Monthly Archives: July 2021

Posted in opinion

ON…AND OFF…THE ROAD AGAIN

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By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

Two weeks ago my husband and I packed up for our first road trip in two years.  Not just any road trip…a trip to see our family in Denver.  COVID has taken a big hit to family gatherings for everyone and we were no exception.  So while we were very excited to make this trip, we discovered that we were woefully out of practice in preparing for it.  I recalled that old adage, “take half as many clothes and twice as much money as you think you’ll need”, and then totally ignored it.  I could have been away for months given the clothes I brought along.  Oh well, at least I remembered the important things like Dash the Wonder Dog’s food and  plenty of oatmeal cookies.  Oatmeal cookies are a must,  They not only serve as a treat, but in a pinch they can fill in for breakfast.  As with most of our long trips, we rented a car so as not to put wear and tear on ours.  This time we got a Nissan Armada with enough cargo space to move an army.  We filled every inch of it.

Our first day we drove to Santa Fe.  Not the artsy, fabulous, interesting part of Santa Fe, but a Hyatt Place hotel near the freeway next to a gas station.  Importantly, there was no restaurant within walking distance and we discovered the hotel no longer stocks any food.  We settled on an Uber Eats delivery from Applebee’s that was pretty much inedible.  After a very long day (and plenty of oatmeal cookies to tide us over), we crashed.  The next morning we took off, stopped for gas and a Starbucks, and hit the road.  We were a half mile down Highway 25 when the tire pressure indicator popped on.  The tire pressure indicator on any car can be wildly inaccurate, but we were just starting a 400 mile trip, much of which is through pretty desolate country, so we didn’t want to take a chance. We stopped at two gas stations for help but the best they could offer was a Slurpee.  We finally drove to the rental car office, where they told us they were out of cars so they couldn’t give us a new one.  They directed us to the local tire store.  A very kind worker checked the tires, filled them all, and sent us on our way.  Luckily, we made it to Denver without incident.

We had a wonderful time with family.  What did we do?  Pretty much nothing – and that was perfect.  We have seen all the highlights of the area on other trips.  This time, we simply wanted to enjoy the time with family after such a long time apart.  COVID has been, and continues to be, a challenge but one of the silver linings is that it has honed our appreciation for the more simple things in life.  Being able to talk with our grandsons and catch up on their lives and plans for the future was pure joy.  As you can see from the photo, my husband was in Heaven with his two boys.

The trip was all too short and soon we were packing up for home.  Just as we finished loading everything in the car, our son-in-law decided to check out the tires just to make sure they were safe.  They weren’t.  There was a nail stuck in the right rear tire.  Long story short, he drove the car to the Denver airport, transferred all of our stuff to a new car, and came home with a large Infiniti SUV.  It’s only July, but he has already won the 2021 Son-In-Law of the Year award.  The next morning we drove to Cedar City, Utah.  Yes…that is a roundabout way to get to Scottsdale but the drive through the Rockies is so beautiful we decided to take the long way home.

Finally, on our last leg of the trip, we embarked on the 430 mile trip home.  We were feeling pretty lucky.  We had not run into any bad weather or freeway construction – a miracle when you’re traveling in the summer months.  Fifteen miles from home my husband decided to stop and get a bit of gas.  As we pulled out of the gas station the car started to sputter.  We made it out onto the Carefree Highway and it began lurching and making a sputtering sound that I’m not sure a car is supposed to make.  My husband was able to steer it over to the side of the road, whereupon it promptly died.

So, there we were, in 101 degree heat, no A/C and Dash the Wonder Dog in the back seat.  Luckily, we were still within walking distance of the gas station and it was attached to a small convenience store.  The kind manager took us in and even allowed Dash to enter her “no dogs allowed” establishment.  You gotta love people who take care of dogs.  I called the rental car company and they said they we were too far out for them to come get us.  I begged him not to abandon us to the vagaries of a towing company.  He finally relented and 40 minutes later showed up with another car.  He helped us transfer everything to the new car while he waited for the tow truck to take our ‘dead’ car away.

