Day 22

  

 

The situation grows more desperate by the hour.

 

 

 

 

The little church

  

 

West of Highway 281 on Texas 117.  Out toward La Gloria.  I located it on google maps:

 

 

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Guadalupe+Toreros+Church/@26.6364329,-98.3403389,856m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x8665c8cf19d6c79d:0xbeeafaaffe06465a!8m2!3d26.6364281!4d-98.3381449

 

It’s the Guadalupe Toreros Church.  Toreros means bullfighters.  A neighborhood Catholic church built about 1920 and in service until about 20 years ago.  The nearest church at the time was ten miles away.  A twenty-mile round trip was a difficult distance for the parishioners, given the condition of the roads at the time, and this little church solved the transportation problem.

 

I find things like this really moody.  I stand in the quiet and imagine the laughter and life.  For eighty years it had sights and sounds, but is derelict by its centennial today.

 

 

 

 

 

I was just thinking

  

 

If we were considering going to war with another country, we’d want to think about how we got our weapons.  If we realized that we were procuring all our weapons from the country we were considering attacking, or that we were concerned might attack us, we’d probably find a way to ramp up production at home, even if the arms industry had to be subsidized, until we were self-sufficient in that regard.  It would be in our national interest and national security to be self-sufficient; to be prepared.

 

Now we’re in a world war with a virus.  Not something I ever considered.  Never occurred to me to think about the entire world having to shut down to let a curse pass.  But there are planners.  There are strategists.  There are people who spend their entire lives thinking about these things, and I’m sure they don’t limit themselves to thinking just about regional conflicts.  They think about what to do in the event of a hurricane, an earthquake, a tornado, or even, possibly, a global pandemic.

 

If we were sitting around brainstorming about a global pandemic, what would be the first question we would ask?  How about, “Do we have the resources to get through this?”  I’m thinking ventilators, masks, and gowns; personal protective gear; hospital facilities, staffing, and test kits; not because I know anything about these things, but because that is what has been on the news.  Of course, we’re not going to have everything we would need on hand, just in case, for something that might happen someday.  But the question has to have been asked “If there are immediate needs in an emergency, do we have the ability to meet those needs as fast as we will need them; do we have a plan?”  If the answer to that question was “No, we would have to buy significant quantities of what we would need from other countries”, who of course, would need the exact same things at home, then what next in this exercise?  Stop?  Game over?  I don’t think so.  We would determine what it would take to be confident we could produce what we needed, even if that industry had to be subsidized to keep it tenable.  It would be in our national interest, a matter of national security, to have a plan.

 

Just thinking; wondering how many people, whose jobs it is to think through these scenarios, have had to watch their conclusions and recommendations disregarded.  “No one could have seen this coming!”  No, I’m sure there were plenty of people who saw this coming.  There are people who have prepared all their lives for this moment.  They saw it coming.  We just didn’t hear them when they told us.

 

Here is a chart showing responses to this infection.

 

The long line starting at the left represents how China, a country with four times the population of ours, responded and capped the number of cases at about 80,000.  Perhaps China saw it coming and had a plan.  The blue line, starting much later, rising like a rocket, represents how the United States has responded so far.  120,000 cases.  It remains to be seen how high our line, the measure of our response, goes.

 

 

 

Along the way

  

 

A reminder of our adobe past.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great-tailed grackles

 

 

 

In the evening light.

 

 

 

 

Judy update

  

Three weeks post-surgery.

 

The knee is so much better.  Physical Therapy three times a week (at home).  Judy does her range of motion exercises every day.  She can get a little impatient at the pace of recovery, but the doctor and PT think she’s on a fine schedule.

 

 

 

Today Judy reports that the knee is starting to feel normal and the most discomfort is now in her thigh, where they put the tourniquet during the surgery, as that part of her leg recovers from the insult.

 

 

 

One can only watch so much TV news

  

It is hard to look away though, from a slow-motion train wreck.

 

If not for the fact that the world-wide infection is serious and deadly, and, well, real; what a great computer game this would make.  You get to try to protect the planet from a global pandemic with options to make every step and misstep possible.  Try all the different scenarios and figure out just the right balance between prosperity and survival strategies.  Except, of course, with a computer simulation it’s okay to get it wrong.

