10,000 Pundits

So I just found out that the “10,000 steps” thing is totally bogus.  And I am annoyed.

You probably know what I’m talking about.  That thing a few years ago where you were supposed to take 10,000 steps every day to stay at the peak of cardiovascular health.  It was on TV and in newspapers.  People debated the pros and cons.  There were whole-ass Web sites where people could log their number of steps.  I have heard, and still hear, both doctors and co-workers talking about the need to “get their steps in.”  And pedometers, even ridiculously expensive ones, still sell like wildfire. 

I assumed, as probably most of us did, that this came out of legitimate science.  That somebody did a bunch of studies and took the results to some exercise science geeks and they broke all the evidence down into the optimum number of minutes that a healthy human being should be physically active every day and translated that into walking, and it was maybe 9,883 steps or 10,211 steps or whatever, and they settled on 10,000 because it was a nice round number. 

Nope.  In fact:  A Japanese pedometer company wanted to sell pedometers in China.  They called their product Manpo-kei, which translates to “10,000 steps meter.”  Reason:  The character for 10,000, 万, sort of looks like a person walking.  Also, in Mandarin Chinese, the word for 10,000 means “a whole bunch” or “an awful lot.”  So it wasn’t exercise science.  It was just a marketing ploy.

Hey, walking is good for you.  Nobody’s arguing about that.  But the totality of the 10,000 steps thing, and how it came to dominate fitness chatter for quite some time (and still today), really disturbs me.  We all just decided this was true.  It became gospel.  And I gotta wonder what other accepted truths aren’t true.  Just in the last few days I’ve found out that, contrary to “what I’ve heard,” health insurance companies won’t really refuse to pay for a hospitalization if you sign out against medical advice.  That the European union won’t really require U.S. travelers to have a visa starting in 2024.  Oh, and that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s full name wasn’t really “John Jacob Oppenheimer Schmidt.”  Imagine my disappointment.

Which brings me to something else that’s really been bothering me lately.  (I’ll come back to the 10,000 steps thing.)  This question that should be taken out of the English language, and any other language it’s been translated into: “Why don't you just...”

I dunno about you, but I hear this one a lot.  Usually from someone who has no idea what’s actually going on with a person and who feels the need to state a (to them) screamingly obvious course of action that they think someone should have taken.  Of course, if it’s screamingly obvious and the person hasn’t done it, there’s a good reason, and the reason isn’t “this person is an idiot”.  More likely, the screamingly obvious course of action is impossible. 

Examples abound:

·       To a domestic violence victim--“Why don’t you just leave?” 

·       To a woman undergoing grueling fertility treatments--“Why don’t you just adopt?” 

·       To a fat person, for basically any reason but also no reason whatsoever--“Why don’t you just lose weight?” 

·       To a black gay trans person living in Texas --“Why don’t you just move?”

People, don’t ask this question.  For one thing, you’re going to feel pretty dumb when you hear the answer, because the answer’s just as screamingly obvious as whatever you think the person should be doing in the first place. 

·       The domestic violence victim--“Because he trashed my car and got me fired from my job, and he broke my cell phone, and he says if I try to leave he’ll kill me, and he has a gun, and the police do nothing.” 

·       The woman undergoing the fertility treatments--“Because I’ve had cancer (or a criminal history or I’m single or I’m gay) and no adoption agency will come anywhere near me.”

·       The fat person--“Gee willikers, I live in America in the 21^st century and, like, I never heard of losing weight, I never even knew that was an option, great golly goshes, it’s not like dieting my whole life led me to the weight I’m at now, or anything.”

·       The black gay trans person in Texas--“Sure, I’ll just quit my job, sell my house (if I can), find a new job in a strange place where I know no one, buy another house (if I can), find new doctors to treat my various medical conditions, qualify for new health insurance (if I can), take my kid out of school and away from his/her friends, pull my spouse away from his/her very good career, pack up everything I own, leave behind family members and friends of my own and maybe elderly parents who need care, and just haul ass across the country.  No problem.”

Look.  If someone wants to tell you the issues they’re dealing with, they’ll tell you.  If they don’t, they probably have reasons.  Such as, you’re the kind of person to dismiss someone else’s genuine experience of life by saying, “Why don’t you just…”.  Okay, great, you get to feel superior for five seconds.  Congratulations.  Meanwhile you’ve effectively shuttered any actual connection with that person, maybe forever.  Please don’t do this.  People have enough going on without being minimized, waved aside, and talked to like they’re stupid.

