we hit Granny's one last time. Sonya loves Granny's. Then I took Sonya to the ferry and wished her a good trip home on the train.
It was fun being a tourist with Sonya for a few days. Fun, and exhausting. Now I'm ready to go back to unpacking moving boxes. We'll get moved in again some day. One box at a time, friends, one box at a time, with occasional breaks for tourism.

Health Care Reform: Now Is a Good Time

President Obama is trying to pass health care reform. To many of us, this seems like a no-brainer. Why doesn't America take care of its people at least as well as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Seychelles, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and The United Kingdom?
People in this country are suffering medically, financially, and emotionally, because we do not as a nation take care of our own. I have heard people screaming about socialism because national health care is being proposed. I beg to differ.
Socialism, like Christianity, is an ideal to which many have aspired but few have put into practice. I believe that people are not afraid of socialism. They don't have the first idea what socialism is. They are afraid of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is an idea that has been put into practice many times, frequently by people who have claimed to be socialists, and we have seen that we do not like it.
Threatening people with socialism is an old bleat, and for some reason, to some people, still an effective one. People toss the word “socialism” around like PETA members throw red paint.
Speaking of red, when did Republicans become red? To an older person like me, who remembers when being accused of being red was a vile slander that could ruin a person's business and life, this whole “red is conservative” thing is confusing. However, I do feel a certain perverse joy in thinking of someone as one of them Republican pinkos.
But I digress.
I have heard people saying that if this socialized medicine scheme goes through we will not be able to choose our own doctors. This is an empty threat to me – we had to stop going to our doctor because my husband got health insurance at work and our doctor did not have a contract with that company. The doctor I go to now is a great doctor and the nurse practitioners in his office are great, and it is more than great to have health insurance, but it would have been nice to keep seeing the doctor with whom we had a history and whom we trusted.
If we were rich we could. We could buy health insurance from some one who contracted with our doctor, or we could pay medical expenses out of pocket. There are always options for the rich.
Are you rich? If the answer is “yes,” then, hey, no worries. For the rest of us – worries.
I wish President Obama well with health care reform. It's a long time coming. As a country we are heartless bastards about our poor, our hungry, our widows and orphans, our handicapped, our elderly, our veterans, our children. We pay great lip service to ideals of respecting and caring for the weak, the heroic, the young, and the indigent, but in fact we allow people to languish in poverty, to starve, go homeless, and die without giving them a thought.
See, it's like taking care of your teeth. Say you go through life expecting your teeth to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take care of themselves. You never brush, you never floss, you never go to the dentist. If you're lucky, your teeth survive. It is more likely that your teeth will go bad. You'll end up with a sick, stinky mouth and a few dingy, ugly teeth that can no longer do for you what teeth are supposed to do. The health of your entire body will suffer.
That's what I'm saying here. The country that does not take care of its own is not a healthy country, and has cultural bad breath.
Support health care reform. It's a no-brainer. Even if you don't care about yourself, you might have children or grand children you care about. Do it for them.
And now I feel an urge to brush my teeth.

