February 2005 Archives

Another repeat performance with an Auden crib for title: "Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden." Had most of this blog done, forgot to hit Save before I looked up another blogging entry, and, whoops, I lost it. But I'm not going to have a third try. Beginning a second time, my theory of options was to combat student laziness for simplistic true-false living, but I realized it was also my impetuous impatience with comfie conformity. (A bit of alliteration there rubbed off from Auden and a recent re-reading of Beowulf, that literary device one of the most notable of our ancient Anglo-Saxon literary heritage.) So my easily bored optionism is why I've bogged down in nine books, wanting to read at least three others, and so spend too much time with computer games because it's hard slogging through a surfeit. But optionism also has practical applications as when I recently discovered I preferred cheddar and Swiss on my homemade pizzas, the cheeses I had on hand when I didn't want to supermarket on an ugly day, and when I also discovered I could tweak [Great] Aunt Myrtle's "Bread" recipe to make wheat instead of white. I had asked her for the recipe when I was teaching at WIU in Macomb, Illinois, and I'll let you detect why my first effort was a messy disaster. Aunt Myrtle was the youngest of the Peters quintet, i.e., Grandma K.'s sister, briefly married to a Wefso from Stuart and quickly divorced (he remarried), leading a long spinsterish life as an elementary school teacher addicted to history (her birthday present to me once was a biography of Alexander Hamilton, one of her heroes), spending most of that life in Randolph where her only brother, Uncle Glenn, was the town doctor for decades and looked after her leukemia. She moved to Center, where Mom could give her her shots, for which she baked us excellent bread. Aunt After a period at a Pierce rest home, at 77 Myrtle died in a Norfolk Hospital in 1968 from a growing tumor that looked as if a giant alien basketball had lodged abdominally in her harsh bony thinness. She is buried on the south border of the Randolph Protestant cemetery, the one closest to Highway 20 northeast of the town; her brother, Glenn, and his wife, the parents, Ed and Mary Peters, are next to one another in the north central area in the Randolph Catholic cemetery farther north. Here is what her clear Palmer penmanship wrote on the recipe card:

Bread
2 cups milk scalded
1 T salt
3 heaping T brown sugar
1 rounded T crisco
Cool with 2 cups cold water
2 package[s] red star yeast dissolved in 1/2 cup water and 1 t sugar
Use enough flour to dandle it and knead
Let rise in warm place, work down and let rise again
Put in greased pan let rise and bake 1 hr in 350 degrees oven.

The scalded milk and brown sugar with the three risings must be the secret (love that old-fashioned "dandle") for my three fine loaves (she usually baked two loaves). You have spotted, I'm sure, why I had to make two or three trips back to my Macomb Krogers and quiz my familiar female checker and why Aunt Myrtle was surprised by my later testy question. I also learned the hard way to grease my hands to work with, in this instance, first slop and then finally dough. With 4 1/2 cups of liquid, "enough flour to dandle" means 10-11 cups never itemized, while I had started naively with 4 and worked up, between trips for more flour. My recent optional innovation was simply to use wheat flour and some wheat germ, too, for half the amount, with an excellent result so that I don't have to stay with white bread.

Back to options: as I've mentioned, I have a bad habit of juggling several books to keep eclectic interests electric and in the last month and a half waded into nine: Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones; Gary Gach's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Buddhism, Second Edition; James C. Davis' The Human Story: Our History, from the Stone Age to Today; Seamus Heaney's Beowulf: A New Verse Translation; Henning Mankell's Sidetracked; Robert Tewdwr Moss' Cleopatra's Wedding Present: Travels Through Syria; Bernd Heinrich's Mind of the Raven; Archaeology Magazine's Secrets of the Bible; and Jack Turner's Spice: The History of a Temptation, while I was buying still more, anxious to get on to the two latest Mankell mysteries, with a new Ystad detective and then with Kurt Wallander and his daughter pairing up, and Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Suceed (having loved his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, which should be a required high school-college text). But when I overload my circuits, I tend to watch too much television and play computer games compulsively, while I also have magazines and newspapers additionally to read and, obviously, afternoons of baking/cooking.

Stuck sinking in my stinking swamp, I've finally shut off the TV for the most part and tried to limit my 21 Blitz, Collapse, Letter Linker, Jewel Quest, and other beat-the-machine games, futile human pride. At least I didn't miss the wondrous ending to That 70s Show last week when, after a disappointing effort to eat out at some place different from the usual diner, Kitty and Red end up yet again at Phillies, sitting glumly at the counter; she asks him to put his fedora back on, the camera pulls away, and they're part of Hopper's most famous painting, Nighthawks, as I said, wondrously. (I had forgotten the darkened facade even had the diner's name in the upper shadows.)

