MFH: 29 May

Today is the 271st anniversary of the marriage of my 7th great-grandparents, Bernard Junck and Maria Magdalena Sues who were married in 1737 in the town of Obermoschel in the Rhineland.

My descent from Bernard Junck and Maria Magdalena Sues:
Bernard Junck + Maria Magdalena Sues
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Barbara Junkin + Johannes Jost
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Peter Jost + Katharina Hütter
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Margaretha Jost + Jacob Schön
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Johannes Schoen + Margaretha Bender
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Frederick August Schoen + Marianne Kress
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John Charles Schoen + Helena Loretta Ruppel
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Harry Frederick Schoen + Freda Irene Needs
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My Father + My Mother
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Me

Madeline Kahn Appreciation Day

(With apologies to Lerner and Loewe for my inelegant changes.)

I've grown accustomed to her voice
She almost makes the day begin
I've grown accustomed to the tune
She whistles night and noon
Her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs

Are second nature to me now
Like breathing out and breathing in
I was serenely independent and content before we met
Surely I could always be that way again and yet
I've grown accustomed to her sounds,
Accustomed to her voice,
Accustomed to her face

I'm very grateful she's a woman and so easy to forget
Rather like a habit one can always break and yet
I've grown accustomed to the trace of something in the air
Accustomed to her voice
****************************************

Whether she was speaking


or singing


or just counting to 20


Madeline Kahn's voice was rich mixture of strength and fragility that suited every occassion and mood.

To read more appreciations, go to StinkyLulu.

Just In Time

The other night Chuck and I were watching a documentary on Logo about two gay couples having civil union ceremonies in Connecticut. Chuck asked me what would 'our song' be when we get married. Of course, I'd given the issue lots of thought and had decided the perfect song would be "Just In Time" by the inimitable Judy Garland. Yes, I got that part of the stereotype. I have the fashion and style sense of a Neanderthal but I got the Judy part, in spades.

If you don't know the song or haven't experience Judy singing it (live from the London Palladium!), prepare to be amazed.

MFH: Happy Birthday

A very happy birthday to my Aunt Alice!

Waiting for Papa

Chuck is in Virginia for work. Emerson and Ozzie are missing their Papa and can't wait for him to come home.

CDW

Sydney Pollack, 73
Academy Award winning director
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/27/pollack.obit/index.html

My Family History

Today, 27 May 2008 is the 399th anniversary of the birth of my 9th great-grandfather, James Palmer, who was born this day in 1609 in All Saints Parish, Rudby, Cleveland, Yorkshire, England. It is also the 318th anniversary of the wedding of my 8th great-grandparents, Johannes Hofmann and Gertrud Reichmann, who were married this day in 1690 in Eisern, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Siegen-Wittgenstein (about 50 miles east of Cologne, Germany).

My descent from James Palmer:
James Palmer + Elizabeth Armstrong
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John Palmer + Christiana Joses
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Ruth Palmer + George Hulme, Jr.
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Naomi Hulme + John Whitacre, Jr.
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Caleb Whitacre + Phebe Gore (they were second cousins, Phebe's grandmother was Christiana Palmer, a sister of Ruth Palmer)
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Sarah Whitacre + Edmund Hayes
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David P. Hayes + Nancy Agnes Haddow
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Lewis C. Hayes + Adda R. Seely
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Harriett Hayes + Thomas Francis Hayes
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Mary Eileen Hayes + Benedict Aloysius Roddy
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My Mother + My Father
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Me

My descent from Johannes Hofmann and Gertrud Reichman:
Johannes Hofmann + Gertrud Reichmann
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Johannes Hofmann + Maria Sabina Folg
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Mary Hoffmann/Huffmann + John Hanback
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Rosanna Hanback/Hanbach + James Lowe
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Jonathan Lowe + Hannah Ayles
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Elizabeth S. Lowe + Jonathan Walker
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Sarah Jane Walker + Andrew D. Fleming
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Rena Belle Fleming + James Eldridge Needs
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Freda Irene Needs + Harry Frederick Schoen
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My Father + My Mother
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Me

In Memoriam

On Memorial Day we honor those men and women who served the United States in the armed services. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge my relatives who have served.