 

Anyway, having torn ourselves away from the coverage, we’ve shifted our attention to movies; and not just any movies, but quality movies.  We’ve watched Creature From the Black Lagoon.  It took me this long since I was eight years old to get up the courage to watch it again.  And Anaconda.  Okay, maybe I’ve already seen it three times but I just can’t stop watching it.  Past episodes of Major Crimes.  I know, not a movie, but charming characters.

 

Quality time.  Sheltering in place.  Thursday, we get to drive to the grocery store and wait in the parking lot while they bring our food order out to us.  There is still excitement in our lives…

 

 

 

A direct hit

  

My left foot has been bothering me a little.  Nothing serious; nothing to go to the doctor about; it’s just that particular movements make the top of my foot hurt.  Why would that be?  That’s not an overuse injury from walking.  Walking doesn’t hurt it.

 

Then it dawned on me.  All those years ago, that foot suffered a direct hit from a mortar round.  Normally a person wouldn’t be recounting how they suffered a direct hit from a mortar round, but in my case I had just placed that mortar round in the bed of my truck and as I looked away, it rolled off the truck and landed square on my foot.  That hurt.  Mortar rounds are heavy.  I spent the next week stomping about the jungle in one jungle boot and a shower shoe, until the swelling had gone down enough that I could put my foot back into a boot.

 

No special dispensation.  No purple heart.  No bravery.  Just a reminder after all these years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isn’t it amazing

  

The presidential campaign has totally disappeared.  Not a mention.  Bernie who?  Joe Biden?  Not a word.  No rallies.  No primaries.  Nothing on the news.  Can’t attack the sitting president in the midst of a global crisis.  Can’t afford to appear petty.  Can’t afford to appear.

 

The president can’t do his normal campaigning either.  No crowds.  No maga rallies.  The only thing on the news is Trump though.  Every day.  Who needs a campaign?  Who needs a rally?  Trump is owning the exposure.

 

 

 

 

The answer to the obvious question

  

Here are the short-billed dowitchers.

 

If these are the short-billed, how long is the bill on a long-billed dowitcher?

 

Here are long-billed dowitchers.

 

Good luck telling the difference.

 

There are some subtle physical differences.  Long-billed is a little chunkier, but the best clue is habitat.  Short-billed prefers salt water.  Long-billed prefers fresh water.  Mostly.

 

 

 

We’re so isolated here in South Texas

  

The pandemic isn’t very near us and we’re not on the way to anywhere.

 

The closest cases are in Dallas and Houston, 500 and 350 miles respectively, north of us.  Nothing much between here and there.  It’s not like it is for our brothers in the Pacific Northwest.  They are in the Seattle area, what was the early epicenter of the outbreak.  Or brother David in the Bay area which is now on lockdown.  There’s nothing going on here.  We don’t really need to employ social distancing, we’re only practicing just in case.

 

Except a few days ago San Antonio got added to the list, 250 miles north.  Okay.  Oops, Laredo.  A little closer.  Make that 150 miles west.  Yesterday, Harlingen.  45 miles east.  Now it’s 40 miles south of us in Reynosa.

 

Bummer.

 

 

 

And now for something completely different

  

Short-billed dowitchers.

 

Short-billed?  Yeah, I know.  Go figure.

 

 

 

 

A thousand-dollar check

  

For everyone who makes less than a million dollars?  That’s one of the stimulus proposals floated.  That’s absurd.

 

Is a thousand dollars going to make a difference in someone’s life if they already have an income of a million dollars?  I don’t think so.  Cap the benefit at people making a hundred thousand dollars, or fifty thousand dollars.  Don’t give it to Judy and me, give it to someone who needs it more than we do, and it will make a bigger difference in their lives!

 

 

 

 

It was a week ago

  

We heard that the rate of spread of the Corona Virus was that the number of cases would double every week.  A logarithmic scale like that is a scary scenario.  At the time, Governor Cuomo guessed that he had 1,000 cases, diagnosed and undiagnosed, and made the prediction that if left unchecked, his state would be dealing with 64,000 infected people in six weeks.  That’s how the math works.

