Diane and Linnea can attest to the fact that the right funny word in a tense situation can cause uncontrollable laughter and provide a welcome release. 

The second day after my heart surgery, Diane and Linnea were the two family members allowed in the room.  The nurse arrived with the order to remove the drainage tubes from under my diaphragm.

As a side note, check out someone who has had open heart surgery.  They will likely have a long vertical scar where the surgeon cracked open the breastbone, and two smaller horizontal slit scars under the ribs where tubes were left in to drain the fluids from the surgery site. Those tubes are a lot longer on the inside than you might think.  

In any case, the nurse was from some Scandinavian county, and she was explaining the removal procedure in the sing song measure of the Muppet’s Swedish Chef, “I am going to count to tree, and on da turd…”

The ladies looked at each other, covered their mouths, and ran out of the room to prevent laughing in the nurse’s face.  While they were convulsed in the hallway, another nurse walked up to give them comfort, “It’s so hard when you see them in pain, isn’t it?”  Diane and Linnea could only nod; they were too out of breath to comment or say thank you.

Yesterday – October 10, 2013 – was the 13^th anniversary of my aortic heart valve replacement surgery.  As regards the date, you may quickly realize that the new valve was 10 years old on 10/10/10!

The decision when you have the valve replaced is between a mechanical (graphite) or animal (pig or cow) version.  The mechanical lasts longer but requires taking blood thinners for the rest of your life.  I chose mechanical mainly because my father-in-law Tom had one; we could compare notes on the operation, the click of the valve, and levels of Coumadin. I also hoped to live longer than the 10-12 year life expectancy of an animal valve and did not want to have another such surgery.

My best man Glenn and my brother Scott both decided to have animal valves.  Glenn had lupus, and the doctors did not want him taking Coumadin.  He had to have his replaced twice!  After the second surgery he sent a note saying everything was fine and he had no side effects, and he included a picture of himself with a pig snout!  No side effects, indeed!

Scott’s doctor told him a piece of information that was new to me – aortic valve replacement is the most common hereditary valve problem… hereditary fits us, anyway.

My friend Dave also has a mechanical valve.  He is the only person I know (besides me) who has a cool plastic card that identifies the serial number, model number, and “heart valve implant” date.  My other friend Bob also had his valve replaced, along with three or four by-passes; I don’t know what version he decided on.

Two things I do know – this valve of mine keeps on ticking (literally), and it is comforting to know it will keep ticking until God wants it to stop.

My niece Christine was married this past weekend, and our family drove down for the event.  When the little yellow light went on in the Honda Pilot warning us that our gas level was low, Linnea reminded me of two related incidents where angels showed up several years ago.

We drove our GMC full-sized van to St Louis after a volleyball tournament in Grand Rapids to attend the party for my parent’s 50^th wedding anniversary.  This was back in the day when you could fold the back seat into a small bed and sleep while travelling; none of the Click It or Ticket stuff was in play. 

After spending the night somewhere in central Illinois and having a lovely breakfast, we headed to the big city well fed and well rested. The weather was great; the traffic was light; the only thing missing was enough gas to get us to Webster Groves.  Fortunately a highway exit appeared just as the van started coughing.  We cruised down the ramp, around the corner, and into a St Louis city neighborhood, where we stopped in front of a block of brownstones.  Cell  phones and GPS did not exist, and  the TripTik was no help in finding a gas station, but when we got out of the car, a friendly African American woman and gentleman greeted us.  It turns out the gentleman was a Deacon (or his name was Deacon, I am not sure which) and had been visiting the woman at her home.  We had a pleasant conversation about running out of gas, 50^th wedding anniversary, heading to Webster Groves, and the church we go to – this was probably more than they wanted to hear. 

In a conversation between these two patient angels, the kindly woman says to her friend, “Deacon, why don’t you drive these nice folks around the corner to the gas station?  I would take them but I got that club on my steering wheel so my son won’t drive it.”  It is amazing the quotes you remember in times of duress.  Deacon took Jesse and me to the gas station; we purchased a container and gas; Deacon drove us back; we poured the gas in, started the van, and were on our way.