To my relatives who have served recently or are serving still, I offer my appreciation and respect: my brother-in-law, Randy (USAF); my cousin, Andy (USAF); my cousin, Carrie (USA Reserves).

World War II:
Charles Albert Gard, USN (my father-in-law; 1916-2005)

Richard Todd Livesay, USMC (my paternal granduncle; 1920-1977)

Benedict Aloysius Roddy, USN (my maternal grandfather; 1909-1994)

Glenda Josephine Schoen, WAVES (my paternal grandaunt; 1915-1951)


United States Civil War:

Andrew D. "Leander" Fleming, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, 148th Regiment, Company G, 1864 (my great-great-grandfather, 1844-1930): His regiment was traveling by train to Washington, DC in late May/early June 1864 when the train was involved in an accident. Andrew was injured in the accident and then contracted the measles. He spent the remainder of his enlistment in the hospital.

Andrew Holden, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, 73rd Regiment, Company F, 1862-1865 (my great-great-grandfather, 1839-1895): He fought at Monterey, Shane's Bridge, McDonald, Franklin, Strausburg, Cross Keys, Cedar Mountain, Freeman's Ford, Waterloo Bridge, Sulphur Springs, 2nd Bull Run, Aldie, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Hagerstown, Ft. Wagner, John's Island, Camp Baldwin, Gainesville, and Charlestown besides over 100 skirmishes and minor engagements

Peter Schoen, New York Infantry, 40th Regiment, Company E, Killed at the Battle of the Wilderness, Virginia, May 1864 (first cousin of my great-great-grandfather; 1841-1864)

First Images from Phoenix

The first images have come in from the Phoenix probe on Mars and they are spectacular:


See more images at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/index.html .

Phoenix Has Landed

NASA's Phoenix probe has landed on Mars.

I couldn't identify a planet, star, constellation, or astronomical object to save my life, but I'm enough of a space geek to get choked up over launches and landings. This latest NASA Mars mission is exciting not least because it is the first soft landing on Mars since the Viking landings more than 30 years ago.

I can't wait for the first pictures to come through later this evening.

CDW: Good night, Dick

Dick Martin, half of Rowan & Martin from Laugh-In fame, has died.





*CDW = Celebrity Death Watch. The CDW is something a group of friends from work have done for many years. I'm sure many others have done similar things. The premise is that celebrities die in groups of three. We try to make the most interesting threesomes possible.

Look Ma No Cane

I don't want to make this blog one long medical report after another but I've had a very medically intense year.

I work for the University of Chicago Press in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. I ride the South Shore commuter train from the Chesterton/Dune Park station to the 57th Street station in Chicago. From the train station, I have a 10 minute walk to my office in the Press building on 60th Street.

On March 3rd of this year, I was on my way to work and had just gotten off the train. I was crossing 57th Street when I slipped on some ice and fell, hard, to the ground. I knew instantly that I had broken my left leg. If I attempted to move, the pain in my leg was excruciating. Fortunately, some passersby stopped to help and called 911. A short time later I was in an ambulance on my way to the University of Chicago ER. Indeed, my left leg was broken just a little below the ball end at the top of the femur. I later learned that the doctors considered this a broken hip.

The doctors in the ER informed me that I would need surgery to insert a rod to repair the break. Fortunately, since my experience last year, I had made and Advanced Medical Directive that gave Chuck the right to make decisions on my behalf if I was unable to do so. I called my friend Cindy at work and asked her to come to the hospital and bring a copy of the directive that I kept at the office. So once again I found myself in the situation of having to call Chuck to tell him not only that I was in the hospital but that I would also need surgery again. I told him not to come to the hospital (hospitals bring out the worst in him) but to wait until I knew more of what would happen. I also called my parents and let them know what was going on and asked them to tell my siblings.

The doctors decided that I would have surgery the following morning. Early the next morning, my broken hip was repaired. Chuck came to the hospital and I was able to see him after I was back in my room following the surgery. I was expecting a relatively short stay in the hospital but my body had other plans. After the surgery, I started spiking a high fever and my heart started beating rapidly. Despite many tests over several days and massive antibiotics, the doctors could not figure out why I was spiking the fevers. Finally, on Saturday, they decided that I needed a second surgery so they could clean out the wound from the first surgery. The second surgery would be on Sunday. After the second surgery, they told there was a hematoma in the leg, no surprise there, but they did not find any infection. The fevers continued after the second surgery and the doctors were at as much of a loss as before.