 

So I watched for an easy number to track.  Last Tuesday the total number of reported cases in the U.S. on the daily news topped 1,000; that’s my baseline.  If the governor’s prediction held, that number should be 2,000 by this Tuesday; today.  Seven days have passed.  The number of cases in the U.S. just passed 6,000.  That represents 2 ½ doublings in my first week of careful attention.  A very scary start indeed.

 

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, all over the globe we’re fighting for our lives, interestingly by doing nothing.  Go home.  Stay home.  Don’t go out if you don’t have to.  Close everything that’s not a pharmacy or grocery store.  Measures that would be fine for a week or two, but long-term are just not sustainable.  This is not a one or two week problem.  It’s going to go on for months, not weeks.  Plan on at least a year, probably more.  Even after its peak, the virus will continue to be a problem until there is a vaccine or treatment for it.  Imagine the cabin fever if we just do what we’re doing today.  How many people have the reserves to wait this out?  No money.  Can’t pay the rent.  Can’t pay the utilities.  Can’t buy food.  Economic collapse.  Not sustainable.

 

We’ll all do what we need to do right now, as long as we can, but after the curve flattens and we’ve made it past the medical facility overload; at some point we’re going to have to suck it up, just start living again, and take our lumps.

 

 

 

 

 

A checkup with the surgeon

  

A trip to Corpus today to meet with the surgeon and see how the knee is doing.  The doctor thinks Judy is awesome.  The knee looks just right for this stage of recovery.

 

Here is how it looks on the inside with an x-ray.

 

Looks just like a knee, doesn’t it?  The empty spaces in the joint aren’t really empty.  Just like cartilage, the plastic part of the joint doesn’t show up on an x-ray.

 

Normally the doctor would have us come back in two weeks, but considering our distance and the virus situation, we settled on waiting a month for our next visit.  We were originally going to stay overnight and see a different doctor in Corpus on Tuesday morning for something else, but were hesitant about going to a doctor that treated sick people (instead of an orthopedic doctor’s office) so we called them up and they agreed to do the visit virtually tomorrow.  The hotel took a late cancellation, no problem.  It seems like everyone is making every accommodation they can.

 

We’re back home again tonight.

 

 

 

Busted!

  

Judy told the physical therapist how well she was doing.  The PT said “No walking without the walker!” 

 

Turns out the walker isn’t required just for security and balance.  We have a couple healing bone ends that don’t want to bear full weight yet.  Walking with the walker distributes weight to the hands and takes some of the force off those healing bones.  Judy woke up sore today.  Maybe PT knows what she’s talking about.

 

We get it.  Judy is back to the walker, even in the house.  Our education continues…

 

 

 

 

What a difference a day makes!

  

Or two.

 

Suddenly Judy is up and about and feels like doing things again.  She has her balance back and is walking all around the house comfortably without the walker.  Tonight we were going to have burritos for dinner and she offered to make them!  OMG, she’s back!  Well, actually she’s not back all the time.  She still needs a lot of sleep; more than can be gotten just at night while her body repairs itself from the surgical intrusion; but when she’s awake, she’s back!

 

We ventured off the deck together for the first time in twelve days and had a golf cart ride around the park.  We talked with neighbors, but only from a near distance, which brings us to another subject.  We’re trying to remember to be conscious of “social distance”.  No hugging and stay back a few feet.  There aren’t any cases of coronavirus reported yet in the Rio Grande Valley, but we’ll start practicing being safe now.  Judy and I are in the danger zone; not for any underlying conditions; no compromised immune systems, but we’re undeniably at risk because of our age.  I go out for errands and take advantage of all the strategically placed hand sanitizers.  Don’t want to bring a virus home to Judy.  Don’t plan on getting into a flying or floating petri dish either.  No airplane or cruise ship rides for a while.

 

Went to the grocery store to get a few things today and that was not cool.  The aisles had more people than food.  There is an abundance of fresh food; fruits, vegetables, and meat, but durable staples; rice, beans, flour; nothing but bare shelves.  No cheese.  No butter.  No eggs.  Never seen that before.  We just had a hiccup in our land of plenty.  We hear stories of other less-developed countries where going to the grocery is a crap shoot.  You might have a wish-list of what you’d like to get, but settle for what is there that day, and figure out how to make it work.  I felt a twinge of that today.  Just a twinge though; a temporary thing.  Those other people we hear about, it’s their normal for weeks, months and years at a time. 