Later that same trip we went to an afternoon St Louis Cardinals baseball game.  My sister Cindy and her husband Mark are huge Cardinals fans.  (I was quite conflicted when the Tigers played the Cardinals in the 2006 World Series.)  We parked the van in a lot near the stadium, walked over and enjoyed a Cardinal victory.  I was a worried on the walk back to the parking lot because I could not find the van keys.  Hoping they were in the van, I hurried ahead and found the van engine was still running!  The doors were all locked and the attendant had tried to turn the thing off, but it just sat there for three hours while we watched baseball!  At least this time we did not run out of gas. 

The angel this time was the same just-married niece, Christine, who was six years old at the time.  The custom van windows on the side behind the driver had a small section at the bottom that could be opened for ventilation.  The latches on those window and screen parts did not quite latch, so a little bit of pushing and sliding allowed us to open up a small hole into the vehicle.  Christine was just able to squeeze through the window and open the locks on the doors.  We tried to recreate the event a couple of years later and Christine was too big!  It just lets you now that angels come in all sizes and are the right size at the right time.

 

I find I like putting together this blog. 

The categories make it easy to capture previous and current thoughts that would formerly have ended up on a scrap of paper in some forgotten folder.  For several years I have been doing a Read-the-Bible-in-a-Year program (the first Year program took eighteen months, the second took 15, but I settled in after that to twelve-month years – PTL).  I had been taking short notes on 5×8 tablet pages, hoping to organize them at some point.  So I can pull out old notes and be pleased when a reasonable topic appears.

Last week I was worried that I was running out of jokes.  I asked God to bring along some more.  Shortly after praying I came across a file named “humor5” in my computer historical directory.  Turns out I had collected jokes and funny lists from the internet ten years ago.  I am finding out that funny remains funny, and most people forget a joke within a couple of years.  Recycling is a great thing.

The jokes thing worked, so when it seemed that Group Prayer ideas had dried up, I prayed for more of those. What a blessing that while sitting in the airport the next day, I jotted down a list of nine possibilities; the next day I added three more.  Cool.

Next week I am adding a second client in my regular data analyst work.  I am hoping the blog does not suffer too much!   

The short form:  I grew up in St Louis, Missouri; came to Michigan State University as a freshman in 1969; met Tom Stark, the first pastor of University Reformed Church; met the Lord; met my wife; and stayed.

 

The longer form begins back in Webster Groves, Missouri, where my siblings and I became Presbyterians after our Mom broke her ankle.  We had been attending the Baptist church, but it was too far away; we could walk to the South Webster Presbyterian Church.  I felt like I knew all the Bible stories but never heard about the possibility of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  On the plus side, South Webster did have a very active Boy Scout troop and a strong men’s fast pitch softball team.

I felt on top of the world in the summer before college – I was going to run on the MSU  track team; I was going to be a Math Professor; and I had a girlfriend.  All these fell apart by the end of October.  My girlfriend announced she had been dating another guy for the whole time we had been dating, and she had made a decision that the other dude would be better for her. Heart break!  I tore a hamstring while hurdling.  Body Break!  I took too many courses, did not have time to master them, and got less than stellar grades. Mind Break!

I found a church to attend through Dave Cushman, a fellow on my floor in Hubbard Hall.  Dave left a lasting impression one night while he was brushing his teeth before dinner.  Not sure why he brushed before dinner, but he asked me, “Do you think man is basically good or basically evil?” just before he applied the paste. I pondered this question that made no sense to me – I was thinking, what does good and evil have to do with math and sports? – And I chose “Good”.  Dave bolted from the bathroom, mouth all a-lather, and let me know I was wrong, and if you just look around you, you can see it!

Dave introduced me to Tom Stark, who kept inviting me to Bible studies and special activities.  I did not know a soul when I arrived on campus and was very glad for a kind group to hang out with.  I learned some of the basics of Christianity and read a couple of books.

Sometime during Spring term 1970, which ran from April to mid-June, I was reading our group book entitled Runaway World, by Michael Green.  The book was an earlier version of The Case For Christ, addressing common questions about and hindrances to believing in Jesus.  The topic that caught my attention that day was “Christians are Wimps.”  I realized that was an obstacle for me – how could a tough guy who loved Clint Eastwood movies and playing hard-nosed defensive basketball become a Christian?

The book described the first disciples, who were rugged, impulsive, and courageous.  Almost all of them ended up dying for what they believed. I realized Christians did not have to be wimps, got down on my knees in my dorm room, and asked Jesus to be my Lord and Savior.

