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Martine Is Back!

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UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center

After spending some five days in a hospital room, Martine was finally discharged today. She feels good, and there is no longer an issue with low sodium levels in the blood. The medical name for this is hyponatremia. According to the Mayo Clinic website, signs and symptoms can include:

  • Nausea and vomiting
  • Headache
  • Confusion *
  • Loss of energy, drowsiness and fatigue *
  • Restlessness and irritability *
  • Muscle weakness, spasms or cramps *
  • Seizures
  • Coma

On Tuesday, Martine was suffering from four of these (marked above with asterisks). In the hospital, she was immediately put on intravenous electrolytes which, over the space of two days, restored her condition to normal. Then she was kept on for observation for a couple more days to make sure her blood levels were normal.

What caused this? Martine thought it was that she accidentally took a second dose of Pilocarpine 2% ophthalmic solution for glaucoma two hours after taking a first dose. Although one physician I talked to in the emergency room said this couldn’t be the cause, the literature accompanying the drug indicated that it was indeed possible.

Whatever the cause, I am convinced that the treatment was correct.

The human body is a strange and wonderful thing, and doctors are not infallible. We tread a narrow path over two abysses. Thankfully, Martine is okay for now.

Hiatus

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Martine at the Zimmerman Automobile Driving Museum

I have not posted any blogs during the last three days because Martine was hospitalized on Tuesday. By accident she took a second dose of powerful glaucoma eye drops instead of the medication she intended on taking. The result was weakness, dehydration, and a host of other symptoms that required an ambulance trip to the UCLA Santa Monica Hospital where blood tests revealed that the sodium levels in her blood were dangerously low.

For two days, Martine was literally non compos mentis—not in her right mind. On Tuesday night, as she was waiting in a temporary patient treatment area for a hospital bed to be assigned to her, she was shaking like a leaf and was barely able to recognize me.

When I returned home, I was shattered. Was this the beginning of something critical, or possibly fatal? On Wednesday, she was slightly better as the hospital worked at raising the sodium level in her blood. But she was still not quite right in her mind: She kept attempting to get up to go to the bathroom while multiple tubes were connected to her body. She kept insisting “This is a free country!”

In the end, a licensed vocational nurse was delegated to keep her safely in bed. I visited her twice, but she forgot that I was there. Fortunately, yesterday and today saw a return to the Martine I knew and loved. Essentially, she is still in the hospital mainly for observation to make sure that her blood work stabilizes.

At home, I was too upset to read or write; so I have just watched the Paris Olympics endlessly.

It looks as if Martine will probably be discharged tomorrow. I hope so: I desperately want to return to our normal lives.

Comprachicos

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Conrad Veidt in Paul Leni’s Film The Man Who Laughs (1928)

It all started in the elevator to the Trader Joe parking lot. Two odd women first commented that I looked like the actor Wilford Brimley, and then asked me why I didn’t smile. That set me off: I don’t particularly like to go around with a smile on my face, and I don’t think much of people who do. Were these frustrated dental assistants to go around accosting strangers for not airing their teeth?

Then I thought of one reason I didn’t like being all smiley. I remembered Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs (1869), which was turned into a 1928 silent film by Paul Leni starring Conrad Veidt, better known as Major Strasser “of the Third Reich” in the film Casablanca (1942).

Well, anyway, the novel and film were about people called comprachicos who, as children, were mutilated to look pathetic so that their handlers can could use them for begging:

The Comprachicos, or Comprapequefios, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, unheard of in the 19th. They traded in children, buying and selling them, but not stealing them. They made of these children monsters. The populace must needs laugh, and kings too. The montebank is wanted in the street, the jester at the Louvre; the one is called a clown, the other a fool. By the artificial production of teratological cases the Comprachicos developed a science and practiced an art. They kneaded the features, stunted growth, and fashioned hunchbacks and dwarfs; the court fool was their specialty.

The Conrad Veidt character in the film was a child who was kidnapped and had a permanent smile carved on his face, which made him look pathetic. And that’s what comes to mind when people tell me to smile. I just don’t care to oblige them.

Wilford Brimley (1934-2020)

By the way, I look almost exactly like Wilford Brimley, except that his mustache was a little bigger than mine. Of course, I would prefer that strangers think I am a dead ringer for Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, or some other dolicocephalic heartthrob. But then, so it goes.

On Being a Slave to Technology

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Something happened to me as I approached retirement age. I mean besides getting old. What I mean is that I began to feel highly critical about several technologies that were beginning to assume a dominant position in our society.

Touch Screen

Although I use an Amazon Kindle to read several books a month, I do not like the imprecision of touch screen interfaces—especially when I have to enter data without a large-sized keyboard. I do not have fingers that measure five millimeters across, so an onscreen keyboard is as difficult for me as using tweezers to move an anvil.

Smartphones

In addition to my dislike of touch screen interfaces, I find smartphones irritating in the extreme. I have a flip cellphone, but I don’t carry it around with me everywhere I go. For one thing, I will not answer the phone while driving, as I wish to continue living and operating an unwrecked car. My cellphone is for outcalling only, except by prior arrangement. Most of the time, it is powered off and sits comfortably on my computer desk.

