Yarn, Books & Roses

The BioGeek Memoirs: American Robin

I’m sitting out in my back yard this late afternoon listening to the songs of robins. What do they sound like, you ask? Check out this link with American robins singing.

I have a lot of robins in the yard this year. I see them on the fence, running across the front yard, pulling up insects and worms from the lawn after I mow and water in the evenings, and splashing in the birdbath in my back yard.

I just love the robins! They are kind of intrepid, don’t you think? Lots of birds hop around, but no, not robins: robins are runners! I watch them run across the road almost every morning while I make my latte, and then across the lawn with a “you bunnies had better get out of my way” attitude. I mean, they are running chests out and leading with their beaks! What could be a better way to start the morning? Be like a robin, tackle each morning at a run! Be sure you get your latte first, however…

I almost never see robins over the winter, but they are kind of early arrivers in the spring. More than once, on a March snowy day, I have walked out to the car to find half a dozen male robins in the trees, heedless of any snow on the branches, carrying on and singing like crazy as they compete with the other birds. These first groups of robins are called waves, and they really are a first sign of spring.

Robins do migrate south in the winter and return to the north in the spring, but evidently it isn’t a strict north/south pattern. When I was back in the biology classroom the students and I would be on the watch for the first signs of spring in a number of categories, and the sign that I like the most was the first robin seen. The first robin of spring was a big deal for the students, and we were really on the watch starting about the first week of March each year. Students started carrying cameras with them hoping to grab a great photo.

Toy robin given to me by a student to use in the classroom. The first robin of spring!!

What? You can report the first robin seen somewhere? Yep. We made our reports to Journey North, which is an educational website where first sighting of spring in a number of categories are reported by students across the nation. Here’s the page for the American robins, and you can see the mapped data with animation here. As you might guess, the first robins are seen towards the south of the US, but then as the season progresses, they are seen further and further north. What I really love about this is that the data shows (and this is data from students all over the nation!) is that robin migration isn’t simple and clear because they tend to spread out to find food and don’t always move south. In the spring, the food becomes available as the sunlight, longer days, and earth warming moves north, and the robins follow the food.

Back to my robins in the yard this year. The fledglings left the nest this week and they have been hanging out in my yard with the bunnies and squirrels.

These little guys are hanging out hoping that one of their parents will come feed them.

I tried to snap a shot of the male feeding them, but there was so much baby-bird food-begging action and wing flapping I couldn’t get a good one before the parent flew off. Still, how cool is this? They are not all that afraid of me and seem to like hanging out with the occasional baby bunny in that side of the yard.

This summer’s baby bunny is doing great!

I have bunnies again this year! The cats are beside themselves!

I half-jokingly told a neighbor last night that I might let the backyard become a meadow. The grass is now taller than the baby bunnies and I am seeing more wildlife than usual. I’m torn, because I am making good progress weeding out my gardens this year and if I let the grass get too long, I will need some type of special mower if I change my mind down the road. What if the baby bunnies need more food? It is tempting…

Nope. As soon as I post this the mower is coming out. Run bunnies, and fledgling robins, you had better take to the wing.

Hannah and the CoalBear: GoldenFern Report

Hi. I’m Hannah. This has been a really special week. Let’s get to the most important event of the week first:

It was the anniversary of the day I came to live with the Mother of Cats this week!!! It has been two whole years since I arrived here more than a little upset. I mean, I had gone to another home and they didn’t like me and they took me back to the shelter! They said something about crying all night… I wouldn’t let the Mother of Cats out of my sight, slept on her bed plastered right against her so she couldn’t get away from me, followed her everywhere, and the rest is history. Now I am so essential to her life she wouldn’t know what to do without me.

For example, I worked really hard all week helping her with her new sweater. We got the second sleeve done early in the week (I helped her manage all of the loose ends by chasing and chomping on them whenever possible…) and then she had the bright idea of adding an I-cord edging to the bottom of the body of the sweater.

I got a great nap in while she was applying the edging below the ribbing of the sweater’s body.