Speaking of being talked to like we’re stupid:  Wouldn’t it be nice if every single thing that comes out of the news media (which now includes scads of independent Web sites, YouTube and TikTok channels, blogs, podcasts, Facebook posts, tweets and tweet equivalents, and tons of other things that 24/7 churn out weird amalgams of wish, opinion and science fiction that really aren’t, and never will be, “news”) wouldn’t immediately be taken as gospel truth and splattered all over every TV screen by every pundit who ever lived?  It’s not really fair to expect people to be skeptical 24/7.  Sure, some of us are (I, for example, am famously skeptical) but why should we have to be?  Why are we being lied to, all the time, about everything, especially in the area of health, fitness and nutrition?  (Remember the four food groups?  Margarine is better for you than butter?  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day?)  

Media needs to do better.  Education needs to do better.  Science needs to do better, too.  Just because it involves weird hard-to-spell chemicals and body parts and physiological processes doesn’t mean it can’t be explained in a clear, understandable way.  Most people aren’t stupid.  (They may act like it sometimes, but that’s another blog post.)  We can grasp this stuff. We are more than sound bites. We can handle ambiguities. We can even handle maybes.  And we can accept that sometimes they don’t have an answer for us yet.  So stop force-feeding us pedometers.  

And stop asking, “Why don’t you just…”.  Or else I’ll tell you.  You have been warned.   

Your Vote, And Health Care, And Why It Matters.

Maybe I ought to update this thing more than once a year.  Like every week, or something.  I keep meaning to do that and then this thing called Life gets in the way.  Something about working two jobs, maintaining a household, keeping a couple of cats happy and, oh yeah, continuing to be sane.  It's not like it gets any easier as you get older, either,  Though, to an extent, as you age you quit giving a fuck about what everyone thinks, which does make it easier, kind of.

Anyway.  I overheard some ladies at the office talking about how expensive health care is.  One of them just had a baby and I think their pay out of pocket portion of a normal delivery was about $4,000.00, if I heard correctly.  The health insurance we have at work (I don't have it because I'm on Joan's insurance, and yes, it's more expensive that way but it's also MUCH BETTER) has a $6,000 deductible so they literally had to have that in hand in order to give birth.  Or, I guess if they didn't have it in hand, the hospital would bill them every month until the kid is five.  

The other lady had just had some emergency dental procedure (I had one myself not long ago) and dental insurance didn't pay for hardly any of it.  She was pretty surprised because she figured if we had dental insurance, there would just be a copay or something.  I explained that all dental insurance sucks.  Some sucks more than others, but none of it is very good.  And when you think about it, it's kind of weird that we even have dental insurance, because teeth are in your mouth, and your mouth is a part of your body, so why isn't it covered by health insurance?  And we pondered that, and then I told them something I don't think they knew.  I told them, "Well, you know what you can do to make it better, right?  Don't vote for Republicans anymore."  

I mean.  The looks.  The wide eyes.  The you've-got-to-be-kidding facial expressions.

People, you may think Republicans are good for the economy (they're not) but they are not good for health care.  You may think they're good for defense (they're not good for that either) but they're not good for health care.  They may be good for warm, fuzzy American values (if you're straight, white, rich, Christian and only care about yourself) but they are not good for health care. They are not good for the cost of health care, they are not good for your ability to access health care, and they are not good for your ability to pay for health care.  

Consider:

• The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which allowed the 210 million Americans with pre-existing conditions to buy health insurance without going through an employer for the first time, was passed without a single Republican vote.  Republicans have voted 70 times as of July 2017 to repeal it. There have also been at least 28 lawsuits to declare the ACA unconstitutional on the basis of "state sovereignty." 
• Most abortions are banned in 14 states with Republican-led legislatures.  No states with Democrat-led legislatures have abortion bans. 
• 41 states and the District of Columbia expanded Medicaid, the state health insurance program for people who can't afford health insurance.  10 states did not.  The 10 states are Wyoming, Kansas, Texas, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, all states with Republican-led legislatures.
• When President Biden announced that he would push for Medicare to negotiate drug prices with suppliers, therefore bringing down prices for 61 million elderly and disabled Americans, a group of Republican senators led the drive to stop him.
• The five most expensive states to get health care are South Dakota, Louisiana, West Virginia, Florida and Wyoming, all states with Republican-led legislatures.  The top 5 states where health care is the least expensive are Michigan, Washington, Nevada, Hawaii and New Mexico, all states with Democratic-led legislatures.
• The five states with the highest amount of medical debt per capita are Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Indiana and South Carolina, all states with Republican-led legislatures.  The five states with the lowest amount of medica debt per capita are Hawaii, Minnesota, California, Massachusetts and Connecticut, all states with Democratic-led legislatures

I could go on, but you get the idea.  If you're at all worried about the cost of healthcare, your ability to access healthcare, or how you or your family members are going to pay for healthcare, you might want to think long and seriously before you vote for a Republican again.  Or if you do, and you suddenly find that you can't get or pay for health care, you have been warned.  Happy 4th of July!