And, after cataloging some of the index items in the various songbooks I have from Mom and Grandma, in the "Vocal Ease" blog, for the same reason lists accumulate in almanacs, to memorialize cultural change as clocks tick on (as well as almanac records of what's biggest, smallest, fastest, slowest, the mostest, the leastest), I was naturally interested in the March Smithsonian Magazine's list for "Top TV Shows of 1970: 1. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In 2. Gunsmoke 3. Bonanza 4. Mayberry R.F.D. 5. Family Affair 6. Here's Lucy 7. The Red Skelton Hour 8. Marcus Welby, MD 9. Wonderful World of Disney 10. Doris Day Show." What hath Popular Culture wrought? Disney is still on, and some of the list rerun on such channels as TVLand. But House is a far cry from genial, fatherly Welby, ER decidedly grittier, HBO's Deadwood too vulgar for me (I liked Ian McShane much better in the much earlier Lovejoy and Dick Francis detective series), and I don't see anything on that list that could engender my shock at the NCIS episode, "Meat Puzzle," on February 8th, the viewer forced to look at length at three dismembered bodies chopped into bloody roast-sized segments, with skinned faces and fingertips to prevent easy identification, the vulgarly named morgue "meat puzzles." As DNA proves, these are the detective, prosecutor, and judge in an old case for which the best prosecution witness was pathologist Ducky (David McCallum--and Gibbs [Mark Harmon] gets to make an inside joke about Ducky's looking like Illia Kuryakin in his youth, alluding to McCallum's role in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series). This was even worse than some of the top CSI: Crime Scene Investigation TV show's grim gore and heightened by the hair-raising threat to Ducky's life, the desperate ending having him strapped down, his blood being drained away--"in four minutes"--in a mortuary by the vengeful psychotic mother-son murderers. But our only native criminal class, according to Mark Twain, Congress, wants to impose $500,000 fines against "indecent" broadcasting performances, still obsessed with Janet Jackson's little boob, these boobs apparently going to judge what is and what isn't "indecent" when the Federal Supreme Court has difficulty defining pornography. Twain also said, "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." I envision George A. Romero's filming zombie Joe McCarthy lurching up out of his grave, without pinko commies to blame this time, probably SpongeBob SquarePants and Will & Jack to be called before his ghoulish committee. And the gore goes on.

The Verdigre Eagle is one of the best small-town newspapers I've ever read so that my older sister saves theirs for me--her husband is a Verdigre graduate--even though I no longer know many in that community. When I was in high school, I knew most of the high schoolers in all the county towns and, because of my parents, many of the adults too, not hard in a rural county where family trees keep branching into each other. Anyway, one of my favorite columns is Glenna Pavlik's "Glancing Back," anniversary selections from "73 Years Ago" to "10 Years Ago." (Last year was a banner year for me in the "50 Years Ago" section, my high school graduation year, and she is good enough to mention Center periodically.) Other county newspapers have these but far fewer items, hit-and-run. Anyway, in the 30 December issue was an amusing "Dec. 10, 1931" sketch of the seasonal sport that I think should be more widely shared before I move back to some Center musings.

Basketball: Basketball is loosely described as an indoor sport and is distinguished from others by its costume, which begins late and leaves off early, and is therefore scarcely suited to dominoes, bridge, or ordinary shuffle board. The object of the game is to throw a ball into a basket, but since the basket--through some inexplicable oversight of the rule makers--has no bottom, the ball must be thrown into it repeatedly and there is really nothing final or conclusive about the game. Practically the entire attention of the players, officials, and spectators at a basketball game is devoted to fouls and penalties in atonement and repentance for them. If a player turns suddenly logical and tucks the ball under his arm or walks or runs away with it, it is a technical foul. If he seizes one of his opponents by the slack of the trousers--of where there is none to spare--it is a personal foul. If he hits him in the nose, bites his ear, kicks his shins, or breaks his ribs, it is a very personal foul and arouses to fever pitch the aesthetic sensibilities of the audience.