The other thing is that I already have to carry around a number of things in my pockets:

  • An eyeglass case with reading glasses
  • A ballpoint pen
  • My wallet
  • My keys
  • Change for parking meters
  • Selected medications, including insulin for diabetes

E-Scooters

Why was this ever invented? I have already seen a half dozen nasty accidents involving e-scooters. And besides, I’ve always thought people looked silly operating them.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

I know that we are living in a world where artificial intelligence is regarded as the coming thing. In my opinion, AI is a way of sacrificing truth for convenience. Please accept my assurance that I do not use AI in producing my blog posts. We have enough half truths and lies all around us without my adding any more to the mix.

GPS

Here I admit I’m on shaky ground. I do not have any GPS device in my car because I do not like to be distracted while driving. Also, I am still a bit skeptical about their accuracy, particularly while traveling in foreign countries. I suppose that for people who don’t know where they’re going, GPS can be a blessing of sorts.

The nice thing about being my age is that I can pick and choose which technologies to adopt. I do not have to turn myself into a rabid fanboy because Apple or some other tech giant is releasing a new product. I believe it was Alexander Pope who wrote the following couplet:

Be not the first by which the new are tried
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Survival Mechanism

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My father was a semi-professional athlete both in Czechoslovakia and in Cleveland, where he played in the 1930s in a nationality-based soccer league. As his firstborn, I was something of a disappointment to him. I was a bit of a shrimp, later ballooning into a short tubby boy with a broad spectrum of allergies. Plus, around the age of ten, I started getting severe frontal headaches almost daily that were constantly misdiagnosed by the physicians we saw. (It turned out to be a pituitary tumor, which was successfully operated on after I graduated from college.)

What unpromising material!

When my brother was born, my father must have breathed a sigh of relief. Dan was tall and an athlete in my father’s mold.

Where did that leave me?

Thanks to my mother’s genius for story-telling—what with dark forests and witches and princesses—I turned to books as soon as I learned to read. There was a period of adjustment of several years during which I had to switch from being an American kid who spoke only Hungarian to an English-speaker. Those dark forests and witches and princesses, luckily, could also be found in books, together with a lot of other interesting stuff.

Although I always had friends, I was left out of school sports because I was frankly somewhat sickly. That turned out to be all right in the end, as my friends were interested in the same sort of things that I was. With Richard Nelson, who was an astronomy freak, I collaborated in writing an illustrated hand-printed study of our solar system and galaxy. Richard later became a meteorologist. Then there was James Anthony, who became a gynecologist.

While I was physically weak, books made me strong in every other way. I never became a famous author or a college professor, but I held down some interesting jobs that help finance my love of books. And I always read a lot. Even today, as I approach my ninth decade, I read anywhere from twelve to sixteen books a month.

What started out as a survival mechanism has brought happiness to my life. I have no children (because I no longer have a pituitary gland), but my retirement years have been mostly contented.

I know that there will be bad times to come as Martine and I age, but I retain a mostly sunny view of life. And in an election year in which Donald Trump is running, that’s a major accomplishment.

My Cities: Cleveland

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This is the first in a series of posts on cities where I have lived or traveled to or even just yearned to visit. It is natural that I begin with the city in which I was born, namely, Cleveland, Ohio. Once I left to go to college in 1962, my visits have all involved school vacations, family visits, or family funerals. In the 1960s, Cleveland was a city that was going nowhere. Jobs were vanishing, particularly from what had once been a healthy industrial base.

And, to make matters worse, my parents’ marriage seemed to be coming apart, after almost twenty years. (Fortunately, it never did.) Nonetheless, I didn’t want to stick around for the escalating nastiness.

So when, during a family truce, my folks drove me to the wilds of New Hampshire, I was already not planning ever to return to Cleveland unless I had to. It was only when I wound up in Los Angeles to attend grad school that Mom and Dad realized that I would never again live in the family home on Lawndale Drive.

Yet after almost half a century on the West Coast, I no longer have any negative feelings about Cleveland and the monster that, according to Seymour Krebs of “Dobie Gillis” fame, devoured it. On the other hand, there is no longer any reason for me to go there. My mother and father have both passed on (in 1998 and 1985 respectively), and my brother now lives in the Coachella Valley of California. My uncle and aunt are no more, and my cousin Emil is also gone. The only remaining members of my family are my cousin Peggy and her three daughters—but I was never particularly close to them as I was to Emil.

Cleveland has some wonderful museums, a world-class symphony orchestra, and some top-notch colleges and universities. But lost forever is the Hungarian neighborhood that helped nurture me—all moved to the distant suburbs and become deracinated.

