2/2/2025

 Sunday, February 2, 2025

D+87

1913 Joyce Kilmer wrote his poem "Trees" in Mahwah, New Jersey

1933 Hermann Goering banned Communist meetings and demonstrations in Germany

1948 President Harry Truman urged Congress to adopt a civil rights program

1954 President Eisenhower announced the detonation of the world's 1st hydrogen bomb 

1974 Pope Paul VI's encyclical "To Honor Mary"

2021 Joe Biden signed executive orders to reunite immigrant families, setting up a new task force to address around 1000 remaining separated families

In bed by 9:30 and up around 10 to tuck Geri in again, awake at 3:15 and up at 3:30.   Geri arose around 6:50, saying she felt better and "What a week that was."  Keeping my fingers crossed.  

Prednisone, day 289, 5 + 2.5 mg., day 26, Kevzara, day 12/14.  5 mg. prednisone at 5 a.m.  Other meds at 7:40.  2.5 mg. prednisone at  5 p.m.           

I tucked Geri into bed at 8 last night.  She ate a simple dinner of a baked russet potato and some Asian salad at about 6:30, feeling better than she had earlier in the day, but not well, still enduring lower abdominal pain from some unknown cause and needing to use ice packs on her knee.  My tucking-in regimen includes emptying the water from the cooling device used for her still-swollen knee, filling it with ice for the night, securing the cooling pad around her knee, ensuring she had water for the night and her phone nearby, and helping to arrange her blankets after the cooling device is in place.  Tonight I also put a bottle of Gatorlyte on her nightstand near her water bottle and put her hearing aids into their charging case.  I've become adept at emptying and refilling the cooling device and I've gotten better at securing the knee cooling pad with its two velcro straps.  I made a trip to the MetroMarket to get the potatoes and salad we had for dinner and two more bags of ice, then to Sendik's to get the egg salad we had for lunch and her dark Italian roast ground coffee and some thin chocolate chip cookies that she enjoys.  In the afternoon, I helped her with a fresh compression wrap for her left leg and I regularly help her get her socks on and off, but otherwise, she is, as usual, very self-reliant. 

 My heart aches to see her laid up the way she has been for the last two weeks.  She's gutsy, brave, quietly enduring her pain, discomfort, and forced inactivity.  I think of my brother-in-law Jim Reck and of myself, what big babies we are (or were, in Jim's case) when we would have a head cold, acting as if a cosmic injustice has been done to us because we had to endure the temporary minor misery of a head cold.  Not so with Geri (nor with Kitty.)  You'd think she was the tough former Marine from the south side of Chicago! 😂  She is my reason for living.  Without her, I don't know that I would go on.  She is is my constant companion, in my head and heart even during the hours each day when each of us is doing our own thing in separate spaces.  When I woke up at 3:15 this morning, I was thinking of Geri and her painful travail, worrying that she is not getting stronger, worrying about the numbers in her blood work, wondering whether she may need to be in rehab facility, as my cousin Jim did after his leg surgery, thinking of the times when I was sick and in pain and she had to take me to the ER or push me in a VA wheelchair to an appointment with Dr. Chatt and another with Dr. Ryzka, thinking of her 3 knee surgeries in the last 8 months - thoughts that preoccupy a guy in the middle of the night.  I think of my Dad down in Florida after Grace died and then Tasha.  I think of Robert Bly's poem When My Dead Father Called

Last night I dreamt my father called to us.

He was stuck somewhere. It took us

A long time to dress, I don't know why.

The night was snowy; there were long black roads.

Finally we reached the little town, Bellingham.

There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,

Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed

The uneven sort of shoes that men wore

In the early Forties. And overalls. He was smoking.

Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps

He left us somewhere once, or did I simply 

Forget he was alone in winter in some town?

Enough already.  

The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor.  I came across this website while looking for Robert Bly's sad poem about his dead father.  How much I enjoyed listening on Saturday evenings to Keillor's live performance radio show, A Prairie Home Companion with his news from Lake Wobegone,  and his daily radio vignettes The Writer's Almanac.  He was liked and admired by millions of fans but his reputation was tarnished by allegations of "sexually inappropriate" behavior with women, allegations which he denied but which led to the termination of his long relationship with Minnesota Public Radio.  He's one year younger than I am but is still performing stage shows around the country.

LTMW at 6:19 this morning I see that snow has fallen during the night.  The Bayside snowplows have been at work clearing Wakefield Court and County Line Road but "Rustic Rusty", our snow plower hasn't cleared our driveways because the night brought less than 2 inches of snow.  Our kitty-corner neighbor, whom we've not met in our 12 years of neighboring, leaves their beautiful lighted tree on all night, and their pretty backyard lights.  The sun came up at 7:04 signaling it was time for the birds and squirrels to show up and I saw I failed to fill the sunflower/safflower tube yesterday afternoon.  Shame on me.

How to privatize the VA Health Service without the involvement of Congress.  (1) Have Elon Musk's DOGE offer every federal employee, including the 16% of whom work in health care like the VA's program, an option to resign with full pay and benefits and no work for 8 months before the date of the resignation. (2)  Watch as so many VA doctors, nurses, therapists, et al., resign that the VA can't provide the service that the enrolled veterans are entitled to under the law, and (3) transfer all those veterans to the private health care market, eventually causing the VA Health Service to become so inefficient that Congress shuts it down and uses only private health care providers (who are already too few in number to care for the nation's health care needs.)  Voilà!  The end of the largest and most successful "socialist," single-payer healthcare system in the U. S. and the one with the most satisfied customers/patients.

Steve and David were here today visiting with their Mom and putting her bed back together again.  They also rotated my mattress and helped with a number of things.  Steve took some of the furniture and furnishings that he had stored in our basement to give to a friend in Chicago who is recently separated and in dire need of home furnishings.

I watched the first part of The Nightingale on MUBI, depicting the cruelty of British soldiers in the penal colony of Australia, both toward convicts and aborigines.