Absolutely guaranteed, will not fail diet!

I’m a fat person. Have been since I was a kid.

When I was a kid in fact my Mom would steer me to the Husky section at Sears to buy jeans. As if I were stupid enough to think that was a canine reference. I knew I was fat; I knew that husky, chubby and chunky were all synonyms for little fat kid.

I wasn’t obese. I was husky.

It was in eighth grade I think when I lost weight. I decided to walk to school instead of taking the bus. It was between three and four miles. Because we were in Japan though it meant walking out the gate of one Army base (Sagamihara, where we lived), down a two lane Japanese road a couple miles and through the gate of another base where the school was (Camp Zama). It was safe and, except for the endless number of Americans who stopped the first couple weeks to see if I needed help, it was easy.

I kept the weight off through high school, though I was never slim. It was always a struggle. And as fat people know, I was a fat guy no matter how much I weighed.

I discovered running in the 70s, and even entered the first Richmond (VA) marathon in 1978, signing up to run half. I in fact lasted through 18 miles, eight miles further than I had ever run.

All that pounding took its toll and eventually I stopped running and then the struggle with weight got really hard. Through the 80s and 90s, and up to this day, I have gained and lost hundreds of pounds. They go; they come back. I have tried lots of diets; some work well, some not at all, all are hard to stick with.

I write today to proclaim the one tried-and-true, absolutely sure-to-work diet that is available to anyone with health insurance: have a major body part removed and replaced. You WILL lose weight.

It happened two years ago in January when I had my knee replaced; it’s happening again after having that replacement reengineered. Without my doing anything: no calorie counting, no carb portioning, no major sweat-producing exercise regime. All I had to do was show up at the hospital; the rest is lost lipids.

I’m still a fat person. Always will be. One proof of that: I went down to the basement today, taking with me my extra-large pants and swapping them for my not-quite-so-large pants. Normal people don’t have 23 pairs of pants that they cannot wear. Fat people do. When I’ve lost some weight I have pants that are too big; most of the time I have pants that are too small. Today I have both. Still lots of work to do.

I know: let’s do the OTHER knee!

Best weight loss procedure ever!

The Land of the Free? Maybe.

Between 1892 and 1997, the United States deported 2.1 million people. By the end of next year, if present trends continue, the Obama administration will have deported that many in a mere six years.

Read those first few words again: between 1892 and 1997 – eighteen ninety-two to nineteen ninety-seven! That’s 105 years! Compared to six years!

Those words are from William Finnegan’s insightful and scary piece, The Deportation Machine (New Yorker, 29 April 2013). In it we learn that fact and a lot of equally distasteful others. The article is largely about Mark Lyttle, a North Carolina-born U.S. citizen who was “deported” by the Department of Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm (ICE). I put “deported” in quotes because citizens cannot be deported. As Finnegan writes,

banishment might be more accurate. ICE has no authority over U.S. citizens, and yet ICE had arrested Lyttle and jailed him for fifty-one days – perhaps “kidnapped” would be a more accurate term.

The United States government kidnapping its own citizens! What in the world have we come to?

Yes, Lyttle’s case was based on repeated government errors and, yes, it was eventually made right, but Finnegan asserts that we only know of Lyttle because he survived and because his family never stopped fighting for him.

Northwestern University professor Jacqueline Stevens has studied unjust deportations and detentions and argues that perhaps “one percent of ICE’s tens of thousands of prisoners are U. S. citizens.” She has documented more than forty who were deported. Again, remember that ICE has no authority whatsoever over American citizens.

This all began to get out of control on September 12, 2001. The war on terror and the Patriot Act have created the machinery by which the government has taken unprecedented control of people’s lives, both U. S. citizens and foreigners alike.

I’m a Democrat. I support the president. But this article has shaken me. It makes me understand and even sympathize a bit with the folks in the picture below; they’re from Seymour, CT, the town right next to ours. Their issue is of course different, and I am totally opposed to the private ownership of guns – any guns – but I understand a bit better their distrust of the government.

Alpha and Omega

The number one song in the land on November 3, 1956, was Elvis Presley’s recording of Love Me Tender. It was the very first 45 rpm record I ever owned; my mother bought it and gave it to me and my brother. I still have it, along with 839 other 45s.

The last recording I bought was Pat Metheny’s The Orchestrion Project. An orchestrion, should you not know, is a mechanical instrument designed to imitate the sound of an orchestra. Metheny has been fascinated for years with creating a wall of sound, to borrow a phrase, with him as the only live musician. I saw him perform music from this album in Waterbury last year. It was quite amazing.

When I say “last recording,” I mean last as in “the most recent” but I also mean it in the sense of “the last one, never to be repeated.” It’s very likely that the Methany CD will remain the last CD I ever buy; furthermore, it may well be the last time I ever pay money to own music.

