3. Lemons to Sour Lemons

Most of these health-saga posts are nuts and bolts reports.
This one is more kind of a philosophical interlude between reports.

Why “Lemons to Sour Lemons”?

My first major heart event in 2009 was a bad thing, but I managed to handle it in a pretty cool way and everything turned out pretty well.

So I patted myself on the back a little and gave the first post I wrote back then the jaunty title of “Lemons to Lemonade“.

This recent heart event in late April 2024 however, was

• a bad thing when it happened,
• a bad thing during the recovery process,
• and continues to be a bad thing to this day.

It ended the peaceful and happy life I was trying to put together in Chico in a most disruptive and unpleasant way.
So no self-congratulations and no lemonade this time, just sour lemons all the way!

It’s pretty much inescapable that your body will slow down after age 70. However well (or not) you were doing in your 60’s, your expectations for your 70’s should be for less. I learned this the hard way.

Just to pick one not so random example, it is a physical fact that your body metabolizes alcohol at a reduced rate the older you get. Who knew?!
(This figures prominently in the next post about me breaking my hip while being a drunken fool.)

I will tease out all these events in subsequent posts, but the overview is that this second heart crisis happened at a fiendishly inconvenient time in my life.

I had just bought a house in Chico, and suddenly I had to sell it!

I never saw the inside of that little house again after I drove to the Emergency Room in the middle of a quiet Thursday night. After recovery I went straight to an old folks home and have been there ever since.

My health decline in Chico

Chico should have worked out great if it all went as planned.
But it didn’t!
I didn’t stay healthy, and it didn’t work out.

I moved into the little house I bought in Chico around the first of July 2023. The biggest and best local health systen there was Enloe Medical, so I enrolled in that. Their way of doing things was to assign one to a nurse practicioner as your main point of contact, then (s)he refer you to specialists, sets up test, etc.

Aug 3: “so tired …can’t go 5 five steps w/o laying down … nausua … blood in urine … can’t keep food down”.

From the Green Notebook, around July 2023, visiting Petaluma.

• “Summary of what a mess I am”.
• Tues June 20, bad food at Aqus(not really!).
  • So tired I poop my pants, get diapers. Fri start feeling better and eating better.
• Thu June 29, Sonoma, Washoe Roadhouse.

Fri April 26 – Emergency Room

Went to the Emergency Room late one Friday night, never set foot in my house again.

Still getting tests all the time – no clues though…

Feeling crappier every day. Couldn’t walk from the house to the van without stopping twice.

On Friday, went to bed really tired. Lay there and decided it was ER time.

3 am got dressed, collected normal outside stuff, and called a Lyft. Did not pack anything for overnight. No clue I would never see that place again!

Evening at the ER was uneventful. They put me in a room, jammed an IV in my arm as they always do and left me alone.

Very early the next morning (Sa 4/27) Cory the jolly ER doctor tells me:

Wow. My life changes instantly.

They took me upstairs to a holding room to get my surgery ready.

It was a two person room, other dude was a spoiled brat.
Would not stop hollering for the nurse.

One more night in the holding room. Annoying neighbor still there.

I got a real nice shave, and an enema (ugh).
They took off most of my scruffy, useless beard. I look years younger!

Actual Operation Tuesday Apr 30 – Wed May 1, 2024

(can’t take notes when you’re unconscious 🙂

Sat May 4 – Intensive Care Unit

Moved to nice room in ICU My home for next 2-3 days

Su 5/5 – Early am – fix bloody bandage – leaking from the big holes in my chest plate. Not the actual incision, but the three holes where the tubes went. No big deal, but I got to see those creepy holes in my chest, which was quite a sight!

Mo 5/6 Prostate Day

• Morning to evening irrigating down there to prevent blood clots
• Really eccentric nice lady urologist
  • didn’t even take her purse off 🙂
• 3 VERY painful (4 counting last night) rounds of going down there and scraping out blood clots. That SUCKED!
• Late afternoon, Dr Holzman(?) shows up,
  • flutters around for a while,
  • leaves,
  • comes back and cleans out clots again. She got a lot!
• I’m told they’re gonna operate on me tomorrow and clean that shit out. cystoscopy
• tu 5/7 – got my fave nurses – Lilly and Cashmir
• tu 5/10 – Kelli the Doctor visits
  • get rid of the balloons
  • schedule 2 ultrasounds – one for lung cavity, one general
  • lung ultrasound shows need for water removal.
    • They wheel me off to the first floor and we get ‘er done.
    • Not as painful as catheters
  • Could breath better INSTantly
• tu 5/14
  • install very interesting litle ‘test tube’ in my back
  • more catheter pain and discomfort, it clogged for an hour
• w 5/15
  • Cory pumped betadyne mixture through test tube
    • to annoy the lung wall into adhering to the cavity wall
    • -> no place for water to accumulate.
    • I thought this was VERY cool!
  • Packing with betadyne was painful, and made my side sore for 2 days.
    • Kind tough when you must use your core and not use your arms, but your core effing hurts!
• sa 5/18
  • doctor says I’m outta here out tomorrow!!!!
    • Intensive care -> recovery place in Redding
  • replace picc-line
• ==== Added 5/17/26
• Mo 5/20 Enloe -> Vibra
• Sa 6/1 – Chad and Brett clean out the Chico house!
• We 6/12 – 2:30 M arrives -> Chico -> Cogir

My new life as an old person

As I’m typing this in May 2026, I’ve been here at Cogir for about two years.
My how time flies when you’re doing nothing!

There wasn’t much of anything in the first year and a half to blog about!

But them I created some excitement for myself by breaking my right hip in Fall of 2025. That story is in the next post!