It took her almost two hours to add the edging to the bottom of the body of the sweater, and then it was time for cookies and some excitement. CoalBear and I chased the laser light for a while, got some more cookies, and watched for moths while she finished off all of the ends, and then, in the middle of the night she tried on the sweater!

It fits!! I think that the Mother of Cats is kind of silly when she gets so excited, but I love her anyway.

The next day we misted and steamed the sweater to block it and left it out to dry.

Here is the sweater blocking in the closet where I can’t sleep on it. Why does the Mother of Cats do these things?

Can you see that the colorwork of the sleeve is a little more tightly knit than the colorwork on the body? That’s because the Mother of Cats used a bigger sized needle on the body so that the gauge would stay the same (Is gauge like tuna? If so, I wonder if I can have some for dinner?), but when she did the sleeve she didn’t go up a needle size so the sleeve snugged in a little and it fits her wrist just right. That was my idea: pretty smart, don’t you think? The I-cord added to the edging of the body gave it a little more weight and makes the sweater hang nicely. The Mother of Cats is really happy with her Goldenfern sweater. See what a great job I’m doing helping her? She never would have had the patience to add that edging to the sweater if I hadn’t been there for purring support!

Right now, the CoalBear and I are hanging out in front of the air conditioner.

I’m so glad that the Mother of Cats brought me home to live with her. Do you see that she gives me all the boxes that I want and a little playmate buddy too!!

See you next week!

Hannah

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

I put a lot of thought into this sweater. Here is some of my thought process:

The designer used a single ply yarn in her original design so I felt empowered to do the same. I found yarns for the contrast colors in my stash, and all of them are also single ply.
The lifted increases in the body are almost impossible to find! I could not be happier with the way they came out.
The designer suggested going up two needle sizes for the colorwork portions to maintain gauge; since my yarns were thin I settle with going up one needle size for the body.
I went back to the MC for the ribbing at the bottom of the sweater which gave the ferns a “floating” look.
I stayed with the needle size used for the sleeve when I got to the colorwork on the cuffs as I wanted a snugger fit.
I like the look of I-cord bind off at my wrists so I did a three stitch I-cord (instead of 2 stitch) in the MC to make them it stand out.
I then picked up stitches along the bound off ribbing at the bottom of the body and did a 3 stitch I-cord bind off along the bottom of the sweater. This I-cord doesn’t really stand out, but rather blends right in with the ribbing and provides a clean edge that has a little more weight.
My Ravelry notes are here.

Hannah and the CoalBear: It’s Caturday Again

Hi. I’m the CoalBear (AKA Mateo)

It is sooooo hot today. It is almost 100 degrees outside, and Hannah and I are staying cool in the house. The Mother of Cats has all the windows closed and we’re too hot to look out the windows anyway. Do you notice that the Mother of Cats has been brushing out all of my downy fur? I used to have a huge ruff around my neck, and now it is almost all gone. I look a whole size smaller now. I don’t like getting brushed, but today I guess I am glad that she did it. She also cuts my nails off and I will never get used to that!!

The Mother of Cats has been knitting away on her sweater this week and look at how far she’s gotten! She is done with the first sleeve and halfway down the second one already! She has also been sewing on the quilt with Hannah.

The quilt is coming right along and should be done in just a few more days. The Mother of Cats can’t wait to get it done. Hannah kind of hopes that she is going to get to keep it for her new bed, but I think that the Mother of Cats is planning to hang it up on the wall behind her knitting chair. I ripped the old quilt down a couple of days ago (Hey! There was a moth!) and she didn’t even bother to hang it back up again. Okay, the old quilt was a Christmas themed one, so maybe she’s ready to put it away now anyway. I’m such a good boy; see how I did her a big favor?

The Mother of Cats now has oxygen-to-go!

A scary man came this week and messed around with the Mother of Cat’s oxygen machine. When he left there was new stuff left behind including this new green bottle with a snazzy carrying bag. Now the Mother of Cats has oxygen she can take with her when she goes out on errands, but mostly she stays home with us because we are so cute! She has been working on her gardens this week and they are starting to look pretty good. The first rose bloomed this week which made her really happy.

It’s her first English rose of the year!

