Elmer Fuddism...

Have you noticed the new commercials by Geico Insurance? The new commercials where the announcer asks, "Can switching to Geico really save you 15% or more on your car insurance?" He then comes back to ask an emphasizing question that makes his point, and in this particular commercial, asks the follow up question; "Does Elmer Fudd have trouble with the letter 'R'?" Poor Elmer is then shown in a cartoon being chastised because he can't say the word wabbit.

I only mention this because as a child, I too was stricken with Elmer Fuddism. Yup that's right, a guy, who's first name starts with the letter "R" (Ronnie, pronounced Wonnie in Fuddism) couldn't say his own name properly. That time machine I spoke about in my very first post, has taken me back to this small traumatic event of my childhood. When I told my wife and daughter in law about it, they just laughed. I told them it wasn't funny, I had to go to special class and everything! They didn't care, they still laughed at me. Little wotten, Wonnie, went to speech class to learn all about them wascally wabbits. Trust me, I know how Elmer Fudd feels.

When using the letter "R", it is mostly pronounced using the "er" sound. So I was sent to speech class to learn how to pronounce the "er" sound. I remember the speech teacher would squeeze my cheeks, and make a face like fish when she would use the "er" sound. I can't remember when the "er" sound just came naturally. It was probably when I started cussing, if you recall there are a couple of words where the "er" sound is really emphasized.

I asked a few folks if children are still sent to speech classes when they are young to learn how to speak letters and words properly. Yup, it still seems like Elmer Fuddism is an issue, but they don't call it that. Wouldn't be politically correct, I guess. It's called speech therapy for children, and in particular teaching articulation for those children having trouble with saying certain sounds or words correctly. The class worked well for me, no one knew about my specialized training in public speaking at such an early age until I told them about it. They still can't stop laughing about it either. Some "secwets" are just better kept to oneself.

Buzzard

The sky is falling, the sky is falling...

at least it is here on the Plateau. If you live in the South, you know that the threat of snow will send most everyone scurrying around like Chicken Little worried that our world will surely come to a snowy end, or at least life as we know it for few days. It snowed between six and eight inches here on the plateau over night. I noticed some drifting, so it could be much deeper in places.

Being raised in the north, and living out in Colorado for a while, it's just another day. We can and will deal with it, even though no one in the south owns snow removal equipment; not even the state if you want to know the truth. Why would they, it snows an inch or two once a year at best. There hasn't been any other news being broadcast in Tennessee over the last few days, it's all about the storm and snow. Every single detail is being talked about, all possible persons of interest interviewed, and preparations were made for all contingencies.

I watched yesterday, as my three dachshunds took little notice of the white flakes falling, and even frolicked a little in the inch or two that settled in the yard by last call potty time. This morning it was another thing. As my wife led them out the front door, the six or more inches of snow had made quite a difference. You would think so too, if your legs were only four inches high, and the most important parts of your body were plowing snow underneath you. Poor Sedona, the oldest of our three, couldn't find a spot shallow enough to take a dump. Think about that for a moment. I mean that's tragic, it belongs on the news, who knew about preparing for your dog to take a dump.

Sedona, is available for interviews, if your listening channels 2, 4, 5 , and 17. However, I must warn you, she still isn't very happy about her ordeal.

Buzzard

Another weight loss program...

My wife brought home something yesterday that I haven't touched in over 30 years; a size large shirt and a pair of pants in a size 38 waist. Hey, this big boy has been an XXL player for a long time. The last time I saw a size 38 waist pants on my ass, I was probably about eight years old. No not really; I was a skinny kid through high school, gained a little shortly after, but lean and mean, by the time I was discharged from the Army. My weight gain began, in earnest, in the late 70's with me topping the scales between 275 or 280 in the 90's. I fought back in the late 90's and took off about 50 pounds. This past October I was pushing 250 again when I visited the doctor for the first time in two years.

It's been over a month now since my heart attack and subsequent surgery. Neighbors and friends will drop by and the conversation eventually leads to the question, how much weight have you lost? I tell them I am on a medical weight loss program, and have lost about 40 pounds since November. Most go ahead and bite at that point, asking me how a program like that works. I tell them, it's a B.I.T.C.H. to begin with, but the results are unbelievable. First they split open your sternum, spank your heart several times, pull some veins out of both your legs and chest, replace a few arteries, and VOILA... over the next few weeks and months a dramatic, or maybe it's a traumatic effect comes over your whole body.

Not too much interest in this program, once you explain it to them. I have seen commercials on TV that talk about medical weight loss programs all the time. Now I know what they are.

