So I spent the six hours or so at the Mayo’s emergency room yesterday. Wheezing. I’ve never wheezed before in my life.
Besides being flicking miserable, it was an interesting experience.
The place was absolutely mobbed. People come from all over the Valley, largely, I expect, because so many local hospitals are not all that great and because the Mayo is one of the very few in the state that rank among the top clinically and in terms of safety. I met people who had schlepped to their ER all the way from Mesa, and I spent most of the six hours with a pair of elderly Michiganders who had driven in from Apache Junction, where they spend the winters in their RV.
Because of the overcrowding, once they let us in to see doctors, there were no rooms for us, so the old guy from Michigan and I were stuck on gurneys in the hallway. This, of course, allowed each to hear in detail what was ailing the other.
He was really a sweet old guy, never complaining and always good-natured despite what must have been a great deal of suffering. As it developed, he had come down with diabetes in his old age, shortly after a botched knee replacement. He ended up with chronic painful, itchy swelling in his lower legs, which were covered with chronic sores that refused to heal. One wound had been open for 18 months. His wife had dragged him in to the Mayo because he wasn’t getting adequate care (he was being treated by a PA—hadn’t seen a doctor more than once or twice!) and she figured he could get better attention there.
When the doctor came around, she was visibly horrified to learn the quality of care he was receiving, though she tried to hide it when she was face-to-face with him.
Part of what ailed the old fellow was impaired circulation in his legs. This, she pointed out, was caused by his pack-a-day smoking habit. She suggested that if he quit smoking, he might have less pain.
If he lost about 60 or 80 pounds, too, he certainly would have less pain. Both he and the missus were pretty overweight. She could have done without 40 to 50 pounds and he, upwards of 60. Even if losing some avoirdupois didn’t help the diabetes (as it might), it would at least take some of the pressure off the poor old guy’s legs.
I thought about the old man, driving home at the end of the day. It made me feel terrible that such a nice old fellow was suffering like that.
He had no intention of knocking off the cigarettes, and said so.
The people who manufacture those things are murderers, plain and simple. They know they’re putting out an addictive product that kills, and they do it anyway. That makes them killers, and it makes the legislators who facilitate their drug business murderers, too.
But that’s neither here nor there.
The question is, let’s say you’re an old person. Let’s say a doctor gives you a choice: do without something that gives you pleasure and relaxation in your daily life and live several years longer, or keep enjoying that something and take those years off your life. Which would you pick?
The answer, to my mind, is not as obvious as it looks.
At a certain age, you realize you’re going to die sooner or later. And you realize you may or may not go through a period of intense suffering before that happens. Maybe forgoing a pleasure that relieves your boredom and distracts you from discomfort today isn’t worth a few extra months or years on the other end: extended life that may be full of pain and misery.
At 20, it’s obviously worth picking and choosing your vices: stay off the fatty foods, stay off the booze, stay off the tobacco, and stay off your fanny. With any luck, you’ll reach old age and old age will be tolerable.
But if you’re already there, or even halfway there? Hm.
What’s your choice? Longer life with asceticism, or shorter life with pleasurable bad habits?
{yuck} Three or four days ago, a heavy cough developed, right out of the blue. No cold symptoms, no flu symptoms: no sore throat, no head congestion, no laryngitis, no achy muscles, no headache, no nothing. It’s a chest-wrenching, goopy cough, one of the worst I’ve ever had.
So day before yesterday I traipsed across the city to a revered physician at the revered Mayo (gotta find a doctor closer to my house!!). She opined that it’s not pneumonia, it’s not bronchitis, and it doesn’t appear to be an allergy. Her theory is valley fever.
Lovely.
She shrugged and said it most likely will go away in a week or ten days.
Right. What she’s shrugging off is the fact that I tested positive for valley fever in my early twenties. That was over 40 years ago.
Valley fever is caused by a fungus that lives in the low Southwestern deserts. It doesn’t go away. Your body may suppress the symptoms, but once the fungus has moved in, it’s there to stay. And a flare-up, years later, can develop into something very nasty, indeed.
It would explain a lot: like why, after years without so much as a sniffle, I developed a mean bug right after I took that damn triple-whammy flu shot (no more of that after this!) and have been sick off and on ever since. This started last September or October and it doesn’t seem to be going away.
