Karl T.

This was the week of measuring. And walking. And more walking.

Blood sugars holding steady, right where we want them. I have walked every single day this week. The exercise makes a huge difference, both in the way I feel and in my numbers. I continue to be amazed at my newfound ability to walk uphill (slowly) without wheezing myself into an asthmatic state.

This coming week I have a follow-up with my cardiac rehab nurse -- we'll go over my diet and meds. I have had a chat by phone with my cousin the nurse practiitioner; she gave me some useful advice about meds and dosing. Most severe side effect so far is that metformin @100mg gives me diarrhea pretty badly, so we may have to back off a bit. That's what the walking is for.

Yesterday I turned on the step-counting app on my phone, and got in nearly 5,000 steps between 4pm and midnight. Today I am probably going to hit 10,000 steps. I don't expect to keep that level up, but I'm going to gather a week's worth of data and then see where to set my goals.

Mentally and emotionally, I'm still kind of all over the place. My appointment with the folks at Behavioral Health (therapy) is not until a week from Tuesday; we'll see how the situation changes as that day approaches.

Two more weeks of walking every day, morning and evening, without fail. Then the habits will be formed, and maybe I can ease off on myself a little. But for now, diligence. The only way out is through.

I drove myself to Kaiser's emergency room at 2:30am on Saturday because I was having some chest pain that wouldn't let me sleep. I expected that they would prescribe me a heavy-duty antacid and send me away. However, once you utter the words "chest pain" in an emergency room, things start to happen very fast.

Once they did two EKGs, they arranged to have me packed into an ambulance and transferred to St Rose Hospital in Hayward, "because they have the best cardiologists around." That was when I clued in that this might be serious. Attempting jocularity, I asked the emergency intern, "Is this for the heart attack I had earlier without noticing it, or is it for the one that's in my very near future?" His reply was sobering: "It's for the heart attack that you're having right now."

Once we arrived at St Rose, they swept me straight to the cath lab, where a very animated and thorough cardiologist did what is called a "left-side catheterization" (or "left cath" for short.) I was awake for the whole procedure -- local anaesthetic took care of the entry point at my groin, and there wasn't any other pain. Feeling people fiddling around in my major blood vessels was very, very odd, but I wouldn't call it pain.

The cardiologist informed me in brisk terms that both my left-side cardiac arteries were between 98 and 99% blocked, and that they were going to balloon and stent them. "Fortunately, your right side looks like a superhighway -- clear all the way." So I spent 45 minutes or so getting my cardiac pathways roto-rooted, and spent about 24 hours subsequently at St Rose, 10 of them in ICU and 14 or so in a regular room.

And then, amazingly enough, they told me I could go. I have a spectacular bruise on my right groin, two new stents, and who knows how much billing hassle to go through, but the monster that got my grandfather at age 58 in 1970 did not get me at age 51.

So now I am home and safe, and I will be on blood thinners for the rest of my life, just like my grandmother was before me -- her heart attack was in 1988, when she was 75. She lived to be 90. And when she could finally feel the spring winding down, she sat down and wrote a note to her cardiac surgeon, thanking him for 14 wonderful years.

So for at least the next little while, I will be doing my very best to cherish every month, every week, every day that the cheerful cardiologist at St Rose has gifted me. Thanks, doc. You're brilliant.

An excerpt from a note I sent to my mother's family on May 28:

Most of you have met my father Bill at some point --- he and Janet divorced in 1979, and his interactions with the family thereafter were quite limited, but he did come to Lisa's and my wedding in 2000, and most of you saw him and his wife Kathy there.

Bill is about to be sent home from Oak Ridge Hospital with a hospice team -- he had an infection outside his lung that they were able to successfully remove, but the lack of oxygen to his brain, coupled with the liver damage that 50+ years of alcoholism had done to his liver, has meant that he has not regained consciousness since the surgery on May 8th. We had some hope that in the week following the surgery, he might come back to us -- he was breathing on his own, reacting to some stimuli, and seemed to be making slow and steady progress. But it is now pretty clear that recovery of consciousness is unlikely, and that he is in that unenviable twilight state between life and death. The end may come in days, weeks, months -- we don't know. There is no brain bleed and no gross trauma that any scans can see, but his brain seems to have reached its limit in terms of re-establishing connection with his body.

