Myrtle's Choice...

Whilst more data needs to be collected and different form of hormone medication tried, both the pharmacist and the surgeon believe the reason the mediation is no longer working for me is the erythromycin.  If I have to choose between emotional balance and digesting food, I choose emotional balance.

Tonight, Marie told me she was thinking about how I've been recently and she understands better what I've been trying to say.  It is not just that I am back to cycling through crazy days where I'm standing beneath a Niagara Falls of emotions that, when ended, is almost just as shocking, but that I have been losing balance bit by bit since last fall.  I've felt the changes and tried to speak them, but really have failed about that.

I am so thankful that the surgeon is truly the most effective listener I have ever met, both inside and out of the medical profession.  She changed the medication and set up a sonogram and follow-up for March 21st.  She also said that she would call the cardiologist's office to see if he would move up my appointment, because she agreed that taking a half dose of theophylline just to manage the cardio symptoms is not really the best course of action.  Funny, when she said she is worried about me, it felt good.

But she also said that I looked better, today, than any time I have been there.
I am better.
I am also worse.

Already I am thinking that I will need to give up the erythromycin.  I lived life with low- and no-motility before.  It is possible to live that way again.  I just don't want to do so.  And yet I do not ... at all ... want to go back to being so unbalanced ... nor do I want to face the constant chest pain, arrhythmia, and palpitations anymore, either. I don't like fainting more, as I did getting out of the shower last night, but I do not like what's been going on with my heart function far, far, far more.

Of course, to me, the x-factor is my blood pressure swings, very wide pulse pressure, and enlarged calves and ankles.  And the bloody, inexplicable weight gain.

But ... for now ... I was given a plan:  I picked up the new mediation (of course it was not covered by Medicare), I set an alarm in the calendar to watch for Niagara Falls for the next few months every cycle based on the last set of bad days, I have a follow-up appointment, and I agreed to call in each week with how I am feeling.  And ... somehow ... I am supposed to find a way to not think about having to give up the erythromycin ... or make any such sort of choice.

Marie said it best:  It's all so complicated.
Maybe that's why I like making labneh.
It's easy peasy.

Snowmageddon Round Two is preventing Bettina and her mother from embarking on their visit on the morrow.  Were I not so low in wood, I would drown my disappointment in fire all the day long.  Maybe I will drown my disappointment in dough, instead, and make all the dough I'm itching to stock in the freezer:  gyro, naan, and tortilla.  Maybe, even, I will gird my loins enough to try making sourdough starter.

In any case, I started the Endeavor / Inspector Morse / Inspector Lewis series all over again.  I've finished three new-to-me Australian television shows and three British ones and thought I would visit with my old friend again before trying a new series.  I see streaming whole series like reading books, and I have always been a great re-reader.

By the way, whilst awaiting my appointment, I started one of the free Kindle books I downloaded, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.  Already I am fascinated.  For one, he finished his schooling and started working odd jobs at 10, signing on a formal apprenticeship at 12.  I wholly believe having children work and be responsible for things is a value we have lost in America.

For the other, the most fascinating way he taught himself to write whilst still a youth:

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third.  I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wish, if possible, to imitate it.  With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand.  Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discover some of my faults, and corrected them.  But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same important, but of different length, to suite the measure, or of different sound for rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also having tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it.  Therefore, I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper.  This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.  By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitions.  My time for these exercise and for reading was at night, after or or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact on me when I was under his care, and which I indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practice it.

For yet another ... Benjamin grew up listening to his father play the Psalm tunes on his violin many an evening!

I was reminded of something I used to teach my college students.  The first printed books readily available to the masses were called chapbooks.  They were cheap, paperbound summaries of great works ... The Illiad in 32 pages or thereabouts.  They were sold for a penny (or a copper), usually by peddlers and street venders.  They were the original Cliff Notes, if you will, yet they were beloved by folk who heretofore might never have owned a book.  The ones still in existence today were rather lovingly preserved by their readers, re-bound in cloth and wood and other more permanent materials.  Chapbooks were also the first books Benjamin Franklin read, and he amassed the largest collection of them at the time, keeping them safe and cared for, appreciative of what they gave him, long after he moved on to real works of literature and scholarship.

Ever since I learned of Benjamin Franklin's love of literacy and both his role in preserving that bit of literacy history and making literacy more available to the masses, I have been a fan.  How wonderful is it that, today, hundreds of years later, I can learn about literacy anew via a free form of his autobiography?!?  I love his approach to learning to communicate ideas and information and can think of all manner of applications for such puzzles and challenges he set himself ... especially with teaching folk the pure doctrine of the Christian Book of Concord and passages of the Holy Scriptures!!

The other day, Michelle read me Romans chapter 8.  I wonder if I could ferret out its hints of sentiment and teach myself its Truth  by writing and re-writing, by deconstructing and reconstructing its form.  It would be a good thing were I to grasp that bit of the Word of God as also being for me.


I am Yours, Lord.  Save me!