Somewhere along the way, the talk switches to how much weight they need to lose, and how they intend to deal with it. It's tough, as I said, I have dealt with it most of my adult life. A couple of friends have offered up tread mills, stair steppers, and other assorted exercise machines that can be currently found in their basements or garages, now used as coat and storage racks. But, as my wife and neighbors know, I have an aversion to structured activities, and especially anything that resembles an exercise routine. The on going joke among them, is you can always find that old Buzzard sitting in his recliner.

I love this old recliner, it fits my butt well. It's placement is such that I have a clear view out the front door to the top of the hill, a beautiful view out the back window to the mountains and beyond, a side view at the TV and full view of all household activities that may be going on. I blog, "Facebook," and read my email using my laptop there, nap from time to time, read, listen to music, and bond with my dogs. It's the perfect peach for an old Buzzard like me. Recently, I have come to believe this chair is an important part of my weight loss program. Yea, that's it, my own customized exercise machine of sorts, up down, up down, lean back, lean back, up down up down...

Buzzard

This is Casey...

Casey is giving me this sideways glance, because he is trying to figure out how pissed I might be. He ate my flutter valve. What's a flutter valve you may ask? Well, one of the things they work on after heart surgery is getting your lungs to work properly again. Never mind that your chest is stitched back together with wire and glue, those lungs have to expand and contract in order to keep the fluid out. I get it, I understand. In the hospital, the nurses and doctors would constantly remind you to use the two pulmonary toys issued to you, a flutter valve that works on the blowing side of your lung capacity, and another torture toy, of which I do not know the name of, that you suck on.

The one you suck on is a killer. It's like that carnival gimmick for the strongest man, where you slam a great big wooden sledge hammer into a small flat plate at the bottom of a long tower with insults printed at different levels, that shout out at you if you aren't coordinated enough to ring the bell at the top. The suction toy works much the same way, except, there are no insults, just large format numbers that stare back at you while you're turning red trying to get this blue hockey puck to float up above 2500. I am still at 1750. I suck in more than one way in this story.

Back to the flutter valve incident. The flutter valve makes noise when you blow on it, kind of sounds like a horse whinny when you blow through it. You're supposed to blow on it as long and as forceful as you can. As I said the nurses and doctors were quite assertive in their lecture about my use of both pulmonary toys daily when I was released from the hospital. So I used them religiously, you know, on Sunday for about an hour, but not every Sunday, because of the weather, a headache, or the car wouldn't start. Okay I wasn't so faithful to the program. On Sunday, (church day by the way), my lungs seemed to be giving me a problem, so I fumbled through the drawer next to my recliner to find the damn thing buried under the pile of hospital and doctor bills we have been receiving. I figured I would flutter, since I didn't mind that as much as being insulted by the sucking machine for under achievement.

Yesterday, my lovely wife drove me to town to get a haircut. I had used the flutter valve that morning and left it on the table next to my recliner when we left home. Casey, one of our three dachshunds, is a seven year old standard size long haired dapple. I say standard size but the maniac is about 25 lbs. His official AKC puppy papers say he is a miniature. We all know that couldn't be wrong, it was certified by the AKC. At any rate, Casey has separation anxiety issues. If we leave for more than a few hours, he looks for something he can seek revenge on. He never chews anything if we are home, but let us leave in the car, and he finds something to let you know, he doesn't like it.

The flutter valve was laying on the floor by the recliner when we came back from town. I heard Teri say "uh oh," as I stopped at the bathroom coming in the door. He got the flutter valve, she said. Still in the bathroom, a smile appeared on the ghostly face in the mirror while I washed my hands. As I came out of the hallway, I saw Casey sitting in the chair flashing me that all knowing sideways glance he has. Dutifully, I scolded him for his total disregard for our personal property, his childish notion of revenge, and general bad dog behavior. Casey dutifully looked back, cowered and wagged his tail.

It's over, another religious icon lost among the rubble of the Buzzard's Loft. Teri picked up on my disappointment almost immediately. Nothing gets by that woman! The whole ordeal left me and Casey so distraught and tired, we decided to go downstairs and take a nap.

Buzzard

Fill these out ...

the office nurse said, as she handed me a clip board with four or five sheets of paper, the doctor will see you in a few moments. My recent health issues the past few months have more than likely wiped out several forests and kept hundreds of workers busy chopping down trees, processing them into paper, printing, shipping them to their destinations, and finally giving them to the medical office receptionist across our area. Talk about a stimulus program, this is it.

