Late Spring Ruminations
Today was a warm one. Mid-80's or thereabouts. Warm enough to make you believe summer is approaching, if not already here. Late May.
About time, I guess.
I've mowed our lawn 3 or 4 times already, the quick-growing grasses of springtime, along with ten to twelve kinds of weeds common to my lawn, succumbing to the whirling blade of my power mower. It's nice to see trimmed green around the house again instead of the grays, browns and dirty whites of not that many months ago. Not to mention the cold.
It pleases the eye as well as the soul.
Across the street we're experiencing a resurrection of sorts and not just the normal springtime rebirth. Or you might even say a Phoenix is arising from the rubble. We've lived our home for over 30 years now and, for all that time, the residences in the neighborhood have remained mostly the same. There have been some remodelings and some repaintings and maybe some small additions tacked on here and there. And a lot of shuffling of owners. But the basic edifices have remained the same.
An interesting feature of my neighborhood is that one of the homes across the street, an older one, has been a half-way house for a dozen or more years. I'm not positive as to what was half-way about it. Perhaps it contained criminals who were learning how to adjust to life “outside” prison/jail walls and were doing so in my neighborhood. Perhaps it was men from mental institutions going through the same adjustment. I don't think we really knew the exact source of the men who lived over there. All we knew was that they were all men and they all were in some sort of transition. And all we were sure of was that they were good neighbors, as odd as that sounds. They were quiet and peaceful, they handed out candy on trick-or-treat night during Halloween, their lawn and hedges were trimmed properly and they caused no trouble to any of the neighbors. If you didn't know the circumstances, you'd never know that house contained “half-way” people.
Good neighbors.
Sometime last year the house became vacant. We noticed that fact when the curtains disappeared and the blank windows faced the street. Not much later a crew came and pulled all the siding off the house exposing the old clapboard and beams. We assumed that they were going to remodel the old place and we kept an eye over there. We assumed the half-way men had either graduated into full-time civilian life or had been transferred to another domicile.
The house sat that way quite a while, its exposed walls and blank windows seeming to cry out for help until some months ago when a demolition crew arrived and tore the house down. It was in some ways sad seeing it transition from a full 2 and a half story house to a rubble pile and then to an empty hole in the ground. That took approximately a week.
The empty hole sat there a month or two until a crew arrived last month and began laying block in the hole, building a basement for a new house. Day after day and week after week we've been watching this new house rise from the ground across the street. We've since learned it's a Habitat for Humanity house, the organization that provides housing for lower income families that are willing to invest “sweat equity” in building their new homes. HH started in 1976 and has built over 350,000 homes around the world providing more than 1.75 million people with safe, decent, affordable housing. You may remember Jimmy Carter in the television ads about HH homes swinging his hammer, pounding in nails and helping build them.
The house is really starting to look good now. They've finished the roofing shingles and have recently installed the siding for the house. We've also seen lots of people involved in putting it up. I'd guess that some of the helpers belong to the family that are going to be our new neighbors.
It's taken a while to get it up. I believe that most of the labor has been donated and volunteered. I do know that a lot of the materials and supplies have been donated. There's a sign to that effect in front of the house. I also know that there has been a LOT of hammering and sawing going on over there for the past few weeks. Looks as if it won't be long until it's finished.
It's going to look nice, too, and it'll be pleasant to see an end to the construction noise.
Although a remodeling of the old house would have been, to my mind, preferable, there was obviously something wrong with the structure that necessitated it's demolition. Asbestos? Foundation deterioration? Something else? In any event it is nice to see another home being erected in our old neighborhood instead of an empty lot being left as is. Empty lots always remind me of a bad tooth being extracted and a replacement implant or bridge not installed. An unwanted vacancy.
And when the work is finished and the new neighbors arrive, I hope they are as comfortable and happy in our neighborhood as we've been the past 3 decades or so.
* * *
Had a bit of a scare recently. Let me tell you about it:
A few weeks ago I'd been feeling a bit “poorly”. A little of this and a little of that. Aches, pains and maybe a bit of a shortness of breath here and there. Some stomach grumbles and nausea. It wasn't real bad but it was off-and-on annoying. I thought it might even be some bad ham I had eaten. I had a doctor's appointment scheduled previous to my recent problems and, while I was there, I mentioned that I was a bit under the weather. He zeroed in on one of my complaints and said, “Shortness of breath, eh?”
And scheduled me for a nuclear stress test.
He did this not only because of my age (I guess) and my recent problems, but because of my family history of heart disease. My whole family's had cardiac conditions. My mother passed away at 52 from a heart attack. My brother passed at age 42 the same way. My father had quintuple bypass surgery a decade before he passed away and my youngest brother suffered a heart attack a few years ago and presently wears a pacemaker/defibrillator.
So I've been living under a genetic Sword of Damocles most of my life.
I've had stress tests before but not for some years. This time the idea of the stress test creeped me out immensely. My symptoms increased dramatically after the doc scheduled the test and the stomach nausea jumped in intensity until I thought I would be sick almost daily. My old nemesis Anxiety had me in it's clutches and was shaking me like a dog shakes a rat.
I was miserable.
All too soon the day of the test arrived. Once again I read the prep sheet about what I had to do before arriving for the test. Line 2 said “no food for at least 4 hours before arriving”. So that's what I did. I woke up, cleaned up, took my morning meds and headed over to the hospital. No food.
The test went about as well as I figured. I was feeling miserable, hungry, anxious, sick to my stomach, my heartbeat was fluttery and I was unable to walk on the treadmill as far or as fast as I probably should have. Plus the diabetes meds I took that morning without any food had brought my sugar quite low and added low sugar jitters to the whole mix. The cardiologist in attendance made several remarks that sounded negative to me after the test. Especially when he said, “I guess it wasn't bad ham, was it?”
I went home feeling even worse. I was sure that the next call from the doctor would be to schedule me for a heart catheterization and stent insertion if necessary. With my family history? I figured I was the next thing to a goner.
I called the my doctor's office the next day and inquired about the results of the test. The nurse replied that it was much too early for the results and that they would call when they came in.
I suffered some more.
I work second shift and, about a half-hour before I was to leave for work, the phone rang. It was my doctor's office.
A cold sweat formed on my forehead and the phone trembled in my hand as I shakily listened to the voice.
The nurse said, “The doctor has gone over your test results and wanted you to know that he saw no problems. He said you were quite out of shape, though, and needed to really work on that.”
And, just like that, my symptoms disappeared. The nausea. The fluttery heart. The this-and-that which was troubling me so much. All gone.
I went to work feeling like, as they say, a million dollars. I had beaten the genetic claymore mine that had been aimed at me since birth.
At least so far...
Since that great news I've rededicated myself to losing weight and being much more physically active. I've lost some weight since then and my glucose numbers are down dramatically. And I'm feeling better. A lot of pluses. Of course I'm not counting the muscle aches and pains from activity after lots of non-activity.
I really feel I was given a second chance.
My wife says I'm over dramatizing. And she's probably right. But I'm still glad and thankful for the good news recently and am happy to be able to start working on my health again more proactively.
Because one day the news won't be so positive and my prognosis won't be quite so good.
But not this day.
Not yet.
And for that I'm thankful.