So her doctorhood ordered a chest X-ray and a valley fever titer test. The results of the latter, whose reliability is questionable in the first place, won’t come back for a week or ten days.
Meanwhile, though, SDXB has developed a similar goopy cough after two months of the 10-week virus that’s been going around. He thinks what I have is the same as what he has.
However…he developed it as part of a rhinovirus infection. In contrast, I got the 10-week respiratory bug shortly after I took a flu shot last fall. Eventually it went away. Then a few weeks later I picked up another cold. Shook that off in about 10 days, and have been feeling just fine for a while. It was completely gone and had been gone for several weeks when this new thing developed. I have no other cold symptoms: just a nasty cough.
Well. And one other odd thing: about a week before the cough appeared, I started sleeping all night!!!
It was so wonderful! Or so I thought. Suddenly, after a good ten or fifteen years of five- and six-hour nights, I’m sleeping seven hours, without waking up and watching the clock tick for two or three hours. Then it’s eight hours. Then nine hours. Then right before the cough started I slept ten hours. I haven’t slept ten hours straight since I was a teenager. On reflection, that is not normal.
Then the other evening I was walking the dog and felt a tightness in the chest, like I couldn’t breathe in enough oxygen. It passed, and I didn’t think much about it. And now this expectorant cough comes along. Pretty clearly there’s a connection; and I expect there’s some connection with the oversleeping, too.
Well. I hope this is just another virus and not valley fever, because valley fever can develop into a chronic, crippling, and life-threatening disease. The first book I edited, as a young thing, was by a pulmonologist who specialized in valley fever, and I’ll tell ya: it was real scary to read. The treatment, like chemotherapy for cancer, is about as bad as the disease. The infection or the treatment, one or the other, is likely to weaken your health permanently.
🙄 Just what I need to make my day!
Image: C. Immitis. U.S. Federal Government. Public domain.
Wow! You should take a look at the comments on this post over at Get Rich Slowly. J.D. asked readers to report on how much they pay for health insurance. It’s just gut-wrenching. One reader remarked that she had paid tens of thousands of dollars for healthcare coverage but never made a claim; another said after she’d paid for the insurance, she couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. Another reader, who used to work for a company that did business with health insurers, described the insurers’ strategy of submitting requests for double-digit rate increases every few months, so they could settle for regular, steady single-digit increase targeting specific zip codes.
Meanwhile, if that doesn’t frost your cookies enough, the comments from Canadians—and from the guy in Japan—certainly will. One Canadian woman had cervical cancer…the only cost to her was the parking fee at the clinic where she had to go once a week for treatment. Other Canadians do remark that health care in that country is far from “free” for your taxes. But pretty clearly few or no Canadians can expect that a major illness or accident will pauperize them.
Really. You just can’t imagine why anyone who’s not a congressional representative and in the pocket of big donors and lobbyists would oppose a national health care plan. Medicare’s not cheap—largely because of the ever-increasing rates charged by insurance companies that have managed to get their fingers in that pot, too. But at least it’s marginally affordable and does cover most conditions.
Back at GRS, comment number 234 mentions something kind of interesting. It’s a healthcare co-op for folks whose feelings about forcing women to bear unwanted babies are so strong they won’t subscribe to commercial insurance lest their morals be contaminated when some other subscriber gets an abortion to save her life. Or to have a choice about what her and her family’s life will be. It’s called Samaritan Ministries.
For a family, according to this reader, monthly cost is $320. Coverage is rather skimpy: you pay out of pocket for medical costs under $300 a month (so if you come down with a chronic ailment, your monthly cost is now $620 a month, minimum—not counting drugs, vision, and dental), pre-existing conditions are not covered, and the most it pays out is $250,000. Get yourself a case of cancer or a heart attack, and that $250,000 will be gone in a trice…you’ll soon find yourself paying a lot more than parking fees!
In the absence of a national health care plan, though, it’s an interesting scheme. If you were young and healthy, it might be worth considering. It certainly is better than nothing, and far more affordable than commercial plans that gouge you thousands of dollars for limited coverage or for insurance you can’t afford to use.
Meanwhile, a Christian blogger in Alabama castsa jaundiced eye on this outfit. Writing as DrAbston, this observer points out that it functions as a loophole for Americans to get out of buying the required insurance under the new Affordable Healthcare plan, that requirements skew the membership toward cherry-picking, and that its ballyhooed Christian philosophy contains an inherent contradiction.