For the last ten years or so most of the music I have bought I have downloaded from iTunes, eMusic or amazon, though I have in fact purchased a few physical CDs. I think those days are over. I have canceled my subscription to eMusic and I have no plans to buy music online.

At 64 I have realized enough is enough. I don’t need to own any more music. From now on when I want to hear something I don’t have, I will listen to it via Spotify – and of course there are other choices too: Pandora and Rdio to name just two. Right now I have only the free version of Spotify; I am still trying to decide whether it’s worth $10 a month to eliminate the ads and have more complete mobile access to their vast catalog.

This is a seismic shift for me. For 57 years I have been buying recorded music in one format or another: 45s, LPs, cassette tapes, compact discs and downloads. No more.

Now, does anyone want to buy the 3,600 CDs on our shelves?

What was I thinking?

I should have known better. Yesterday I wrote a mostly upbeat, optimistic essay about how well I was doing and how much less pain I was in than after the first surgery. I was looking forward to a reasonably fast recovery.

Within minutes – minutes, I say – my knee started to throb. Throb at a level I hadn’t experienced in months. I ditched the cane. Even with a walker, I could hardly move. Sitting with my leg propped up offered little relief. Sleeping was impossible until I took an Ambien.

I awoke this morning to no change, though rest and extra drugs have helped as the day ground on. I am spending most of my time sitting on a couch with my leg atop a tower of pillows. I’ve doubled the dose of Dilaudid and, with plenty of rest, the pain has begun to subside.

But what a kick in the face! How silly of me to be optimistic. Life sucks, pain reigns, and then you die.

And the worst part: all of the above is about my LEFT knee, the heretofore uncut knee. The right knee, where I just had surgery, is recovering pretty well. The staples are due to come out tomorrow and I am – dare I say it – hoping that knee will finally heal properly.

Good thing, as I’ll need it to limp through the next phase of my life.

Looking pretty good right about now

Longing for a long walk in the woods

It’s very hard for me, card-carrying cynic, to say this, but it’s been going much better than I expected. The pain has been way less than it was two years ago and I am much more mobile, much sooner, than I was then. Of course the surgery was quite a bit less involved this time around: two years ago the surgeon from hell replaced my entire knee; last week the surgeon-as-savior replaced one piece and tweaked another; it makes sense that recovery from this should be easier.

Another part of the explanation though is a much better drug regimen. Last time I was mainly on Vicodin, from which I got very little relief, and Percoset, which failed me as well. This time the main pain relief is coming from Hydromorphone (Dilaudid) and I am ready to buy stock in that manufacturer. It has kept me almost pain free when I am relaxing or sleeping.

Not that there’s not a lot of pain involved: that’s called physical therapy. I’m working with the same dominatrix I met two years ago and some of the stretches she puts me through make me want to cry. I both look forward to and dread her visits.

One of the worst parts of recovery though is boredom. The pain may be less than it was, but the drugs that make that so also make me lethargic as hell. I have managed to finish the book I was reading, and I did stay awake all the way through the brilliant Life of Pi, but it ain’t easy. All I really want to do is sleep. But I’m also sick to death of sleeping.

I want that long walk in the woods.

And I want that walk without the cane, pictured here. I bought it on a day trip to Inverness last summer. It has already proven its worth, and then some: although my leg was not in enough pain to warrant using a cane, I couldn’t pack it, so I was walking with it as I approached the gate in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. As I settled in at the end of maybe an hour long line, a ticket agent came to me and, pointing at the cane, said “you don’t need to wait in this line; follow me.” She then not only checked me in, but also bumped me up to Business Class. As I said, the cane has already proven worthwhile. Today it is my constant companion.

The bottom line is that the knee is better than I expected. I am better than I expected.

The scary footnote is that it’s likely we’ll do this dance all over again, with my left knee. I don’t want to think about that.

A Room with a View

You pay a lot of money for a great view in a fancy hotel room. You pay even more money for a lousy view in a hospital room.

I’m at the Hospital of St. Raphael, now part of the Yale-New Haven hospital network, having surgery on my right knee.

“Wait,” you say, “didn’t I already do that?”

Why yes, I did. More than two years ago. That surgery caused nothing but trouble. And the second surgery, trying to find the cause of the problems, found nothing. This is round three.

New hospital, new surgeon. Ruin my life once, shame on you. Ruin my life twice, shame on me.

Yesterday’s surgery was the easy part. I remember my back being painted with an antiseptic and then the next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery room, where I spent three hours before being moved up to this aforementioned room. Now the real work begins. The twice-daily painful physical therapy, first here in the hospital and then at home for the next couple weeks. Followed by twice-weekly visits to a rehab center for a month after that.

And then there are the long nights of trying to sleep through the pain, wondering what comes first: taking enough Vicodin to mask the pain, or OD’ing on it.

This is day seven hundred and ninety-eight of this knee play. I remember it all, and I am NOT looking forward to repeating any of it.