Category Archives: Health: Mental and Physical

Having endured an anxiety racked week or so, I finally got in yesterday to have my carotids checked out.  Heaven forefend, but I even got in exactly when I was scheduled.  I was escorted by a woman, perhaps a few years younger than myself, back to a room with the sonogram equipment.  I told her right off that I didn’t like medical stuff much and was pretty anxious, a fact confirmed by my blood pressure that was 150 over something or other (well over the 140 considered the cut off for the “normal” range).

I had to lie down of course but in my own clothes which I like and Sharon (I think that was her name) went to work rubbing this device here and there along the inside—by which I mean the front along the adam’s apple–of my neck and up to the hinge of the jaw bone.  Like totally minimally invasive.  No pain at all, not even your fabled “mild discomfort.”

I let her know right off my carotid artery history and about my smoking habit and how much I had tried to stop it, and how guilty I felt about it, and all the crap that has gone down this last year or so, and how I am depressed, and pretty much—I apologized—a human train wreck.  To which she said there are more people like you running around that you might expect, or something to that effect.  Oh, I said, I knew—there’s lots of human train wrecks running around these days.

Turns out she is Catholic and up to her neck in guilt herself and raised a daughter who appears to be in the running for sainthood what with all the time she is putting in with crazy children and methadone addicts to get in her 3000 hours for an MFCC.

Anyway, she wasn’t about to make me wait for the doctor’s report (the doctor’s report would have probably been her report in any case), so I now know that my carotids have been variously described as “great,” “very good,” and “good.”  I will average it out and say that overall my carotids appear to be very good.  Wide open really with some plaque but of the hard, calcified and not likely to break off variety.

When I got back to the condo, I took my blood pressure and it was back to its usual range 128 over something or other.

Sharon showed me a picture that looked a like this one—at the spot where the carotid splits and where plaque tends to collect.

 I knew Walter A. Davis way back when.  He is now professor emeritus at Ohio State and continues in retirement to write books.  I wish I had his energy.  He published recently: Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11.  I started poking about the book; I don’t read books anymore.  I poke about and came across the following passage while thinking about zombies:

Belief in the self is the American ideology. Next to surplus value the self is our most important product: the thing we constantly proclaim and reassure ourselves about in order to cover over the emptiness of that concept and the void it conceals. Nothing is shallower than the inwardness of the average American, a subjectivity composed of little but the incessant mimicking of "signs" of success and affects that through ceaseless happy talk confer no more than a phantom substantiality. Beneath that chatter the truth of its inner condition continues to work on the American psyche: the death of affect, the deepening of psychic numbing, and a collective flight from anything that causes the least anxiety.

A zombie is a zombie because his or her psyche or subjectivity has been hollowed out.  He has one thing on his mind; and he isn’t going to see a shrink about it.  Maybe that’s why they like to eat brains.  They are trying to make up symbolically for their lack of interiority.

            I can’t quite tell what the zombies in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead stand for.  Us, of course.  But us as what?  Since Romero had the nerve clear back in 1968 to make the protagonist of his movie a black man—a sane and decisive black man to boot; compared to which the whites in the movie are raving selfish lunatics—one thinks perhaps that the zombies represent the unthinking mob and its manifest prejudices and general idiocy.

             But in The Dawn of the Dead (1978, I think), Romero’s second and equally classic zombie flick, it’s pretty clear what the living dead stand for.  Consumers.  The living characters—to get clear for a while of the pressures of moving around in a completely zombified universe—hole up in a deserted mall.  It has everything they could possibly want, including mall music.  And one thing they don’t want.  Zombies… They are there milling about in the parking lot, pounding at the doors, drawn to the mall as if by an instinctual force.  So what if they can’t buy anything—they just want to be in that mall.

Consumer as zombie.  Were I in an arguing mood or had the strength for it, I would argue that nothing has contributed more to the disembodiment of subjectivity than the consumer society.  We carry our hearts on our sleeves now in the form of advertisement for Nike.  