My future wife was living in the same dorm.  She recalls meeting me during that freshman year, but my memory starts as a sophomore.   We started dating and attending the church college group, and were married at the beginning of our senior year at MSU.  We tried to move away at least once but the Lord brought us back, and we have lived in the Lansing area and been members of URC ever since college days.

I mentioned in the post of 7/8/13 that today, September 9, is our anniversary.  We have now been married 41 years.  This is the first prime number (41) anniversary since our famous 37^th – 09/09/09.

Anniversary 35, in 2007, was one of the best celebrated.  We decided that just like 25 is silver and 50 is gold, 35 is license plates. 

Michigan was changing plates, meaning that Diane would have to give up her SAM 278 plate.  She really liked SAM, as it was easy to spot in the parking lot.  Who knows what you would get on a new, assigned plate, although Jesse has CAP and Amber BUG.  With personalized plates, we could have something that started with SAM although we were denied just plain SAM because that was already taken, presumably by someone whose real name is Samuel. 

We tried lots of options – SAM 2 (taken), SAM AGAIN (too long), SAM SAM (too repetitive), and SAM TWO (taken) – and finally found a winner:  SAM TOO.  It has a nice play on the idea of “also” and is easy to read.

For Allan, the new plate had to start from scratch.  We thought of variations of ZOOMER, but they were all taken.  One time last year Jesse and Amber saw the sports car with the ZOOMER plate, in the parking lot of Home Depot on Waverly Road.  “Good on ya” to that guy.

The next choice was SYSTEMS, a shout-out to my now-defunct graduate school department at MSU.  We were helped by getting a personalized Michigan State University fundraising plate, with the block S on the front.  YSTEMS was, surprisingly, already taken, but YSTMS reads almost as well.  So the gift for Allan was SYSTMS.

Unfortunately, Allan was in an accident and totaled the SYSTMS Buick.  We purchased a new vehicle for Diane, Allan inherited Diane’s old car, and the world has turned upside down.  Allan is now SAM TOO and Diane is SYSTMS.  I think we are handling it alright; most days we know who we are, even if our license plates don’t.

 

When Jesse was dating Amber last year, we were introduced to her energetic daughter Molly.  Jesse and Amber are now married, Molly turned  five years old, and she started Kindergarten this week.  Diane and Linnea took her shopping for school clothes and supplies last Saturday, and evidently the “girls” had a wonderful time.

But a year ago, the big question for Jesse’s parents was “what will Molly call us?”  Diane likes “Diane” and she stuck with it.  But I chose “Zoomer,” which has also stuck nicely. I know this because for Christmas, Amber and Molly gave me a set of drinking glasses with Zoomer stenciled on the side.

Some have asked where in the world that name came from, so here is the story…

The summer after graduating from high school I worked in a steel shelving warehouse in St Louis, Missouri. The days were spent packaging orders and loading trucks.  I learned how to drive a manual transmission vehicle while working the clutch on a forklift.

Part of processing every order was counting out the nuts and bolts and other pieces that were used to attach the shelves to the frame for the steel shelves. There were huge bins of nuts and bolts, and each order specified numbers of each.  I think the reason there were not more complaints was because we were careful to over-count – customers were unlikely to bark if they ended up with more than they needed. 

One of the regular “games” we played while counting was a result of assisting a fellow worker.  When my friend Rollie would demand, “Hey, pass me a couple of those zoomers,” we would all throw multiples of each at him.  Zoomer could refer to nuts, bolts, brackets or other shelving bits, so we might even throw extra at Rollie if we weren’t sure what he needed.  We all added a new word to our vocabulary.

That fall, I went off to Michigan State University and made friends with Twelfth-Floor Rick.  He was in the northwest penthouse corner room of Hubbard Hall, the tallest dormitory at MSU.  His room was the one whose window had a giant search light that could be seen all over campus. Rick was the latest in a long line of the Fellowship of the Light, who passed along each year the solemn responsibility to protect and defend their prize possession from evil forces and campus administrators (or at least he was living in the room that year.)  His favorite descriptor was “golden,” similar to “awesome” but more profound than “cool.” The phrase Golden Zoomer was born.

For several years afterward, softball and basketball teams in various intramural, YMCA, or city leagues in the Lansing area would be named the Golden Zoomers, mostly made up of University Reformed Church friends and relatives.  I still have a Zoomers t-shirt (gold, of course), a framed Zoomer banner, and a craft bottle of Zoomer wheat ale that Gerry gave me (the label on the bottle is gold).  When emails and aol came along in the 90’s, zoomer was already taken, so I used akzoom.

