A CT and PT

I went to my first session of outpatient physical therapy yesterday after getting a CT (pronounced "cat" of course) Intravenous Contrast scan of my head on Monday. Today is more blood work. The pricks in my veins are never-ending, apparently. No reading on the CT, which I take as a good sign. Here, according to the technician or nurse who prepped me and the discharge sheet, is what I could have felt as a result of the x-ray dye in the intravenous contrast: a warmness as the dye enters your vein (nope), a metallic taste in your mouth that some describe as tasting like cheap whiskey (check, though I wasn't lucky enough to have it taste like whiskey), the sense of peeing on yourself ("don't worry you're not," check and I wasn't), and -- the really serious ones -- hives, difficulty breathing, shortness of breath (nope, those would have involved a trip to the emergency room.) Sliding on the moving bed in and out of the tube and watching the lights in the tube turn red, green or orange dredged up another memory from the lost days of January -- I was in one of those and seeing those lights at least one other time. The PT was fine, first of eight or so. I always like PT -- it's just hard enough to make you work, and effective enough to make you feel progress. There's already progress of course from the work at home and just time since my discharge (now over two months). My therapist, J., said I was in the best shape of any of his patients all day, i.e. the least problems. Of course, he is going on vacation next week, but he plans to hand me off to one of the other therapists who specializes in exercises for leg edema. I got to drop a few exercises from the regimen, but added a slide stepping one that took me right back in an instant to high school basketball drills.

Weather Vanes

I was walking well after dark to see Bonjour Tristesse at the David Niven Centennial Festival at MoMA on Friday night (no need to put it on your Netflix list) and walked by two tourists, one wearing sunglasses and the other holding an open umbrella. It was neither sunny nor raining. Raining hard at the end of the movie, though, and sunny today, so hang in there long enough with your outfit and you'll be right.

Annie Was Amazing

Sunday I got on the bike for the first time and rode, on another of the beautiful spring days we have pretty consistently been having, up to the GW Bridge, then back down to 102nd and then back to the apartment. The Hudson River bike path was closed off at 125th, so I had to head inland and ride up Broadway to 116th before swinging back over to Riverside. It's a stretch on Broadway that before the illness I could do in the highest of the 21 gears on the bike, but this time I had to downshift twice and still struggled with the mild, but blocks-long incline. By the time I finished and hung the bike back up I'd probably gone 7 or 8 miles and was completely trashed, as tired and overdone as the first weekend after getting out of rehab when my son and I walked back to the apartment from Absolute Bagels on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night snowstorm. There was nothing to do but flop on the couch and watch the Masters for an hour or so. All I could do while watching Phil Mickelson hold everybody off was think about Annie and her biking to Grimaldi's in Brooklyn in our group. More than twice the distance I did, on a similarly gorgeous April day, must have been almost exactly three years ago, scarcely three months before her death. How hard must that have been? How determined, brave, she had to have been to tough it out and do it.

"New York Has Bedbugs"

Like this is news? The Times did a big article in the Homes or Real Estate section a couple weeks back and the bottom line was the critters can work their way through walls from adjoining apartments, are hell to get rid of, and are increasing throughout the city. But still, is Broadway on the way to the Ed Sullivan Theater where David Letterman does his show the best place for a large, public service billboard with the title of this post in huge print? We've seen it half a dozen times because we've been going to the MoMA a lot lately -- most recently, for me, today for the last day of Monet's Waterlilies show -- but at a rough guess probably 80 percent of those who see that ugly billboard with its ugly message are tourists. Give me your tired, your poor, your hungry, your huddled masses yearning to be free...of bedbugs. That's the new welcome to New York.

"Wow, You're Tall"

If I had ten bucks for every time someone said that or a variation to me at St. Luke's Roosevelt or Mt. Sinai, I'd come close to paying Dr. F's bill. Hey, I'm 6'3", above average yes, but it's not like I'm Manute Bol or Yao Ming. I don't even stand out in the subway. Maybe everybody who goes to the hospital is 5'9" or less. I learned this -- each time you become less critical, the beds get more uncomfortable. My last one at SLR was the one Lincoln died in (somebody actually believed this when I said it to them face to face) -- it was clean, but straight out of the 50's.

Fog Lifting

More blood drawn today, more procedures planned, but nothing negative, in fact, a steady, building sense of returning, crossing back from where I spent the first two plus months of 2010 to where I inhabited before then. Not quite there yet; as Dr. G. said yesterday in as insightful a comment to describe the current condition as I've heard or had myself, "Anyone looking at you on the street would think you're normal, but you know you're not normal yet." Yet. But getting there.

Today I was in an elevator at St. Luke's Roosevelt, and recognized from some precinct of my brain, the clergyman who had come to visit me at least once while I was a patient. I think it was in the few days between emerging from the ICU Rip Van Winkle state and moving to Mt. Sinai for rehab, but I can't pin that down. All I know is that it was him and I remember liking him. Then he got off and went on his way. I'm guessing it will be my last glimpse of him.

One effect is still have is I usually can't remember if I've said things, written them, or just thought them. So repetition may leap up here.

A (Very) Big Shoe Drops

As best I can piece together from the various insurance company statements and doctor billings, the total sticker price to keep me on, as someone once said or wrote, "the top side of the planet," is somewhere north of $600K. We've been spared the huge majority of that, but a couple days ago a bill arrived from Dr. F. -- probably the person most key to my treatment -- for nearly $22,000. She is, in the terminology of my health insurance company, a "non-participating provider," meaning using her costs more. Not that I had a choice, being unconscious at the time, not that I would have insisted -- had I been conscious -- on a "participating provider" to save money. Dr. F.'s billing department and I and my health insurance and I will have conversations about this at some point, but for now, the bill is just gently marinating in my to-do box.