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Above, please find a mall zombie from Dawn of the Dead. 

I suppose it was the reasonable thing to do.

After all I am 61 years old, and I have a very bad forty year old habit.  Smoking seems at least partially responsible for every ailment known to man.  And WB, my deceased father, had in his mid seventies his carotid arteries reamed out.  He was getting light headed or something, I forget.  But they checked him and found both of his carotids were pretty clogged up, and because he had a very good heart and low blood pressure, they experimented on him a bit with a then relatively new procedure that involved going into the arteries with a miniature rotor router that had some sort of vacuum attached to keep the particles that broke off from going direct to his brain.

And then of course my brother Dan has a stroke and they find one of his carotids is 100 percent clogged and the other is 50%.

I sort of hem and haw about it.  I mean what good will it do if I do find out something.  But finally I make an appointment with my primary care person and go in and tell her what’s happened and that I would like her to authorize a sonogram of both of my carotids.  She says, like no way, because everybody in the world has family with heart problems, and if they started giving sonograms to everybody that had family heart problems they would go bankrupt.

So I say how much would it cost if I paid for it, and she says thousands and then starts to talking about these places a person can go to have some sort of scan and you pay out of your own pocket to have diverse body parts scanned.  And I ask her where the nearest place might be to go to get scanned because, now that I am in the mood, I plan to go get one of those things done that very day if possible.

But she must have been thinking about something.  Because she like points to that bed thing they have in every one of those little rooms and says lie on your back and I do and she listens to my carotids having me breathe in and out and says, Wait a minute, and goes out with my whole stack of medical documents, and is gone 5 minutes and comes back, and says, You got it.

She says she spoke with the internist on duty and, when he heard my history, he says like, “This guy needs to have his arteries checked out.”

Well, OK.  I guess that is good.  But now I am good and scared.  I mean why that complete and sudden about face?  I have to wait till June 5 to go in and have what they call a “carotid duplex” sonogram which is a fancy way of saying, Do both of them.

I don’t want to go.  But I guess I will because it’s the reasonable thing to do.  I guess.

I am nearly putrid with anxiety.

Carol’s mom gave us a car since she can’t drive anymore.  Carol’s still driving the green Honda, and now I drive the new car, a Toyota because Carol drives a lot more than I and the Honda gets better mileage than the Toyota.  It’s a 2000 Sadona.  It’s not new but the closet thing to as new car I have ever driven since it only had 12000 miles on it.  Because it’s new and the paint isn’t all wretched and there aren’t cigarette burns all over the interior I have decided I have to keep the thing looking new.  I don’t like the pressure really.  I joked that if anybody wanted a ride in my old Volvo they had to get shots first because there was no telling what was living in it.  But I felt really comfortable in it and there was absolutely no upkeep pressure involved.

So I have only had this car a few months but I have taken it to this car wash place three times already.  It’s just a half a mile or so away located behind what was once a non-franchise hamburger place.  You drive around it and there are these big stalls with a hose hanging down from the ceiling of each.  You have to make sure you have quarters because you need 10 of them to get the machine going.  The little dial where you put the quarters has all sorts of settings on it like wash, rinse, and light rinse, and soap, and mop, and even wax.  It’s pretty confusing, so usually I just wash with soap and rinse and that’s it.

I had thought about washing the car but then when I was driving back from working out, I drove right passed the place.  Then I remembered and turned a U in the middle of the block and went back and realized I had only 2 dollar bills and started cursing, but then I felt in my pocket and I had like 10 quarters.  I don’t know how that happened.  So I pulled the car into the stall, and started pushing quarters into the machine.  But the machine would not take the quarter.  I flicked the quarter with my finger but it wouldn’t go in. Damn.  I thought maybe that particular machine was broken or maybe full up with quarters.

So I pulled out of that stall and drove into the one next to it, and started putting quarters into that machine and it wouldn’t take the quarter either.  Damn!  Then I looked at the machine and realized I was trying to put the quarters in the wrong slot.  The right slot was at the top of the machine.  You put the quarter in that and gravity pulls it down, but I was trying to put quarters into the bottom slot made for bent quarters to come out.  Damn!  I like just sort of scratched my head and thought maybe I was too tired to be out and about.  How the hell did I get the top and bottom slot confused?