You Believe Me Now?

Happy Independence Day, and I hate to say I told you so.  But I told you so. 

As of this writing, eight states have banned abortion outright, though three of them have had their laws blocked by court decisions.  22 states are likely to ban all or most abortions by the end of the summer.  That's about half the country, in case you can't count.  

You believe me now?  

Ohio, United States:  A ten year old girl had to be evacuated to Indiana for an abortion. A TEN YEAR OLD.  Most ten year olds are riding in booster seats and weigh 55 pounds and she had to TRAVEL TO ANOTHER STATE FOR MEDICAL CARE.  

You believe me now?

Apparently everywhere, United States:  The Arthritis Foundation is reporting that female patients are having trouble getting their methotrexate prescriptions (one of the most commonly prescribed drugs for rheumatoid arthritis along with conditions such as lupus and certain cancers) because methotrexate is also an "abortifacient."  Now, methotrexate is never prescribed for routine abortions.  Ever.  It never happens.  Sometimes it is used in ectopic pregnancies, which are medical emergencies in which the embryo is not viable and will kill the mother if it is not removed.  Nonetheless, some doctors are refusing to prescribe methotrexate to women who "might" get pregnant.  I might add that if they're not similarly refusing to prescribe methotrexate for male patients, they're violating the ADA, but that's neither here nor there.  The point is, this wasn't an issue before June 24 and now it is.     

You believe me now?

Austin, Texas:  Legislators in several states are crafting model legislation to prevent pregnant women from traveling outside the state to get abortions elsewhere.  How they're going to enforce that has not been decided (though the notion of suing anyone who helps them is gaining prominence).  "Just because you jump across a state line doesn't mean your home state doesn't have jurisdiction, said Peter Breen, vice president and senior counsel for the Thomas More Society.  "It's not a free abortion card whey you drive across the state line."  Of course, this would violate the Interstate Commerce Clause and the human rights of half the species,  And, by the way, you can drive from Texas to Colorado, smoke all the pot you want, drive back and and not get arrested in Wichita Falls.  But, sure, your home state has jurisdiction.  Whatever. 

You believe me now?

There is also chatter about pulling pregnancy tests from drugstores, thereby forcing pregnant women to see a doctor to find out if she's pregnant and thereby creating a record so someone can follow up with her in nine months and make sure she produces a nice healthy cute white infant. 

You believe me now? 

For those of you who saw this coming, what the fuck were you doing?  For those of you who didn't, why the fuck didn't you listen? And for those of you who smugly thought the Supreme Court would never overturn Roe v Wade because, well, those new justices said they wouldn't, and they would never lie under oath, where the fuck have you been since 2016? 

Oh, and hey, Democratic leadership:  Are you planning to take any action any time soon?  Because there's a ten-year-old in Ohio who could use a few words with you.

Happy Independence Day.  Please understand if some of us don't feel like celebrating. 

Arthroscopic Knee Surgery (TM)

 It will be 2022 in just under 90 minutes, so I better type this fast or it won't count for 2021 and I have a rather pathetic number of blog posts for 2021.  I hope next year will be better.  Somehow I've gotten out of the habit of getting on the computer when I get home from work and actually writing some stuff.  I need to get back in that habit.  There's stuff that needs writing, after all, and it's not like anyone else is gonna do it for me.  

So, I had Arthroscopic Knee Surgery (TM) and it didn't go well.  Well, the surgery itself went well, but everything leading up to the surgery really didn't.  I was doing this thing solo because Joan can't drive, and although I'd arranged transport to and from the surgery center, I sort of didn't think I could ask any of my two intrepid drivers to actually go through this with me.  In retrospect, I certainly could have, but anyway, lesson learned and all that.  

A couple of days before the surgery I had to go down there for a Covid test.  Which is fine, I get the whole Covid thing, but there were no instructions about where one should go to get the Covid test.  I hobbled into the building with my cane, and there in the lobby, which is empty, is a sign that says, "Check in downstairs for outpatient surgery."  So downstairs I went, only to be sent back upstairs to the lobby and down the hall.  After I checked in there, they sent me back to the lobby for a third time and then up in the elevator to the third floor, where I finally got the damn test.  And I'm like, people, I'm hobbling around on a very unhappy leg, you know?  This is not a scenario that works very well for disabled folks, even temporarily disabled ones like me. I sent an email to the administrators. They never answered.  So things were off to a flying start.