In addition to the surgeons, I was also seeing doctors from the medicine, infectious diseases, and rheumatology services. There were running just about every test known to man to try to figure out why I kept having fevers. I consented to an HIV test which came back negative. None of the tests pointed to a cause of the fevers. On Wednesday of my second week in the hospital, the surgeons decided, much to the dismay of the infectious disease doctors, to stop the antibiotics. Miraculously, this did the trick. The fevers stopped almost immediately and in 24 hours they told me I could go home the following day as long as I did not develop any fevers in the meantime. After 12 days in the hospital, I was finally allowed to go home.

Chuck, Emerson, and Ozzie were greatly relieved to have me back home. This time I came home with a walker; not convenient for moving about an apartment with two small young dogs. Emerson and Ozzie were sufficiently afraid of the walker to keep out of my way most of the time. The week after getting home from the hospital I began physical therapy. The therapist quickly gave me crutches and I was able to move around more easily. At the beginning of May, the surgeon said that there was enough new bone growth around the break so that I could start bearing weight on my leg and that I should move from the crutches to a cane. Just this past week my therapist suggested that I start walking without the cane at home. And yesterday, I ventured out without the cane for the first time. It was good to finally walk around unencumbered. I'm hoping that the next year will be much quieter for me medically than the past year has been.

One Year Later

One year ago, at the age of 43 years, 8 months, and 17 days, I under went an emergency double coronary artery bypass. It all started with a little pain in my left shoulder. I was walking from my office to the train station, a 10 minute walk, one day after work. As I walked, I started getting a sharp pain in left shoulder. The pain wasn't very strong so I didn't think much of it. After I got to the train station the pain disappeared. Over the next several days, every time I walked from the train station to my office or from my office to the train station, the pain came back. It gradually intensified and spread down my left arm and into my chest. After about a week and half, I decided I could no longer ignore this pain and needed to see a doctor. Of course, I hadn't told my partner Chuck that the pain had gotten worse, so he was not very sympathetic to my desire to see a doctor.

So off to the urgent care center I went. I explained to the doctor what had been happening and he immediately said that I would need a stress test and might to be sent to the hospital immediately if they could not run the stress test at the clinic. He also asked about family history of heart disease. I knew there was some bad family history with respect to heart disease but I never thought it would pertain to me. In 1992, my mother's brother, my Uncle Mike, died from a sudden heart attack at the age of 44. His death certificate indicated that he had atherosclerosis (i.e., hardening of the arteries or blocked arteries) and an enlarged heart. A short time later, another of my mother's brothers, my Uncle Vince, was diagnosed with coronary artery disease; he was about 40 years old. Also, my grandmother's (my mother's mother) brother, my Uncle John, died in 1957 just one month shy of his 35th birthday from a sudden heart attack. In addition, both of my parents are on high blood pressure medication and my mother is also on medication for high cholesterol. I told all of this to the doctor and for the first time realized how significant it was to my life. I called home and left a voicemail for Chuck explaining what I knew at that time which wasn't much.

The doctor was able to have another doctor at the clinic give me a stress test. The results of the stress test were not good and the doctors decided that I had to go to the hospital
immediately so that the cardiologist their could do an angiogram. Before leaving the clinic, I called home again to let Chuck know what was happening. This time I did speak with him and told him all I knew. He was incredulous that a little pain in the shoulder could lead to all this drama but was concerned and supportive. As we only have one car, which I drove to the clinic, he called his sister and asked her to drive him to the clinic so he could pick up our car and then meet me at the hospital.

I was transported the 5 minutes to the hospital by ambulance with siren and lights blaring. Great fun! In the emergency room, their primary goal was keep me as comfortable as possible and then get me to a room as soon as possible. I wasn't in the ER very long, maybe about an hour before they took me to my room. The angiogram was scheduled for next morning. After getting settled in my room, Chuck arrived and I caught him up on what I knew. Now came the unpleasant task of notifying my family. I knew that if Chuck called my parents they probably wouldn't answer the phone or if they did wouldn't want to talk for long, but since I could call them from the hospital, he had to make that call. A short time later my father called my hospital room. His first question was to ask me who was in the hospital. I told him it was me and then proceeded to tell him what had happened. I asked my dad to call my siblings to let them know what was going on and to give them the phone number for my hospital room. I also asked Chuck to notify my boss and friends. At last, I could rest and begin waiting. The following morning, the angiogram was scheduled for 10:00. I was taken down to the cath lab where the nurse prepped my for the procedure. Chuck arrived shortly before the procedure was to start so I got to see him before they sedated me. The doctors did a good job of explaining exactly what would happen and thanks to the wonders of anesthesia I have no memory of the procedure.

