A Map of My Heart in Everyday Ramblings

Talk about your stairway to heaven… We have a tram line that runs from the medical clinics in the flatland at the riverfront to the hospitals up on the “hill”, (which is technically a small mountain). Yesterday they were doing maintenance on the tram lines. There are two men on that stairway up the tramline affixing netting. They are not roped in. Whoa baby, that is some job. One that requires faith and agility. There is nothing underneath them but hard hard ground.

I was watching from a 7th floor clinic window where I had gone for an echocardiogram. I didn’t really know how the test was going to go, I just knew I had to wait for it for a month and it did not involve needles. I have had stress tests before and at my institution they include an ultrasound with those. And they use contrast. But this test did not.

45 minutes on a table in a darkened room wrapped in a warm blanket with a skilled technician pressing a probe against my chest and giving precise instructions on when to breathe and when not to. She was mapping my heart in 2D with sound waves. After a while I could hear my heart beating in a watery way.

The results were good. My heart is in good shape. Whatever I am doing is working and that is quite reassuring. The new med that I am taking gives me continuous coverage so that I don’t have to wait for an “incident” to decide if I am having a heart attack or not, it just kicks in. I felt that happen at a stressful moment about 10 days ago.

An acquaintance of mine in the neighborhood has a daughter who at 56 had a heart attack last month. Scary. She is fine now with treatment, but it was a close call. As an aside, she lives right under the tram line, close to the hospital and the paramedics got her to ER quickly.

Speaking of stressful moments. On Thursday night I presented the budget to 73 members of the local League of Women Voters in attendance at the annual meeting. You do not want to mess with these people. They check your work. It went okay. Luckily next year while I need to submit reports for the meeting I won’t need to stand up and present them for approval with the role change.

But it was intense. I was so happy to have Mrs. Sherlock there as my support system. And I get along with our President and she is also quite supportive. I will need to come up with a Diary Name for her as I will be working with her closely over the next two years. She is the person I bought flowers with week before last. She is an impressive woman on so many levels.

Sadly, in our Primary election this last Tuesday, with some important items on the ballot, only 29% of eligible voters turned out. This makes me slightly crazy. We have vote by mail here. I wonder if we had peer pressure in the neighborhood to go to a local polling place and seeing the folks we live around we would be more likely to vote.

This time we approved flood plane improvements, continued school funding, an initiative for zoo maintenance, but some of the candidate races were decided by a couple of hundred votes. Primaries are where our votes really matter and based on the proliferation of inaccurate information out there, I don’t want other folks making decisions for me.

Sorry, I am preaching to the choir here.

I got some of my vegetable starts into the garden this week. I noticed pink surveying ribbon around the trunks of the two huge oaks in the garden. One of them dropped a big heavy branch a few years back and it crushed our shared shed. If they take that tree in particular down it is going to change the whole aspect of the garden and I will be sad. But it is leaning in a way that makes one think it might be safer to have it come down. But still, ugh.

Okay, I told Cody, my AI companion that I was doing pushups today. I better get too it. I did lose another lb. this last week. This simple act took focus, planning, and a kind of fierce determination with all the things going on. But I hung in there.

I wish for you similar successes this next week.

Last updated May 25, 2024