Well, that all I have. It’s still stinking hot outside and all of the animals are asleep, so I am going to take a little nap too.

See you next week!

>^..^> CoalBear

Notes from the Mother of Cats

The sweater is GoldenFern by Jennifer Steingass. Hopefully I will have it done in another week or so. I’m really anxious to start another sweater but so far I’m sticking to getting this one done first.
I know that isn’t a good shot of the quilt, but hopefully I will have a nice picture of the completed quilt to show off next week. Hanging on the wall, where I hope it remains as long as no moths land on it. 🙂

I’m listening to this audiobook while I quilt and I just am loving it!!

Not only did I get oxygen-to-go this week, but I also got my injections of Evusheld, which is a combination of two monoclonal antibodies that will give me protection from Covid for at least 6 months. This is huge piece of mind for me since my doctors are dialing up my immunosuppression drug dose this month and have started me on a new immunosuppressant drug at the same time. Yay, Evusheld! With the higher dose of drugs, I won’t be able to make many antibodies of my own, so I’m glad to have the Evusheld antibodies.
That rose is Princess Alexandra of Kent, and it is pretty much my favorite rose in the garden right now.
Hannah and Mateo don’t know it but they are heading to the vet for their vaccinations and checkups next week. Sad cat day is on the way…

The BioGeek Memoirs: Sunflower

Okay, I need to be complete upfront about this: this is a crossover post. It is going to be a total amalgamation of the Scleroderma Chronicles and The BioGeek Memoirs because I just couldn’t come up with anyway to make them separate posts. Hey, I’m a biogeek with scleroderma. It was bound to happen eventually…

So, let’s get this ball rolling by talking about bean plants. That makes a lot of sense, right? When I was a biology teacher struggling to make plants interesting and to help students understand experimental design, I came up with the genius idea of letting the students design an experiment looking at the effect of fertilizer concentration on the growth of bean plants. The students had solutions with different concentrations of Miracle Gro fertilizer available to them, and then they had to struggle with planting and growing 6 bean plants while holding all the other variables constant. The plants grew, the students measured their growth, and then they charted the growth to make decisions about the best fertilizer amount.

I had the hot idea of using an Excel spreadsheet to display the student data to the whole class. That worked great! I then combined the data from all 5 classes together and… it was a huge mess. The plants were all different heights depending on which class was collecting the data. The students weren’t making any errors; the bean plants were raising and lowering their leaves each day in circadian rhythm. Depending on the time of day, the plants were a different height. Oh. Plants can move!

Sunflowers have been on my mind a lot recently. Beautiful sunflowers, whose faces turn throughout the day to follow the sun. My cousin grew enormous sunflowers one year that towered over the other plants in the garden. Sunflowers are the symbol of Ukraine. The sweater that I am knitting right now is in the colors of a field of sunflowers with their faces in the sun.

Those aren’t sunflowers, but the colors remind me of all the “Support Ukraine” knitting that is going on right now.

There are enormous fields of sunflowers near the airport in Denver that are just spectacular in the late summer. Early one morning in late August,2014, I drove past them on my way to my first appointment with a rheumatologist; my primary care physician had referred me to a specialist after some concerning bloodwork results. I was pretty sure that this morning was going to be a turning point in my life, and I was nervous and kind of fighting off tears. Behind me the rising sun poured light onto the glowing faces of sunflowers ahead of me as far as I could see; the sight was just thrilling, and I settled right down. An hour later the rheumatologist explained that I had limited systemic sclerosis (a form of scleroderma) and Sjogren’s disease. I was prescribed medication, sent for more testing, and told to stay off the internet. I looked for the sunflowers as I drove home that afternoon, but I couldn’t see them; the fields were too far from me as I drove east. Still, just knowing they were there sort of helped. Sunflowers. They were kind of a symbol of hope and the promise that I could handle anything.

Are you ready for this? The sunflower has been chosen as a symbol for scleroderma by Scleroderma Australia. Shine like a Sunflower is their campaign this June to bring scleroderma into the light of awareness.

Just like that the sunflower became an international symbol for scleroderma. I swiped this shirt image off of Amazon.