A half-hour and three cars later we arrived home – it has never looked so good.  It was great to be away but it is also great to be home.  The lure of the road has somehow lost its appeal.  We’ve cancelled our road trip for August and will wait until September to take our annual trek to Sun Valley, Idaho.  We’ll be driving our own car.

 

Posted in Health

Imprisoned at Hoag – Epilogue

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by Bob Sparrow

As much as I enjoyed the care I got at Hoag hospital following my knee-replacement surgery, I was not looking to return to that venue any time soon.  That plan was working up until about two weeks following surgery.  The knee was healing nicely, but I wasn’t feeling so good – fever, chills, vomiting, rapid heart rate.  So, Linda took me to a Hoag Emergency Center, where they took my temperature (103), my heart rate (140), blood pressure (off the charts either high or low, I don’t remember) and they looked me in the eye and said, “You’re sick!”

So back to Hoag Hospital I went – diagnosis: Sepsis. I really didn’t know much about Sepsis, but as I Googled it, I became more alarmed – it’s serious!  Infected kidneys and a urinary track infection were causing significant blood problems.  I was started on an antibiotic, but was told that a blood test and analysis, which would take about 48 hours to complete, was needed to find the specific antibiotic to fight this serious infection.  So, for two days, I was on one antibiotic and when test results came back, I was switched to another antibiotic for the next two days.  Neither seemed to knock the Sepsis out, so a third antibiotic was tried.  Whether it was a combination of all the antibiotics or the elevated white blood cell count that was fighting the infection, eventually the fever went away.

After five days in the hospital, I was finally released.  I felt like I was getting out of a prison camp where I was being tortured via sleep-deprivation techniques.  Other parts of the torture were, day-time TV which included a constant barrage of bad news.  Before leaving the hospital I was given a ‘mid-line’, which is a port in my arm so that antibiotics can be administered at home – which continued for another six days.

Now that I’m home, I have ventured all the way out to the end of the driveway, so I’m hoping future blogs will be a bit more interesting.

Thank you to those sending prayers and well-wishes my way – much appreciated.

Posted in opinion

PASSED TIME

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By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

 

I was thinking the other day about how quickly time seems to be passing.   My brother (the real Jack Sparrow) turned 80 last week and next week we will celebrate our youngest grandson’s high school graduation.  Where did that time go?  Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were at Tahoe celebrating Jack’s 50th birthday?  Wasn’t our grandson just asking me for tickles and a grape popsicle?  Time really does seem to be flying by and almost everyone I speak with observes the same phenomenon.  So I decided to find out why time seems to go so quickly as we age.  The answer is way above my pay grade and my hair hurt trying to understand all the scientific research about it, but here goes.

First, the feeling of time going faster as we age is a universal one.  The studies on this syndrome conclude that almost all older people perceive time to pass more quickly than younger people.  But why?  There are a couple of theories.  One has to do with memory as a percentage of our age.  For example, one year in a ten-year-old’s life represents 10-15% of their conscious memory, which is a pretty significant amount.  But one year for a 50 year-old is only 2% of their recallable life.  And for the very old, say 80-90 year-olds, it obviously represents far less.  This explains why children think of summer as endless, while adults perceive a summer as going quickly.  Unless you’re in Arizona and then the summer drags on and on.  But that’s a subject for another day.

The second reason for the difference how we sense time as we age seems intuitively backwards to me, but then again, I majored in English, not Physics.   Adrian Bejan, a researcher at Duke University, believes the discrepancy in how old and young perceive time can be blamed on the ever-slowing speed at which images are obtained and processed by the human brain as the body ages.  He explains that the experience of time is always a backward-looking process, reliant on memory and, more importantly, reliant on visual memory.

Like frames in a movie, the more frames one sees in a second, the slower the image appears to pass. The fewer frames one sees per second the faster the image seems to move. In other words, slow motion reveals many more frames-per-second than normal motion or fast motion. Bejan asserts that as we age our brain’s neurovisual memory formation equipment slows and lays down fewer “frames-per-second.” That is, more actual time passes between the perception of each new mental image. Children perceive and lay down more memory frames or mental images per unit of time than adults, so when they remember events—that is, the passage of time—they recall more visual data.

