Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Volleyball’

Medical Migration

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 21, 2026| Leave a Comment »

It all started when our Great Aunt Mary had heart surgery. We were away on vacation when my MIL’s sister had her heart valve replaced by a pig valve at a hospital on Long Island. Her son was an orthopedic surgeon at the same hospital because MD is a gene that runs in our family. What could go wrong? Mary was in her early 80s, and this procedure was supposed to prevent minor complications in the future, but instead a blood clot traveled up to her brain and she had a major stroke.

Ada would drive into New York to visit her older sister almost every day. Mary was pretty spectacular as older sisters go – a talented musician, she taught me the Yiddish lullaby I sang every night to my babies and the Rocker is singing to his babies. It’s a magical tune about raisins and goats and to this day can make the L’il Pumpkin close his eyes and enter a dream state! When we returned from our trip, we visited Great Aunt Mary and noticed a flock of small bluebirds had appeared at her bedside.

It was the start of a collection. Ada had been delivering tiny, glass and porcelain bluebirds to Mary as a reminder that all will be well and her happiness would return, just like the migrating bluebirds.

So it was inevitable that when the Bride decided to pivot, and leave hospital-based Emergency Medicine, with its brutal schedule, administrative horsehockey, and clinical intensity, she would call her new venture, “Bluebird, MD.” I saw the change happening during the pandemic; the showers before hugging her children, the slowing down, the constant battle in a red state to enforce health guidelines for Covid. She wanted something better, for herself and her family. She and her husband were on the front lines of a war at that time, in the ER and the ICU. And You. Know. Who. was our Commander in Chief.

Many people migrate at midlife. We moved from watching herons fly over the Shrewsbury River on the Jersey Shore, to watching Pileated Woodpeckers demolish trees in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Midlife is a time to reflect and consider alternatives – a sort of existential right of passage. To quote an existential therapist: “… you have a responsibility to show up to your life. You can’t avoid it, in all its pain and beauty, by living in the past—personal histories and buried traumas matter, and they might inform the present, but it won’t do to dwell on them.”

And for some of us, we wake up and wonder if we’re really where we want to be – are we happy?

When Bob retired from his ER practice, I knew my happy place was near our grandchildren, and so we moved again. Flying further south, to Nashville. I wanted to be present for all the skinned knees – for the roses and the thorns. Just this past weekend, I sat on a bleacher in a huge gym in Franklin, TN with the Bride as we cheered on the Bug’s volleyball team. Did I almost get hit in the head with a ball? Yes. Was I happy? You betcha!

I’m proud of my daughter for cutting ties with the hospital and opening her own practice this year. Bluebird, MD is a mobile Urgent Care practice. You can actually call and speak with a person… a doctor! You can schedule a same day appointment or have a remote visit. It’s not concierge medicine, there’s no fee to join, it’s a direct care practice. They don’t take insurance, there are “… no barriers or delays of the traditional insurance-based system.” She’s come full circle; her Grandfather also made house calls. https://www.bluebird-md.com/

Yesterday I delivered one of Ada’s glass bluebirds to my older sister Kay. She’s working on a watercolor of peonies, and when she held the small bird in her hand exclaimed, “Oh, I can paint him!” This bluebird pic was captured at Radnor Lake.

https://www.instagram.com/bluebirdmdnashville?igsh=MnI2Z2Zkb254N3Ns

Read Full Post »

Tulip Peonies

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 24, 2026| Leave a Comment »

The peonies outside my snug are starting to bud. Our cherry tree blossoms are littering the path to the old garage currently getting a facelift. Spring has officially sprung! Along with pollinators and robins frolicking in the bird bath, bluebirds visiting our feeder, our yard is alive with the sounds of construction. This is a time for reinvention – a time before the humidity of summer dampens our best efforts.

So of course I signed up for “The Good List.” I’ll be getting a weekly newsletter from Melissa Kirsch, a NYTimes journalist, who compiles all the things worthy of our attention that might just bring us joy. In her bio I’ve read that she will remain apolitical, she writes: “My beat is broadly about how to lead a meaningful life. I’m interested in the eternal human pursuit of happiness, connection and community and the ways in which technological advancement both helps and hinders these aims.”

It sounds a lot like her beat is similar to mine, minus the technological bits of course… and the apolitical. My purpose is more connecting the dots between the personal and political. And almost every night, Bob and I like to recite at least three things that we were grateful for that day. Our pillow talk ranges from mundane to philosophical. I feel like it sets the stage for my brain to recover and dream good thoughts, to reinvent our dystopian reality. I wake wondering why Bob is hanging pictures, when it’s only a wall going up in the new/old/garage/casita.

Did you know that our brains could use a little down time during the day as well? Boredom is actually a gift I’ve tried to give my children and grandchildren. “How could you be bored?” I’d say, while explaining all the wonderful things they could be doing like reading, or just taking a walk and noticing plants along the way, or not. I remember the surprise of the Bride’s little friend when I said we were going for a walk in the woods, to nowhere. She was actually shocked. But it’s a scientific fact, we need to stop our monkey mind every now and again to recharge – it’s called the “default mode.”

“The default mode network is a bunch of structures in your brain that switch on when you don’t have anything else to think about. So, you forgot your phone and you’re sitting at a light, for example. That’s when your default mode network goes on. We don’t like it.” https://hbr.org/2025/08/you-need-to-be-bored-heres-why

I would say most people don’t like it. That’s why our phones have become small, addictive antidotes to boredom. Maybe I do write about techy things! Say you’re standing in line at Starbucks and everyone is looking down, at their phones. Or maybe you’re stuck in a TSA line at an airport, that devious device becomes a way out of the chaos. After the Groom returned home from Europe this past weekend, he was Facetiming with the Bride in Memphis. Our sporty Love Bug was playing in a volleyball tournament, and while I spoke with them I asked why the video on his phone was black and white? “It’s his phone Mom,” she said laughing.