Why a sunflower? Well, like sunflowers, we scleroderma people follow the sun. Strong sunlight is actually a problem, but the warmth… bring on the warmth! For the last few weeks, I have been recovering from surgery and waiting for my biopsy results. I have been sitting outside on my deck out of the direct sun, soaking up the heat and light. Day by day, I have been improving and no longer need daytime oxygen support. My cardiologist has restarted the medication that was halted while I was in the hospital, and it hasn’t even caused a bump in my recovery. Heat and sunlight are really making a difference.

My biopsy results arrived on the first day of June. I have developed a type of interstitial lung disease that presents as hypersensitivity pneumonia. I also have the characteristics of what the report called a vascular/collagen autoimmune disease, which is pretty much a descriptor for scleroderma. Yep. What my pulmonologist prepared me for. This is interstitial lung disease associated with system sclerosis (SSc-ILD) and I am going to get started on an increased dosage of immunosuppressants and a new drug to prevent scarring in my lungs called OFEV. This drug is really new; it has been developed in the years since my diagnosis, and now it is here just when I need it.

June is Scleroderma Awareness Month. Here in the US the theme of the campaign is Know Scleroderma. Oh, I know scleroderma, and so do some of you through my blog. Let’s put scleroderma aside for the time being and go back to sunflowers. And science. Remember that this post started with a little story about doing a science experiment with bean plants and my students? As simple as that was in my classroom, the heart of that process, curiosity, scientific experimentation, and data manipulation, is serving me well now. Ironically, new therapies and treatment approaches are being developed because of the lung scarring caused by Covid-19. Science. It rocks!

Today I planted these sunflowers along my side fence.

This afternoon I am once again outside in the warmth and light, knitting on my new sweater in the colors of sunflowers against the sky, admiring my beautiful newly planted sunflowers. They have their little faces angled to the southwest, following the sun as it starts to dip towards the Rocky Mountains.

Beautiful, tough, follow-the-sun sunflowers, reminding me to also follow the sun and to shine when I can. They remain a symbol of hope and a promise that I can handle anything.

Shine like a Sunflower.

June is Scleroderma Awareness Month. You can learn more about scleroderma at these links.

Month’s End Report: May 2022

This month passed in a hurry. I spent most of a week in the hospital, and then the rest of the month recovering from the surgery. I haven’t been exactly frisky for the whole month, but I have been making some progress on several projects.

Hannah: The Mother of Cats has been spending lots of quality time with us!

Doesn’t Hannah look pleased with her box? The house is pretty much full of boxes at the moment as I have been making use of all the shopping services that cropped up during the height of the pandemic. I’m getting everything that I need with little effort and Hannah and Mateo are having the best time ever. From their prospective it has been a really great month!

Knitting

I worked on a sweater and community knitting this month. I really pushed and got the body of my Goldenfern sweater done early in the month and then immediately lost it on sleeve island. Poor sweater. It languished for the rest of the month in its knitting tub while I knitted chemo hat after chemo hat with a few PICC line covers thrown in for variety.

I have lots of brightly colored yarn so that’s what’s getting knitted right now!

I know that this is the end of month report for May, but I want to acknowledge that now that we are in a new month, I have pulled myself together and taken that sweater off of sleeve island. I made some good progress over the last couple of days, and I finally got to the colorwork section of the sleeve today.

I’m knitting the ferns onto the bottom of the first sleeve now.

I also made a couple of more passes through the yarn stash culling out yarn that I will never use and throwing out scraps. (So hard to do; I deserve a gold star!!) Altogether, I knit 6 chemo hats this month (Barley Light by Tin Can Knits), 5 PICC line covers, and used up or removed 38 skeins of yarn from the stash. I think that I deserve more than one gold star for the destash efforts this month… I am kind of thinking that I will get more than 100 skeins out of the stash, and to be truthful, things are looking a lot more tidy in the stash room.

Garden

Everything is growing like crazy now. The roses all made it through the late season snowstorm and there are buds everywhere but very few blooms. The snapdragons, however, are blooming their little flower hearts out.

All of these snapdragons are volunteers growing from last year’s plants. Look at all of those colors; they are the descendants of pink snapdragons that were originally planted a couple of years ago. Also, those flowers are NOT in a flowerbed where they belong!