So it appears that the faith-based (or anything else-based) health-sharing scheme, while perhaps useful for a limited number of special-interest groups, is not a viable answer to our country’s health care issue.
When you read the responses to JD’s post—245 and counting!—you realize something has got to be done.
So I drove across town to an urgent care clinic on the southern fringe of the affluent Arcadia district (on the northern fringe of a barrio) because the nearest urgent care clinic to me has gawdawful customer reviews.
Along about 5:00 p.m. my temp suddenly spiked and I thought “yipe!” Grabbed a flashlight, ran to the bathroom mirror, peered into the throat, and saw much more scary-looking white crud than the last time I worked up the courage to look in there. Since this is in the running for the worst sore throat I’ve ever had, naturally I figure the streptococcus had its tiny tentacles around my neck.
There’s an urgent care clinic closer to me, but it’s had some pretty negative reviews.
Okay. I suppose one ought not to take consumer reviews on the Internet as worth the pixels they’re published in. But that place sent some very angry people out onto the Web.
So off I go across the city, about a 20- or 30-minute drive, to a place with many happy reviews. I took a sheaf of Medicare open-enrollment paperwork, about fifty poorly reproduced pages that one is required to plow through by way of figuring out if one should keep the current providers, look for someone cheaper, or opt for someone more expensive who provides better benefits. Figured it would take about an hour to sift through all this bureaucratic excrescence, which, I expected, would occupy around a third of the time I’d be sitting in the urgent-care waiting room.
But…
To my astonishment, there was NO WAIT!
I couldn’t believe it.
By the time I got to their screening tech, the temp was back to normal. Either that or something’s wrong with my mercury thermometer.
They took me right in and plopped me in an examining room. Naturally, I expected about a 45-minute wait there, so I went back to sifting through pages of Medicare comparisons.
About two minutes later the doctor surfaced. Examined. Opined that it’s not strep throat.
Did you know that if you have the head congestion, cough, and sinus headache typical of a cold or flu, a sore throat is probably not streptococcal but viral? Who knew? Not moi!
He remarked that if it was worse tomorrow I should come back. He must have seen the subliminal wince, because he said, “If you want, we can do a strep throat test now. If it’s negative, you’ll know you don’t have strep.”
Uhm…”You’re the doctor. Whatever you think is best is fine by me.”
So he did the unnecessary test, and yes, it was negatory.
Thank goodness!
They sent me out into the night without once asking for payment. They accepted Medicare (that alone is a miracle), and they asked for nothing. No doubt a bill will come in the mail. But for the nonce, at least I didn’t have to run up the credit card on the last day of the billing cycle!
Did knocking off the sauce (again :roll:) make it happen? Not likely. About once every six months I jump back on the wagon for a few weeks, and it never changes the scale reading. Besides, I don’t think one or two glasses of wine, beer, or bourbon and water really is that far over the top.
The weight loss has occurred, in fact, over just the past week or so, after I decided to experiment with my daddy’s favorite folk diet: cut out all starch.
By “starch,” he meant bread, potatoes, rice, cereals, and pasta.
LOL! In the good old days, they didn’t eat much of what we would call “pasta.” It would never have crossed my parents’ minds to serve a big bowl of spaghetti topped with fresh chopped tomatoes, basil, and shredded Parmesan. Spaghetti, to their generation of Americans, was some kind of ethnic food that entailed a full day of simmering a gloppy red sauce. Macaroni was served with cheddar cheese and white sauce. And noodles were to be smothered in rich beef, pork, or chicken gravy, preferably with cream added.
Yum. If it were just a little cooler (say, about 50 degrees cooler…) I sure could do with some of my mother’s beef strogonoff over noodles.
Well, anyway. As soon as I quit eating “starch,” the weight started to drop.
We could say this is a modified Atkins diet. Actual, real Atkins, it is not. On My Daddy’s Diet, you’re allowed to eat anything you want except “starch” and desserts loaded with refined sugar (pie and cake, for example, would be nixed, but plain strawberries or peaches would be OK). Atkins wants you to stay off sweet, juicy, delicious fruits (at least at the outset) and certain kinds of veggies dubbed too high in carbs.
Sorry, Dr. A, but I wasn’t about to let the candy-sweet watermelon and the Costco flat of astonishing peaches in the fridge go to waste. So I’ve been blithely scarfing down two or three peaches a day, and as much as a quarter of a watermelon.
