So, listen, Mr DJ . . .

Music has always been an important part of my life. As a child in the 50s I think I looked forward to watching "Your Hit Parade" even more than my parents did. Rock n' Roll was liberating, and just enough dangerous to make it exciting, but the music that really grabbed me was the the Brazilian music of Gilberto and Jobim of the mid-60s, and the jazz they influenced of performers like Stan Getz. Later folk music took its hold on me. I would even take my guitar with me when I was in the hospital.

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Put your right foot in, take your right foot out . . .

One of the few ways I can still amaze my wife after almost thirty years, at least when I'm not irritating her by doing the very same thing, is by remembering little details of of a place and time. What really makes her shake her head is that I can tell you, draw a floor plan if I must, exactly how the ER was set up in 1954 when I would be passing through on my way up to the wards; but, except for a very few exceptional bleeds I will not be able to remember what was bleeding where to save my soul. It completely baffles my wife.


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Don't know much about history . . .

Over at "Bringing Generations Together" is very nice article in honor of Hemophilia Awareness Month. It's another reminder, to me at least, that you can't know where you are if you don't know where you've been. Give it a look.
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Number nine, number nine . . .

I think the one question that is guaranteed to drive me completely mad is:

On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain you can imagine, how would you rate your pain right now?

I hate that bloody question. Mostly because I never know how to answer it. Is this pain a 6 or an 8? It hurts a lot, but nowhere near a couple of hemorrhages I have had. So do I say it's a 5 because it is only about half as bad as the bleed I had in my arm, or is it an 8 or 9 because it still hurts like hell. I think that for most people the worst pain they can imagine is pretty much the worst pain they have experienced, and when I was twelve I was pretty sure I had experienced the worst pain imaginable. As it turns out, I might have been wrong, but that is a story for another time.

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Going for a ride in the car, car . . .

As Chairman Kaga would say, if memory serves me correctly, out of the two hundred fifty some times I have been hospitalized (such an odd word—sounds like I was made into a hospital, but I digress) I have only been in an ambulance twice.

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I visited your house again . . .

My maternal grandfather was born on the 10th of August, 1874. I know nothing about his ancestors except for the names of his parents, but he was, as it turned out, a bleeder. I don't know if his family used the term 'hemophiliac,' or if they even knew the term, but by the time my mother was born in 1919 he had been diagnosed as having hemophilia.

There is a family story that when he was about five or so he was kicked by a horse or a mule. Like so many family legends it will often get bogged down at this point while various aunts argue the finer points of the animal's species. Horse or mule, the upshot of the episode was that the kick dislocated his hip. The treatment for this kind of injury was, I have been told, fairly basic. A couple of burly men take firm hold of the patient's torso while another pulls on the leg until the joint slips back together. Not an altogether pleasant way to spend an afternoon.


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All I want for Christmas are my two front teeth . . .

Until I was about ten or eleven it seems that every hemorrhage I had was either my knee, usually the left, or something to do with my face. On one trip to the doctor after using my nose and mouth to break a particularly hard fall he asked me, "Have you got something against your face, son?" When I was a toddler all my pictures for about an eighteen month period show a large, bruised lump in the middle of my forehead.

Cutting teeth always seems to be a very worrisome time for the parents of guys with hemophilia. (For the record, I detest the word hemophiliac—I know it just means a person who has hemophilia, but I hate the way it sounds) Anyway, in my family, and for many others I've talked to it has always been almost disappointingly uneventful. My younger brother and I seeped a tiny bit around a couple teeth for a couple days and that was about it. At last report my grandson did the same.



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They call the wind . . .

In a past post I mentioned I had two Hallowe'en stories I wanted to tell. Since Hallowe'en is over, and Thanksgiving is quickly approaching, I think I should probably get around to the second story. As for Hallowe'en here, it came and went with nary a 'boo.' We have had our fifth straight year (as opposed to all those sexually deviant ones, I guess) without a Trick or Treater, which is a good thing since I haven't bothered to buy candy for the last three. And before I move on, what is the correct spelling for one who goes Trick or Treating? Does it end with '-or' like actor, creator, and facilitator; or does it end with '-er' like singer, engineer, and teacher? Microsoft's dictionary detests both (which is enough to make me want to use both), and I don't find the term in my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed) although it does list the past tense, or perhaps the passive voiced, 'trick or treated.'



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I hurt easy, I just don't show it . . .

It has been brought to my attention that I expend a lot of energy giving hemophilia a rather rosy glow. It seems I give the humorous incidents precedent, and attempt to keep the painful truths behind a curtain, safely out of sight. That perhaps I trivialize the condition to the detriment of all those who must struggle with its realities every day. How can I expect society to understand the seriousness of our pain and struggles if I keep talking about Castor oil induced fifty yard dashes, and making crippling knee hemorrhages sound like an everyday occurrence not worthy of treatment. I am making light of the most devastating thing to ever happen to these people.