As some of my high school photos show, the trunks were like later hot pants, very tight and very brief in shiny material, with the undershirt above, now mutated into stylized T-shirts and baggy pants that give me the giggles because they're barely disguised culottes (women's very baggy divided pants with enough material to resemble skirts, the only way women could wear pants publicly without scandal for some years, weirdly enough). Such sports drollery was to hit a high point in My Favorite Year, 1954, in another sport with Andy Griffith's hugely successful, hilariously comic monologue, "What It Was Was Football" (as experienced by a naive hillbilly). I tried to find the text for it, but it's still selling and undoubtedly fiercely guarded by vendors and copyright. The other side of the record was his "Romeo and Juliet" satire, the 45 rpm now selling for $25 up.

Basketball was THE Center High sport. We were the orange-and-black Center Panthers. We had a baseball team, but the budget couldn't support another sport like football. In fact we had the choice between playing six-man football or building a new gymn; and, given that we played basketball--our superintendent-coach's obsession--from October to March, ending in intramural tournaments after the state hoopla, we built the gymn, which also gave us noisy heaters and air-conditioning, a hard tile floor, a spacious stage, shop classrooms above the large locker rooms that could double as locker rooms for tournaments, a kitchen for a hot-lunch program, and a new community center for, among other events, dances. We could finally, proudly host tournaments in a better gymn than the bigger towns then had. It was new enough for me to draw for our 1954 annual and now the only wrecked remnant of the town's schools left up on Schoolhouse Hill, the two-story schoolhouse and, much later, the one-room schoolhouse moved in for elementary grades where my sisters first went gone with the passing times. (Much earlier the place where we played anti-i-over, a long stable southwest of the big schoolhouse, was razed, though pupils still rode to school when I started, especially when the roads were bad. For that matter farmers still came to town with teams and wagons, and we're talking the 1940s.)

Up to that time, we were consigned to playing basketball in the old hall, a gutted two-story hotel on the north end of Main Street with wooden floors, some of the slats buckling, some dead spots, a small stage with no work space, two small subterranean low-ceilinged locker rooms with stairs down on each side of the stage to their dim dankness. The spectators sat in a single row of folding chairs around the perimeter and stood in the corners. This made for close encounters of a very sweaty kind, and we were used to nasty complaints from other towns, though Verdigre's school gymn was also very small with high walls (but balconies for the spectators) and Spencer's was impossible because of being a dance pavilion with large low crossing beams regularly spaced preventing any lobbed passes or long arced shots (there was even a trick to making free throws). A furnace beneath the stage between the locker rooms could heat the place, but nothing could cool our old hall except opening the doors. When we started practicing, approximately a month before other towns, we contended with wasps, and the ceiling and upper walls occasionally had honey stains.

This hall also served not only for dances but our movie theater on Saturday nights in the wintertime, where we held fund-raising carnivals and town meetings, where we hosted the large crowd from around the state for the church's 50th Anniversary celebration, where we gave our class plays, school programs, commencements. It was where I was the eighth-grade Scrooge in a very abbreviated Christmas Carol and the lead in the only freshman-sophomore class play ever.

Out back of that long gone important community center was a two-holer for extra use when the locker rooms were occupied or locked, that outdoor toilet the only one I ever got to tip over on Halloween and also my paradigm for Mom's attitude about behavior. Dad's having been the mayor for years--43 ultimately, I think--I was supposed to be a role model, or so Mom contended, a useful opposition to peer pressure (and an empty claim, no other kids caring what I did). Actually, I knew that his being mayor meant that he had to clean out the sewer periodically, to unclog the plugged culverts when the Coulee flooded through town after summer thunderstorms (before he got a levee built), to fix the streetlights and town well pump, to put up the meager Christmas lights, to flood our home-made skating rink, to see that the streets were plowed after big snows, or to otherwise serve as the town's handyman, which the position mostly called for, besides presiding at town council meetings and fielding neighbors' disputes. Mom controlled me thoroughly anyway, but this social claim afforded a polite additional weapon. A hallowed Halloween custom was tipping over the several wooden toilets out back of stores, Dad's shop, private residences, considered dutiful comic vandalism by the same ones who soaped all the business windows and flung toilet paper into trees. Now that I look back at the practice, I realize it's one of those ancient remnants of human carnival, like Mardi Gras, a social steam-letting that dates to early religious rites and the Lord of Misrule from Roman Saturnalia and medieval Christmas celebrations. But none of us knew anything that anthropological then, and I was scarcely allowed out to go trick-or-treating. In my junior or senior year, however, I actually persuaded Mom to let me just once tip over a toilet--promising to right it the next day, which made my request even sillier--specifying the old two-holer behind the hall. It sat not far from our trash pile, where--before the EPA and OSHA--we dumped and burned our garbage/trash, which creates interesting middens for archeologists hundreds and thousands of years later, so we were making history of sorts. (Middens were originally dunghills, but the word now applies to kitchen refuse heaps, packrat piles, and antiquated garbage dumps.) Well, in my rush after the dirty deed, I tripped over our trashpile and ran a stick into my wrist, leaving a permanent scar as just punishment, to which--as my sisters are mightily tired of hearing--Mom snapped, "Serves you right!" while treating the wound. As I said, my paradigm for her code of conduct.