After the angiogram, the doctors woke me up enough to tell that they found 2 arteries that 95+% blocked and that I would require immediate bypass surgery. The only thing I remember from this period is seeing the pictures of the blocked arteries. They did the surgery the same day, starting in later afternoon. Chuck and his sister waited at the hospital for many hours until they were told that I was out of surgery and in the recovery room. He wasn't able to see me but left the hospital knowing that I was in good hands.

The first time that I woke up after the surgery, still in an anesthetic haze, I sill had a tube in my throat and my arms in restraints (so I wouldn't try to pull the tube out of my throat). The doctors had prepared me for this do I don't remember being alarmed. The following morning was I woke up they took the tube out and removed the restraints. Later that morning, Chuck was able to visit and told me that my sister, Mary, was on her way. She decided that she could not stay at her home in North Carolina while I went through this life-altering and life-threatening ordeal. I was surprised and deeply appreciative that she would come. I have, I think, a very good relationship with all of my siblings; they are my best friends. The overriding feeling I had during this period was calm. I don't remember being anxious or worried about what was happening to me. So that is why I was surprised that Mary decided to travel to Indiana to be with Chuck and me. I know that my family were much more anxious for me than I was for myself.

After a couple of days in cardio-vascular intensive care, I was transferred to a regular hospital room. The days passed somewhat slowly and the first time the physical therapist came to get me to walk I thought she was insane. How could they possibly expect me to walk only a few days after having this major surgery. But, walk I did. After about a week in the hospital, the doctors said I was ready to go home. It seemed an unattainable ideal to me. I felt that I could barely feed myself, let alone do anything else. But as usual, I severely underestimated myself and my ability to cope to with a difficult, to say the least, situation.

With caring doctors and nurses, a changed perspective and attitude about food and exercise and some terrific meds, I am now doing quite well. My cardiologist assures me that if I continue with the changes I have made, eating healthier foods, exercising, and taking my meds, I should not have a recurrence of the problems which landed me in the hospital a year ago.

So the moral of this story is pay attention and take to heart, no pun intended, your family history and make sure you share that family history with your health care provider. It just might save your life.

Dramatis Personae

I'd like to briefly introduce you to the main players in our drama.

I am Rick, your narrator and commentator. I am 44 years old and currently living in northwest Indiana. Although I was born in golden state of California I consider myself to be a Buckeye from the great state of Ohio. My parents moved a few times in the early years of their marriage---Washington, DC; California; Ohio. I lived in Ohio from the time I was two years old until I graduated from college. The I moved to Chicago for graduate school, fell in love and eventually moved to Indiana. I am the third son and third (of six) child in my family. I have two older brothers and three younger sisters.

Chuck, my partner, is also 44. He was born and raised in northwest Indiana. Apart from living in Chicago for about 12 years, he has lived in Indiana all his life. He is the only son and fifth (of six) child of his parents. He has four older and one younger sisters.

Emerson (the brindle on the left) and Ozzie (the fawn on the right), both 16 months old, are our two French Bulldogs. They are brothers and litter mates. They came to live with us when they were three months old. They are the fourth and fifth French Bulldogs that have shared our lives. Our previous three companions, Henri, Pete, and Bert, are gone but most fondly remembered.

I've Arrived --- The First Picture of Life

Well, here is the first post for my blog. Very exciting so far, yes?

The images to the left and below are from the birth announcements that my parents sent out after I was born. So, I thought they would be appropriate to announce the "birth" of my blog.

The name of my blog comes from the announcements, with hospital photo (see profile), that my parents sent out after my birth. These announcements had a space theme with stars and planets. Very futuristic! The image in the banner comes from one of these announcements.



If you've come by to visit, please introduce yourself. It always nice to make new friends or renew old acquaintances.