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The zombies were having fun . . .

I have two Halloween stories I want to tell. At first I was going to do both of them in one long, involved post, but I know that many people—my wife, primarily—cannot, or will not, read anything longer than two or three paragraphs on a computer screen. (And yet, she can spend hours examining and comparing spread sheets the size of Texas until she finds the one tiny discrepancy that shows someone somewhere did something naughty. Go figure.) So in the interests of those people—my wife, primarily—I will tell them in two separate posts that are only sort of long, and not very, by my standards, involved.

The first one involves jack-o-lanterns. Every year around the first week of October each kid on 6-West would get a small pumpkin which we would then carve into the scariest, or weirdest, jack-o-lantern we could manage. The jack-o-lantern would then sit on our bedside stand until a few days after Halloween.



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When there's too much of nothin', no one has control . . .

I have been mulling over this post for quite some time. Not simply because it is embarrassing. If I stopped telling stories just because they were embarrassing I would have about four and a half minutes of not quite boring material. Nor is my reluctance cause by the subject matter. With a bit of finesse the subject can be presented in a manner that is only slightly offensive and mildly scatological. No, the reason I haven't gotten to it, like the reason we don't do so many things is: it's hard.


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Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, be prepared . . .

I have already talked about the unfortunate semester I spent at St Elizabeth's when I was in the third grade. Believe me, I only scratched the surface. There was, for example, "Spelling Period." This was not a part of the day devoted to studying spelling, and perhaps having a quiz like any normal teacher might have devised. It was a period, usually about thirty minutes long, during which Sister Rose spelled every word she would normally say; and you, if called on, were expected to do the same. When your sentence came to a punctuation mark like 'comma' or 'period' you said the appropriate word.

I hated Spelling Period. I have learned over the years that I do not assimilate things as quickly when I hear them as I do visually, and I spent most of Spelling Period wondering what the heck was going on. Sister Rose would be up there yammering on, "A•N•D•W•H•A•T•I•S•T•H•E•C•A•P•I•T•O•L•O•F•M•I•C•H•I•G•A•N•comma•G•U•Y•question mark"

When I heard that "comma•G•U•Y•question mark" I knew I was in trouble because I didn't have the slightest clue about what the question was. I got very good at spelling out, "I•D•O•N•O•T•K•N•O•W•period."

But as much grief as Sister Rose gave me, she was not the worst person I ran into that year. And like the good Sister, this man also felt he had God on his side.


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Ah, but I was so much older then . . .

When I think back on it, it seems that a good deal of my younger life was concerned with, or at least references, the wards and floors of the University of Michigan Hospitals. Just as I might tell you about walking down a street in Buffalo in the winter, and expect the place name to elicit a certain set of connotations and images; telling you that this or that happened on 8-West or 6-East gives the story, for me at least, an atmosphere that it could have no where else.

Moving from one floor or ward to another was also a kind of rite of passage, and meant I had, with luck, become a bit more mature. Since we didn't move to Michigan until I was almost six, and my first hospitalization wasn't until I was seven, I started out on 6-East.


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See the man with the stage fright . . .

It happened when I was nine years old, which would make it the summer of 1955. Having been fed lunch my brother and I were invited by our mother to spend the rest of the afternoon outside. Actually, it wasn't so much an invitation as a declaration of what was going to happen. She had cleaning to do; soap operss, Queen for a Day, and Liberace (the last two were different) to watch; and she didn't need two young boys doing their best to distract her.

To be honest, Mom did not really have to say very much to get us out of the house. The last thing nine and seven year old boys wanted to do on a nice summer day was stay inside. We had ants to watch, a tire swing to break our arms and/or necks on, and a cardboard rocket behind the shed to fight invading Martians in. At the very worst we could sit on the back steps and watch our cat taunt our dog by staying just an inch or so beyond his reach.


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Dear old Golden Rule days . . .

The school I went to when I was in first and second grade, Central, was built a little before World War I, and the architects had certainly never heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Probably because it hadn't been passed yet.) To get into the thing you had to go up six or seven steps, my classroom was on the second floor, and the restrooms were, of course, in the basement. The steps in the stairwells were made of some kind of stone that had been rounded by fifty some years of use. They were also slick as ice whenever there was the least bit of moisture on them.

Because my crutches would often just slide out from under me on those steps the principal, Mr Green, would carry me up to my classroom in the morning whenever I had a knee hemorrhage, and then back down at the end of the day. At lunch time he would carry me down to the lunch room and then back up to the classroom, and if I needed to go #1 or #2 Mr Green would carry me down the three floors to the restroom. All this being lugged about like an infant was just a bit humiliating for me, and didn't do Mr Green's bad heart much good either, so I often didn't go to school when I had a knee bleed.



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Roger, draft dodger, sneakin' out the cellar door . . .