And I still lost weight!
Atkins also wants you to kick not just your alcohol habit but your caffeine habit: he theorized that caffeine somehow interfered with your metabolism. Right, sure. Life’s miserable enough without a bourbon and water in the afternoon. I’ll be darned if I’m doing without my morning coffee and my all-day iced tea supply. Matter of fact, as we scribble I’m swilling down coffee with élan.
And I still lost weight!
Hot dang.
Daddy’s scheme allows you to eat pretty well, without making you feel unduly deprived. Come to think of it, I don’t feel in any way deprived…now and again I push away from the table feeling I ate altogether too much. It’s just a matter of finding something unstarchy to substitute for your favorite cereal and potato products. For me, it’s been lettuce, lots of lettuce. Cabbage is good, too.
Breakfast looked a little problematic. Though I don’t eat much cereal (hate the processed stuff, and am not crazy about gooey cooked cereal), I’ve long been in the habit of fixing two pieces of bacon, two slices of toast, and about a gallon (so it seemed!) of orange juice frappéed with frozen strawberries.
I substituted a couple of sweet, flavorful tomatoey Campari tomatoes for the toast. With so much fruit in the house, often I’ve scarfed down a large peach or slab of melon in place of the juice, which itself consists of one large glass of OJ blended with about four large berries and a drop of vanilla extract. There’s been plenty of fruit at breakfast: a few days I’ve had a peach and watermelon!
When I took it into my little pea brain to cook up a stir-fry, I was given pause. After all, isn’t the whole point of stir-fry to eat the rice soaked in soy sauce? Well, it was late at night and I sure didn’t feel like making a green salad, which didn’t sound very good with stir-fry, anyway, so I just added lots of veggies and tried it sans rice. It was delicious! It didn’t need rice at all to be highly wonderful. What’s an Asian word for sans?
{chortle!} I figure the initial poundage drop is the loss of bloat from drinking one or two bourbons and water a day. I rarely drink more than two, and they’re pretty watered-down, but still…they are alcohol, which when you come down to it is just another sugar, only even less benign than the white granulated stuff. The pot belly is still there, though the love handles are noticeably reduced.
Exercise? Not hardly! It’s been too hot to poke one’s nose outside the door this past month. By 10:00 p.m., when it’s marginally cool enough to walk around and the pavement won’t burn Cassie’s feet, I’m usually just too pooped to do much other than drag into bed.
This morning when I woke up at 5:00, though, it was an unheard-of seventy-five degrees out there! A brilliant full moon hovered over the western horizon like a hallucinatory alabaster plate floating in the sky.
Grabbed the dog and made a tour of the neighborhood (as far from the German shepherd hosts as possible). After we returned and Cassie was fed, it was still cool enough for me to pump up the bicycle tires and ride all over Richistan, just to the east of us. Then plunged in the pool before breakfast.
So I got a little exercise, certainly nothing very vigorous but better than nothing. And it’s not likely to happen again soon, because the brief cold snap we’re having is supposed to dissipate today.
But it’s only a little after nine, all that activity has been activated, the plants are watered, all the laundry is done, and the sheets are on the line. Dang! Not a bad kick-off for the day.
I’d like to lose another eight or ten pounds. Even though I’m back in the “normal” BMI range, which I’d managed to edge above, I believe about 140 is more like “normal” for a woman my height and age. What I hope to do is get down to 135, so that during the times of day when one weighs out at one’s heaviest, the scale would never read more than about 140. And if that actually comes to pass, which would surprise me, I think the only way to maintain it will be to stay off the sauce permanently and after this to refrain from dumping vast mounds of spaghetti on my plate.
Welp, speaking of mounds, a pile of student papers awaits. And so, to work…
Once again we’re reminded of how unhealthy it is for us to spend most of our waking hours seated at a desk or loafing in our favorite easy chair. The latest report tells us a 14-year study showed women participants who spent six or more hours a day sitting down were 40% more likely to croak over prematurely than women who spent the time standing or moving around; men got lucky this time—the sitting male is only 20% more likely to die.
Six hours? Six hours?? Would that I could get off my duff after only six hours! Dunno about you, but between blogging, editing, and grading papers, I spend eight to ten hours a day, every day—that’s seven days a week—sitting in front of a computer. That would be in normal times; get a crunch, and you can revise that figure upward to twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours. Easily.