 

Home from the brush with reality.

 

 

 

Quinta Mazatlan

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Progress Report

  

Ten days post-surgery.  Knee recovery is slow.  Moving and stretching exercises every day.  The knee moves a little and hurts a lot.

 

For a while, the surgical leg was so swollen it didn’t even look like Judy’s leg.  The swelling is going down now though, and her leg doesn’t look so fully-inflated.

 

Less swelling should mean less resistance to range of motion.

 

Just today Judy is starting to feel like getting up and around, not because she has to for PT, but because she wants to.  We see the doctor for follow-up next week.  There aren’t any surface stitches to take out, but the knee will look a lot better when we’re able to get the tape and glue off and wash off all the magic marker lines.  Then we’ll know what it really looks like.

 

 

 

Great news!

  

The Denver Broncos remain undefeated in 2020.

 

Go Broncos!!!

 

 

 

 

I’ve been wondering

  

Where are all the dead birds?

 

How long do songbirds live?  Maybe 10 years?  That would mean in a stable population, about 10 percent of all the birds die each year.  According to my painstaking ten-second research on google, there are on average about 15 billion (15,000,000,000) birds in the U.S.  If 10% of them die each year, that’s one and a half billion (1,500,000,000) dead birds every year!  Where are they?

 

Sure, some are inside the bellies of cats and other predators, or scavengers, but that’s an awful lot of predating and scavenging to get rid of that many carcasses in the United States alone.  I’ve heard windmills and windows kill a lot of birds.  It’s easy to get to windmill farms here in Texas.  I’ve gone to them and walked around under individual windmills looking for dead birds, just as an anecdotal test, and have yet to find a dead bird.  We’ve got a hundred birds flying around the bird feeder in our yard every day.  Not only that, we’ve got windows.  Yet I don’t see any dead birds under the feeder or below our windows.

 

Is there a bird graveyard, like elephants are supposed to have an elephant graveyard, because you don’t find a lot of elephant bones lying around Africa?

 

 

 

Fitted Sheets

  

I do the folding.  Sheets, towels, handkerchiefs, cloth napkins; that’s what I do.  I don’t do it like mom did, with a mangle though.  Many a day we came home from school to find mom in the service porch mangling sheets and handkerchiefs with something like this:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJiVjzUTsA8

 

What could possibly go wrong with mangles, on/off levers, and fingers involved.  Remarkably, mom kept all her fingers all her life!

 

Brought up with a mangle in the house, and with none at hand now, I do what I can with what I’ve got.  I use a “hand mangle” technique to smooth things out.  Sheets, towels, handkerchiefs, no problem for me; except for fitted sheets.  Fitted sheets were a pain.  I had figured out how to fold them square, but it was cumbersome.  I watched YouTube videos on how to fold them; most I didn’t understand.  But this guy; this guy knows what he’s doing.  In fact, he knows what he’s doing so well that he can actually demonstrate it so I can understand it.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHTyH2nuFAw

 

Ever since I adopted this technique, fitted sheets are the easier sheet to fold.

 

Since fitted sheets are easier now, I guess I’ll need to turn my attention to improving my flat sheet folding technique next.

 

 

 

The mockingbird got over it

  

It terrorized the bird feeder for a few weeks, but now it has moved on to song; a singer not a fighter.  That few weeks of aggressive behavior might mostly be a matter of seasonal hormones brought on by springtime.  We’re back to the normal fluid feeder hierarchy where the bigger birds tend to muscle out the smaller birds, but the mix of birds is constantly changing, so everyone gets a chance.

 

 

And a special alert.  Formula 1 racing resumes for another season, starting next weekend in Australia.  Don’t forget to set your timers.  Practice Session 1 is on Thursday!

 

 

 

We wonder about being monitored digitally

  

Big Brother.  Every online vendor is tracking our purchases and preferences.  Who knows how much of that the government knows.  Uninvited invisible intrusion into our lives.