On the day of the actual surgery, I got called in from the waiting room and the first thing they said was that they needed a urine test.  Now, this is particularly stupid because at this point, I don't have any urine. They told me not to eat or drink anything after midnight, and although I happen to know that you can drink clear liquids up to 2 hours before the procedure, I didn't want to argue about it so I just did what they said.  This meant I was dehydrated by 10:30 the following morning.  But anyway, I tried to produce said urine sample and ended up dropping the cup into the commode. 

They were not very happy about this.  They asked me if I could do it again.  I told them, uh, basically no.  I asked if they could do a blood test instead, since they had to run an IV for me anyway.  There was some whispered discussion among nurses and the verdict was, they would Find Out.  Then I asked why in hell they needed a urine test, anyway, and they said to make sure I wasn't pregnant.  

I am not pregnant.  I have never, at least as far as medical science knows, been pregnant.  In order for me to be pregnant, I would need to have been pregnant since 1992.  The Summer Olympics.  The vaulting finals. I told them this.  They did not care.  They said they tested eleven-year-olds and sixty-year-olds. If you got a period at all, they had to check for pregnancy. Hospital policy.  (TEXAS HEALTH PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL DALLAS, DALLAS, TEXAS.)  And I thought, who in the hell is still getting her period at sixty and how can I keep that from happening to me?  

Okay.  I get that it's hospital policy, even if it's an idiotic policy that assumes everyone with a womb is just that, a womb with legs.  I bet they don't test transgender men for pregnancy, even though some transgender men have uteruses.  I bet they don't cancel your surgery if you turn out to be pregnant, either, though I don't know; maybe they do.  But I don't take well to being treated like a womb with legs.  So next time I'm just going to lie.  "Nope, haven't had a period in years."  Seriously, do you want a relationship with a medical professional that starts out with being called a liar?  If they're going to call you a liar, you might as well actually be one.  

So, as I said, things were not going well.  I hadn't had my meds that morning, either, since they told me nothing to eat or drink after midnight.  Then I got to the pre-op area and they had left a gown out for me that was about five sizes too small.  People, my height and weight is in my medical records; you might not be able to extrapolate my exact size from that information, but is a plus size gown really out of the question?  So I had to call the nurse and send her back out to get a plus size gown, and while that was going on  I called Joan and told her I was ready to cancel the whole thing and just leave now and should I get an Uber or should I call Kellum, who was picking me up, or what.  

Joan, naturally, talked me down.  Something about the doctor probably didn't have a choice of what hospital surgery center he was allowed to operate at.  So even if I did reschedule, I'd have to do this all over again with the same gang of idiots. By this time the nurse was back with a gown that actually fit, so I began to think things might actually be okay.  Then the nurse tried to start my IV and stuck me five different times.  

(Eye roll)

Well, again, I was dehydrated. There's nothing to get veins to collapse like not having enough in them.  Fortunately, somebody somewhere had a moment of clarity and got me another nurse.  The second nurse was obviously trained in how to talk down a surgery patient who was about ready to climb out a window and disappear, because she spoke in very soothing tones and generally wasn't an idiot.  She also got my IV going on the first try.  Imagine that.  (Incidentally, it's a month later and I still have a huge yellow bruise from one of the first lady's needle sticks.) 

Once the IV got started, things got a lot better.  Drugs may have had something to do with that.  The next thing I knew, it was over and Kellum was there to pick me up.  The doc said everything had gone very well, except for my meniscus, which was totally shredded to the point where they had to basically remove the whole thing.  He wanted to know if I'd been in a car accident, or a bad fall, or something else that might have caused that kind of damage.  My answer was, basically, no.  I still have no idea how I came by this injury.  My best and only guess is uneven pavement, and that exists all over Dallas.  So, I may do fine with no meniscus.  Or I may really be in trouble.  We don't really know and won't for some weeks yet.  If I'm still in pain after everything heals up, the next step is a knee replacement.  Let's hope that doesn't happen any time soon because with the pandemic filling all the hospital rooms, I won't be able to get one for quite a while anyway.

I was packed off home and spent the next four days recovering.  I'm in physical therapy now and we get to play with lots of cool toys.  And I'm sore a lot, but it's easier to get on and off the couch without help.  Which is good.  I'm still hobbling around with a cane, but maybe by February I won't need it anymore.

So that's the story of my knee surgery.  Now it's almost 2022 and people are lighting fireworks and firing off guns and just all manner of strange things, so I'm going into the kitchen, like I do every year, and hide under the table until about five minutes after midnight.  Y'all be safe now.  If you're going out, mask up and drive sober, but have a wonderful time and a happy, peaceful 2022.  I'd say you've earned it.  Wouldn't you?  

