Category: Journal

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My legs are battered and bruised.

Well, mostly just bruised.

This all started when I got a new chiropractor. I’m still going to the same clinic, but the previous owner, Dr. Nelson, sold it “so I can be a kid again”. According to his theory, the point of working is to eventually be a kid again: have lots of money and time and play however you want. I’m a tad skeptical, but whatever. It’s not like I was going to do anything to try to keep him from retiring.

During my appointment and for about a month overall, he was bringing around the new doc so she could meet the clientele, get to know them a little, find out why they were coming to the chiropractor, etc. After getting my adjustment, I asked Dr. Halbe if her technique was the same as Dr. Nelson’s. Even though they went to different schools, she confirmed that they were pretty much the same. She lied.

My next visit to Dakota County Clinic wasn’t to Dakota County Clinic: I walked through the doors into Exuberance Chiropractic and Wellness Center. They have new appointment reminder cards with pretty colors and designs on them and everything.

They brought me to my little room, Dr. Halbe walked in a couple minutes later, we exchanged pleasantries, then I laid down on the table so she could check my back. I think it’s the L4 and L5 vertebrae that are slightly out of alignment—I know it’s right above the pelvis—so that’s where she was going to do the adjustment. That in itself wasn’t a surprise.

The surprise was because she’s significantly shorter than Dr. Nelson. Where he was able to stand above me, then use his body weight when thrusting down to adjust the spot, Dr. Halbe couldn’t do that. I used to roll onto my left side, wrap my arms up in kind of a self-hug, then rotate my hips a little to get the proper angle. This time, I had to roll on my left side, then she had me stick my leg out so she could leverage that to get the twisting or pressing or whatever motion she needed to make the adjustment. It felt like it worked, but it was waaaaaay different than what Dr. Nelson did.

As we were talking afterward, I told her about a problem I had a while ago that was starting to come back a little bit: I’d occasionally feel some random pain on the outside of my lower left leg. Very infrequent, but noticeable. A physical therapist gave me an exercise that made the pain stop coming back, but naturally, I stopped doing it after a while. Dr. Halbe listened to the story, then took a look at my leg and said… I don’t remember the terminology she used, but she basically said that my foot was turned to the outside.

I already knew that. I’ve known that for years. It came from playing soccer when I was younger. There was one time in high school—I think it might have been during a debate tournament—when some girl asked out of the blue if I played soccer. I said yes and asked how she knew. It’s because my feet were pointed outward. Rotating your feet out to trap the ball and kick it with the arch of your foot… “Keep making that face and it’ll stay that way!” Apparently, that theory works with feet, too.

So the doc thought that straightening my foot might help the pain go away. According to my totally unprofessional theory, my feet pointed the way they were wasn’t a problem for a really long time. However, because I haven’t been playing soccer for a while (and haven’t been up on my feet much, for that matter), I don’t have the musculature to support the awkward angle of my feet and I’m starting to feel how it’s putting pressure where it doesn’t belong.

Whether that’s the case or not, she had me sit down, then twisted and tugged my lower leg around so that when I stood up, my left foot was pointed at a different angle than my right. That was weird. It felt fine, but definitely looked weird. And did I mention that Dr. Nelson never looked at anything besides my back? Yeah, Dr. Halbe totally lied.

She made my next appointment a couple days later to check to see if my leg stayed adjusted properly. She had advised me that whenever I turn, I should be sure to lift my feet instead of keeping them planted and turning my leg. I apparently rotate at the hips instead of the legs because there were a handful of times when I thought, “Shit, I forgot to lift my foot when I moved like that!” When the doctor checked my leg, though, she said it had stayed in its adjusted position.

My next request? Straighten the other foot. I’d prefer to have them at the same angle in comparison to the rest of my body. I don’t want to stand upright, look down and see one foot pointed at noon and the other at 2:00, you know?

I think what she did next was so my pelvis would be aligned properly. I was laying on my stomach and she would hold my leg below the calf, then thrust it forward up towards my head. I asked her if she was trying to make me shorter, but she said it was to make sure my legs were the same length. That’s what she said, but I wonder…

That all popped into my head this afternoon when I was getting some exercise at the Y. I was wearing shorts during my workout, so when I sat down on the floor to stretch afterward, I saw a handful of small bruises on my lower legs. Again, this is my totally unprofessional theory: when Dr. Halbe squeezed her hands at the bottom of my calf and then thrust my leg forward, it sometimes burst tiny blood vessels and voila! A bunch of small bruises that are all below the knee!

The next time I go in for an appointment, I’ll probably have to tease her about it: I can pull up the legs of my jeans, show her the results of her handiwork, then say, “It looks like I’m in an abusive relationship with a dwarf!”

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I make writing blog entries way too difficult.

Yep, that’s the story with me and shawnbakken.net. I love telling stories and I love elaborating on said stories, including all sorts of juicy details, but when it comes to writing stuff down on paper (or typing on keyboard—using a pencil on my computer monitor gets messy after a while), those details can scare me off a little. I can tell a story in ten minutes, easy, but when it comes to blog entries, I might stop after an hour and be halfway done if I’m lucky. That’s how ridiculous I can get when it comes to fleshing out stories.

