We got to introduce our family to friends here and share favorite places. There were many meals for eight. Altogether a joyful noise. It was quite a week.
They left this afternoon. They’ll do Sea World in
It was a special Christmas for us Becky, Brian, Taylor, Tony, Teigan, and Conner.
Becky, Brian and the kids are on their way here for Christmas. They’ve been on the road for days.
They rented a Class C Winnebago and left the
Sunday, another drive south all day to the other side of
Tomorrow, they’ll get us and we get them.
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From: Steve Taylor [mailto:
Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2007 8:51 PM
To: Bill Taylor (Bill Taylor); David Taylor (David Taylor);
Subject:
Birding in
Neotropic cormorants
Harris’s hawks
Greater roadrunner
Golden fronted woodpeckers
Vermilion flycatchers
Scissor tailed flycatchers
Green jays
Blue gray gnatcatchers
Long billed thrasher
And olive sparrow.
I still get chest pain during strenuous exercise; so I can walk every day, but I can’t run. I was concerned that the remaining chest pain might mean they missed something and I might need more work, but the doctor said that is not the case. He says the angiogram reveals blockages as small as 20%. There are no significant blockages remaining. When they saved the two major arteries in my heart, they lost a small one. It had some flow in it, but after they fixed the other two arteries, it just went away. They don’t know why that happens; sometimes it just does. The portion of my heart that is supposed to be fed by that small artery doesn’t like it when it runs out of fuel during exercise and that’s what causes the chest pain. The good news is that over time, collateral vessels will probably develop to make up the difference.
This is a good place to be. We’re done with doctors having to fix things for the foreseeable future, but there is still work to be done. I get the challenge of exercising (within limits) with the expectation of improving exercise capacity. There has been a fair amount of anxiety for the six weeks or so, wondering what the outcome will be. We’re happy with this one.
A good day.
The tankers are low in the water when they come in and high in the water when they go out. Guess they don’t produce enough oil in
Dean and Betty Jo arrived in their new Newell. A significant upgrade from the nice American Eagle they were in last year. The Newell is all curved lines inside; not a square corner. It’s a forty-five footer. They made good use of the extra five feet of length with an extended front room: a rambling sofa on one side and a sweeping office desk on the other. The exterior door and the interior doors are air-operated, so they open and close with a quiet whoosh at the push of a button. It has a doorbell. It is a thing of beauty.
No. An upgrade from the Beaver coach is not in our plans.
A pair of coots owns it. Other birds can be in the pond. The ruddy ducks aren’t a problem. The yellowlegs, great egret, and blue heron can work the shore. The scaup and blue winged teal can paddle about. Wilson’s snipe; fine. Doves, killdeer, and grackles coming down to drink; no big deal. But no other coots are allowed.
The problem is; more coots want to live in this pond. Any other coot touches the water though, and the resident coots turn into half-submerged attack submarines, heads straight out on extended necks at water level, clucking and scolding. At one point it escalated into a splash fight, two sets of coots, each bird locked up with another at the feet, flapping and squawking wildly, each trying to gain the advantage and submerge the other. It was like watching bull elk locked in mortal combat except it wasn’t mortal combat and they’re not bull elk. They’re ducks. It was a splash fight.
We left on a side-trip for three days. When we left, the two coots in the pond were holding off five intruding coots ganged up on the grass at the edge of the pond, probing for a weakness in the defense. None of the new coots was able to stay in the water yet, but it was a continuing assault.
Three days later, the rules have been rewritten. We come home and there are twelve birds in the pond, four of them coots. There are now two pair of coots in the pond. They don’t tolerate each other well, it takes lots of squawking, clucking, and sometimes chasing and splashing to reinforce the limits, but it is now a four coot pond.
Never know what you’re going to get with the beach. For the past two weeks there hasn’t been a piece of seaweed on it. Today, big difference. It changes; we watch.
It will be full by Christmas.
There is a downside to all this. We had to cancel my annual haircut with Cynthia. Now we’ll have to decide whether to reschedule or just wait until next winter.
December is a great time to be here on
Pink sided junco.
The exercise chest pain we had been discussing these last few weeks was not the result of
We couldn’t have been better cared for. The GP doctor in Port Aransas called the cardiologist directly to get us right in. The cardiologist gave me the treadmill test himself (not to see how far I could go this time, but to document when the discomfort started). The cardiologist got us a room in the hospital that night and on the calendar for the “cath lab” the very next day. The cath lab found an artery that was 99% blocked, closely followed by two more blocks at 85% each, and another artery that was 70% blocked. We had made it to help in time, but just barely. They opened up the blocked arteries and put in a couple stents to make sure they stayed open. One day later I’m home and good to go. Good as new…. or at least better than before… writing this!