Mini-Post: Surgery, After All

 When last we left this sordid saga, I had arthritis and couldn't have knee replacement surgery because of Covid.  Well, that's still true, but we have a new development.  The injection of cortisone didn't work, and my doc got concerned because it should have worked.  Cortisone shots nearly always work.  But this one didn't, and so I got stuck in an MRI to find out why it didn't work.

MRIs, by the way, are quite a thing.  They're this long tube, surrounded by a big machine, into which human beings go to get scanned.  While you're in there it sounds kind of like being on a train, or driving across a bridge.  Whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop.  Only louder.  So loud they put you in protective headphones and ask you what kind of music you like so you won't get upset while you're stuffed into this tube.  I told them I liked New Age music and they piped in Tracy Chapman, 10,000 Maniacs and Madonna.  Not exactly New Age music but it did make the whoop whoop whoop a little more tolerable.  I was in there for something like 45 minutes.  Every now and then someone interrupted Tracy Chapman to advise that this would take four minutes, or three minutes, or five minutes and fifty seconds.  Whoop whoop whoop.  Then a pause, then more Tracy Chapman, then another four minutes.  It was very surreal.  When it was over, it took two grown men to help me back to my feet.  

A few days later the results came back.  The doc came in and asked me how things were going.  Could I live with my knee the way it was, or was the pain interfering with my life?  After I stopped laughing I told him that, yes, unbelievable as it might sound, level 6 pain at all times except when suitably dosed with Tramadol was, as he put it, interfering with my life.  He said that besides the arthritis, I had a torn meniscus.  I pumped a fist at the ceiling and said, "Yes!  I knew it!"  Which, he said, was not the reaction he was expecting.  I said, "Look, I've been a paralegal for 20 years and I've seen a lot of torn meniscuses (menisci?) and I know they can be fixed."  Well, said the doc, not exactly fixed.  More like ameliorated.  They don't sew the meniscus back together or anything.  They just cut away the torn part, and the pain signals stop.  Or should stop.  Or stop most of the time. 

The meniscus, incidentally, is a tendon that connects the two long leg bones to each other beneath the patella.  I had a nifty drawing all ready to go here but it turned out to be copyrighted, so, never mind.  

Anyway, so, after some three months of limping around with a cane, I find out that I can have surgery after all.  I can get my knee fixed, or at least partially fixed.  Or at least the part that is causing me the most trouble at this exact moment can get fixed.  It's not even a particularly scary procedure.  My insurance covers it, it takes like 15 minutes and I don't have to stay overnight at the hospital, which means it's possible to do.  This is all great, right?  

Well, it is great, but of course I had to do research about all this.  (I am a paralegal, after all.)  And--well.  It seems that having meniscus surgery makes arthritis worse, faster.  Of course, some clinicians say that not fixing a torn meniscus also makes arthritis worse, faster.  Or maybe both are true.  It sort of depends on what article you read.  And some minor percentage of people who have the surgery don't feel any better afterward, and of course this tiny percentage drop dead from an allergic reaction to the anesthetic, and and and.  

Joan says I shouldn't worry.  She had a torn meniscus, got it fixed, and she was fine.  And her arthritis did get worse, but then she also got ten years older.  And getting it fixed was certainly preferable to not being able to walk, which was where we were.  Which is where I am.  And of course, if I keep limping around for another god knows how many months, I'll eventually hurt the left knee.  Tear that meniscus, too.  So there's really nothing to do but to have the surgery.  

In nineteen days, six hours and thirty minutes.  

Osteophytes, Cortisone and Untested Furniture Upholstery Gel

Some of you who have been hanging around these parts for a while are probably wondering why I haven't gone off in a long rant about the new Texas abortion law.  Well, there's a reason for that--actually two reasons.  The first reason is that I already said what I had to say, way back when the law was actually passed but before it went into effect.  The second reason is that, pretty much, people have done it for me.  The collective journalistic zeitgeist are losing their minds over this law, and to be honest, it's a little refreshing. If I wasn't so concerned about women dying and going to jail, I might even say hell-o!  Wake up call!    

I know some of y'all thought I was Chicken Little, talking about the sky falling, because I kept saying over and over again that access to abortion was going to disappear.  Well, I'm accepting lavish apologies at this site (see below).  As long as we had a fairly normal Supreme Court, I could sort of forgive you for thinking these laws would not stand, but people, we have not had a fairly normal Supreme Court for quite a while now and won't for many years to come.  This means the laws your legislatures pass matter, because some of them, however ridiculous, are going to get upheld.  This also means your state and local elections matter.  So you need to register and then vote, and you need to vote in all the elections, folks.  Not just the flashy ones every four years but the small ones, too, for City Council and school board and stuff like that. Read up on the issues, and then vote.  Not voting is no longer a luxury we can afford if we want to continue to have a democracy.  And those of you who think I'm tossing around hyperbole, that's also what you thought when I was talking about disappearing abortion access.  QED. Again, lavish apologies are being accepted below. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, yours truly woke up with a very sore knee about, oh, say, four weeks ago now.  Before the sore knee, there was about a month of this weird instability, where I felt like I was going to fall down at any moment.  I did not, in fact, ever actually fall down.  However, it didn't occur to me that this was anything out of the ordinary because I take a truckload of medication, people, and about half of them have as a side effect "causes dizziness."  This sense of instability wasn't really the same thing as dizziness, but hey, what do I know.  Maybe dizziness and instability are the same thing.