I usually lean toward something like “I saw water pouring from the faucet, then felt a warm sensation in my bladder as it released, the leg of my khakis beginning to adhere to my inner leg with moisture and a massive flood of shame rolled over my body” instead of just “I peed my pants.” And that’s not a story, it’s just a random example. Yep, just a random example.

So unless the situation demands it, I might want to rein myself in a little. If I ever get into another car crash (God forbid), I’ll take the extra time to talk about the intricate details, especially if it prevents other people from getting smooshed in their own cars. That was a big deal; that deserved a long entry. If something isn’t as big of a deal, I might want to at least leave out the part about the khakis adhering to my leg, which is still just a totally random example.

That would make it less of a chronological and emotional investment. That would also probably include cutting back on some of the editing, which could be painful for me: the Grammar Police can go fuck themselves, but when it comes to word choice and phrasing, I’m the guy at the firing range who’s willing to stay until closing time, blowing hundreds on ammunition until I hit the bullseye.

And besides, it could be enlightening for the readers as well. I’ll admit that there have been a few times I opted not to write anything because it was late at night and I thought no one would get the chance to read it, but seriously, am I writing this blog to enlighten the masses? Well, sometimes. Sometimes the world needs a reminder that Joe Bastianich is a total douchebag. Plus I’m sure the number of people who had ever pondered the existence of an entire cookbook devoted to cooking goat testicles increased exponentially. But for the most part, the blog entries are essentially a type of self-satisfaction. And if you can connect to the Internet with your phone, a type of self-satisfaction you can get in the middle of a department store without being arrested.

And I think that’s enough for now. Given that I’m trying to loosen my standards a little, I’ll do a quick spell-check, then let this entry stand as it is. Plus I may even go back sometime and finish writing some old blog entries that got started and never made it past… there were a lot of details I was going to add that would have taken me a long time to write, so I ended up bailing on them entirely. They might be entertaining, they might be enlightening or they might be worthless and merely take up space on the Interwebs (like there isn’t enough worthless shit out there already). But fear not: if nothing else, I promise that none of those stories involve goat testicles.

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There’s no place like home

From mid-November until today, Dad has spent 42 days in the hospital. Six weeks. Six weeks over the course of two months.

Until today. After so many visits to Southdale Hospital (the drive is about twenty minutes if traffic is good), Mom and I finally had an additional passenger on our way home. Dad is finally back. He’s finally back home.

From the garage, he went straight up the stairs. Not both feet on each step; he went straight up. He sat down long enough for us to get his shoes off (he still has enough fluid in his system that he can’t reach down to put on shoes and socks by himself), then walked to a chair next to the picture window on the north side of the house.

His view in his hospital room consisted primarily of the roof of the building next to his, a crane and a nearby highway. From the picture window, you can see Orchard Lake, Orchard Lake Park, lots of trees and drifting snow and people walking their pets… a lot of stuff that’s not hospital-related.

We’re sending out a mass email to family and friends that goes out to four lists an hour apart. If we clump everyone’s email addresses into one message, Frontier thinks it’s spam and won’t send it. The lists are that long.

In it, Dad thanks everyone for their support, their prayers, their gifts, phone calls, emails and personal visits. Without it, those six weeks in the hospital would have been much more difficult to endure.

Now we can rest for a while and get used to regular life again. A life where he can sleep flat on a bed. A life that doesn’t include visits from nurses at all hours of the day and night. A life of knowing what day of the week it is. A life of stairs and haircuts and showers and looking out the window at more than just another hospital roof. Regular life at home.

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Houston, the duck hunter has landed!

Dad was planning on coming home yesterday, but alas, his heart had other plans. The nurse took him for a walk down the hall and they hadn’t gone very fair before they were intercepted: “Are you Mr. Bakken?” He had some sensors glued to his chest, they were monitoring his vitals at the nurses’ station and his heart was beating a lot faster than it should have been. And it happened again several times during the day.

The doctors weren’t really surprised: a lot of people suffer from atrial fibrillation just after heart surgery. Essentially, one chamber of the heart is like, “Hey, let’s race!” And the others are like, “Screw you, I’m sticking with the current heart rate.” And the one is like, “Screw you, I’m gonna race anyway!” As you would imagine, when your heart rate is 80 beats per minute and one chamber suddenly jacks up to 160, your blood doesn’t flow nearly as well as it should.

So they kept Dad at the hospital for another night, time for more testing and more rehab sessions and more hospital food. Since they knew his problem was a-fib, it meant one more medication for the next four weeks. There are a lot of medications he’s taking for the next four weeks. After that, he’ll get to revisit the doctors. Some of the problems might be gone by then.

He’ll be getting antibiotic infusions again—the surgeons didn’t think that spot on his valve was a bacterial infection, but we don’t want to take any chances. He’s taking medication for the a-fib, but his heart might correct itself naturally. There are a lot of things we simply don’t know at this point. After pumping him full of various meds for four weeks, we should have a few more answers and be able to make adjustments from there.