There’s the story.  It might seem to be an odd name but please remember that Zoomer is golden.

Tomorrow, September 1, is Linnea’s birthday, so it seems good, O reader, to give you the full story of her birth.

 Diane had a very short labor with Linnea.  So short, in fact, that she was born unexpectedly at home on Orchard Street in East Lansing, Michigan.  So many events and people were involved in such a short time that the only way to tell the tale is with long run-on sentences that you read quickly, punctuated by brief slow down intervals to catch your breath (hee-hee-who-who).  The story may not be as dramatic as Kevin and Trisha delivering their son Jacob in the parking lot at the hospital, but it was still an unusually unpredictable event.

You need to have some background…

First and foremost, Diane has a huge tolerance for pain. She soldiers on through waves of colitis attacks. She speaks complete sentences and makes decisions even as fierce headaches are ripping her brain apart. She walks through Plantar Fasciitis.  Her 15 years of the worst, most painful menstrual cramps imaginable had prepared her to have babies.  The only thing that ever stopped her was an ear infection shortly after we were married – the infamous ear infection during which I put spoiled milk on the cereal, causing her to throw up.

We had been married for seven years when we announced Diane was pregnant.  Her grandfather Stew made his own announcement, “I am so happy for you.  I figured you were sterile.”

We had been to Natural childbirth classes, practiced the hee-hee-who-who breathing techniques, and knew where the hospital was.  Diane had helped our friends Tim and Wanda the previous March to deliver their son Jeremiah at home.  Although I couldn’t help with that birth because I had to watch Magic Johnson and the MSU Spartans win the NCAA basketball title game, we figured we knew what we were doing.

Linnea was due August 15 and was born on September 1, 1979. Nowadays you don’t go two weeks after the due date, what with inducements and c-sections and such.  It turned out that September 1 is her Grandmother Dot’s birthday.  If you have to choose a birthday, go with your grandma’s birthday rather than a basketball national championship because you get a cool party every year with grandma and it is much easier to explain than the sports occasion.    We went to dinner at the Kellogg Center on Friday night, August 31.  Diane was crying miserably at dinner, “I’m not going to have an August baby.”  I made a wild guess that Diane may have been somewhat emotional at that time. 

We had birth announcements all drawn up, awaiting a sex identification (which would influence the name), height, and birth weight.  The orange card stock has a baseball theme with a diamond and the proclamation that a new member had joined the team.

Seemingly random events and circumstances were piling up.  We knew God was in charge of all these things but you don’t know the significance until later.

–           Emergency was a popular television program, following paramedics on their weekly adventures.  We watched sometimes; our favorite part was the inevitable step when the paramedics first arrived at the scene, always inserting an IV with ‘Ringer’s Lactate’, some sort of magic juice for distressed patients.

–          September 1 was a lovely Saturday afternoon during Labor Day weekend, no pun intended.  Many families were away at the lake or somewhere, but every boy left in town was out riding his bike.

–          Emergency 911 calls in East Lansing always sent out a response team – a fire truck, a police car, and an ambulance

–          We had a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

I had a stopwatch which I was ready and very willing to use.  Contractions had started Saturday morning;  I was timing them.  The intervals varied widely: 18 minutes, 30 minutes, 3 minutes, 12 minutes.

Our friends Tom and Mary came over from Grand Rapids to have lunch with us on Saturday.  Evidently walking is a labor inducer so we walked a few blocks to the restaurant.  Mary was a hospital OB nurse who listened to Diane’s symptoms and estimated the baby would be born in the next 24 hours.  She was right, but they left before all the fireworks started.

The Tigers were on TV that Saturday afternoon, and Diane’s brother Phil had come over to watch with us.  Diane’ contractions continued; I dutifully logged  the times and durations. Something must have happened with the game, but no one remembers any of that.  Diane excused herself to go upstairs, “I’m not feeling well and I’ll just lie down for a minute.” Later, the doctors suggested that Diane “not feeling well” meant that she was “in transition”  A few minutes later, a call came down the stairs, “Allan can you come up here?”

