Where are we in the saga?
In the middle pf living my heart attach drama, it was clearly time to take up the health reports again.
This is the second Health Saga report in (new-ish) 2025 blog
1. Leaving Reno (Feb 2022).
The next one will be Lemons to Sour Lemons.
Between those two events my Health Saga took a very dark turn! I went from:
- a happy Chico home buyer full of optimism to start over in a fun new town to:
- a defeated Chico home seller …
- who was so beat-up and wrung-out that I enrolled myself in a managed care facility before the surgery.
Heavy thoughts
The Freemans (my family on my dad’s side) have a history of bad hearts. My dad and my sister both died of heart complications.
That seems as likely as any to be my fate also.
All that time in the previous post where I was nowhere in particular finally ended when ….
At the end of June 2023, I bought a pleasant little house at the end of a pleasant little block on a pleasant little street in Chico.
It was going to be great! I would re-create of my Reno life on the California side of the Sierras in a lively little college town that Martha loves to visit!
- When I moved out of Reno, Chad and Bret schlepped all my stuff across the mountains to Lakeville Storage in Petaluma.
- Sometime later they started renting the second floor storage area of the Home Hub, their second hand store.
Chad and Bret again schlepped my stuff from Lakeville Storage to the second floor attic space of Home Hub. No monthly rent for me! - In the first part of July 2023 I bought my little cottage on Oak Street in Chico.
Chad and Bret then schlepped my stuff out of the Home Hub attic back across the Central Valley to Oak Street.
So now visiting the family is a 2.5-ish hour drive across the Central Valley from Chico instead of a 4.5-ish hour drive over the Sierras from Reno.
Merely convenient in the summer, but kinda crucial in the winter!
That was supposed to be the big payoff of the move!
My personal stamina and health was not an official problem … at first.
I was low energy from the start, but I was able do stuff.
If I had still been living in Reno when it all happened who knows how different my life would be today. Would I still have gotten the heart infection?
We’ll never know.
It was all going so well in Reno
You might ask:
- If the goal was to be closer to Petaluma, why buy a house in Chico?
- Good question!
- I still wanted to buy instead of rent and I could not afford a house in Sonoma.
- (*) Looking back…, I NOW question the whole idea of buying a house.
I guess my notion of the permanence of things was stronger then. sigh…
- (*) Looking back…, I NOW question the whole idea of buying a house.
- I still wanted to buy instead of rent and I could not afford a house in Sonoma.
Martha really likes the area around Chico, I think mostly for spring wildflower and such.
I really like it for the University, the coffeeshop scene that thrives around the university, and the thriving bar/club/music scene.
[Now that I live in Rohnert Park, I should note that Sonoma State University does NOT have these things. You could be in the local shopping center and have NO idea you were a half mile from a major university. I like to I think most unversities are more like Chico.]
It did not work out.
- Would it have worked out if I had been my two-years ago energetic self?
- Or was it doomed from the start?
- Who knows, but I sure would have liked to have been healthy enough to give it the old college try!
My notebooks show that I was having slow motion heart failure for the whole time I was there.
Why Chico?
Martha loves to go to Chico. She does it on her own once or twice a year.
- She goes for the spring flowers north of Oroville(*)
- Then for summer swimming in the huge municipal pool in Big Chico Creek.
I really like that pool also!
So the plan was that I would see a lot more of the family than I did in Reno, because Martha would be visiting frequently.
Also Chico is a happening college town with plenty of live music and a thriving bar scene. What could go wrong? My health is what could go wrong.
Enloe
The biggest and best (and only?) local health system in Chico is Enloe Medical Center, so I enrolled in that. Their way of doing things was to assign a nurse practitioner to you as your main point of contact, then (s)he refer you to specialists, sets up test, etc. That person is basically your interface to the Health System!
From earlier days, Enloe had a really good brand with me. As soon as I moved, I enrolled and never looked back. Seeing how badly they muffed the diagnosis of my heart condition, I now wonder, but I was totally happy with them at the time!
Am I having fun yet … no!
Looking back my notes to pull this report together, it’s all right there:
I was already feeling like crap when I bought the Chico house. From July, after I’m in the new home:
- July 7: “So tired all day”
- July 12: “Home all day. Very tired.”
- July 10: “Made Doctor’s appt for September”
- Aug 3: “so tired …can’t go 5 five steps w/o laying down … nausua … blood in urine … can’t keep food down”
- Enloe assigned me a nurse practitioner, not an MD, in June: Morgan Oloya.
- She sets about trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.
- Symptoms (sudden weight loss) could be cancer, so we spent a lot of Enloe money on expensive tests looked a lot for that.
- Somewhere in July(?) I drive myself over to Enloe Urgent Care. They admitted me to hospital for rest of the day for dangerously low blood pressure 78/48 (?)
- Oloya signed me up for three biopsies, a colonoscopy, all kinds of cat scans. No resulted to speak of. I guess we were looking for cancer that (happily!) wasn’t there.
Me and Ms Oloya got along fine until the end. But it’s hard to look back and say she did a good job.
She ordered expensive tests all summer. Then in the Spring it took the Emergency Room staff about an hour to diagnose a critical heart infection that must be operated on NOW.
I think she got tunnel-vision on the cancer thing, but that’s excuse for failing me as badly as (I think) she did.
Livin life interlude
From the start I was not energetic on Chico. Walk along the creek. Go to coffee places. That’s about it.
I didn’t particularly care for the only really close bar.
Ed walked to the 5th St bars, just as the Reno me would have done.
But the Chico me couldn’t make it that far.
Hanging out at the bar was my going to be my go-to strategy for meeting new people. No bars + no other social outlets –> NO friends here in Chico.
It was not working out AT ALL like I expected it to. :((
Getting worse
This is a list of medical shit that happened to me in less than a year.
It is not the list of a man who is enjoying life!
- 6/20/23 – First mention of debilitating tiredness
- 7/18/23 – Had a stroke
- 7/21/23 – At Gannons, Laura takes me to Kaisesr ER
- 8/04/23 – BP plummets, drive to Urgent Care, they sent me to hospital
- 8/15/23 – shouder hurts really bad
- 9/18/23 – appt with Oloya
- 9/20/23 – Pulmonologist, then kidney scan
- 9/21/23 – dentist – get crown re-glued
- 10/02/23 – appt with Oloya
- 10/11/23- Oncologist (cancer doctor)
- 10/12/23 – Cardiologist, also Pulmonologist (trouble breathing)
- 10/13/23 – get blood work
- 12/02/23 – Colonoscopy
- 12/05/23 – Renal biopsy
- 12/19/23 – see Dr Randolph
- 12/21/23 – Pituitary scan
- 4/09/24 – see Dr Randolph
- 4/12/24 – see Oloya
- 4/17/24 – bone marrow biopsy
- 4/18/24 – Urologist
- 4/26/24 – Drive myself to Enloe Emergency at 1AM, never set foot in my house again!
Exciting details in the next post!