So I had a sore knee and it was hard to walk around, not to mention impossible to get on the treadmill.  Hell, even getting up and down the three stairs to my laundry room was difficult.  I let this go on for about a month, during which I developed a sore heel on the other foot and this weird nerve thing where it feels like somebody's stabbing me in the ring finger on my left hand.  The weird nerve thing remains unexplained, except to the effect that it's probably some weird nerve thing.  But I did finally go see my Regular Doc about this sore knee business.  

My Regular Doc is okay.  She's fine if you have a sore throat or a sinus infection or high blood pressure or whatever sorts of medical issues normal people have (I wouldn't know).  And as a starting point, again, she's fine.  She took a look at my leg and told me it was one of two things; costochondritis (an inflammation of the tissue behind the kneecap) or a torn meniscus (which usually requires surgery).  She suggested I get a brace with a nice big hole for the kneecap, the kind that prevents any lateral movement of the knee joint, and see if I felt better in two weeks.  So I left planning to do that, and then overnight the pain in my knee joint went from a 4 to about an 8. (More than you ever wanted to know about the one to ten pain scale can be found here.)  And I'm not a very patient person anyway, so I started calling around to orthopedic surgeons.  

I got lucky and got in for an appointment in less than a week.  This Ortho Doc is the doc of a friend of mine and also the colleague of the guy who saw Joan about knee surgery and told her he would do it whenever she was ready.  (She isn't ready yet.)  So I hobbled into the office, went for a bunch of X rays, and then spent what seemed like an inordinately long time waiting in one of those little exam rooms for the Ortho Doc to show up.  Which he did, finally.  He said:  "Well, this is no mystery. You have severe arthritis on your knee, probably on both of them, and it's causing the irritation which is causing you pain."  I was kind of surprised--not about the arthritis part; an X ray tech who shot my chest for possible pneumonia told me five years ago that I had arthritis in my shoulders, so I figure it's pretty much everywhere at this point.  No, I was surprised that the Ortho Doc didn't think anything was torn or otherwise out of place.  Honestly, it feels like somebody's operating a blowtorch under my knee.  How it could feel that way without something seriously torn is a mystery.  

So the Ortho Doc gave me a cortisone shot in my kneecap (ow) and said that it should help.  (It did; it brought the pain back down from an 8 to again about a 4.)  The next step, unfortunately, is a knee replacement.  What he hopes will happen is that the cortisone calms everything down for a while and I can maybe skate another year or so before I have to have my knee replaced.  That would be good, because it can't be done right now.  Why?  Well, because all the hospitals are filled up with people who have COVID (in fact, as of this morning, there were no ICU beds available anywhere in the entire state of Texas, or Oklahoma either).  A knee replacement requires an overnight hospital stay and that Just Can't Be Done at this time.  

I've heard a couple of horror stories about this.  There was a man here in Texas who died of a gallstone, of all the stupid things, because there wasn't a surgery team available anywhere to take it out and his gallbladder became infected and then necrotic while he waited.  Another man who was shot six times waited a week for surgery.  Parents whose kids need an ICU bed are basically being told that they're waiting for someone else's child to die.  And shrieking headlines announce in thirty-point type that our medical system is on the verge of collapse. 

Um.  No.  No, I would say that if we have so little care available that people are dying of gallstones,  our medical system has already collapsed.  

I mean, will I live?  Of course I will.  I can get by on cortisone shots for a while, and if that can't happen for whatever reason (sometimes they quit working) there's always the option of having my knee joint filled with untested furniture upholstery gel.  A friend of mine actually just had this done and we're all sort of waiting to see if she turns into an ottoman.  But look, this was entirely preventable.  All we needed was about 70% of the population to get the COVID vaccine back when it first became available.  That's it.  That's all.  Once you have that many people immunized, the virus drops way off because it doesn't have enough hosts to keep propagating.  Also, things like the Delta variant don't happen for the same reason.  So if you're one of the people who didn't get the shot yet, GO GET THE SHOT.  (Yes, I  know some people can't get the shot for various reasons.  I'm not talking to those people.)  If you're not going to do it for your sorry self, do it for the wife and kids of that guy who died of a gallstone.  And if you're not going to get the shot because Joe Biden told you to or because you want to own the libs or something, fuck you.  Very hard.  

