Still buried in work! Was set to spend the day slogging through the rest of the Semiramis index (i hoped…) when the current Chinese Graduate Student send another iteration of her last chapter, slashed and burned by her dissertation director and reconstituted by her.
Rereading and updating edits on that consumed half the day.
So for the second day in a row (day before yesterday most of the hours were consumed by a client’s book formatting issues), I came back to the mind-numbing index job so tired I could hardly hold my head up. Keyboarded entries from a few marked-up pages (decided to dispense with the notecard technique, since this is already such a large and time-consuming job) and then crawled into bed around 10 p.m.
This morning I’m supposed to go out with a friend to breakfast/lunch (depending on when she gets away from her client). Then fly to south Phoenix to pick up page proofs of the client’s book and fly back up to Richistan to deliver them to the guy. Then fly home and get back to work on the index.
Really, I should farm this index out. But I need the money and don’t want to share just now.
Interesting news on the Hypochondria Front: since I have to submit to a major fishing expedition check-up in order to stay on the rolls at the Mayo, and since I’m supposed to revisit the cardiologist in another month, I decided to revisit the blood pressure issue. CardioDoc suggested keeping a running record of twice-daily readings for a period — when we were trying to shake off the hysteria engendered by the quack Young Dr. Kildare sent me to, he asked me to do that for six months, after which he declared me free of high blood pressure and probably free of any cardio-vascular problems.
Well, I hate taking my blood pressure — the act itself seems to drive up the numbers — so decided to limit that exercise to a week or ten days. But it seemed like it would be good to have a running record, because just walking into the Mayo (or any other medical facility or doctor’s office) pushes my blood pressure up. Way up. I’d like to have a little chart I can show this new doctor to fend off a new effort to put me on some not-so-benign med for the rest of my life.
Amazingly, despite the eight or ten pounds of overweight I’ve put on since the start of the bellyache problem and despite the endless, stress-inducing workload, the BP readings are well within the normal range: 116/72 this morning, after fiddling with the computer, feeding the dogs, and puttering around the house.
So that was a pleasant surprise.
Along those lines, I made another surprising discovery. In an idle moment while taking a break from the grind, I happened to google my father’s name. Discovered his brother is buried in Tarrant County, Texas, whence they came and where he returned after my aunt died. (He had moved to Sun City because my father retired there).
Turns out he remarried after moving back home in his old age. The new bride lived about ten years after they wed, and he outlived her another ten years. I had no idea!
My uncle lived to be eighty-nine. My father had told me he was 84 , and that his other brother had also died at 84. The only reason this uncle died was that he fell off a chair he’d climbed on to change a light bulb. He broke his hip and died of the ensuing shock.
If that hadn’t happened to him, he presumably would have lived into his 90s.
My father died at 84. The big difference between the two of them, besides the fact that my father worked on ships and my uncle had a quiet managerial job at a dairy, was that the uncle never smoked nor drank. My father smoked — and more to the point, lived with a woman who was smoking six packs a day at the end of her life — and he also had a drink or two almost every day.
At Find-a-Grave, I may have tracked down the third brother. If the record I found is his, then he lived to age 82. I believe he was a pretty tough character — a cowboy and eventually a ranch foreman. My father disliked him, and I knew almost nothing about him. The man I found in those records was married, briefly, to a woman who had a new last name by the time she died, and he is listed has having a son, born in the 1930s, who used his mother’s last name, acquired after his birth. So presumably they divorced early on, and it appears that this uncle never remarried.
At any rate, given that on my mother’s side, the women who evaded the family disease (cancer) lived into their mid-90s without ever seeing a doctor (they were Christian Scientists), it appears I have some pretty good genes in the offing. I may make into the 90s, too, barring a successful effort by one of my fellow homicidal drivers. 😀
Otherwise: all quiet on the Western front. It’s getting warm enough to swim, despite some unseasonably cool days. That would be nice, if I could find some time to do so.