 

I thought about it, checked a resource, and determined that unwelcome observation isn’t a problem after all.  I asked Alexa if she was spying on us and she answered “No.”  She said she values our privacy.

 

 

 

 

 

Elections

  

We as a country have been voting for two hundred years.  Voting should be, and could be, easy; maybe even fun.  Yet this week, primary voters suffer hours-long lines?  C’mon.  It’s not rocket science!  It’s just the primaries.  It’s not like there is any point in suppressing the vote.  Sometimes more people show up than we expect.  We can’t build that possibility into our plans?

 

Meanwhile, if we were keeping score by day, it would be Judy 3, Knee 1.  The knee is winning today.  We’ll see if Judy can mount a comeback tomorrow!

 

Got the dogs home from the boarding kennel.  The pack is complete again.

 

 

 

Day 3

  

What a difference a day makes.

 

At the hospital they pushed more and more Percoset.  Two every four hours.  Judy was barely conscious by the time we left.  Last night and today, two Percosets spread out over the first 24 hours.  She still needs some pain relief, but not nearly as much as she was getting.

 

From the slow-motion escort of her every move, suddenly she’s up and around (with the walker) going room to room unassisted.  Her first taste of regaining physical freedom.  She had her first appointment with the physical therapist today.  The PT put her through all the rehab exercises then announced that Judy was doing better on Day 3 than anyone she has ever worked with (over a 7-year period).  That’s encouraging!

 

We (and by “we” I mean Judy) will be dealing with pain and swelling for weeks, but it’s a good day today.

 

 

 

Day 2

  

The more modern version of the hospital recliner chair for sleeping.

 

It’s not a recliner.

 

It’s a hide-a-chair!

 

Not great, but it let me stay next to Judy without having to curl up in a recliner all night.

 

And today, the big reveal.

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Time to take the wrap off.

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Before you look, let me point out that we’re not looking at scars or stitches.  We’re looking at magic marker the doctor put there for reference.

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No external stitches.  It’s all tape and glue.  Her scar will be a tiny vertical line.

 

More walking and PT today.

 

Lead with the good leg going up; lead with the surgical leg going down.  That way the non-surgical leg does the majority of the bending under load.

 

Through the discharge procedure and gone before noon.  It was a longer drive home than usual because we had to stop the car to get out and stretch our legs a couple times along the way.  Can’t drive that far without moving the knee.

 

Back home settled in at Sandpipers for a long recovery and rehab.  The hospital was wonderful.  It’s good to be home.

 

 

 

Day 1

  

Now it’s all about the Percoset.

 

The nerve block has worn off.  Reality has set in.  Judy is still up and about, staying awake most of the day, walking around the hospital floor, but with her eye on the clock for the next pain killer.

 

Me, I got out for a walk around our old stomping grounds at lunch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The knee surgery went great

  

Judy now has a new knee.  When they take the joint apart, they don’t really cut off the bones on either side of the joint.  It’s more a matter of taking out the old joint, then recontouring the bone ends to fit the prosthetic knee.  They only take off a few millimeters of bone. The new knee joints are produced in multiple sizes and are modular, so the different parts plug together to be just right for each patient.  The vendor is present during every surgery to make sure every aspect of the joint works just as it should.  It only took two hours in the operating room and just one hour of that was the actual knee replacement by the orthopedic surgeon.

 

Within two hours of surgery, and while she was still waking up from the anesthetic, physical therapy was in and Judy was up and walking around.

 

This afternoon she did her second walk of the day, circumnavigating the entire floor, and practiced going up and down steps.  When we got back to the room, the PT announced that she had just done the entire sequence of Day 2 expectations on Day 0.  That was cool.

 

She’s not past the pain yet.  That will take a little longer.

 

Meanwhile, our domain.

 

A most promising Day 0.

 

 

 

We’re off to see the wizard

  

 

Settled in at our hotel in Corpus.

 

Here in time for a walk around Blucher Park.

 

 

 

Not Judy though.  She’s not walking that much until after she gets repaired.

 

Parmesan crust snapper with crab sauce for dinner at Landry’s with a marina view.

 

We report for duty tomorrow morning at 05:30.