And the pace picked up…

I went upstairs and Diane said she had two really hard contractions in a row, so I called the hospital and explained the situation and they said, “If those hard contractions keep up for another half hour come on in,” and as I hung up and turned around, Diane said, “My water just broke and the baby is coming, ” so I called the hospital again and agitatedly asked them to send an ambulance but they said, “We don’t send ambulances, you will have to call 9-1-1,” so I yelled down the stairs and told Phil to call 9-1-1 to order an ambulance because this baby is coming, and Phil called 9-1-1 and said please send an ambulance, and they asked, “What is the address?” Well, Phil did not live there and he had no clue but he picked up the Sports Illustrated magazine and read the address off the label and said “I hope this is right.” 

Meanwhile Diane and I are upstairs preparing for Allan being the delivery boy.   I retrieved towels from the cupboard and spread them on the bed where Diane then laid down.  We were past the hee-hee-who-whos and concentrated on blow-blow and don’t push.  I got a wet washcloth for wetting the lips and mouth.  My short journal notes have a cryptic description of “blow, blow, want some washcloth?”  I’m sure we were just as calm as could be, but don’t really remember that part. I think we got some water in a basin.  I bet we prayed.  A lot.

And then we heard the sirens…

The ambulance, fire truck, and police car all arrived at the same time, parked out front and came running into the house. Phil pointed upstairs, and pretty soon there were seven men, in uniforms, standing beside me in the bedroom where Trent the paramedic took charge and said, “I am just going to call the hospital to get them connected.” “Hello,” Trent says into the phone, “This is Trent and we have a woman here who thinks she is in labor.” At which point Diane is saying, “Can I push yet?”  And Trent announces he is just going to check the lady and then they will transport to the hospital.  Trent checks the appropriate area and screams, “Yahhh… I see the head!”  The hospital guy on the phone calms the paramedic down, “Trent, you have been trained for this, you know what to do, and you have done it before.” “But that was in Vietnam,” says brave Trent.  The hospital guy gives some orders and quickly a Ringer’s Lactate (!) IV drip is started, Trent is in position, and Diane starts pushing.  Meanwhile every boy in the neighborhood has followed the sirens and parked their bike in our front yard and the neighbors started gathering. The older fireman at the head of the bed leans over to Diane and says, “You’re doing great, honey.  I don’t know anything about this, but you’re doing great!”  The breathing drill is out the window; one push and the head crowns; another push and most of the head clears; a third push and most of the body clears and the baby cries; one last push and a baby girl is born at 6:30 pm. That first cry follows the breathing drill right out the open windows, where the gathered multitude breaks into applause, just like we were on the Waltons or something.  The little boys’ cheers turned to boos when Uncle Phil told them it was a girl, as Trent wiped off the baby, wrapped her in a blanket, and handed her to me. “You take care of this beauty while we get everything ready to transport to the hospital.  They can deliver the placenta there.”

At this point, time slowed down for Linnea and her proud father.  She looked at me with the calmest sweetest expression; truly a lovely creation! I took her on a tour of the house.  First stop – her bedroom, containing a crib, a changing table, and a bookcase. “This is the library, Linnea.  Here is our book collection.  A lot of textbooks, Agatha Christie mysteries, Hobbit tales, and some of the latest and greatest Christian best sellers.  And this is the bathroom with a tub and sink.  And out here in the hall is your mom on the gurney, being lugged down the stairs and out the doorway.  And we are walking down the stairs after them. Here is the living room and the TV, but looks like the Tigers game is over.  Do you know who won?  Here is the dining room and the kitchen with the calendar on the wall.  Did you know you were born on your grandmother Dot’s birthday? Let’s go back to the front of the house, and  look, there is your Uncle Phil talking to the crowd, and here is the front door and please, meet the crowd.”

Things had not slowed down for Diane…

Once the decision was made to “transport,” the crews set up the gurney, secured all the lines and wires, and 1-2-3 switched the new mom onto said gurney and the most scary part commenced as four seemingly old and out of shape men huffed and puffed and took that gurney over the staircase railing, down the stairs, and out the front door all the while Diane feeling surely there would be a heart attack or stroke and she would get dropped although she was evidently secured to the bed and was unlikely to slide off the downhill side and then they hoisted her, gurney and all into the ambulance.  I climbed in, still holding Linnea, and they took off, asking Diane if she wanted the sirens on or not, which she declined.