The Groom’s default mode is black and white to make his phone less appealing! Genius.

I lose my phone ALL the time. It’s teetering on the toaster, or lost in the bed covers. Sometimes I need Bob to call me so I can find it, although my Saint of Lost Things would prefer to search for it. For a long time I was feeling like dementia was right around the corner, I’d be dialing my microwave to call someone in no time. Until the Groom told me that misplacing my phone was a good sign – it means I’M NOT ATTACHED TO IT. Phew.

I think artists in particular need to engage their default mode. Our brains need time to rest and let some creativity bubble up; if we start doom scrolling on our phones we’re likely to end up wherever that algorithm takes us. I like to say my best ideas come to me in the shower. The Bride thinks I should listen to podcasts while I walk, but then I wouldn’t meet Molly, the senior Shiba Inu who is pushed like a queen in her stroller. The Flapper once told me, “Everyone has a story,” and I don’t want to miss any of them.

After we hung up with the Love Bug, I rushed out to Trader Joes to get some tulip peonies for our returning volleyball champion. I had read on The Good List that these flowers were currently available for a very limited time. I’d never heard of tulips that look like peonies, two of my very favorites combined to trumpet in Spring. Well, Nashville’s TJs had never heard of them either, but I did find some purple tulips.

This picture is from Spring Break in Paris! The Pumpkin is almost as tall as me.

Read Full Post »

Medical Musing

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2024| 3 Comments »

I remember when Great Grandma Ada broke my ribs.

We were in Target and she was newly arrived in Nashville; she was rolling along nicely on a motorized red shopping cart, heading towards shorts for Hudson. Suddenly, instead of going backwards, she plowed right into me. I found myself on the floor covered in clothes with red shirted people gathering and gawking. My chest hurt and a foot was aching too, but I managed to walk out of there and straight into an urgent care.

After looking at my chest Xray, the doctor apologized for not being able to prescribe more narcotics! The law had just changed in TN, and the government was trying to control the opioid epidemic by limiting the number of pills a physician could give his/her patient. It wasn’t the first time a doctor had apologized to me for some aspect of care gone wrong – a spinal tap done on my newborn, the path lab mess after an amniocentesis, the West Nile conjunctivitis diagnosis. You can see why I am a skeptical healthcare consumer.

I’ve been thinking about this since I read that two doctors were charged in Matthew Perry’s ketamine overdose death. DO NO HARM takes on new meaning when it pertains to drug addicts. Addiction has touched just about every family I know, including my own. For years we didn’t know where Bob’s middle brother was living, and by the time we intervened and got him into rehab it was too late. He left a couple of days later and died of an overdose just a month before the Rocker’s Bar Mitzvah. He was the sweetest of three brothers, but he was caught in the trap of our medical community with its rules and regs around methadone and a secret underbelly of drug dealers.

And btw, read Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Demon Copperhead” if you’d like to understand Appalachia and the scourge of drug addiction. JD Vance’s book doesn’t hold a candle to Demon.

The Bride told me that ketamine, on its own, would not usually result in death, that Perry’s death was most likely caused by being in a hot tub while also taking a cocktail of drugs including ketamine. Emergency physicians may use ketamine while doing surgical procedures. It supposedly produces a dissociative experience, or as my daughter demonstrated with a whirl of her arms, “The mind separates from the body.” Psychiatrists have started using the drug in treating depression. But why someone would think it was a good idea to abuse ketamine is beyond me, then again, I don’t have an addictive personality… unless you count shoe shopping.

In a combined public and private effort, we have made a dent in the numbers of drug overdoses in our country. By taking drug manufacturers to court, smarter foreign policy measures, enforcing policy at home by stressing treatment, and limiting a doctor’s ability to prescribe narcotics, and of course the availability of over-the-counter Narcan we may be turning a corner. We have life-saving Narcan nasal spray in our house, do you? Oh, and legalizing marijuana nationally would probably help as well.

The new data show overdose deaths involving opioids decreased from an estimated 84,181 in 2022 to 81,083 in 2023. While overdose deaths from synthetic opioids (primarily fentanyl) decreased in 2023 compared to 2022, cocaine and psychostimulants (like methamphetamine) increased.” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2024/20240515.htm

But this all came too late for my brother-in-law.

I spent an hour this past week getting an infusion of Reclast, a bone strengthening drug in the hospital. I sat in a plushy recliner and contemplated the beautiful, verdant landscape outside the picture windows. Except for the occasional bleep from the machine, it was blessedly quiet. Bob sat beside me reading his book on his phone, occasionally the nurse would come in to check on me. Medicare paid for this treatment…

Still, most insurers will not pay for treating the disease of addiction. We are a puritanical country and we expect people to “pull themselves up by their own boot straps.” But this would be like telling me to build my own bones, or telling a diabetic patient to watch what they eat. I read this morning that Matthew Perry paid $55,000 for 20 vials of ketamine. All of his enablers should be held accountable.

And maybe we should all learn to live with a little pain. Yesterday I went to the first Bug’s volleyball game of the season and got hit in the face with a ball during warm-up. My glasses went flying off and I found myself surrounded by kids asking me if I was alright. The Pumpkin and his friends sat in front of me for the rest of the game, my guardians against incoming fouls. Of course, I didn’t cry, until last night’s opening salvo for the DNC.

Also my pearl stringing for Kamala is coming along. Night Night DT

Read Full Post »