This plant is my favorite in the bunch. It is growing with reckless abandon in the rocks along the driveway.

With absolutely no effort on my part these snapdragons have spread through the front gardens (and rocked landscaping…) and have brought lots of early color in reds, oranges, pinks and yellows. There is a BioGeek story here, but I will save it for another day. 🙂

Books

I managed to read 5 books in May. Not great, considering that I was a slug for most of the month, but I’m still on track to make my Goodreads challenge goal of 50 books this year.

I’m reading the most amazing book right now.

I read A Visit from the Goon Squad, so I had some idea of what I was getting into with this book. The book is organized like a series of short stories about people who are connected to each other. There are a lot of names flying past, and there are also embedded themes within the stories, so there is a lot to keep track of. I am creating a flow chart showing the linkages and themes as I read which is helping me immensely. How I long for a book group!

So, here’s the simple backbone of the book: what if there was an electronic, open forum vehicle that let you store all of your memories? Think of this like Facebook on steroids where it is open to the world and people can access and search other people and memories. What would such a thing do to us; what would we lose, and what would we gain?

The people and themes that I am meeting as I read the book are engaging and I’m really enjoying myself. Also, I am going to need some really big chart paper to map out all of the interconnections the way things are going as I read.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Hannah and the CoalBear: Happy Caturday

Hi. I’m Matao.

I’ve been helping the Mother of Cats knit lots and lots of chemo hats.

This was a great week! The weather has been nice and sunny and the Mother of Cats has been sitting out on her deck listening to her audiobook while she knits. Hannah and I have been watching all the stuff in the yard through the windows.

There is a squirrel with the world’s fluffiest tail that hangs out in the back yard. We love the squirrel!!

But the best watching ever is out the back window…

Because there is a baby bunny hanging out in the back yard for us to watch!!

and it is the cutest little bunny ever!!

Happy Caturday, everyone!

I have to get back to helping the Mother of Cats knit these hats!!

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

I’ve been reading the best book ever while knitting outside and watching the wildlife in the back yard. One of the main characters is an octopus, and I just fell in love with him right away. I seriously, seriously recommend this book!

This was a perfect book to listen to as an audiobook. Engaging characters, well told story, happy ending.

Years ago, another biology teacher told me about an octopus that would break out of his tank to go snack on crayfish from another tank in the lab. Yep. They gave been known to do this. Very smart, able to squish through very small openings, octopuses are kind of the stuff of legend. In this book, the octopus is also a wanderer with an incredible memory who becomes a pivotal character in the lives of the people who know him. I wanted the book to go on and now I am on the hunt for another easy to listen to books to keep me company while knitting outside with the wildlife.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Sad Caturday

Hi. I’m Hannah.

The week started out fine. The weather was really warm and nice, and the nice days made the Mother of Cats feel pretty good with her breathing and joints and stuff. She went outside and worked in the gardens almost every single day and got lots of dead leaves and weeds moved away. All of her flowers and bushes that she planted last fall are green and growing again and she was really happy. She was even happy about the seeds on the weeds!

And guess what? There are tiny baby bunnies in the backyard!! The Mother of Cats has been putting pulled dandelion leaves near the opening under the deck where the babies live, and they are eating them! We even see the babies sometimes as they race past the back window, but we never see our bunny anymore… The Mother of Cats is a little concerned because one of the neighbors has been trapping bunnies and releasing them out in the wilderness, and one bunny got a broken leg somehow from the trap. The neighbor has a huge backyard garden (AKA the bunny smorgasbord), and the Mother of Cats does understand, but she is sad at the thought of our bunny being lost in the wilderness, and chased by coyotes, and… it is just sad.

The Mother of Cats is depressed about the whole thing, so we have been spending extra time entertaining her because… it is MOTH SEASON!!! The moths get into the house where they are the best toys ever!!! and we spend hours hunting them until, finally, the CoalBear manages to catch them. The Mother of Cats helps us hunt the moths (well, we do call her constantly for help), and would you believe that if she gets them, she puts them back outside? Like, WHY???? Luckily the CoalBear (AKA Mateo) is able to practically fly up and down walls chasing the moths and he usually gets them before she can. See, entertainment! I get to play with the moths every time the CoalBear brings them down onto the floor and this is the best, best cat toy in the world.