When the time comes, I will let all of you know, and those of us who knew him can gather (with Dan Decious and anyone else I can think of on this coast who loved my parents) and tell stories and toast his memory. If you have suggestions for who should be invited, please feel free to send them in a reply. In the meantime, I ask for all of your good thoughts for Kathy -- their 30th wedding anniversary was April 6, and what this is doing to her is just heartbreaking.

Bill left us about 6am Eastern time this morning. RIP William Ernest Thiessen, born September 17, 1934, in Kansas City, Missouri, died at home in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, June 4, 2015. He taught me how to draw a crystal structure, how to musically blend in an ensemble, how to drive (and parallel park!) a stick shift, and how to make popcorn on the stove. My current profession as a software engineer also owes much to his development of programs in FORTRAN to analyze scattering patterns from neutron diffraction when I was at an impressionable age.

I went up to FOGcon this morning to have lunch with a couple of friends. Had a marvellous time, but had to come home early to pick my wife up to go to dinner with her family in celebration of her birthday.

All was uneventful until I got to the freeway exit for our house, where I saw a number of police cruisers and a bunch of flares blocking off the off-ramp. That's odd, I thought, and proceeded up to Skyline Boulevard to come around via Hickey and Callan. At the corner of Callan and Serramonte, some blocks from the house, I encountered another group of police cruisers and a half-dozen officers directing traffic, not letting anyone into the neighbourhood. I explained the date with my wife and her family to one of the officers, who replied, "I understand, sir, and I apologize. But you can't go up there." There were about two dozen local residents standing on the various corners of Callan and Serramonte, so I asked one of my neighbours what was going on. His response:

"They've got a fugitive holed up in one of those apartment buildings at the bottom of the block. They say he shot a San Francisco cop." Ah, that would explain why there were so many SFPD cars down here in Daly City. (SFGate story link)

So I called my wife and let her know to call her mother and let her know we were likely to be late. And after milling around for ten to fifteen minutes chatting with people and determining that no one really had a firm grasp on what was going on, I decided to see how far up the hill the police perimeter extended. Eventually, I was able to approach our house from the uphill side and make our dinner date.

So, long story short: we're all right, but our quiet little neighbourhood wasn't so quiet tonight. I thought I had something pithy to say about the event, but I don't, really. I just hope this doesn't become the new normal, and I am uncomfortably aware that in too many places and for too many people, this is just daily life.

Edited later to add: They haven't found the guy, but the news story made the front page on KRON and KTVU.

The past fifteen months or so have been some of the hardest of my life. If you're reading this, you have more than likely been part of the reason I've gotten through them with any sort of grace at all. Thank you.

I've changed jobs. The new gig is very different from the old. (Of course it ended badly — if it hadn't gone badly, it wouldn't have ended.) I am working with two very different teams, each with their pros, cons, quirks and lessons. I have not yet fallen in love with this job, but I come home without that heavy slogging feeling, so that's something.

I know myself better than to promise any sort of creative output, whether it be prose, code, or anything else. I'm not saying that this post will mark a return to regular updates. But my head has broken the surface of the water. I'm still paddling like hell to stay afloat, but I can breathe.

Today, I showed up to the text box in the browser and created something. Keep going, keep loving, keep learning. Some days, that's all you can ask for.

Thanks for reading.

(In writing, at least. Not so much in life.)

There are a lot of things going on with me just now. Both of my parents are having serious health and aging issues, I'm re-evaluating my roles at work and in my primary fannish activity, and my social life is slowing down after a year that was best described as a bit frenetic but rewarding.

If you were expecting to hear from me but didn't, please accept my apologies and get in touch again; I can only promise that I'll do my best. I'm not hermiting; there has just been a lot of change in a pretty short time.

Dreamwidth is going to continue to be my primary expression point online, I think. I do still follow my LJ flist, but I hardly ever comment there if I can communicate with folks by other means. Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr all remain completely opaque to me -- I don't have the time or the brain-space for them, and events there will totally pass me by.

If I do wind up writing up a BayCon 2012 con report, it will be published here. I make no promises about when (or even whether), however.

Please continue to take care of one another, and remember that love is a verb as well as a noun. I'll check in as I can.

If you're thinking of using your personal friendship with me to obtain not-yet-published information about events I'm associated with, then you don't know me as well as you think you do. And it says entirely too much about what you think of me that you would try.

Short version: We're OK, we're uphill and upwind of the fire, we have not been evacuated.

That said, it was less than 1500 metres away, just across Skyline Boulevard, and the fireball was terrifying. Getting into and out of the neighbourhood is going to be a bit tricky until they get this thing all the way out.