This is what causes the perception of time passing more rapidly as we age. When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images relative to our older selves.  Children’s brains are like a slow-motion camera that captures many more frames per second than a regular speed one, and time appears to pass more slowly when the film is played.

After all the reading I did I still don’t quite understand it.  It seems to me that the slow-motion camera would capture fewer frames.  But again, I can barely remember what happened yesterday so maybe my brain is in super-slow mode.  And you probably hoping by now that you can forget you ever started reading this post.  Don’t worry – if you’re old enough, you’ll have forgotten all about this by tomorrow.

Posted in Health

High on the Hoag

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by Bob Sparrow

I was not off to a fast start!

The leg was bad from the start.  Literally, from the start, when I was born, my right leg was broken.  Not sure how it happened as I was busy trying to get through the birth canal at the time.  My best guess is that when the doctor slapped my butt to start me breathing, I slapped him back and he dropped me.

It was fine through high school athletics, but in my first year of college football, I was playing cornerback (back in days when they let white guys play cornerback), and I was coming up to make a tackle, when I was not only faked out of my jock strap, but with cleats stuck firmly in the turf, my right knee went in a completely different direction than the rest of my body.  I missed the tackle, and subsequently missed the rest of that football season.  Miraculously, I went on to play 5 seasons of college football (counting my red shirt season) and two season of service football with the Navy in Japan and never missed another game because of injury.  It got banged up pretty good sometimes, but never too bad that I couldn’t play.  Playing quarterback instead of cornerback helped significantly.  Later in life, it did keep me from running a marathon, when I was on an 18-mile training run, just three weeks before the LA Marathon, and it decided that it had had enough.

In 2010, I had finally decided to have knee replacement surgery and the doctor agreed it was time, but then wife, Linda won a sales contest which was a trip to Wales to see the Ryder Cup.  I didn’t want to miss that or be hobbling around on one leg through the Welsh bog, so I cancelled the surgery.  Upon returning from Wales, the knee felt fine, so I kicked knee-surgery down the road.

Dr. Jay Patel

After 60 years from the initial injury (not counting the break at birth), surgery was finally confirmed for June 21st with Dr. Jay Patel of the Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Irvine, CA.  A word about Dr. Patel; he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He then went on to earn both a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and his Medical Doctorate from Stanford University. He speaks three languages, English, Spanish and Chinese.  Intellectually, I thought we were a good match, as I had earned a BS degree (How appropriate!) from Westminster College and spoke one of the three languages that Dr. Patel knows.

Dr. Patel did my hip replacement surgery four years ago and not surprisingly, I haven’t heard a word from that hip since.  Dr. Patel continuously reminded me that “Knees are harder”.  I wouldn’t know, I slept through both surgeries, but I can attest to the real professionalism, competence, friendliness and overall caring attitude of the Hoag staff.  They are truly the best.  My surgery was on Monday afternoon and by Monday night they had me walking the halls of the hospital and on my way home on Tuesday before noon.  Those who have had this surgery know that the rehab is the tough part, and I’m told if you don’t do the rehab, you shouldn’t have done the surgery.  But I’m confident in my willingness to work hard to do what’s necessary and I have confidence in Dr. Patel’s ability – for some reason he just doesn’t seem to be a slacker to me.

Knee – before & after

It’s now been two weeks since the surgery and I’m telling my physical therapist that I don’t feel like I’m progressing like I should.  He looks at me, shakes his head, and says that I am ahead of schedule and that I should go to YouTube and watch a knee-replacement surgery and I’d see why it takes more than two weeks to heal.  I watched the video.  YIKES!!!  Glad I didn’t watch it before as I might not have gone through with it.  Saws, hammers, drills – it looked like a major construction project – I guess it was.  Watch it at your own risk!

The leg, broken at birth and woefully abused ever since, has now been fully repaired, or rather replaced, thanks to Dr. Jay Patel – and they said he’d never amount to anything.