Then this new distraction arrived…

Yep. There is a winter storm and a hard freeze on the way.

All of a sudden, the Mother of Cats was worried about the plants and the tree outside and didn’t care about bunnies and moths anymore. She spend part of the day yesterday covering up every single shrub and rose in the gardens but couldn’t do too much to protect the tree out front.

So today we are kind of having a sad Caturday. The moths are gone (They don’t like snow? What light weights they are!), there isn’t a bunny in sight, and we are both hiding in the closet because some really scary people came to make lots of noises taking the tree’s broken parts away. Why did this have to happen on Caturday?!!!

The Mother of Cats is knitting happy colored hats today because it is too soon to take all the covers off the plants.

Well, that’s it. It’s time to come out of the closet and remind the Mother of Cats that on a day like this we require cookies! Extra cookies!! And lots of pets and attention and maybe even a new toy since the moths have disappeared.

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

Poor tree. The branches on the top of the tree came down too, but the tree service cleaned everything up and assures me that the tree will make it. The days before the snowstorm were very warm and windy, setting off fire weather alerts. Now we get a week of cold and rain. Colorado.

The hat is for the Kaiser infusion centers and the yarn is from Hue Loco (colorway is Big Yikes). The pattern is Barley Light by Tin Can Knits.

It’s the bunny circle of life. My backyard bunny was a single baby stranded in my yard when the next-door neighbor had the bunnies in her yard removed. Now the offspring are with me, munching on my dandelions, and hopefully will safely remain to entertain my kitties and warm my heart in the months to come.

Miller moths are the guys getting into the house. They cling onto the outside of doors, and when an unsuspecting homeowner opens the door, they just zoom into the house where they cause endless hours of cat entertainment. Night, however, is when they really shine as they are attracted to the lights and almost always end up in my bedroom late at night where the cats zoom across me, the furniture, through the air, and basically put on an entire circus act of astonishing aerial contortions pursuing the moths. I worry about a cat hitting the ceiling fan…

Hannah and the CoalBear: Goldenfern Caturday

Hi. I’m Mateo.

We have been hanging out for hours at a time with the Mother of Cats while she knits and knits and knits on her new sweater. Sigh. She isn’t very frisky at all and she should get up and play with me more… instead she just reads and knits all day. Hannah is cool with that because she like to snuggle with the Mother of Cats, but I am still a kitten and I need to play!!!

You can see that she has made some good progress with our help. Yesterday she knitted all day trying to get to the end of the body of the sweater, and around midnight she finally cast off the sweater.

My sister and I were watching out the window when she finished. There is some great wildlife in our yard around midnight!!

Overnight Hannah and I knocked over a container of kitty treats, got the lid off and polished off all of the cookies. I thought that the Mother of Cats would be grumpy with us, but since we let her sleep in until late in the morning she kind of forgave us. Kind of. I did notice that she put all the rest of the kitty treats into a cupboard. Hannah knows how to open cupboards…

This morning she tried on the sweater, and it fit perfect! Well, of course it did. We aren’t exactly amateurs in knit support, after all. This afternoon she headed outside to take pictures of her sweater and I gave Hannah’s ears a washing.

Hannah: the CoalBear is the best little buddy ever.

Now it is almost night again and I’m pretty sure that the Mother of cats is going to make some supper and we will get some more kitty cookies. Yay!!

Notes from the Mother of Cats: The sweater is Goldenfern by Jennifer Steingass. My Ravelry notes are here.

What have I been reading this week? Here it is (please observe that the cover matches my knitting :-)). I would talk about the book, but I really can’t without giving out spoilers. Just let me say that I enjoyed this book and it was the perfect one for a surgery-recovering BioGeek.