Maybe I am getting aphasia like my brother Dan.  He had a stroke though.  As far as I know I haven’t had one of those.  But my powers of identification are excessive.  I was returning from one of those damn conferences once and watched the Rain Man on the flight, and by the time we landed I was damn certain I was autistic.

It was more of an adventure than I wanted it to be but I managed to wash the damn car without further mishap.

In the Ego and the Id, Freud—if memory serves and it serves poorly lately—says in effect that the sense organ of the Ego is the skin.  Or to say the Ego is rooted in weight of the body; and the skin might be considered the parameters, all over, of the body—the boundaries as it were.  Of course, the Ego is not precisely the skin; rather the function of the Ego is to guard those parameters and boundaries, to make sure they are not inflicted with pain and, contra wise, to make sure they are generally as comfortable as possible (Pleasure).

So the Ego is the reality tester; reality being defined, in this instance, as more or less physicality.  Or the fact, as it was of physicality.  Descartes, when he concludes cogito ergo sum, enters into a world of utter unreality and shows himself totally unfit for survival.  Since he cannot be certain about any of the “knowledge” derived from the senses, he concludes that world of the senses is somehow unreal.  Descartes was no doubt a very bright man, but under this aspect, the aspect of the Ego, he is a complete idiot.

But what is reality testing.  In the most brute sense, it might mean sticking your hand in a fire to find it hurts, or stubbing your toe and concluding you would rather not do that again.  With enough instances of this kind one concludes that one does not have to hit one’s head with a hammer to know it would hurt.  This seems to me a fairly solid inference based on evidence as I know it.  

But once we step into the realm of inferences we have left the immediacy of the skin behind.  The ego’s function is more complicated than just kicking things.  If one is standing in line and feels for example, the sudden urge to pinch the behind of the woman standing in front of one, the Ego must ask what would happen if one did that, and if the Ego concludes that damage might be done to one’s own skin, it says “stop.”  The function of the Ego is completely non or unmoral.  It doesn’t stop because it is wrong to pinch the behind of female strangers, but because damage might befall one.

I am thinking about his issue because of that guy, Tim, at the club whom I previously mentioned, as the person engaged in an Ahab like conflict with Moby Gopher.  I was sitting in the steam room with Tim and a guy came in and asked Tim how hot the pool was that day, and Tim said it was 81 degrees and the Jacuzzi was 102 degrees and he knew that for a fact because he had used his own thermometer. So here is a guy that doesn’t believe the people who work at the club when they tell him that the pool is so and so degrees.  More than that, for some reason, he doesn’t even trust the thermometers the club uses and to which he has ready access.  Instead he brings his own thermometer. For some reason he trusts that thermometer; possibly because it’s his own.

I am not sure I want to think about this anymore.  But Tim’s thermometer is a reality tester for sure and he uses it to detect the temperature of the water against his skin.  Not however because he fears the heat or cold of the water, but because he doesn’t trust the word or even the tools of his fellow humans.  Perhaps I don’t want to think about this anymore because doing so might mean coming better than I do already to understand the reality testing of the paranoid.

Or: the Ego gone Mad.

Phooey…I am still pooped out.  Three nights now of less than satisfactory sleep.  And my standard for a satisfactory night’s sleep is pretty low.  I was insomniac for years.  I stopped being insomniac, in an extreme way, when I went on meds.  When I was first prescribed Prozac, I don’t know how many years ago, I was at first also given Xanax for anxiety.  That stuff was crap.  So I got myself switched to clonazepam.

.25 milligrams in the morning, and .50 milligrams at night.  If I am able to get to sleep at all, that’s the stuff that does it.  Over the years I managed to cut back by .25 because the stuff is an energy drainer, but even cutting back that .25 was rough.  Withdrawal produced some really, really dark feelings.  Every time I mention cutting back more my psychiatrist gets edgy and starts talking about how I must cut back VERY SLOWLY.  Now it seems they have a .25 tab that is water soluble.  So you can put the tab in a glass of water and drink a little less of the stuff over time.