Of Antimatter and Cell Phones

So in case you were wondering if this blog had gone the way of M. Night Shyamalan's last several movies, let me hasten to assure you it's not so.   Firstly, you probably missed this controversial post.  Secondly, I started a new job in June, and it's been quite the adjustment. It's hard to explain what I actually do, but I can tell you what it's like.  It's like being the navigator on the Starship Enterprise.  The captain tells me where we're going, and I calculate the heading to get us there so that we don't go right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, because that would end our little trip real quick, wouldn't it?  Then I run down to Engineering and make sure the engines are pointed the correct direction, and I talk to the cook to make sure we have enough provisions, and I see the fuel guy to make sure we have enough fuel, and I talk to the guys who line up the, I dunno, space fins, to make sure the space fins are lined up properly, and then I go back and tell the captain we're ready and then he or she says, "Engage."  Yeah.  That's what it's like.  So there have been some extra hours and there have been lots of meetings and for the most part when I come home from work, I fall asleep on the sofa in front of the re-imagined "Perry Mason." Don't ask me what's going on.  I have no idea.

In my spare moments, though, I've been thinking about the concept of duality. The guys down at the CERN high speed supercollider have apparently created antimatter, at least for a few nanoseconds.  Turns out if you have a particle, you can also have an anti-particle, which is like the polar opposite of a particle. No, I don't know what the polar opposite of a particle would look like, but it's pretty cool, no?  If the particle and the anti-particle run into each other, they either explode, releasing energy, or cease to exist, which should be impossible.  (Matter is neither created nor destroyed and all that.)  And while the implications for physics are positively mind-boggling, the implications for philosophy are even greater.  For example, is there an anti-Elvis?  (Yes.  Michael J. Fox is the anti-Elvis.)  Is there an anti-Trump? (Yes. Beto O'Rourke is the anti-Trump.)  How about an antiChrist?  Well, that one's been kicked around a lot over the millenia, but I'm of the opinion that if there's a God, the physical manifestation of all things good, there must also be a Devil, the physical manifestation of all things bad.  Good thing I don't believe in either one, because that'd be pretty scary.

All of this leads to a question much dearer to my heart.  Is there such a thing as an anti-Buddha?

Yes.

People, the cell phone is the anti-Buddha.

Yes, your cell phone.  My cell phone.  Every cell phone.  Do you know our cell phones are more powerful than all the computers that steered Apollo 11 combined?  They do amazing things that even Star Trek didn't imagine (though it did imagine a communicator that you could activate by hitting yourself in the chest--I guess that's pretty cool.) And cell phones are the anti-Buddha.  Seriously, it's hard to imagine anything less Buddhist-y than a cell phone.  

Think about what Buddhists do.  We meditate, we practice mindfulness, we cultivate certain states of mind like happiness and compassion and selflessness.  Cell phones basically unwind all that.  They're bright and shiny and full of nifty graphics.  They're an endless distraction.  Even when you're not looking at them, they chime at you wanting your attention:  Look at me!  Look at me!  They present an endless parade of news, mostly bad, and invite you not only to comment on it but to get into public spats with other commentors.  Spend half an hour on a cell phone and you're practically guaranteed to be less happy, distracted, anxious and wanting to hide under a rock until the world ends, which it's obviously going to do any second. 

Yes, you can also use your cell phone for Positive Things.  You can keep up with your family and friends, communicate with your work peeps, give donations to charity with PayPal and gently encourage your elected officials to do the right thing.  But people don't.  They use their cell phones to compare themselves to other people, get into arguments, work themselves into a state of despair about Current Events and just in general make themselves really unhappy.  I include myself in that assessment; since Yahoo quit allowing commentary, I quit going there, because if I can't post provocative responses to articles and get other people mad at me, what's the point?  (Yes, I was somewhat of a troll on Yahoo.  Thankfully the sun has since come up and I've frozen in place.) 

Now that we have cell phones, though, I don't see people giving them up in large numbers.  They've kind of become ubiquitous to our landscape.  We expect them to be around, too.  I've seen a number of movies where the plot actually depended on the existence of cell phones, and it's kind of funny to watch a movie or TV show made in, like, the late 80s or early 90s and think how different the outcome would have been if the characters had had cell phones.  So nobody's probably going to get rid of theirs.  I'm not getting rid of mine; I need it for work, but of course everybody says they need their cell phones for work.  So the challenge, then, is to change how we use cell phones. To put it bluntly, we need to use them instead of letting them use us. 