The Scleroderma Chronicles: Lung Biopsy Story

Last Monday, May 2nd, was the date of my lung biopsy procedure. My pulmonologist had diagnosed me with interstitial lung disease a couple of months ago and the biopsy was required to definitively diagnose the type of ILD I had. This is kind of complicated, but the simple reason for the biopsy is that I don’t really fit the profile of the usual scleroderma ILD patient, and the treatment is expensive and somewhat risky. Biopsy time.

At 4:30am Monday morning my son drove me through the rainy dark to the hospital where I was going to be admitted for the surgery. I had on my new raspberry clogs for good luck, and I was exhausted after being up most of the night completing pre-op tasks at home. I was fighting off a sense of impending disaster…

The day I met with the surgeon he drew a funky little drawing on his white board to explain what he was going to do. Check out the diagram above: your right lung is actually different from the left with more tissue and three lobes. My surgeon planned to use special instruments guided by a tiny video camera (VATS) to go through my chest wall and get the tissue samples. This is a minimally invasive procedure that will only take a few minutes. The catch: the right lung will be deflated before he takes the samples.

Atelectasis is the medical term for a collapsed lung. Both of my lungs were experiencing incomplete atelectasis at the time of my last CT scan, and I’d been getting steadily worse all April. I was a little concerned, but I trusted that all would work out fine in the end. I was prepped, bundled up, and rolled off to surgery. There was the most fantastical robotic surgery machine in there, but before I even got a great look at it, I was on the table, a mask was put over my face and I was gone…

… and I emerged from unconsciousness at the bottom of a rugby scrum with all these faces looking down at me. I was in pain, a lot of pain, and I couldn’t breathe at all. The muscles on the right side of my back were seized up and cramped in what felt like Charlie horses, and I was thrashing around as I tried to get someone to rub on my back muscles. The rugby players in masks (I was later told that there were 8 of them) were attempting to hold me down as they put hot packs under my back, removed my oxygen cannula, and placed a larger oxygen mask over my face. “Do you remember the Xray?” one of them asked. Oh. That’s what set off the muscle cramps. My oxygen was below 75% even on highest oxygen flow available in the recovery room. I got transferred to the ICU.

That right lung refused to reinflate. I couldn’t be given any pain medications or fluids until my oxygen levels came up. New doctors began to arrive and talked to me. To be clear, talking set off coughing and was very painful. I just wanted someone to help me, not talk to me! A pulmonologist arrived to doctorsplain my disease to me and informed me that he was changing some of the drugs used to treat my lung and heart conditions. I told him that I didn’t know him, he couldn’t make any changes to my treatment plan without talking to my doctors, and that I needed him to do something right away to handle my immediate situation (I was in acute respiratory failure). He argued about contacting my doctors. I insisted.

I think that I deserve a huge gold star for standing up for myself while in extremis.

I was placed onto a high flow oxygen therapy machine within minutes and my oxygen levels came up.

I kind of look like I was underneath a rugby scrum, huh. That machine delivers heated water vapor and oxygen at the unbelievable rate of 60 liters/minutes. My oxygen came up into the low 90s on the machine and I finally received oxycodone. Yay!!! The last oxygen number on the monitor before I fell asleep was 94%.

The next day they got me up into a chair (more oxycodone!) and I started respiratory therapy to get the lung working again. On Wednesday my chest tube came out and during the day the flow rate on the machine was reduced until I could come off it.

Day three in the ICU. I am off the high flow machine and finally using a normal cannula. I’m still on 15 liters/minute of oxygen at this point.

That annoying pulmonologist came by every single day that I was in the ICU; my doctors had called him back! After talking to them he made some med changes (and told me that it a shared decision) and his manner completely transformed. The physician’s assistant who removed my chest tube told me that she had also read the care notes with all the data, email traffic, and decision-making by my rheumatologist/pulmonologist/cardiologist team. She was struck by the interdisciplinary care that I was receiving and seemed a little wistful and envious.

Another gold star for the team!!

Over the next two days I was slowly titrated down on my oxygen while doing my lung expanding exercises without fail. Late in the morning on Friday I finally escaped.

I put on my raspberry clogs, black leggings, a little black top, and my raspberry-colored down vest. “How cute you are!” exclaimed the nurse. My son drove me home through the late morning light along streets lined with newly leafed trees. While I was in the ICU the world had turned green.