I'll post a FAQ here sometime today, but for now please accept our thanks for all the good wishes and offers of places to come and stay.

We love you all.

Holy Mother, where did all of this energy come from? I've made the most serious run at our kitchen that I've attempted in months, and put a huge dent in the Laundry Monster.

Don't get me wrong, the upside of the roller-coaster has its advantages, but if there's a crash coming, I had better hold on for dear life. This isn't just spring fever; it's an unholy combination of work stress, shifting relationships, oncoming BayCon, and the stupid cocktail of drugs that keeps me breathing as normally as I can, given 40 years of asthma and related ailments.

Not in a place where I can write deliberately or even particularly coherently, but I wanted to capture the moment so that if there /is/ a crash following, I can make an approximation of the timetable.

I am profoundly uncomfortable with the notion of trying to map my own neurochemistry at nearly forty-five years of age. But if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.

The discussion on hugging and personal space this morning on b.org caused me to do some fairly serious thinking about a subject that has come up quite a few times in my life, all the way from early adolescence through the present time:

Why am I so attached to the act of hugging, even in the face of the social perils (and occasional disapprobation) that it brings in its wake?

Background first. My immediate family-by-birth are not terribly physically demonstrative -- not precisely repressed, but not given to displays of affectionate enthusiasm, either. I am clearly an outlier in that context, and it's been noticed and remarked upon throughout my life. I am an only child, and while I did not lack for affection growing up, I did feel that I was 'snugglier' than most of the adults around me were quite comfortable with. I was not, as far as I know, prematurely sexualised -- I was not looking for erotic gratification, but simple closeness, and an expression of something more than simple affection ... call it joyful enthusiasm. I am fairly certain that this behaviour read as developing-sexuality to most of the adults around me, and held all of the squicks and 'danger-signs' associated with teaching an adolescent which forms of expression are acceptable and which are not. I know that it made several adults in my extended family curious, if not outright uncomfortable, and they said things to my mother which she passed on to me. She was generally as gentle as she could be about it, but I still vividly remember the sensation of rejection, especially from family. But my mother explained that it was important to take other people's comfort into account, as well, and I did my best to not offend anyone.

With my peers, I was an outlier in a different way. I tried to smooch my next-door neighbour when I was five (she was six), as little boys will do, and she whapped me with her jacket and caught my lip on the zipper, quite accidentally. She was very apologetic, but quite firm in her resolve not to be smooched. And when we became good friends a few years later, we did not engage in rough-housing or much other play that involved physical contact. When I was introduced to the playground 'chasing and kissing game' at age eight, I didn't see the point of running away, really. I wasn't very good at running (the asthma was a bit limiting), and I didn't see the point in trying to smooch someone who didn't want to be smooched, having internalised that first lesson entirely.

I got through elementary school (ages 5 to 12 for non-North American folks) with the usual number of deeply-felt childhood crushes, both on my peers and on the adults around me. I got teased about a number of them, but the adult recipients were generally very sensitive about respecting my dignity. There was one incident (in grade 6 - I was 11) in which I came home crying after a teacher had teased me about having a crush on a classmate, and my mother had a very simple suggestion: Tell the teacher that she had hurt your feelings. It was stunning in its simplicity, and I had profound doubts that it would do any good. But when it happened again, I walked up to the teacher's desk and asked to have a word with her. Doing my best to hold back tears, I told her that the teasing hurt my feelings, and asked her how she would feel if she liked someone and I made fun of her for it? And a truly amazing thing happened. She took me seriously, and apologised to me. Not teacher to student, but human being to human being. And a whole raft of troubles that I had been having that year got a whole lot easier. When I went home and told my mother about it, she held me in her arms while I cried with relief.

What does that have to do with hugging? Not so much on the surface -- but I was taught from an early age to express myself when I was hurt, rather than to shut down -- and 'boys don't cry' was something I just completely didn't understand. When someone was crying, you didn't ever /make fun/ of them, you did what you could to help, no matter whether they were male or female, adult or child.

And from that day to this, that's what I associate the feeling of a genuine, heartfelt hug with -- keeping each other safe and comforted in a world that too often wants to make fun of us for being who we are. And if I can keep that in balance with the knowledge that not everyone interprets hugs in the same way, and pay enough attention to other people's sensitivities and preferences that I don't offer comfort where it's not wanted/needed, I think I may be able to do my small part to make the world a better place.