We have had some practice with this.  If you own a car, you're probably familiar.  You can own a car, or you can let a car own you.  If you bought, say, a Maserati to show off to your neighbors or because you thought you had to, you can barely afford your payments, your insurance is through the roof, your car requires frequent and expensive maintenance and you lose sleep at night pondering what you're going to do about the damn car, then you don't own it.  It owns you.  If, on the other hand, you have a cheap, reliable car that's paid for, the insurance is a nominal amount, maintenance is occasional and not very expensive, and it gets you where you need to go when you need to go there, then you own the car.  It feels much better to own a car than to be owned by one.  I've never had a Maserati, but I don't think I'd enjoy the experience if I did.

(Sammy Hagar, though, who is practically a billionaire, owns several race cars and apparently enjoys them very much.  So, you know, circumstances differ for each of us.)

Back to cell phones, though.  How do we go about owning a cell phone, instead of being owned by one?  Well, I hate to suggest this, but I think we need to start by strictly limiting or even no longer using social media apps.  I hate to suggest this because I am a Twitter fiend.  I love Twitter.  Millions of humans gathered in one place tossing off pithy one-liners about their lives and how to navigate this crazy world we live in.  I follow something like 500 people and they all feel like good friends.  But, I spend way too much time on there, and inevitably some bad-news issue comes up that everyone starts commenting on and I read the attached articles and stuff and my old friend, chronic anxiety, rears its ugly head.  

I used to spend a lot of time on Facebook, too, but I've pretty much stopped.  Well, actually for the last I don't know how many months I've stopped altogether because when I went from Old Cell Phone to New Cell Phone, I somehow lost my password and I haven't been able to get on there.  Which sucks, in a way, because the only reason I was still going on there was to keep track of my cousins and their kids and now I've kind of lost track. But on the other hand, I didn't have access to Facebook during the whole election drama, the January 6 fiasco or any of the happy-go-lucky days that followed.  (Hey, did anyone else realize that January 6 is Epiphany on the Christian calendar?  That's the day the wise guys showed up to Bethlehem and acknowledged the Christ child as a newborn king.  Which seems significant in a way.  Hmm.)  Facebook is, I say without hesitation, a political sewer.  Unless, of course, you keep your friend list to your cousins and their kids, and unfriend anybody who wants to drag you into the political sewage.  So I really don't miss it that much.  I could, reasonably speaking, also drop Twitter.  But I hope I don't have to do that.  I hope we can come to some sane and moderate usage of Twitter---thirty minutes a day, let's say--that means I don't have to drop it altogether.

Then there are the news apps.  As much as I'm for moderation and not total abstinence, the news apps have to go.  For one thing, I'm not supposed to be watching the news.  Doctor's orders.  And while I interpreted that literally and quit watching local news, I'm pretty sure Doc meant all news, from all sources.  Anyway, I get plenty of news from Twitter.  If you follow the right people on Twitter, you will get not just a good idea of the prevailing issues of the day, you'll get the news before the news people even do.  For example, I am hearing about the fall of Kabul as it is happening. from people who are actually there.  (And in case nobody knows that Kabul has fallen to the Taliban, it has.  Just FYI.) Now, if Twitter is a source of news, that's another really good argument to get rid of it.  But again, moderation versus abstinence, if that's possible.  If it works.  We shall see.

Now I have to tell you something witheringly ironic.  I have a meditation app on my cell phone.  Yes, on my cell phone, the anti-Buddha, there is a meditation app.  And I love my meditation app.  I'm not getting rid of it.  But I need to get rid of the scrolling through the latest news and the Twitter updates and so forth and so on before I log into it.  (Does anybody else have this happen?  You pick up your cell phone to do a particular thing and it makes a chimey noise or something pops up so you go see what it is and 30 minutes later you put down your cell phone, having completely forgotten why you picked it up in the first place?  This happens to me a lot.  Annoyingly, it often happens at work.)  The meditation app is Important.  Everything else, somewhat less so.  Because the everything else unwinds all the time I spend on the meditation app.  Probably as effectively as alcohol, if not more so.  And by the way, if someone tells you that he/she believes that he/she is addicted to his/her cell phone, believe him/her.  It's totally possible.  It's even likely, in some instances.  

So that's the story of the anti-Buddha, the cell phone.  If Shakyamuni were a modern man, he'd be sitting under the bodhi tree chasing enlightenment and Mara would walk up to him and hand him a cell phone.  Hopefully, Shakyamuni would grab the cell phone and throw it to the ground, whereupon it would turn into a lotus.  I hope so.  What scares me is that he might pick up the phone instead and log into Twitter.  Cheers, all.