We’re told, too, that no amount of exercise reverses the damage done by this habit. Holy mackerel. I’m doomed.
This is an issue that’s been nibbling at the periphery of my consciousness for quite some time. It doesn’t take a controlled scientific study to tell you sitting on your duff all day long ain’t natural and cain’t be good for you. For the privilege of loafing in front of a computer exercising my fingers ten to twenty hours a day, I’m paying in pounds. I’m getting fatter and fatter and fatter.
Nothing very abrupt: just a very, very slow but steady accretion of love handles and belly fat and tight, tight jeans.
When your size 12 jeans are too tight, you know you’ve got a problem…
I keep telling myself I’m going to go on a diet, going to set a timer to go off every twenty minutes and make myself get up and stretch or walk around the house, going to take the dog for 30- to 40-minute walks twice a day, going to bicycle every day, going to swim 20 laps every day… Right. Well. Tomorrow, for sure.
All those promises go into the same trash barrel, along with the New Year’s resolutions and the good intentions.
Killer app?
The problem is the computer. It’s like a magnet. I can’t stay away from it, even when I’m not actually working. First thing in the morning, I stumble across the four feet between the bedroom and the office, turn the damn thing on, read the mail, read the Play-Nooz, write a blog post. Now it’s not the first thing in the morning anymore. And now it’s time to get down to work. Fix breakfast, throw down some food for the dog, and head back to the office to start computing for pay. When the work is done, do I get up and move around? Hell, no! I cruise the Web (StumbleUpon is one of my favorite toys), search my favorite news sites for the day’s most lurid stories, read other people’s blogs, comment on other people’s blogs, play Internet games, glance up at the clock…and it’s 11 p.m.! Haven’t had dinner, haven’t fed the dog, and most certainly have walked neither the dog nor me.
The computer is like the family TV of yore. Television was decidedly addictive. I knew people—many people—who ran it all the time, from the instant they rolled out of bed in the morning to the minute they went to bed. Some friends would have a TV in the bedroom, where they deliberately left it running as a lullaby to send themselves off to sleep—they’d put a timer on the thing so it would go off after they were out.
This, obviously, was not healthy. But the computer is worse, because it’s interactive. When a television is blathering, it’s sending its message at you: the noise and pictures are coming out of the set toward you, and your only task is to change the channel now and again. But, unless you’re running a movie or music, a computer demands that you physically be in front of it. To make it do its hypnotic thing, you have to be there feeding messages into it.
When I was a kid, my family had the television going all the time. It was on while we were cleaning house, on while we were cooking, on while we were washing dishes, on while we were ironing (to this day I can’t iron without a TV program to alleviate the boredom), on while we were eating, on while we were reading the papers, on while we were doing our homework, on while we were sewing or knitting or pasting photos in the family album, on while we were playing, on while we were talking (isn’t that quaint? In the olden days, family members conversed with each other). All of which is to say that the TV did not necessarily interfere with physical activity. In fact most of the time we were moving around the house while the boob tube was blathering on.
Okay. Flash forward to 2011. We now have these fundamental facts:
1. I am not gonna give up my computer habit. 2. None of us can give up our computer habit, because it’s now the basis of our lives and social interaction and, heaven help us, our livelihoods. 3. Whatever is to be done about the health effects has to be simple and easy to work into one’s daily routine…and that, I’m afraid, does not mean setting the kitchen timer to interrupt your train of thought every twenty to sixty minutes. 4. There actually is a very simple solution.
Yes. There is a simple solution:Stay off your duff while you’re in front of the computer!
Where does it say that you have to sit down to use your computer? You don’t. You can work on a computer standing up.
Instrument of death?
Before you fall off your well-worn chair laughing at this concept, consider:
Some years ago, I went through a spate of tenacious back pain. It hurt all the time, and it went on for so long I thought it was going to be a life-long problem that would never go away.
After a year or two of this, a friend who was a licensed massage therapist and yoga instructor started giving yoga classes at my house. The women in her group ranged from early middle age to their late 70s, and one gal was so overweight as to be disabled. All of us were beginners. So, as you can imagine, the level of the yoga we were doing wasn’t very strenuous.