Montana, Parts 1 and 2

Montana, Part 1

Greetings from Kalispell, Montana, where the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, and a local resident can give you much better directions than Mapquest. My cousins Nancy and Charlotte and I are on the road again.
Before setting out I made a list of what I needed, and yesterday morning the three of us were dancing around each other, packing (“I'm ready!”), and unpacking (“On second thought, I don't need this, or that, or those”), and doing last minute laundry. Then we packed the car (“We're ready!”) and then we re-packed it (“Wait – this will fit in here”).
Finally we were off, heading east on I-90, bound for adventure, old friends, and relatives unseen for forty years who live in Montana.
We stopped in Idaho to see the Old Mission east of Coeur d'Alene, “the oldest building in Idaho.” The oldest structure partially built by white people in the four-walls-and-a-roof style, that is. It is a Catholic Church that was built between 1850 and 1853 by the Coeur d'Alene Indians, and the Jesuits who came to settle there.
The Old Mission is a state park now, and the church building is almost empty inside, with a few sparse exhibits. The altar is there, as are two side altars with iconographic paintings and decorations. The hand-hewn floorboards are shiny with age and care, and behind the altar you can see the mud and straw construction that is covered by wood elsewhere. There are two pews up front facing the altar, and one kneeler. Engravings of the Stations of the Cross were hung around the walls of the church, as is customary in a Catholic church, and there were a few iconic paintings of saints.
One painting is of a happy priest or brother and a happy nun, with joyful saints fluttering above them in heaven and tormented souls capering in the flames of hell below. This one bothered me because I have problems with “scare the hell out of them” theology. Just my opinion.
At several places both inside the church and scattered around the property were stations where you could push a button and hear recordings of Coeur d'Alene storytellers. Charlotte and I listened to one tale of going up the mountain with grandmother to gather huckleberries and make jam over the campfire. Inside the church an endless loop played liturgical music and Indian prayer and song.
The Mission has a public restroom which turned out to be an outhouse. Clean, well constructed, well maintained, and if you sit down, a nice cooling updraft. The first, but not the last, of this type of facility encountered on the trip.
We kept going east from the Old Mission and stopped for a late lunch in St. Regis, Montana, where we discovered we had cell phone reception for the first time since leaving Coeur d'Alene, and like E.T., we called home. We also discovered in St. Regis that we had crossed into the Mountain Time zone. I had not thought about this happening. Suddenly it was one hour later. Cousin Charlotte assured me that I would get the hour back on the way home. Good. I'm getting older fast enough without dropping odd hours here and there. Another thing I did not know was that cellphones KNOW what time zone you're in and adjust their clocks to local time. This gave me a little bit of a heeby-jeeby.
From St. Regis we headed north up the Clark River, and then up the west side of Flathead Lake. Flathead Lake is a large body of water with miles of shoreline, waterfront cottages, little marinas filled with boats, and scenic roadside lookouts. To the east beyond the lake stand the Rocky Mountains.
At the north end of the lake sits the city of Kalispell, in a broad grassy valley with the Rockies on the east side and the Bitterroot Mountains on the west. I would say it is beautiful there, and it is, but beautiful seems such a worn-out, overused, and inadequate word to describe the area. This was a problem I would continue to have in Montana. Words can't describe the scope, the magnitude, the sheer drop-dead gorgeousness of the land. We went when the weather was sunny and fine and not too hot, so that may have enhanced the impression of heaven on earth.
We stayed in Kalispell for a couple of days, catching up with friends and family, and then we went to Glacier Park.
Next time: Glacier Park and heading home.

Montana, Part 2: Glacier Park*

When last seen, our intrepid spiritual smart aleck, amateur tourist, was in Kalispell, Montana. Here we pick up the narrative:
On Wednesday we loaded Charlotte's Camry and pulled out of Kalispell on Highway 2 headed for Glacier Park.
Kalispell is located in the grassy Flathead Valley. As you are driving on the valley floor heading east, the Rockies are in front of you, and there is an abrupt change from flat land to mountains. There is no gradual ascension into the mountains. There are no foothills. You just drive east and bam! Suddenly you're in the Rockies.
Soon Charlotte announced that we had just crossed the continental divide, and she pulled into a rest stop there so we could contemplate this fact. I've never crossed the continental divide in a car, only in trains and airplanes, so this was new for me, but I have to tell you, the divide itself is not more picturesque than the surrounding mountains. I took pictures anyway.
We drove on a while longer and suddenly we came around a turn and bam! There were the Great Plains! I was shocked. It only takes a couple of hours including a rest stop to drive through the Rockies? I was raised on tales of the brave pioneers crossing the Plains and then crossing the Rockies, and I always thought that the Rockies were a pretty substantial physical barrier, but if you cross on Highway 2 from Kalispell, not so much.
At East Glacier we headed north on Highway 49 to Highway 89. By this time we were on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. They were called Blackfeet because they wore dark moccasins, I learned. I always wondered about that.
We came to where a forest fire has left untold acres of dead burned trees on both sides of the road for miles. Finally we passed through the burn and came to unburned landscape and then to St. Mary, a little settlement from which you can enter Glacier Park on the Going to the Sun Road. We entered the Park, and headed west.
Now, many people over the years have raved to me about the beauty of Glacier Park, but now I've seen it and realize that there are no adjectives that adequately convey the beauty, the wonder, the awesomeness, the steepness and wetness and snowiness that is Glacier Park. So now I'm raving about the beauty of Glacier Park. You must go see it, and soon, because the glaciers are melting fast.
The Going to the Sun road was completed in 1932. It is just under 50 miles long, and is currently being re-built, one section a year for the next 8 to 10 years. It is two lanes of narrow, sometimes twisty, sometimes hair-raising road clinging to the sides of sharp peaks above deep valleys, taking you past the falls and vistas and flora, and the deer, bear, and bighorn sheep, and road construction, of the Park. If you're afraid to drive this road, there are park shuttle buses and antique red tour buses. It took us about three hours to wander from east to west.
The only wildlife we saw was one deer, a young buck grazing near a rest room near Lake MacDonald. We saw none of the grizzly bears which Park literature, rangers, and signs warn you about repeatedly.
We returned to Flathead Valley at the end of our day, and stopped for the night in Bigfork. The next morning we got up and went to Kehoe's Agate Shop, where we saw more gem and silver jewelry than you can imagine is possible, and where we also realized for the first time that Montana has no sales tax.
Then we had lunch at the Hot Diggity Dog hot dog stand in Bigfork, and headed for home, and the Pacific Time Zone, and at least one casino where Nancy won some money, as she always does. At the end of the trip we parted sadly, saying, “Next year, the Grand Canyon!”
I can hardly wait.
*Note: Officially it is Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park because it straddles the border with Canada.

