Alfalfa Bill and Los Arcos

 Alfalfa Bill and Vistek Ranchero

Ever have one of those days where weird, wonderful things happen and you finish the day just thrilled to be alive?

I woke up at six when the alarm went off, collected my bicycle riding stuff (helmet, safety orange shirt, Gatorade, GPS, route recorder, etc.) and headed out to Tishomingo, Oklahoma. It was the day of the 35th Alfalfa Bill Bike Tour. I had been planning on this ride most of the year, and I already had my bicycle in its carrier on the back of my car.

The day couldn’t have been better, with clear skies, a little warm with a little breeze to keep me cool. I have done this ride three times now, the first time for thirty miles, and then the rest at twenty miles. Yeah, I’m not as young as I once was. I was wearing a heart monitor wrapped around my chest, synched to the Garmin GPS machine on the bike.

I was one of the first to check in at the Chickasaw Information Center in the middle of Tishomingo and got my swag bag with a sweat shirt and a lot of other stuff like tumblers, sport drink bottle, free tickets to restaurants in the area, etc.

At nine o’clock we were briefed on the different routes, which they had marked with arrows painted on the roads in various colors, depending on which course you were riding. They had a choice between 10, 20, 30 45, 65, and 100 miles. All were led out of town to the east by a police cruiser with all lights flashing, and a couple of miles out of town he pulled over as we all pedaled by. I waved and hollered a thank you and picked up the yellow arrows for my twenty mile course.

The wind started to come on strong from the south, which helped on the first half of the course as we went north. At the ten mile point there was a rest stop, where I picked up some delicious cookies, and had a small drink of water before I continued on. Not many bathrooms on this trek, so an old guy has got to be careful!

Because of the wind, which was blowing down small branches, we had to fight our way back into Tishomingo. You get to appreciate those lower gears. The object is to find a gear that lets you pedal fast and easy, not slow and hard. I have 16 gears on my road bike, and hills and wind will keep me shifting constantly. 

I got back to town with 20.8 miles showing and checked out with the race officials so they knew I made it back. I put the bike back on the car and drove home, tired but happy.

Darlene was up when I got to the house, and asked how the ride went. I was still glowing and told her how much I enjoyed the ride. After trying to upload the data on the ride to Facebook, without much luck, I went outside and took a nap on the front porch in my camp chair out of the wind.  

Later that evening I asked Darlene if she wanted to go out to eat. “Sure!” she said. Since she started her chemo therapy and got her ID card for Medical Marijuana, her appetite has come back with a vengeance. I enjoy seeing her awake and alert again.

We drove over to Los Arcos Restaurant in Calera, Oklahoma, which has a large room with lots of tables and booths and good food to boot. It is Tex-Mex, I’m sure, because the menu lists Vistek Ranchero. Translated from Spanglish, that would be Rancher’s Beefsteak. That’s not Spanish! But it’s good!

We had just sat down, been served drinks and chips with salsa, and relaxed to listen to the man on the keyboard playing and singing Mexican music.   

Suddenly I heard a familiar tune. So did Darlene. She said, “Listen to that!” I already was. Made a complete fool of myself sobbing at the table, and it took me a minute to get my composure back again. I wiped the tears off of my face, and hiked over to the musician, and tipped him five bucks for playing that song. “Lo Mucho Que Te Quiero” was the title. It was a big, but local, hit in Southern California in 1969, when my wife and I got married there. Darlene was just eight at the time, but she remembered. 

You never hear it anymore. I’ve heard it once since then, when Featherstone Assisted Care Home put on an Anniversary Party for Carolyn and I just months before she died in 2018. I think they found an original recording by René and René on YouTube. When Carolyn heard it the memory broke through the Alzheimer’s and she leaned forward and smiled. 

Coincidence? Serendipity? What are the chances that the piano guy in a restaurant we frequent every other month would find that particular song and play it for us? Fifty three years after it was popular. Wow!

Today was the kind of day that fills your heart with gladness.

I am so glad I was alive today!

If Life Ever Gets Dull...

 If life gets dull, I’ll know I’m dead!

For those people who are squeamish about medical procedures, stop reading this and find something else to read.

For those who for some reason are offended by references to sexual areas of the body, stop reading now and go on to something else. This will be TMI for you.

I have been diagnosed with a very rare condition. My urologist has never seen a case like this. She is consulting with doctors and surgeons to find the appropriate therapy for this condition. I’m awaiting their decision.

It started with a routine post TURP (Trans Urethral Resection of the Prostate) follow up visit to my urologist. I was showing no symptoms serious enough to mention, but of course I had to provide a urine specimen as I came into the office.

After several minutes she came into the room where I sat, and said she found something that worried her - crystals in my urine specimen. She said that might be from kidney stones, so she gave me a medical order to go over to the hospital for a CT scan of my abdomen.

She also recommended that I include more acidic foods to prevent the crystals formation. I went to the store and bought some fresh pineapple and overdosed that night. Worst acid stomach I’ve ever experienced!

A couple of days later she called and scheduled me back for the results of the CT scan. She put me on the table and did a sonogram of my pubic region. Then she went to her office and was gone for nearly an hour. I thought she had forgotten me and went to the door of the exam room and looked down the hall. A nurse immediately told me she would be in to see me soon, but she was busy studying my scans.

When she came in she brought her laptop computer with the CT scan on it. She had me come over to the counter and watch as she ran a series of pictures showing horizontal planes from the top of the bladder down to the bottom of the prostate. I asked about the kidney stones, and she quickly reassured me I don’t have any.

The prostate is still enlarged, but thanks to the TURP surgery, it has been hollowed out to solve the urine flow problem. She pointed to the bladder and said, “There is the problem!” I didn’t see anything unusual.