The stuff is prescribed for epilepsy, anxiety, panic attacks and the notorious restless leg syndrome.  Somehow it makes the brain “less active,” whatever the hell that means.  But I guess I know because before I started taking the stuff I would just toss and turn hour after hour chewing on some thought.  

I have had only three or four true blue anxiety attacks.  Once I was eating and for some reason, my arm starting shaking and I couldn’t get the food to my mouth, and then I felt I couldn’t breathe.  I went outside to walk around to calm myself, but that didn’t work.  I thought I was having a heart attack.  But then my reading in psychology came to my rescue and I concluded that I was having an anxiety attack, so I went back inside and took an extra tab of clonazepam and the attack went away in about half an hour—probably placebo effect plus the drug kicking in.

Damn, I depress myself just by thinking about myself.

Now critics of the consumer society and the drug industry say we take these meds just to take care of ordinary human unhappiness.  The implication is that we have lost our souls and want a happy pill for everything, like Huxley’s “soma,” or something.  Well, I don’t think not being able to sleep well for years upon years or going around thinking you are having a heart attack when you aren’t is ordinary human unhappiness.  And if it is, I think more allowances—in the form of extended vacations, reduced work days, more and more personal days, as well as institutionalized and socially accepted nap time on the job—ought to be made for those suffering from ordinary human unhappiness.

Continue reading Morpheus→

I am foggy in the head.

It got up to 85 degrees here out of nowhere and I wasn’t ready for it.  It was 81 degrees at about 10 pm.  I thought it would go down, but I didn’t open the windows full blast and remove all sheets and blankets till about 1 am.  So I didn’t sleep long or well.

Santa Barbara has a really, really mild climate.  It was a bit colder than usual this winter, but we turned the heat on only a couple of times.  During the summer it does get up to the 80s a number of times, but very, very rarely into the 90’s and I only remember one time, years ago, that it got over a 100.  So as I said, it’s really, really mild; and even more so where we are located, about a mile from the Pacific.  Having the ocean so close moderates the temperature even more.

The heat came with some winds off the ocean and so outside right now it’s bright and really, really clear.  The winds aggravated my sinuses though and I have this sort of ring of ache around both eyeballs.

While I am talking about eyeballs, maybe I should indicate too that I am very, very regular.  Daily regular.  If I miss a day, I get really upset and start to feel all stuffed up.  I am probably thinking about this because one time I visited a friend back in the 70’s who lived in Tucson, Arizona.  It was really, really hot there and I guess I got dehydrated or something, and was unable to relieve myself for a good four days.  I felt as if I was seriously ill and was going to die.

Damn, that was a while ago.  I remember now that we went to see Jaws; it had just come out.  So that was 1975.  So that episode of constipation must have really left its mark for me to remember it all this time.  Though, actually, that I would remember is probably also tied to my anal sense of humor.  Whatever that means? 

Damn, I just remembered a time back in college in the 60’s.  I can see it clear as day.  I was walking along and asked the guy—that I would see here and there—how he was and he said not good because he had not crapped in two weeks.  I started laughing because I couldn’t believe it.  That was sort of rude of me because I saw the guy was actually in pain.  He wasn’t kidding me.  He really hadn’t shat in two weeks.  I didn’t know something like that was even possible.  I still don’t know if such a think is possible but I am pretty sure the guy was not lying to me.  I left him with a new found respect.

McFadden—the guy’s name was McFadden.  I am pretty sure.  Where the hell did that come from.  He was a good guy.  He’s now a Professor of Chemistry at Boston College specializing in kinetics and dynamics of free radical and electron attachment reactions in the gas phase.  Cool. 

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That’s a pic of McFadden from the BC site.  He still looks like a good guy.  Wish I had that hair. 

