Cardiology 101 v Cardiology 1

Cardiology advice as to how to know if you're having a heart attack:   chest pain or pressure; pain or discomfort in arms, back, neck, jaw, stomach; shortness of breath; cold sweat; nausea; lightheadedness. 

That seems to cover a lot of ground if you're trying to determine if you're having a heart attack

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 Real-life advice as to how you might know,  even if you've had a cardiology check-up a few weeks before and your only issue is controlled high blood pressure:

  No pain in chest or neck or jaw or stomach, no shortness of breath, no cold sweat, no nausea, no lightheadedness.  Only PAIN which may have begun as back pain but quickly accelerated to all-encompassing and all-consuming pain which fills the entire upper section of your chest area, as if somehow severe pain was pumped in and occupies that section of your body. There is no room for speculation, even if your history doesn't seem to indicate you're a candidate for heart attack.  You know. 

   Of course, there are degrees of heart attack severity. It's been found some heart attacks occurred without ever having been detected. 

   Case in point, B. had a brief occurrence of chest pain and at arrival at the hospital cardiac unit, the cardiologist was ready to discharge her as she was then symptom-free. But there is now (I don't know the length of its availability) a test for a cardiac enzyme, Troponin, whose presence  detects heart attacks. When the lab released her results, she underwent the placement of two stents in non-critical coronary arteries.

Troponoin acceptable range is 0-54. I don't know what B's was, nor did she. But I do happen to know that Troponin can range from 554 to 37,616 and if treatment of stent placement is within an hour or so, the patient can survive.

Ah, well, just a test....

 Wednesday is the night I put the garbage out front at the end of my driveway for usual early Thursday morning pickup. However, it was very windy and I decided not to put the recyclable bin out because it is filled with  a lot of papers, which last year was tipped over by the wind and papers were strewn all over the property.

I did put the garbage bin out in late afternoon, unobstructing because of my car-less driveway. Soon after, I noticed the bin had blown over, and was lying sideways. I thought of going out and standing it back up, but then I decided to wait and see. I keep hearing of all the helpful acts directed toward senior citizens (old people.) Such kind caring helpers, often pictured for their humanitarianism. I know there is a constant flow of traffic past my house, including rural neighbors and acquaintances. Who might stop by in the daylight hours and stand the bin up. We all know for present refuse pickup, that if the robot arm cannot reach out and make contact with the bin, the bin  will have to wait  for another day. No human ever leaves the truck. 

As the daylight waned, I looked out and saw the container, lifeless, still lying on the ground.I guess no one cares.

The Importance of Oral Punctuation

 Trying to take my mind to the less contentious,  I recall this interaction that took place in a car in which I was a passenger:

  The driver asked his front-seat passenger to check her window for oncoming traffic. She uttered two words, no and cars.  She meant to report "No.  Cars. "  He heard "No cars."   Kinda close encounter, but no collision.

   

Vindication / Reaffirmation Via Chatbot?

 

Question above was if engine surging is more likely if car is only briefly driven. 

Just Thinking

 Autism is a controversial subject at present, with RFK's declaration that the number of diagnoses has increased over the years in correlation with vaccine usage. Those in health research attribute the increase in autism diagnoses to an increase in detection of those afflicted with autism.

   I am not a researcher, but have years of experience in observation. Thinking back to my early school years,  some vaccines were in their infancy and others had not yet even  been developed. Autism was not yet a diagnosis, and there were almost no services offered to those students who had difficulties with doing their schoolwork. 

 Most class sizes were of at least 20 or so students, from 1st grade on. As I recall, there was at least one student in every grade I was in who had a learning disability, which today would be somewhere in the autism spectrum.  No concessions were made to the students in those days. A boy in my 1st grade class sat all day long at the sand table and played with toy cars. He wasn't able to learn to read. A child whose first language was not English labored so hard to read that he pretty much refused to talk. In other grades, one girl who had difficullty learning was assigned the role of hall monitor where she stood all day in the hallway,  not in class. I would say there was a minimum of one learning disability in each class I attended all the way through high school. When we attended school in the neighboring village, classes were larger and so was the number of students who had trouble learning, the majority of them being boys and many of them dispalying anti-social behavior, and subjected to in-school punishment which further alienated them from scholastic norms.

   The specter of what today would most likely fall into the classification of  autism was not apparent only in classrooms. Even some of our childhood playmates, and a few relatives as well, might well have been designated to be in  the spectrum of autism, as defined today. ( I could name a few, but will refrain from doing so. 

During my years of teaching, I would say the percentage of autistic students remained the same. One difference was that services became more available, and more specialized. I still feel some remorse from my early teaching years when certain students were destined to fail my class because they could not fit the mold of the "normal" student. 

I don't know the ratio of vaccine to autism in any of those students, though would assume the percentage being vaccinated would probably have increased over the years, at least until lately.   But my unconfirmed conclusion would be that differences in how children learn and their mental and physical dispositions are not due to the administration of vaccines. As I reflect even further into the past, I recall my father's remembrances of student behaviors that might have been autistic in nature, way before the word was ever even heard of by most.

  

  

The Turning Point...

 ...or the Point of No Return , whichever it turns out to be.

  I will soon delete this post, am writing it only to use the written words to clarify the events in my own mind.