Lake Worth

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My Home for a Few Months in 1946-47

When I was about one year old, my parents decided to move to Lake Worth, Florida. It was more of its own city then: Now it’s more like a suburb of West Palm Beach. I don’t know why they decided to do this, and I was never curious enough to ask. I have no memories of the place before a 1950 visit with my mother when I was five years old. And my only memories of that visit was discovering a weed with a nettle at one end and straight enough to use as an arrow with my toy bow, and also of the train ride there.

The only proof I have of my residence in Lake Worth is a picture of me at the age of one wearing no clothes and peeing into a bucket. I would insert that here except that I once got into trouble by doing just that. Oh well, I suppose there are a lot of sickies who would get off on that, so WordPress would be in their rights.

Our stay in Florida came to an end because of my father’s easily upset digestion. When your job is disposing of the rotted bodies of dead alligators, it’s difficult to keep one’s lunch down. So it was back to Cleveland we went where Dad, who was a master machinist, could get a job that was more in his line.

When he retired, he and my Mom bought a condominium in Hollywood, Florida, in the same complex where my Uncle Emil and Aunt Annabelle lived. It was more to his liking to live in Florida as a retiree than as a young man with a foreign accent trying to get a job anywhere in the South.

Although I visited Florida a number of times, I never liked the heat and humidity. There’s something about always being sweaty that didn’t appeal to me. Even after buying the condo, my folks preferred to spend their summers in Cleveland, which I thought was only marginally better.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

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Los Angeles at Night

This afternoon the thought suddenly hit me that, in the Los Angeles night, it never really gets dark—or altogether quiet, either. I have experienced total darkness only once, when the lights in the Cave of Balancanche near the ruins of Chichén Itzá in Yucatán were turned off to show the turistas why the Maya thought that caves were portals to Xibalba, the “place of fright,” the underworld.

I used to love camping in the desert during the winter months, finding the nighttime in places like Death Valley, Hovenweep, and Chaco Canyon a magical experience. Seeing the myriad of stars in the sky without interference from city lights is something I recommend to all. When was the last time I saw stars in Los Angeles? How about … never?

In addition to the all-pervasive light pollution, there is constant noise, not only from the heater and refrigerator, plus an all-pervasive high-pitched electronic susurrus, but from the city around us. Whenever a motorcycle or a performance car races down the street, a number of car alarms go off and screaming until the automatic shutoff kicks in.

Also, I live within 2-3 miles of three major hospitals: UCLA Ronald Reagan, UCLA Santa Monica, and Saint John. In an average night, we hear several ambulance sirens carting the sick to local emergency centers.

Despite all this, I somehow manage to clock 8-9 hours a night of fairly solid sleep.

I wish I could say the same for Martine. To avoid nightmares, Martine must take a sleeping pill that gives her only 4-5 hours a night, or even less. At a certain point during what I call the Hour of the Wolf, Martine just lies in bed trying without luck to drop off into slumberland.

Whistling Past the Cemetery

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Sometimes I wonder why I am alive today. My father died at the age of 74 in 1985; and my mother, at the age of 79 in 1998. One reason I have survived is that between 1962 and 1966, I had to walk a mile to classes at Dartmouth College from one of the more distant dormitories, the infamous Middle Wigwam Hall, later renamed McLane Hall.

My journey led me past the Thayer School of Engineering, the Tuck School of Business, several dormitories, and the scary Hanover, New Hampshire cemetery. Burials in that graveyard went back to the 18th century. At the time I was in college, the walk past the cemetery was dark, lonely, and long. In the winter, it was also quite icy.

Then, after I graduated from college, I had brain surgery entailing the removal of my pituitary gland, after which I started growing again. My left hip did not like that, so the orthopedists at UCLA put me on crutches for two years. More exercise.

No sooner did I get off crutches than I did a lot of walking. It was 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from my apartment in Santa Monica to System Development Corporation, and 2.5 miles (4 km) from the same apartment to my next job at Urban Decision Systems. During that time, I also did a lot of hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains, sometimes on trails that were up to 10 miles (16.1 km) in length.

I don’t do so much walking any more, but over the years I had developed some good habits which, I think, are standing me in good stead today.

Drawing Blood

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Looking Back on the First Time

As I recall, I was about ten years old when I first had to give a blood sample from the crook of my elbow. My mother drove me to Saint Luke’s Hospital close by the old Buckeye Road Hungarian neighborhood where we had lived until 1951. When I found out that a nurse wanted to stick a needle in my arm, I took the only reasonable course. I bolted down the corridor until a couple of orderlies deputed to drag me back got hold of me.

I thought it hurt like hell. And ever since, it has not been easy to draw my blood. The veins around my elbow run deep and are not terribly visible. The person drawing my blood has to be very experienced with patients who veins like to hide. There have been times when I was punctured three or four times before a big enough vein was found. Sometimes, they just stuck the needle in the back of my hand, where my veins are more prominent.

Saint Luke’s Hospital from an Old Postcard

The only thing that’s changed is that I no longer resist getting by needles. In fact, I have to administer an insulin shot into my abdomen or thigh four times a day. Even when there is some pain, I know that it won’t be long-lasting. It’s one of those things you get used to as you age.