That’s Penny there.  You can hardly see her because the picture is bad and that light thing is in front of her face and she is wearing her dental hygienist mask.  Penny has been cleaning my teeth for maybe 15 years and I don’t know her last name.  Probably I do know her last name, but I have forgotten it, so it works out pretty much the same.  Before Penny cleaned my teeth Marsha Cecil did.  I remember her name only because she lived in the apartment next to ours when Carol and I lived in downtown SB on Bath Street.

 Marsha had a husband name David and a daughter named Mary.  Marsha talked openly about her deep love for Mel Gibson.  Later they moved up north, I think, maybe to where David’s father ran a successful rice farm.  California is a major rice producer.

 As soon as I got dental insurance, the dentists starting insisting that I came in not twice a year, as is more or less customary, to have teeth cleaned, but three times I year because I had developed back then in my early to mid forties “gingivitis” or gum disease.  I expect a 100 years ago anybody who managed to live to 40 had gingivitis, chronic inflammation of the gums.  That’s why people back then when they reach 60 frequently had few, if any teeth; gingivitis, if not controlled, can cause your teeth to fall out.  So going to have my teeth cleaned 3 times a year suggests I am making a long term investment in my teeth.  I hope I die smiling so people will appreciate my high quality teeth and my responsible investment in them.

 I floss regularly and have one of those electric tooth brushes.  They really do a better job than the manual ones.

 Having my teeth cleaned always tires me out.

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 Brother Dan writes:

Puccini! 

That is the name of our dog. 

My brother is not a lover of opera, so I expect the name Puccini had more to do with a penchant for word play as in, “Where is that pooch?  Pooch!  Pooch! Puccini!”  –Like that, I mean.

Continue reading Pucinni→

Aunt Sue tries to be a good Aunt.  By this time she has long left the migrant worker’s shack by the freeway and moved up to L.A. and married this Italian guy who worked cutting meat in a meat packing plant.  And they are both by this time somewhat along in years and he is Catholic and already has a bunch of kids and his wife had died, so he married Aunt Sue.  Or she married him because she always wanted a family, but mostly they were older in high school or already out of the house and they mostly resented her.  But she was a good cook and an economical housewife and pretty much filled the bill wife-wise.

When I am in college a couple of months, she actually shows up at the dorm and says she has come to get my dirty clothes to wash them for me.  I am amazed but she is right; it’s been a couple of months and I have failed to wash my clothes.  So I go with her with the clothes and visit while she washes the clothes.  I don’t know what we talked about since she couldn’t stand my mother and so didn’t say a word about her, though she did praise my father to high heavens, lord knows what for, unless it was having the fortitude to live with my mother.

One time I don’t know when it was exactly, I go to her place for a visit and my good buddy, Richard, is with me.  He is a real smart guy who started out pre-med and then joined the horde of ex-pre-meds and became an English major.  He grew up in Lubbock TX where Buddy Holly came from and so we had the southern thing going, plus he was pretty much working class, his father having returned from the war not the same and ended up doing all sorts of jobs.  I think maybe he drank too and he died while we were in college.

So Aunt Sue says she is going to fix some dinner for us, and she treats us like royalty and takes us out to the back patio, and offers us beer, and after a while, she brings out the plates that are like completely covered with a steak.  The plate is like hardly visible beneath that steak, and it’s called a t-bone steak because it has a bone shaped like a T in it and  I do believe it was the biggest piece of meat on one plate I had seen to that date.  I remember thinking, damn! But this is a big piece of meat. 

I guess that’s why I remember it.  Nobody had ever given me a piece of meat that size before.  I ate all of it.  And with it came a dinky salad and a bowl of jello.  Aunt Sue had this thing about jello; she served it at every dinner.  Somewhere on the table there would be some manner of jello.  And every time, she served it she would say like clock work that jello would help your blood to clot faster should you cut yourself. I don’t know where she got that from, but it was a bit spooky because you got the feeling she was sitting around waiting for one of her family to cut themselves real bad and bleed out before their blood could clot.