 Friday, April 11, started out like any other day. At 12 a.m., I had done wordle and Connections, and as usual waited for Spelling Bee which comes on at 3 a.m.  I paused the game and went back to bed, as usual,  to complete the game later in the day.  But in the morning I decided I'd better get my NYS Income Tax done, don't want to pay that penalty after a hefty assessment already. It took a while to download and fill out the forms, so I waited until the post office opened after lunch to mail them.

  And here is the start of the nightmare. As I've done thousands of times, I stop my car so I am able to see any oncoming traffic coming over the bridge. I would never assume nothing is coming. So I would have braked to probably a full stop. But as I stepped on the gas pedal to turn onto State Street, the engine revved up to full speed and I was unable to stop the car. I've never driven so fast anywhere in the entire village, not to mention rounding a curve. I couldn't stop and then I  saw a vehicle, some kind of orange truck,  ahead of me, about at Brundige's store. I knew I was going to smash into it. I thought I could drive off to the right into a ditch, but no user-friendly ditch is there. I thought of turning off the key, but remembered hearing this was a bad idea because then you'd lose steering. Suddenly the car returned to normal, and I was able to proceed to the post office and mail my taxes. I was afraid to trust my car, and had parked  by the library entrance, planning to leave it there and call somebody for a ride home. But the area was a swamp and I thought I'd chance driving  down to Valley Auto. I pulled in there, but there was no open spot I'd trust to drive into, so very slowly, I drove home.  

  I want to make plain: NO, the floor mat was not bunched up. I consulted with D. and also with Chatbot, and learned that engine revving can be caused by a stuck throttle, not unheard of in older cars, like a 2012 Honda. I do try to do my own dirty work (always aware of Barbara's odyssey). I figured and was advised that the best course would be to take the car to the dealership. I called Rensselaer Honda, spoke to Greg, who seemed to understand and made the earliest available appointment, Wed, April 16. He asked if I would wait or drop the car off. I said drop off. I knew they have a nice waiting room there but I don't hang out much anymore. 

 That evening Joe T. showed up, heard my sad tale,  and took the car for a trip around town and reported nothing seemed too far out of the ordinary. After he left, I recalled that Greg at the dealership had asked me if the lights came on during the engine surge. He said I would have noticed, but in truth the very last thing on my mind would have been noticing lights. So I decided to go start the car to see if any lights were lit. I took the key that I thought Joe had used, a Honda key, but not my usual key. STUPID!!!It was the key that had broken off at Stewart's a few weeks ago , and it did so again. I tried to pull it out, but even with the help of pliers, it wouldn't budge. So now my car is dead in the driveway. Can't go anywhere.  I'm eating leftover leftovers.

 The next day, or I guess it was Sunday, Ben showed up, listened to that sad tale, and was able to extract that broken key. But the broken off stub had evidently been left in the "on" position and the battery was dead. Ben used his car to jump the battery, got the car running, drove it for a bit, and parked it in the driveway.

  So today, Monday,  encouraged by the car seeming to not be suging ahead, I decided to overcome my fears and drive to the P.O. to mail a rare ebay sale. I used my own good key, inserted it in the ignition and nothing would move. I jiggled the steering wheel, turned it, the key was useless. 

  As I mentioned. I try to conduct my own affairs, so what to do. Joe T. is out of town. I called AARP Roadside Assistance, spoke to a robot, who offered 2 choices---battery jump or tow. I chose tow. I would have wanted a tow to Troy but the robot said the nearest garage, Valley Auto, and I would be contacted tomorrow. OK, I'll start there, I thought. But the tow truck arrived at 6 p.m. today. I attempted to tell him that my car was dead, but he said all he needed was to put it in Neutral. He scoffed when I said nothing would move, but he had to change his mind and resort to what he called "opening the door", which meant inserting a sharp tool into a fingernail-sized  compartment on the console, springing some small configuration out to release something that releases something else. Anyway, he and a helper loaded my car onto the tow truck and left my driveway, about  6:30 this evening. You'd think that might be the end of the story for now, but you'd be wrong.

  Less than 10 minutes after leaving, the tow truck driver called me with a question:  "Who at the Old  Country Farm in Johnsonville is going to receive my car?"      O Lordy.

  

  

Kind Words --I'm thinking. I'm thinking. 4/8/25

     These would be kind words or praisewords directed toward me. I will hereby list the most recent:

1) At  a recent routine medical followup procedure, the nurse had to insert an IV for  the testing, and had to use the, widely detested by all, hand area. After doing so, he asked if it had hurt. The first time anyone had ever asked me that question. I said no. The entire interaction lasted about 10 minutes, and we were.  never to  meet again. I had to sit in the waiting area for the injected dye to circulate or whatever, and the aforementioned nurse was leaving his shift and in conversation with those at the desk as he walked  through the doorway. But he must have caught sight  of me as he exited,  and opened the door and walked back in to wish me well. 

2) Credit Karma congratulated me for paying my bills on time.

3) wordlebot praised my performance, even after I bested his efforts. (I designate masculine gender to wordlebot because he "doffs his cap" and that sounds like a guy thing.

4)  An old friend said she liked my latest published literary endeavor, a poem. 

The Not-Yet-Dead Poet's Society