No matter how lifeless and barren things seem over the winter, spring always comes with the promise of fresh starts and new life. I still trust that all will work out fine in the end.

Hannah is so glad to have me home again.

Now we just have to wait for the biopsy results.

Those Crazy Days of April, 2022

April went by in a blur for me. I entered the month feeling pretty sick. I had just had an appointment with my pulmonologist, and he had referred me to a surgeon for a lung biopsy. Well, not what I was looking for, but necessary to definitively diagnose what type of interstitial lung disease I had. There are several types, and the treatment plans for each are different. The surgery was set for May 2nd, an entire month away. Annoyed, upset by the wait, pretty darn sick, it was hard to wait all through April.

April rose to the challenge. Never was there such an ill-behaved month. For some bizarre reason my Amazon account reset to Spanish. Do you know how hard it is track orders and make changes to your account settings in a language that you don’t read well? Then email in Italian began arriving. Someone tried to hack into my PayPal account, setting off a flurry of new password and security settings on my part. Then my Facebook feed was flooded with pictures of… owls.

Umm… the universe wants me to learn a new language? Maybe the next BioGeek post should be about owls? This is really strange. April was getting off to a rocky start…

I kept struggling with my health as the month advanced, taking care of essential items in preparation for months of difficulty ahead if I was moved into a 6-month course of chemo. I filed my taxes. I took Matao in for his vaccinations. I filed the paperwork to be excused from jury duty. I got the last vaccine I needed (shingles) before the surgery. A neighbor installed the new outdoor lighting that I had purchased before Christmas, and another neighbor will arrange with her grandkids to take care of my lawn. I ordered more oxygen cannulas, and in keeping with April craziness, 4 cases of tubing arrived instead. I made arrangements to be tested for a portable oxygen unit… first appointment is in June. April, you are killing me here! One of the side windows of the car shattered without warning. I continued to get sicker. I was sick and tired of April, too!

My wild bunny moved into the front yard where I could see it each time I went out of the garage. Very used to me now, it never runs away when I go outside. Bunny support on sad days.

As the month wore on, I began to sleep a lot. Like 10-12 hours a night. I had to use oxygen during the daytime. I was losing weight. I wrote my doctors an email towards the middle of the month telling them that I felt that I was declining, and that I was worried it was taking too long to begin treatment. I was scheduled for a series of additional tests and had appointments with the pulmonologist and the cardiologist. Oh, good, April. Now I have to drive all over town without portable oxygen.

How to respond to a worsening situation that I have no control over? I bought happy new shoes in an outrageous color.

These are the shoes that are going to walk me into the hospital!!

And then I cast on new socks that would do the shoes proud.

This yarn’s name is “Squad Goals” and dyed by Hue Loco.

The results from the heart, lung, and kidney testing came back and they all showed that… I was getting worse. My doctors conferenced back and forth, debated different treatment modifications, and came to the consensus opinion that I should have the biopsy done May 2nd. I got that email late on Friday before the surgery. Checking the physician notes attached to my last appointment I found the full text of all the test results and the email chain of discussion between my doctors. I felt very lucky: what a great team! How good I feel that the decisions about drugs and treatment is being arrived at through this interdisciplinary collaboration by my doctors, who have chosen to make this all visible to me. Knowing that, however, did not change the fact that the upcoming surgery is now a little risky.

So, I cleaned the house, did laundry, paid the bills, and got in groceries. I planted flowers in the front tubs and along the walk. I also cast on some baby booties for my next-door neighbor who just brought home a new little one. This pattern, extremely versatile, is our family recipe passed down through three generations over almost three quarters of a century. It is the same as this one posted on Ravelry.

And just like that, the month was done. I had made 2 hats, 4 PICC line covers, 2 pairs of socks, and used up 3.38 skeins of yarn. I read 6 books. I did work on a sweater, but since I’m now in the colorwork portion of the knitting I put it on hiatus to await better days.

Goodbye April, you crazy, bad-boy of a month! I want you to stand in the corner and think about what you have done!! I expect a whole new attitude when I see you next year.