The emergency was handled, the baby was born, the crowed melted away, and life with Linnea began.  Diane got a larger than expected baby dose the first couple of nights in the hospital because “dirty babies” born outside cannot mix with those delivered in the normal location and must stay in the room with the mother!  We are still grateful to our neighbors Jim and Marge (Marge, actually) who took all the bedclothes and towels and washed them for us.  Uncle Phil is still a quick-thinking star whenever the tale is told.  Special paramedic Trent came by a few years later to see how his special delivery was doing.  I wore my suit to church that Labor Day Sunday because I realized it was time to grow up. Linnea attributes her career as a librarian to her early exposure to books.   The birth announcement was altered to include the phrase “safe at home.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

God has some strange diseases out there, and I had one.  Just before my thirty-first birthday I came down with Guillain-Barré Syndrome.  Linnea had recently turned two and we were living on Hazel Street near the Gothros, the Whites, and the Quinns.

Guillain-Barré is a syndrome because people don’t know what causes it and are not quite sure how to fix it.  I have heard there have been treatment advances recently involving complete blood transfusions.  What IS known about Guillain-Barré is that it is a neurological disorder where the Mylar sheathing on your nerves is stripped away, resulting in paralysis because there is no more communication between your brain and your muscles.  It’s an ascending paralysis, meaning it starts in your feet and hands and moves up your body.  If the paralysis reaches your diaphragm then you’re in trouble and you have to go on a ventilator.  If it reaches your heart then you’re in even more trouble and have to have a pacemaker installed.  At some point, the nerve sheathing stops shedding and starts regenerating. 

The course of the disease is pretty well-defined even though it’s a syndrome; they even have a named treatment plan – Expectant Therapy.  They expect you are going to hit bottom at some point and then start getting better; expectant therapy is keeping you alive until you do so.  I like that – keep me alive until I start getting better.  About 2% of the victims die, but those odds were in my favor, especially as I was a young non-smoker.  And, there was another Guillain-Barré Syndrome patient in the hospital when I arrived.  He died, which probably made my odds better somehow.

My case was just like everybody else, at least as far as I know.  You fall down the stairs the night before Halloween, one of the first signs that your muscles are going.  You go to the clinic on Monday and talk to Dr Keith who was substituting for Dr Geoff that day.  It turns out Dr Keith had presented a paper on Guillain-Barré the prior summer, knew all about it, and was surprised to see a real case.  He puts you in the hospital and tells you the basics:  “We don’t know how long this will last, but at some point you will probably feel like your bones are pressing down through your body because the muscles are no longer able to support them.”  Something to look forward to?

You spend your birthday in the hospital, but get nice cards and a banner, and then your prayer buddies come along and crush your head with when they lay hands on, because you just can’t hold your head up and it really hurts and you cry. 

You gradually get worse until the point where you choke on chicken soup and you have to go on the ventilator.  Someone pumps an air bag through your mouth while you’re waiting; there is a delay because someone had to go downstairs to the pharmacy to get the cocaine.  They make you snort cocaine to increase the size of your nasal passage so they can ram the air tube down into the lungs, and then the ventilator takes over. 

The next morning they replace the nose tube because the prior one was too small and was leaking.  This time, the drug of choice is curare – they don’t want you moving while they work.  You hear a train go through your head (right to left) and realize the complete paralysis of the curare occurred while your eyes are open… you see what’s going on! The doctors talk like you can’t see OR hear.  “Let’s work fast, we have about two minutes.  Do we need a seven or a seven and a half?”  I am about to die, I am a car,  and the mechanics are figuring out what size wrench to use…

We get the tube size figured out and the ventilator breathes for you in the Intensive Care Unit and punches a hole in the left lung (pneumothorax), requiring an incision to re-inflate the thing.  Then pneumonia sets in and the doctors are planning a new air tube through the esophagus (tracheostomy) for Monday morning.   At just the right time on Sunday night, the elders come in and pray like it says to do in James 5, and you start getting better.  Literally. These prayer buddies said I was ashen when they came in but had turned pink by the time they left.  A Monday morning x-ray showed enough improvement to call off the trach!

There are many  highlights in this story – cocaine, curare, collapsed lung, choking on chicken soup, etc.  But the best one, from my point of view, was the miracle answer to the elders’ prayer – I started getting better!

One of the first warnings I got when diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis was that “multi-tasking will be harder to do.” What does that mean? Is it about not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time? Is it like the guy who used to be able to sit at his office desk composing an email to the bank, when a worker walks into his office with a semi-important question about employee benefits just as the phone rings with a potential order on the line? And he keeps track of all the separate threads at once and concludes each well?