I hate filling out medical forms, they seem to repeat themselves no matter how many pieces of paper are stacked on the clip board. If you sit in the medical office waiting room long enough you hear the complaints as the dreaded paper work is handed out to all the new bee's or those that haven't visited in the last 30 days. A lot can happen, in 30 days, trust me, I know. People start fumbling for their glasses, notebooks, bags of pills, phone books, insurance cards, work numbers, and on and on and on and on...

I made my first visit to my heart surgeon's office post op last week. Sure enough the receptionist handed us a stack of paperwork several pages thick. I'm thinking, hey, I just spent two weeks in the hospital in which your doctors spent one whole day extricating medical history for me and my family of every known fact in our medical genealogy, cut my chest and removed my heart, prescribed 30 different medications to take umpteen times a day, scanned my wrist band and talked to my insurance company for approvals everyday, and really, you don't have all the information you need about me? Give me a break!

My wife dutifully filled out all the sheets, just asking questions of me, she didn't already know off the top of her head, which were few. That woman knows me like a book I tell you.

Two days later I visited for the first time, the office of my diabetes doctor assigned to me while I was in the hospital. Again, a stack of forms too complicated to believe. My wife and I both have college educations, and have filled out medical forms as I said before, by the hundreds. My wife even worked in a doctor's office for three years doing this dreaded job of medical office manager and insurance information gatherer, but these forms today were special. She looked at me and started naming off medical history disease questions, that neither one of us could pronounce let alone knew what in the hell they were. I started looking around the office for the hidden camera, this was a joke, right? No joke, we sat there fumbling through the forms, making our best guess, and waited an hour past our appointment to see the doctor. I bet anything, he was reading the forms we had just filled out prior to our appointment.

In the mail on Friday, I received a large packet of forms to fill out for my heart therapy visit this week. The nurse at the therapy office called and said she may have sent some forms that didn't apply. She said that I should check the packet, and if any of the forms said pulmonary and not cardiac to skip them. She was emphatic that all other forms were to be filled out completely. I opened the packet and skimmed through the various forms. The first few forms looked to be the standard contact, insurance, medical history, and medicines routine. The next couple of forms looked to be an exercise or energy evaluation, and the last 10 forms, I kid you not, were what I would refer to as psyche or depression evaluation forms.

WTF is that all about? I thought it was heart therapy.

The hell with it, I began with the first routine forms. About two thirds of the way through I came across the question;

"Do you have any problems or difficulty with your periods?"

I remembered my phone conversation, like I said, she was emphatic that all questions must be answered. I thought about it, and then the answer occurred to me. I wrote, "No problem with my periods, but I am confused with the placement or use of comma's or semi-colons." The next question was much easier for me.

"Have you ever given birth?"

Oh hell yea! I remember this one time, I hadn't gone for days, and it took me a while, but that toilet, (by the way, my wife hates when I tell this story), oh yea, that toilet and my butt just wasn't big enough...

Can't hardly wait for the psyche evaluation!

Buzzard

Words of mouth...

I am doing my best to stop cussing. My wife Teri scolded me the day after coming home from the hospital, saying it wasn't right to use the Lord's name like that after receiving the gift of life I was just given. Who could argue with that logic? I didn't go down like a whipped puppy however, I dragged her right along with me, and said she could remove a few words from her vocabulary too. We now have an agreement.

We started a cuss jar. Every time a cuss word is spoken, a quarter is put into the jar. We couldn't afford more than that amount at this time in our life, as was quickly indicated the first few days when we both put fists fulls of shinny silver quarters in a large mouth half gallon jar, that we just left the lid off of to reduce the effort. A week later they still trickle in. We're donating the money to the mission here in town.

Mom and dad were not much on profanity. When dad died, mom later married a part time minister. I feel so guilty when a word slips out in a conversation, and have apologized for my language many times. I was raised in the inner city of Chicago, and I picked up most of my bad language habits from the street, to be cool or fit in with my peers. You would have thought a college education and 25 years in a management position would have all but erased the use of these unclean words, but not so much. As a grumpy retired man, the words seemed to have found new uses to describe my intolerance to irritating people, ideas, and events. Looking it up, I am still confused whether it is called cussing or cursing. Even though most of these words are nouns, they seem to be always used as adjectives to describe persons, events, and especially feelings.

As a loaned executive with my company, I was assigned an urban community internship in a Catholic church in Chicago. The priest was a dynamic individual, running an orphanage, a school for boys with social skill issues, a soup kitchen, and several community social programs. This man could pick up the phone and talk to the mayor, police chief, or corporate executives, and pretty much get what he needed immediately. He also cussed more than any other person I have ever met! Both men and women participated in these assignments, and his reputation was notorious with both sexes. The second worst was my X mother in law. I'll not say more about this, other than to say I am thankful that her daughter did not inherit the trait.