January went as advertised, a new attraction to SAD this year being a hydrocele, varicocele, and infection, which had me back at the Med Center, UNMC, the hospital I trust the most after years of medical malpractice suits, where my PCP--primary care physician--is and most of my operations have occurred. Hospitals are peculiar places, and the advice to spend as little time in them as possible is very wise. Until I developed a herniated cervical disc, the only hospital I had ever been in was a converted house in Bloomfield when I was very young, where I had a tonsillectomy, got to drink through a glass straw (well, it was a big deal then!), and the first treat upon leaving was a strawberry sundae at the Corner Drug Store at the time when it had a soda fountain with dark marble counter tops and high stools and, sitting apart, little wrought-iron cafe tables and chairs, with the twisted-metal heart-shaped backs. It also had a sheet music rack and a magazine stand I later found handy, as well as gifts, all of which made it a typical-but-special pharmacy of its day.

My first notions that all might not go well in hospitals came from an RN I once dated, who had experienced sponges left inside after operations and other sorts of good-grief stories.

Anyway, I did not have good times at Nebraska Methodist, where I had my first experience with a surgeon, an arrogant breed to match lawyers, who later led me into a royal battle with the insurance company so that I cancelled my policy and went without medical insurance for four or five years until the State offered other insurance company options. I also had my first inept phlebotomist: I think about the seventh time she poked me trying to find a good vein, I threatened to poke her. And two special events. After being injected with radioactive dye, I was whisked downstairs for a fluroscopy (?), a X-ray technique that looks comparable to the Off Air TV of whirling dots, except that the X-ray has body shapes and glitters beautifully. I was fascinated with the gorgeous light show. But my older sister was nearly hysterical, knowing that process was for cancer patients and figuring the family wasn't being told the bad news. Oh, well. Wrong room, wrong patient. For the second event I also lost my roommate by catching staphylococcus, the common "staph" always hovering in hospital air, which meant isolation and everything being discarded--higher prices suddenly--while I scratched furiously, drawing blood, at the terrible itching in my ears and eyebrows, on my cheeks, which I insist I have to this day with fiercely itchy eyebrows and ears, though my PCP says it is merely psoriasis. Incidentally, from the very beginning I've trusted the nurses more than the doctors but also know they are woefully overworked.

My second time there wasn't as eventful, once I got past a sniffy nurse who was upset that I had intruded on the schedule with an emergency visit after my bailiff had insisted. (I had had to use nitroglycerine on the way to the bus and at work.) I was on the very verge of a heart attack from a 95% blockage, discovered a few seconds after I got on the treadmill. My surgeon this time was a young, cheerful rock music enthusiast who listened to that noise while operating and made a teaching movie of the angioplasty and placement of my first stent; I also enjoyed him because he had a cardiac clinic at the Creighton hospital where my older sister worked and because he'd been a Boy Scout who'd contended with rattlesnakes while camped at the Battle of the Rosebud site in Montana, which I'd been to in my pursuit of Western history with emphasis on Indian battles. The little film was engrossing going into my heart; he said it was the best one he'd ever done. The only mishap was later when the tube into my groin was pulled out and I bled all over the place.

My next two operations were at the Med Center, where I had terrific nurses, male and female, and no problems. The double fusion at the bottom of my cervical and top of my thoracic spine was to correct the problem in my left hand and arm, very like carpal tunnel. The failure window was 15%, and unfortunately I went through that window and still have a problem there, one of the reasons I ultimately retired. I had to watch the angioplasty for the placement of my other five stents--one site couldn't be stented because it's at a Y--in the midst of the best nursing team I've ever experienced, including a husband-wife whom I would've liked as personal friends. I didn't tell anyone but my bailiff and judge, went in on a Wednesday for a mere test, got the chemical version of the treadmill with an international group of doctors from six different countries observing--UNMC is a teaching hospital, after all--had surgery the next day, went home on Saturday, and returned to work on Monday morning.