In October of 1964 I turned eighteen. Eighteen was that magical semi-step into adulthood for young men that meant that you were still far too young to drink alcohol, except in the state of New York, and still could not vote, but you were now mature enough to spend a few years in the Army. Several weeks before my birthday I received a large envelope in the mail from the Selective Service with a nine or ten page form I was to fill out and return before said birthday. I really don't remember much about the form except for thinking, "I haven't lived long enough to have answers for this many questions." Or something like that. That is at least the gist of my reaction which was a very complex mixture of thoughts, emotions and panic which at the time got edited down to something which probably sounded more like, "Damn!"


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Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad . . .

I had my first run in with a social worker when I was about sixteen. I was in the hospital with some kind of hemorrhage—most likely my knee or hip, but who knows. One afternoon I was sitting in my bed reading, just minding my own business when a somewhat older (late twenties or early thirties) woman came up to my bed and introduced herself. At first I thought she was from the Hospital School because she wasn't wearing any kind of uniform or doctor's lab coat, but it was the wrong time of day for them (and I knew all the teachers) which left the Chaplain's office. I was not in the mood for another discussion about how some god, or his son, could help me through this "difficult time," or perhaps even end them forever. (If you took their reasoning to its logical end this god, or his son, was responsible for the "difficult time" in the first place, and I was just not quite ready or willing to thank him for having bestowed this special blessing on me. But I digress.)


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I can see by your eyes friend your almost gone . . .

Yesterday, as I sat in the ER waiting for some pain medication to take hold, I made what I considered a cogent observation. Or it could have just been the drugs.


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Doctor, Doctor! Mr M D . . .

Todai hospital also turned new mom away : National : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri)

I have always known that Japan was more hide bound about following the rules than the Chairwoman of a Methodist Church flower committee. Everyone in a school or corporation dresses alike, and they all change from winter uniforms to summer uniforms on the same day, and damn the weather. But this article about a woman dying because hospitals seemed to think that the number of beds their policy manual states they will have is more important than the number of people who are actually in critical need really takes the cake.

When a desperately ill person arrives at your emergency room, it's not something you can handle by using your best imitation of Eddie Izzard imitating James Mason while blocking the patients entrance. "Dreadfully sorry and all that, but you see we can only take nine patients, and I'm afraid we've reached our quota. Trauma surgeon's already complaining about having to work five and six hours at a stretch. But look, I'm not really supposed to tell you this but, just between you and me, Yamaguchi doesn't look good. If you can hang about for a few hours chances are an opening will appear. What do you have? Massive brain hemorrhage? That could be dicey. Yamaguchi's got a bum heart, and they never seem to move along when you need them to. Anyway, good luck.

What do these so called hospitals do when there is a train wreck or a building collapse? Hold a raffle? "Okay, there's fourteen of you in critical condition and twenty-three that are merely serious. Well, the staff took a vote and they decided they would take three criticals and four serious. So what we're going to do is give each of you one of these carnival tickets and put its mate in this bedpan here. Then we'll do a drawing. Remember! Just three critical and four serious. As for the rest of you, well, it is a lovely day."

Sorry about this, but I feel the need to shout. THESE ARE HOSPITALS DAMMIT!

They don't decide they'll do a spot of healing today, and then maybe take a long weekend. They take what comes to them. If they have nine beds for neonatal emergencies, and nature thoughtlessly presents them with a tenth—THEY TAKE IT. Bassinets are moved a bit, maybe a laundry cart is put in the hall. You make room. Then the staff figures out how to divide up the load. What you don't ever do. Never, ever do is condemn people to death just because it's inconvenient, doesn't follow the official guidelines, or you would have to go to all the bother of finding a space. You are in the business of saving lives. That's your priority. Only that.

So if the Second Assistant Floor Director comes around throwing a stink about how there seem to be ten beds here and the Guidelines clearly state the room was built for nine. Invite him to take it up with the third bridge from the North, and offer to write a press release clearly stating he was the person who decided the critically injured woman expecting her first child had to die because treating her would have clearly deviated from the Holy Official Guidelines, which seem to be more precious than any mere life
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I would like to apologize for my friend here . . .

Aside from the sister-in-law who lives in Michigan, it seems that the majority of the people wandering onto this blog are algebra students. At least I think they are algebra students. The reason I am not a retired architect instead of a retired bookseller is that my math abilities are comparable to my ability to fly. That is, largely a matter for my dreams. They could be physics or chemistry students for all I know, but the phrasing of their searches leads me to believe they are struggling with a math problem; and since algebra is the branch of mathematics I understand least, I assume that's the kind of math.

Anyway, these poor souls are doing Google searches for "missing factor" or some similar phrase, and Google obligingly directs them here. I imagine it can be quite frustrating to be desperately searching for the answer to a homework problem or help preparing for a test and suddenly find yourself looking at the ramblings of some old geezer.

For this I sincerely apologize. I hope the exam goes well, and that you do find an answer to your missing factor problem

If it is any help, the missing factor in my life has always been 9.
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