What an amazing process! They puncture an artery in my leg, feed instruments all the way up into my heart (angiogram), identify the blockages, open them up with a small balloon (angioplasty), insert little wire mesh cages (the stents) into the affected areas, expand another balloon inside each of the stents until they match the diameter and configuration of the arteries, pull everything back out, and send me home within twenty-four hours of starting the procedure. I never got a general anesthetic; it was all local. I never even got a pain pill. I never needed it.
In the hospital, they kept good track of me. Before and after the procedure, I had a heart monitor on my chest at all times. All the wires attached to my chest terminated in a sending unit in a pocket of my gown. The nurse’s station was monitoring the signal from every heart monitor on the floor. The morning of the heart catheterization, Judy got next to me in bed for an extended hug. Within just a few minutes, the door burst open and the floor nurse said “I have to see his heart monitor.” He checked everything out, then pushed a button to turn the heart monitor back on. When Judy laid up against me, she unknowingly pushed the button to turn the heart monitor off. All they could tell at the nurses station was that I had suddenly flatlined.
It was a long day Thursday. We were up at five for the blood draw, vitals signs, and such. A few hours later they took me into the lab for the procedure which took a couple hours, then held me in recovery for three hours, then sent me back to my room with instruction not to move my right leg or anything attached to it, and not to lift my head for six hours. They had just punched a hole in the femoral artery in my right leg through which to thread the instruments up to my heart, and they wanted to give the artery time to close back over before we did anything that might accidentally open it back up. It’s an artery, not a vein, so we really really don’t want that thing pumping uncontrolled. So I’m lying on my back in bed. I can’t move anything on my right side. If I forget and bend my left elbow, it crimps off the IV line and the alarm goes off on the machine next to the left side of my head, so I can’t move my left arm much either. Halfway into the six hour don’t-move-a-thing assignment, it had been ten hours since the last time I peed. We asked the nurse if it was okay for me to get up for a minute. She handed me a bottle. Right. I’m going to lie on my back, head on my pillow, not clench any muscles, and pee into a bottle. Sixty years of training to hold the bladder while in that position, no matter what, no matter how many times you dream about walking into the restroom and peeing; and I’m going to convince all my involuntary muscles to forget about that, it’s okay to go just this one time. It was a long three more hours to the end of my bed rest sentence.
Early on in this process, as I lay in a room between visits and tests, Judy and I together at all times, I was struck with the realization that had I been born at any other time in all of human history, we would be saying goodbye right now instead of choosing treatment options. I was fading fast. I could feel I only had a short time left. Without the option of going inside the heart and fixing it, there was nothing else to be done. My time had come.
It’s a good time to be alive.
We don’t know the extent of the work to be done yet. They’ll probably do an angiogram; slide a tube up through a vein in my leg and take a look at my heart from the inside. When they do that, everything else they might need to do just naturally follows while they’re already there. Decisions will be made on the fly. Judy already knows all my concerns and preferences.
I’m glad to get this taken care of now. My daily exercise has been slowed to a snail’s pace. This should get me back on the road again.
We’ll find out more tomorrow. I’ll report back.
The forecast looks promising.
Kerrville to Port Aransas. Downhill; and south. We’ve not only moved to the eastern section of the
Eighty degrees, calm, and misty when we got here. Tonight, it’s all the way down to seventy degrees so far, and foggy. We’re on the beach. We won’t be moving once a week for a while.
We spotted an entire flock of them at Buckhorn.
The whole giant motorhome, matching trailer, swirly paintjob thing; that’s been done before. They could have raised the bar. They could have set the standard. They could have had a giant seventy-five foot articulated RV.
Soo close.
Buckhorn RV Resort. It’s definitely a big-rig park.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re in
I love driving this bus down the highway.
We didn’t see the roadrunner at the park in
Scaled quail, pyrrhuloxia, white-tailed deer and javelina.
Here in
Our neighbors in the airstream trailer are here for exactly the same reason. They are having more luck than we are. They got 20 today. They have an unfair advantage, though. They have dogs that run though the tall grass flushing the birds for them. And they have guns. They brought two quail over tonight to show us what they look like. They even offered to clean a couple of them for us for dinner. We decided to go out for Mexican food instead.
We’re still looking for the Montezuma Quail. We’re not going to put them on our life list until we spot some that are still breathing.
We’ve been looking for Montezuma Quail at the oak edges and Arizona Woodpeckers in the canyons. So far we’ve got Gamble’s Quail and Acorn Woodpeckers. Not new birds but always fun to find. We’re always on the lookout for new birds. We got four last May. We got up before dawn and went to the grouse dancing grounds. But then we didn’t get another new one until June, and didn’t get another until September. Today, finally, new bird! Gray Hawk. Got a good look at him standing on a branch right over the road. Gray bird with a black and white banded tail. Gray Hawk.
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