 If MS reduces my abilities to be in that office worker’s shoes, I am in big trouble, because I couldn’t do all those things when I was twenty-five!  On the plus side, I walk and chew gum at the same time very well.

 I talked to my friend Keith about this concept and he claimed that multi-tasking is over-rated.  “I find I can only do one thing at a time anyway.  My problem is the distractions when working on that one task.” That makes it sound like other MS “symptoms” that are common in the general population, like dizziness from too much ear wax or not being able to stand on one leg when putting on your pants.  But everyone is faced with distractions when working on tasks.  Maybe the question of multi-tasking erosion is more about the limit of distractions you can tolerate.  This sounds more like another MS by-product related to exercise or working in the garden – muscle fatigue.  I asked Dr Jayne what the deal was when my legs turned rubbery after a walk or my arms were worthless after raking.  “That’s muscle fatigue.  Repetitive movements can lead to a temporary blocking in the nerve. When it hits you, the best thing to do is stop what you are doing; it won’t help to try and press through.”

 So limited multi-tasking capability is really task-fatigue.  The tasks mount up or drag out and lead to a temporary blocking in the nerve or brain. And here is what it looks like…

 Suppose you are mounting some blinds on the French doors to the deck, to keep the summer evening’s sun out of your eyes when you watch the Detroit Tigers on TV. This is not a real high priority project because it is only a problem for a few days around Midsummer solstice when the setting sun peeks around the house behind you. And even on some of those days the Tigers are playing the Angels or Mariners on the West Coast and don’t start until after dark.  But even if it’s not very useful project.  God knows the name of that star that shines in my eyes on those Midsummer evenings.  It’s The Sun!

 No matter how useful the project is, it seems like it would be mostly linear – do one thing at a time – measure for where the screws go, mark the spots, make an indentation with a nail, drill the holes on top of the indents, screw the mounts to the door, snap the shade in place. Voilà!

 However, there are two shades with two mounts each. You are not so confident to do all the drilling at once, so you check the process (drill size, right tools, measurements, etc.) with one of the four mounts before doing all the rest. This does not make it multitasking. This is just changing the linear order of events. But making that adjustment does add to task fatigue…. the plastic mounts are slippery on the painted wood door, making them hard to hold and mark at the same time. This is not multitasking either; it is just one of the tasks getting harder than it seemed at the beginning. Again, task fatigue increases.

 Multitasking starts when the electronic screwdriver starts beeping because the battery is low and then you drop the screw. Now besides the linear steps of the project, (a) you are wondering whether you can finish the work before recharging is required, and (b) you have to get down off the stool to chase the fallen screw. The elusive fastener is hiding in the carpet so you have to search on hands and knees. The overload point hits when your wife comes in and asks, “what are you looking for?”

 If you only have one thing to do you can speak well enough.  You will calmly say, “I am looking for the one-inch mounting screw I dropped on the floor while attempting to attach the slippery plastic mount to the French door with the rapidly draining electric screwdriver and God is working all things together for my salvation.” But with task fatigue you have limited options. What you don’t want to do, but you probably will do, is lose your temper, make a face at your wife, and blurt stridently, “SCREW!”

 With the thoughts of measuring, marking, drilling, screwing, snapping, recharging, and searching all running through your brain, the best you can do is point at the pile of remaining hardware and grunt. Fortunately, you don’t drool or fall over or anything like that. You just look like a moron, which all things considered is much better than yelling like a creep. Unfortunately, when you know inside your head what is going on but you can’t communicate it at all, you usually get very angry. That is why it is better to be quiet; you can’t sound nice when you’re ticked off.  But, being quiet also has its disadvantages; you can appear aloof or snobby.  So, warn the people around you.  Maybe you can devise a little sign, like grabbing your ear or tapping your nose the way they did in the movie, “The Sting.” This lets everyone know you have reached task-fatigue and won’t be able to do much else until the temporary block on the nerves clears. 

 I am glad that I know the One True God of the universe, who must be able to multi-task since he knows all of us better than we know ourselves, and he can do anything, anywhere, anytime to keep his promise of working all things together for my good!

 And, I was glad that I could laugh.  I took a rest and finished the project.  I am looking forward to comfortably viewing the Tigers any evening next summer.  Or maybe we will move to a new house.  Imagine the task-fatigue in that project!