I will get better about controlling my words, gimmicks like the money jar keep me focused on the goal. My daughter in law Melissa came down to spend a few days during my recuperation yesterday. Our relationship, one of sarcastic humor and put downs, should help the mission in town reap vast rewards from the visit. We're both going straight to hell, I know it.

Buzzard

Take a breath...

My mom just turned 77 on January 3rd. The family joke has always been about mom constantly, incessantly, and with great specific details, talking with anyone about anything no matter a stranger or a friend. Mom has always been in complete denial of this fact, and insists that the reason she has so many friends, is because she is such a good listener. Trust me mom doesn't listen, she talks!

Ask mom about the dinner she went to with friends from church, you will find out about the trip to the restaurant, the time they arrived, who was there, who she saw and knew in the restaurant, which of them acknowledged her, what they wore, what everyone had for dinner, the service, the quality, the taste, if she had dessert, the time they left, how she felt after dinner, and how the food digested and passed through her system over the next few days. I mean this woman is thorough! She never meets a stranger, and I challenge anyone to say nothing more than "hello, how are you, " and try to walk away. Never ever, ask that question, unless you have time to spare and really want to know. Mom has experienced a considerable amount of health issues in her life, and she will tell you about them.

I say this all in good fun, because of the good news we received over the last couple of days. You see mom like me, and my brother before me, had open heart surgery procedure yesterday. Yes, three family members have had their chests cut open and hearts mended over the last four months. My brother was first with coronary artery bypass surgery in September; the same for me just two weeks ago, and mom had a heart valve replaced and a aortic aneurysm repaired yesterday. This is sick family in more than one way.

Mom made it through the surgery just fine. My brother called and kept me informed throughout the four hour operation of her progress and recovery. The family was allowed in ICU to see her for the last time yesterday around 8:00pm. She was still under some sedation, on a ventilator and resting comfortably he said, when they left to get some rest. They were allowed in again at 6:00am for a brief visit and update. They found mom sitting in a chair next to her bed, jabbering away at anyone that would listen. My brother said he asked the nurse how the night went, and she said it was fine until they took the ventilator out, she hasn't stopped talking since. Everyone laughed knowing mom was back.

It's time to take a deep breath and save our energy, because the best mom in the world has another story to tell, and this one will take a while.

Buzzard

A new heart arrival...

Tomorrow I will mark two weeks since my coronary artery bypass surgery. Not how you would normally wish to have your new year start, but exactly the outcome you would hope for with any major surgical procedure. I made it!

More than 500,000 bypass procedures are performed in the United States each year, making it the most frequently performed major surgery in the country. Having said that, nothing about this procedure is routine from the heart patients' point of view. I ran into a few post-op complications, like passing a blood clot through the lung two days after surgery, and a devastating emotional experience of reliving a 40 year old memory from the Vietnam War. I don't remember having too many PTSD days after the war, but this memory was different, it was real, I was there, and I was reliving a horrible event in my life just as if it were happening now. They changed my medications and I have since moved on. The surgeon said he has had about six other vets have similar experiences, during his years of performing heart surgeries.

They called us "cabbage" patients, which stood for Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG). A term I found not all too flattering, kind of reminds me of things that smell bad for some reason. However, there is a very appropriate and special phrase they use in the cardiac intensive care unit upon one's arrival post-op. They use the phrase "a new heart arrival." It is in this critical 12 to 24 hour time period one nurse is constantly at your side to make sure your new heart is well taken care of. It's a phrase, I personally found profound, in recognizing the gift I had been given.

The last thing I would like to share about the surgery is the deep feeling of appreciation and respect I have for our doctors, nurses, and health care professionals. I was well taken care of by all. Health care for all is my vote. Not sure how we make it happen, but why we would deny anyone access to health care in this great country for any reason is beyond me.

The very best thing I had going for me is my rock, Teri, my wife, who massed with her own personal health demons, some how made it through it all with a smile, a kiss, a hug, a rub, a whisper, or a kind word all at exactly the right moments. I have no words to describe the depths of love and devotion I feel for this woman. Truly unfathomable!

I have learned that nothing happens in this world without prayer. Thanks to everyone, friends, family, strangers, and the many church organizations that made Teri and me part of their prayers and prayer lists. This mended or new heart I now have, has challenged my spiritual notions. It must be something to do with facing your own mortality. I leave all who have read this post quoting scripture, I hope I have used it in the correct context, since scripture is the one thing I hardly ever quote.

"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." Ezekiel 36:26

Buzzard