We have a good doctor/patient relationship, because she has found out that I am familiar with most medical terminology, due to helping take care of my wife’s physical problems in her last years, and before that helping my son as he studied to be a Registered Nurse in College. She knows she can just discuss in normal medical terms what is happening, without trying to find words to simplify things.

She smiled as she punched a few keys on the computer, and now the CT scans were in the vertical plane, from front to back. As she moved through the scans the prostate and bladder came into view, stacked as normal. But as she moved farther back, all of a sudden my bladder distended to the right and fell over. The picture kind of reminded me of a beret, falling over to one side over an ear.

She asked if I knew I had a hernia. No, I didn’t. Never noticed any symptoms in my life. 

I have an inguinal hernia, but instead of the usual digestive tract pushing through the hole in my peritoneum, my bladder fell through. Or at least part of it. I asked if surgery to implant a mesh suspension under the bladder was next for me. She didn’t think so, although she said she had never seen this condition before.

She is hoping that a laparoscopic procedure to push the bladder up and put some stitches in the peritoneum will suffice. Me, too!

I came back home as she consulted with doctors to find the proper procedure, and of course, my mind has been pondering how I came to have a hernia at this late stage of my life. I am retired and no longer lift heavy machinery parts around the shop. I have always been careful to use my legs, get help if needed, or go get the forklift or overhead crane. 

I wondered if long distance bicycle rides might cause problems in the inguinal area. I know some riders have problems with erectile disfunction due to the bicycle seat pressure on the perineum. I can’t see how that would lead to a hernia, though.

Then another thought occurred to me. A year ago, after my first Pfizer vaccination, I got myocarditis and went to the hospital in an ambulance with tachycardia. They stopped the rapid heartbeat in the ER, and the cardiologist scheduled me for a series of heart examinations, including an angiogram. 

For the angiogram they insert a catheter into your femoral artery and push up into your heart to study all the valves and passages. The place where the catheter is inserted is right beside the inguinal ligament. Pretty much right where the hernia is.

When they withdraw the catheter, they use an active closure device to block the artery from hemorrhaging. It consists of a collagen piece fastened atop the arterial incision and covered with a thick bandage. 

After I got home from the hospital I laid down in bed and tried not to move. When I woke up several hours later, I noticed some bleeding under the bandaged area, and a bit of blood under the skin on my thigh. There was some thought that maybe I should go back to have it checked out, but it seemed that I had achieved hemostasis, even though there was a soft lump under the skin indicating a small thrombus there.

I survived for the next week, and although the bruising and swelling went down I still retained a soft pad above the groin incision. I assumed it was part of the collagen closure device and would dissipate over time. 

It never did, and now I wonder if that was my bladder there all along.     

Isn’t life exciting? As I get older, it seems to be one exciting moment after another. 

Hey, my goal is to live forever. Even with all the excitement, so far, so good.

Notes on Tulsi Gabbard's speech

 Today I watched a speech by Tulsi Gabbard as she quit the Democratic Party. I could sympathize most of the time. She said the Democrat (sic) Party was an “elite cabal” who were destroying our country and it’s freedoms.

She got it absolutely correct when she pointed out that the people in power have completely abandoned the working class of the country. They have been complicit with Republicans at destroying unions, preventing any raise in the minimum wage, or doing anything to make medical costs stay within reasonable bounds.

They are obviously bought by the money of the big corporations, big pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and the financial crooks on Wall Street. They talk about being friends of the workers, but when they pass legislation in Congress, it is glaringly obvious who they represent.

However, she missed the point entirely when she was pointing out the lack of religious freedom when Democrats didn’t use the words “under God” in their convention. I don’t know if she never learned the history, or is being disingenuous.

This country was founded as the one and only secular country, the very first in the world. Nobody could force you to bow down to or pay taxes to support somebody else’s church or religion. Thomas Paine, who started the Revolutionary War with his writings, was a dedicated Atheist. Thomas Jefferson did not believe Jesus was divine and did not believe in miracles. His Bible is still at his home in Monticello, with all the miracles scissored out. James Madison made sure there were no references to God or Jesus in the Constitution. They were all aware of the ugly history of the bloody European wars between religions there.

Up until 1954, the motto of this country was “E Pluribus Unum”. When Joseph McCarthy was accusing everybody in the country of being Communists, the government added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. They also added the phrase to our coins at the same time.

That marked the end of religious freedom in America. I recite the Pledge just as I learned it in school, because I don’t believe anybody should have to pledge to a God they don’t believe in, whether that would be Rama, Allah, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Or none at all.

I have trouble understanding the concept of the government using non religious, or secular language being an assault on religious freedom. Is religious freedom just the freedom for someone else to force me to abide by their religion? That is freedom for them but not for me.

The most egregious loss of religious freedom happened this year. By lying and cheating the Republicans stacked the Supreme Court with a majority of Catholics. After lying (sure we’ll respect prior rulings) and cheating ( denying President Obama a choice on the Court, but pushing a judge onto the Court by President Trump) the Supreme Court is now no longer an impartial arbiter of the Constitutionality of laws. One of the first rulings was to overturn forty years of precedent to allow states to impose Catholic dogma denying the right of a woman to choose an abortion rather than carry an unwanted fetus to birth. And they have announced that birth control, which is also against Catholic doctrine, is next in their sights.

So it’s here, folks. War is peace, Truth is a lie, and Freedom is to do as the government says you must.

Yes, we have no bananas. But we are a banana republic nevertheless. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats care enough to return us to our original freedoms. When Julian Assange is given a full and complete pardon and his passport back, I’ll know we have Freedom of the Press back. I’m not holding my breath. 

My only hope is that my FBI file is so big and bulky that they won’t have any idea where to start looking. 

I’ll be working November 8 at an election polling place near you. Hope to see y’all there.