Treasure: My Father's Letters

My mother passed on in 2001, and my brother and sister-in-law have had eight boxes of miscellaneous stuff stored in their garage since. The idea was that I would go down to New Mexico to sort through the boxes with my brother, but I never got around to it. They are moving house now, and are sending me boxes.
Yesterday I opened a box that contained all the letters my father wrote to my mother during World War II. My mother kept them meticulously, numbered in the order they arrived, with the date she received each one written on the envelope in her careful book keeper's handwriting. There are 247 letters.
In April, 1942, right after his thirtieth birthday, my dad enlisted in the Army in San Francisco. His first message, a postcard, has a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge on it. He wrote:
“Dear Nita: It's now 8:45 A.M. & we'll be leaving at 9:00. I guess we'll go thru town about noon. You'll address me as pvt. until further notice. Your private, John” The post card is canceled with a postmark that says: “San Francisco, Calif. Apr 27 5:30 PM 1942.” They must have been traveling by train. The main line does pass through Watsonville.
His second letter is dated May 1, 1942, from Camp Sutton, North Carolina. “Dear Nita: Well, here I am in camp, and is it a dirty dusty hole. We had a good trip across the continent...We came in Pullmans, three in a section. I was lucky to get a pair of brothers as partners and they wanted to sleep in the lower together. So I had the upper all to myself all the way.
“This outfit seems to be a swell bunch of guys, but they're having a little trouble getting used to the army, so you hear quite a bit of grousing. I really don't know what to write you as I haven't seen much of this deal yet. But, anyhow, maybe I'll have more to tell. Until then, All my Love, John”
On May 2, he writes: “Dearest Nita: I just came in from my first day of drill, & what a mess...My writing is kind of shaky but we have no desks & I have to write in my lap. This camp wasn't even here a month ago & it shows it. All the comforts of hell.”
Reading that one I pictured my father writing on this piece of paper in his lap. I've done a little lap writing in my time, and am amazed at how that image made me feel connected to him as I held in my hand the letter he wrote in his lap in May, 1942.
He says he doesn't know how long he'll be at Camp Sutton or where he'll go after. “They don't tell us anything and when they do, they change it.” He says they are spending a lot of time making sidewalks with gravel, using large rocks for borders. In letter #3 he writes, “We live six in a tent, and I happened to get a swell bunch. They're all common working scrubs, like me. There are quite a few fancy pants city guys in this outfit, but I steered clear of them.”
On May 12 he wrote two letters. The first one begins: “My Dear Wife: I got three letters today. They were all very nice. You mentioned hearing Kate Smith singing 'Rose of No Man's Land.' I was listening to her at the same time I guess, from the Charlotte station. They must be on the same network...I was on Regimental guard duty along with about 40 other men from H.Q. Co. from 1 P.M. yesterday to 1 P.M. today...I volunteer on almost everything once, just to learn the ropes. But I haven't had any K.P. or extra duty, on acct. of I'm too good-? Some change. I volunteered in this mess tho, so I have no one to blame, so I might as well do it right.”
Postmarked the same day is a second letter: “Dear Nita: I just wrote you a letter, but I forgot to ask for a few things I should have. I'd like to have my slippers. All of my medium weight dress socks like I wore away. Maybe you'd better send all but the lightest ones including which work socks are good, then I can throw away what I don't want. Also I want the soap box out of that other kit. That's about all I can think of. So goodbye again. All my Love, John. P.S. G.I. Socks are strictly N.G. Love, John”
That's a sampling of letters 1 through 6. They give me a look at my father and a first hand report on what it was like for him during the war. I'm grateful that my mother kept these letters, these treasures. Stay tuned for more!