Longevity is a pretty amazing subject. We all try to figure how long we will be here based on those that came before us….a slippery slope….IMHO. My Dear Dad passed at 85….went thru two quad by-passes, right around 16 stents, a partial lung removal and chemo for lung cancer. The oncologist of course blamed cigarettes and he was a smoker for right around 35 years. When he quit smoking 35 years ago the docs told him that within two years his lungs would look just like a non-smoker…it seemed like a “pipe dream” (no pun intended) to me at the time. And it appears my suspicions were warranted. I think genetics play a role but not the only role in how long we’ll be here. As for me, I would like to stick around as long as I am relevant and folks care. Locally, a couple in their 80’s were found dead and the authorities think they were dead 2-3 weeks before anyone noticed…Kind of frightening when you think of it….
Poor fella. One does wonder, when a person is upwards of 80, what the point is of putting him through surgery and chemo.
My father was 80 when he had his heart attack. Like me, he looked younger than his age. When the doctor asked me (“told” is the operative term…) to sign to give permission for a triple bypass, I didn’t realize that in a few days he would be turning 80. I might not have signed if I’d known that. And…a couple of years later, he told me that if he knew he was going to suffer the way he did, he would never have called for help from his apartment that day.
I personally think that everyone who works in the tobacco industry, from the highest executives and corporate owners all the way down to the grunt in the fields, should be prosecuted for homicide. Tobacco manufacturers have known for generations that nicotine is an addictive drug and that smoking causes cardiovascular disease and cancer. To keep on making and selling a product that you know kills people is nothing other than homicide.
My great-grandmother and great-aunt lived into their mid-90s. They were Christian scientists who a) NEVER went to doctors, b) never took any medications, and c) never smoked or drank. They also lived in the Berkeley foothills and did not own a car, so they had to walk every day to get to public transport, to the neighborhood grocery store (remember those?), and to friends’ and relatives’ homes.
They were healthy right up to the end. My great-grandmother served a holiday dinner for 12 people, cleaned up the mess, scrubbed the kitchen floor, went to bed, and died quickly in the middle of the night. My great-aunt went to Hawaii the week before she died. Not that dying was easy for them, but that it wasn’t a long-drawn-out, protracted affair. They died quickly, with a minimum of suffering compared to what many Americans go through today.
Well Funny, I think it depends on the individual. The crazy thing is my Dad was scheduled to have his lower left lobe removed. During the “pre-op” exam they found he had …”challenges” with his heart. When I found this out I thought that was it….he was 81…BUT my Dad’s “Cancer” Doc lobbied for him to have the surgery and Dad wanted to do it….Came thru it with “flying colors”….then recovered enough to have the lung surgery. If nothing else he was “a gamer”. Sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off just treating the symptoms….BUT it was his call. His original diagnosis was grim….I will forever be grateful for the 3.5 years my Dad survived. I was there pretty much every step of the fight….Fought many a Doc….hugged many a nurse….asked a lot of questions and learned a lot about our Country’s medical care along the way. The hope was to extend his life AND learn from his illness to benefit those that followed…. I will tell you dying is hard work…
He must have been strong as a horse. But it sounds like he hadn’t already suffered a heart attack. I think my father’s heart attack weakened him considerably; he apparently had pretty advanced cardiovascular disease by the time he arrived in the surgeon’s precincts. So those two factors undoubtedly worked against him when it came to trying to recover from the surgery and cope with the unpleasant side effects of the 87 gerjillion drugs they put him on.
Have a friend here in the ‘hood whose husband had lung cancer for several years before he finally passed over. He got along OK for quite some time. And La Maya had a friend who managed to hold it at bay for ten or twelve years. But both of those men were younger…not in their 80s.
The things they can do these days are amazing.
Based on the women in my immediate family line, I’ll be lucky to live to 80. :-/
I do take better care of myself than they did/do (referring to grandmother and mother here), but I also smoked for a number of years, so maybe that has an impact.
I just try to take it day by day.
{sigh} They say your body undoes most of the damage smoking does, once you quit. Hope that’s true: my son smoked for some years. And I “smoked” for 17 years, from the day of my birth until the day I left for college, breathing the fog of my parents’ second-hand smoke.