But then UNMC entered into a partnership with Clarkson next door, which is where I had my knee replacement and such a repetition of my Methodist experience that once again I felt as if I were caught in George C. Scott's black comedy, Hospital. My surgeon and I didn't get along from the beginning, and he lied to me, as I later discovered, telling me I would be able to hike and bike just as well as ever after the drastic surgery, though I'd be limited to carrying 50 pounds. Yeah, right. Mom hadn't had a happy experience at Clarkson years earlier, but I had little choice, the HMO dictating as usual. Anyway, I started with a pretty, very sweet anesthesiologist who talked me into an epidural, but that was given by her boss, the rudest medical man I've ever heard as I was disappearing, swearing and sarcastically scathing to her (not me). The Sweet Young Thing had told me the epidural would wear off in 12-24 hours, when I would be given new pain medication. More than 12 but considerably less than 24 hours later, I came to in agony, but the night anesthesiologist refused to do anything until the 24 hours was up. That is, he refused until I was hanging from the bar over my bed yelling and the nurse, at her station just outside my door, after having called him twice earlier, told him flatly he had to do something. This episode put me in the cardiac unit with drastic atrial fibrillation, my heart boinging from 60 to something like 260 pulses. While the cardiologists were trying to get that quieted down, a tech took me down to be X-rayed and shut the surgical leg in the elevator doors. I did a lot of yelling in this fortnight. (I'm a very polite patient; I mean yelling of the Big-Ouch-Damn-That-Hurt kind.) The next day or so, a nurse insisted I get up and sit in the chair, which led to a serious catheter accident completely blocking my urethra, those complications taking up much time over the next week. I had really bad phlebotomists, including one I told never to come back and one who started to weep in frustration and finally went off to find a substitute. I was transferred to a room with a very spoiled Hispanic teenager who would order big meals and then would eat almost nothing because his family would bring him bags full at night and his grandmothers would cater to him at noon, besides which he got to dictate the room terms. I complained about the late-night food visits but otherwise used diplomacy so that we ended up OK, but it took a lot of Zen. Next, the therapist, not the doctors, discovered I had a blood clot below the surgical knee. When I was taken later for tests on that clot, one tech snapped my elastic hose into my groin; returning to the room, another tech accidentally collapsed the back of the wheel chair, luckily catching me. My favorite tech slipped and cracked the back of her skull on the tile floor. My orthopedic surgeon visited me once and just shook his head. After working on mere mobility, the physical therapist showed me how to go up and down stairs just before I left; she allowed me only two practices, the second grudgingly at my insistence. When my younger sister took me home, I forgot what little I hadn't learned well and fell down the front steps, catching myself on the banister to swing myself around enough not to fall on the new knee. (I was later to have an accident on my stairs which swelled my knee up the worst it ever was and cut short my physical therapy sessions within the allotted insurance time.)

My younger sister was to have an arthroscopy at another hospital. The surgeon went through the motions, and she was even assigned to therapy afterwards--until a lawyer friend's sister, a nurse on the operating team, told the lawyer the doctor had not actually operated but had thrown a tantrum about the operating equipment, hurling the tray of scalpels and whatever against the wall. My sister got a quiet settlement and a proper arthroscopy at the Med Center.

I actually didn't intend to write about medical problems, really personal affairs; but what happened was mordantly funny, as my title suggests. I am not whining. (All I did was yell when it was too excruciating.) I never sued anyone, though I felt like whacking a few. But I know where I'm not going back to. And I will say flatly that people should investigate when possible. They might begin by checking out medical malpractice suits. One surgeon, in our courtroom several times on sinus-surgery lawsuits, has four or five computer screens of malpractice suits he's glibly learned to beat. From him and others I would urge anyone to avoid sinus surgery, very iffy at best, which generally ends up involving more than one surgeon along the sequence to correct mistakes so that no one can be blamed when juries are asked to decide who did what. I would likewise recommend never having tubes in children's ears. One suit of ours involved a little boy's paralysis; but the medical records were all destroyed, the doctors deliberately stonewalled, staff were shunted off, so that the truth wasn't won until the plaintiff lawyers found many persistent years later an operating-room nurse who had been moved to Florida who was persuaded to tell what actually happened in the surgery. So I guess, when I say, "Take care," I really mean it.