He signed his release papers a couple hours after I got there, at which point we grabbed his stuff and walked out the door of his room. They were calling a wheelchair to bring him out, but he was walking anyway. I saw the guy with the wheelchair first, so I told him Dad was trying to escape before I headed out to get my car.

I pulled up next to the building, put Dad in the back seat and headed out to the highway. (In case you’re wondering why he was in the back, it’s because if he’s in front and the air bag goes off… that’s bad for a surgically-repaired sternum.) He was glad to be out. He spent a majority of three weeks in a hospital bed and that was more than enough. As I was driving us home, I agreed: that was more than enough.

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The Stare of the Roto-Rooter Man

The drain pipe going out of our laundry tub is plugged. And I mean plugged. The last time I did a full load of laundry, I came downstairs just in time to hear water spilling out over the top. We decided to buy a gallon-sized jug of Draino and applied it in various amounts for various periods of time: when it doesn’t work the first time, add more and let it sit longer. Turn on water, watch it back up and start filling the tub in about thirty seconds, repeat.

So we finally called Roto-Rooter. (As much as I enjoy not washing my clothes for weeks at a time, it shouldn’t reach the point where they’re capable of escaping from the laundry hamper under their own power.) The guy came to the house today, looked at some paperwork and revealed that they were here in 2002 for the same problem. Eleven years is plenty of time for a significant amount of goo to collect in a drain pipe, so it’s not like they did a poor job.

In fact, they may have done a better job than we thought. When he mentioned the visit in ’02, Mom told me that we took a picture of the previous Roto-Rooter guy. Why? To make sure it wouldn’t back up again. How? We put the picture on the side of the washing machine so he maintained a constant threatening presence next to the drain pipe.

It worked for over a decade. While this new guy was fixing the pipes, Mom brought up the old picture that had been on the washing machine. The caption read, “I’m Watching You!” The picture… well, it was starting to look like that melty-face dude from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not as threatening anymore, which is probably why the drain had the proverbial balls to start backing up again.

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All things considered, Dad’s doing okay.

Some of you have heard about this through my friends and family; some haven’t and thus have no idea what the title of this blog entry entails. The short, short version? Dad had open-heart surgery on Thursday and seems to be recovering nicely. (I hear that generic orange popsicles are “the best popsicles ever” when they’re the first thing you eat after surgery.)

The longer story about Dad’s heart goes back about six years. First off, he’s a mutant. Seriously. He has a genetic mutation that resulted in his being born with a bicuspid aortic valve (vs. most people’s tricuspid valve). That never kept him from being active and playing sports better than his friends as they got older (probably not a result of his being a mutant, but you never know…).

Back in November ’07, Dad had a heart attack and needed double-bypass surgery, so they replaced his aortic valve at the same time. If I remember right, it was leaking a little bit at the time, but not enough to do anything drastic. Still, since they were already performing open-heart surgery—the blockages were in places where the doctors couldn’t just use a stint—they found a piggy that may or may not have volunteered to have its own aortic valve put into Dad’s chest. Thus, he received a new tricuspid valve that was supposed to last for 15, 20 years.

If you’re taking notes, highlight the term “supposed to”.

A couple weeks ago, Dad came down with a case of pneumonia. He’d spent a lot of time coughing and hacking and trying to catch his breath, but it took a while to finally get him to visit the doctor. Why? Because he’s a badass, that’s why. But as it turns out, his level of badassery made nary a bit of difference.

I can’t count the number of doctors who’ve poked their heads into Dad’s hospital room with a stethoscope, placing it at various points on his chest and back and telling him to take deep breaths. When his regular doctor did so, he heard some interesting sounds. The first was fluid in his right lung, an obvious sign of pneumonia. The second was something about his heart. He wasn’t entirely sure what the problem was, so he sent Dad to get a CAT scan right away.

My understanding is that when he got that CAT scan, he became one of the only (if not the only) patient who’s been admitted into the hospital immediately after his scan. They shipped him via ambulance to another hospital that specializes in cardiac treatment. It’s where he had his first open-heart surgery; it ended up being where he had his second as well.

They kept him for about a week, doing all sorts of scans and tests, injecting fluids and withdrawing blood, poking at him with stethoscopes… they did a lot. When looking at the overall results, they saw that both his aortic valve and mitral valve were leaking. They’d pump blood out, but some would wash back in. The mitral valve wasn’t too bad, but the damage to the aortic valve was officially “severe”.

What’s more, they detected some vegetation near the aortic valve, which could signal a bacterial infection. If that was the case, the bacteria could break away at any point, wash into his blood stream and infect God knows what other parts of his body. Much like the valve itself, they couldn’t just leave it sitting there

Most of the doctors thought he’d need to have his aortic valve replaced (again) within the next few months, a decade less than the 15-20 years we expected from the first replacement valve. One doctor thought the damage looked really old and recommended antibiotics for 40 days to get rid of the vegetation, then they’d take another look. If Dad had been okay for this long with a leaky heart, maybe he wouldn’t need surgery at all.

Continue reading “All things considered, Dad’s doing okay.”