I found that after a few weeks of this, the back started to feel a little better. If such mild exercise helped with that very stubborn pain, I figured, there must be other things I could do to fix it. Maybe there was something in my life that was contributing to the pain, and maybe I could change it. My attention turned to my daily habits.
And on inspection, what should I find but…yes! A threadbare desk chair. I realized that then, as now, I was spending uncountable numbers of hours in front of the computer, and as I was sitting there, I was slouching grotesquely, perched on my tailbone with my feet up on the desk and my head stuck forward, staring at the screen. Hour after hour after hour.
The execrable posture and the fact that I sat in the same bad-for-you position most of the day had to have some bearing on the back pain. How many chimpanzees spend their waking hours sprawled in a chair with their feet on their desk and all the weight of their bodies bearing down on their tailbones? This could not be natural.
Well, years before, my then-husband had a law associate who dealt with his own chronic back problems by working at a standing desk. The firm special-ordered him a beautiful standing desk—it was a handsome piece of furniture—and he claimed this kept the back pain under control.
Ordering up a standing desk from Thomas Moser was out of the question. I certainly couldn’t afford to spend upwards of $6,500 just to see if it would work. However, gathering dust out in the garage was an old drafting table we’d bought for our son when he was a little boy. A brief inspection revealed that the top, meant to be used at an angle, could be adjusted to lay flat—at a height that would let you stand up to work on a computer.
So I washed it down, dragged the thing back to my office, put it together, set it up, and voilà! a standing computer table!
With my PC and keyboard perched on this thing, I had to stand up to work or play on the computer. A hard wooden stool, bought very cheap at one of those big linen & household goods stores that are now defunct, served as a perch when my feet started to ache.
And it worked! The back pain went away.
Soooo… Would the circulatory damage also go away (or not start) if a person worked standing up at a computer on a high table?
After the back had been feeling better for a good while, the table exited during a redecorating frenzy. The thing took up a lot of room and really made the office ugly and cramped. So I got rid of it.
Now, I guess, I need to get another one. Amazon has a similar model, only with a fake wood plastic veneer instead of a white plastic veneer. As you can see, these things give you a fairly roomy top—leave the pencil holder off, and you get an expansive flat workspace. The little shelf on the bottom is too flimsy to hold reference works and binders, as intended; but it works nicely as a footrest when you’re perched on a stool. Mine didn’t have that back thing, which would get in the way of your feet, but I’ll bet I could find one just like my old drafting table at an art store.
For the nonce, though, the solution is free: it’s called the kitchen counter. I’m working on a Macbook in the kitchen instead of on the aged iMac. In some ways, this is an improvement: the iMac is so old it won’t take Snow Leopard, and so I can’t load Lion into it, either. It runs at the speed of a galloping snail, which is one reason I pass so many hours in front of the computer: much of that time is spent watching the computer grind away…and grinding my teeth as it grinds its silicon innards. The MacBook runs like a rocket, by comparison.
Yesterday I read 60 pages of a new client’s copy—about five or six hours of work—while standing at the kitchen counter.
Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But not only wasn’t it awful, it had these salubrious effects:
• Forthwith I found that because I was standing up, I was inclined to take occasional breaks for short yoga exercises.
• All the time I was standing there, weight was bearing down on the osteopenic bones in a non-impact way. That’s exactly what your skeleton needs as it ages.
• Before long I realized I could practice balance exercises without interfering with work concentration. Get this: today I balanced on one foot for a full minute without teetering, and in fact quit only out of boredom, not because I fell over. This is huge for old ladies. And for men, gentlemen: you can fall and break your hip, too.
• I got through the work faster. A lot faster. Because I wasn’t loafing in a chair, I was less inclined to wander off to cruise the net, so I stayed on task longer. And because this computer runs faster, much less time was wasted on waiting for things to happen.
• The kitchen got cleaned the first thing in the morning—who wants to look at a dirty dish while they’re working?
This could work.
Eventually, if I decide it’s a healthy thing to make permanent, I’ll have to get a new drafting table for the office. The kitchen counter is a little low for comfort, and it’s inconvenient to have the printer in the other room. For the moment, though, setting the MacBook’s cardboard carrying box under it holds it at the right height.
I think if I’m going to shove a tall table in the office, I’d like to get rid of the old furniture, replace the clunky old desk with a couple of lateral files, and go considerably minimalist. Less junk is better.
