Posts in the “personal” category

Caution: If you’ve had an angiogram and now have an Angio-Seal device in your leg (or arm), and you have medical concerns about that device, don’t waste your time reading this article. Call your doctor, or call 911 if you think it’s an emergency situation.

Introduction

After having what I call a “fake heart attack” — something that was really Kounis Syndrome, also known as allergic angina — I had an angiogram in May, 2016, at which time an Angio-Seal device was used to help seal the hole that was put in my femoral artery after the angiogram.

WARNING: Chest pain can be a serious life or death matter. If you’re experiencing chest pain right now, don’t waste any time reading this article — get yourself to a hospital.

Initial signs and symptoms of my pericarditis

On Sunday, November 3, 2019, I had just finished lunch, looked at the clock, and saw that I could fit in about an hour of work before the Denver Broncos game started. Despite Denver’s 2-6 record, I was looking forward to see how Broncos’ quarterback Brandon Allen would do in his first career start following Joe Flacco’s neck injury.

A minute later I had severe chest pain. The pain wasn’t in the middle of my chest, but it was on the left side of the left chest/breast area. To the best of my memory, I went from feeling perfectly fine to having severe pain in a matter of moments; there was no other warning.

“This is what I practice for, to play against the best players in the world. It’s going to be tough. This, I know. I will control the controllable, which is giving 100%, having the right attitude, fighting for every ball. And then we see the outcome, no? More than this we cannot do.”

~ Jannik Sinner, before playing Novak Djokovic in 2024

January 28, 2020: In a dream this morning a bunch of people came into my apartment uninvited. All but one of them were maintenance people, and they started renovating my apartment. I argued with them that a little notice would have been nice.

While that was going on, I saw that the other person was a Tibetan monk. While the maintenance people started drilling and cutting, the monk walked around breaking all of my things. He’d pick up a glass thing and let it drop to the floor and break, and work harder to break other things. I ran over to him and asked, “Why are you breaking all of my things?”

He didn’t reply, but broke some DVDs in his hands. For some reason this made me more lucid in the dream, so I stepped on some of the DVDs he had dropped to the floor so I could crunch them more. “I get it,” I said, “it’s the whole ‘impermanence’ thing, right?” Then I thought of something and said, “Stay right here for a moment. Break something if you need to, but I’ll be right back.”

Then I went over to my DVD collection and grabbed my Dalai Lama video collection. I went back to the monk, handed him the DVDs, and said, “Here, you can break these, too. Or watch them. I don’t care.” Then I remembered that my tv started on fire when the maintenance people did something, but it didn’t matter, he took the DVDs and sat down silently.

Sunrise at Virginia Beach, April 9, 2017. No filters have been applied, this is what it looked like. :)

“Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.” ~ Albert Einstein

When I think about words like “time to wonder” and “have holy curiosity,” what comes to mind is that when you have an abusive parent, they basically smack the “wonder” and “curiosity” out of you. I remember thinking that I never felt free until I moved very far away from my family, and then felt much more free once my abuser was no longer on Earth.

I know, kind of a morbid thought, but I do believe that abusers — at least temporarily — beat the wonder and curiosity out of kids. (And that’s true whether your abuser is physical, verbal, or both.)

Despite the whole Santa Fe bedbug experience at the Sage Hotel, I still love Santa Fe, and the best restaurant I know there on an “average American income budget” is the Plaza Cafe in the downtown plaza area.

At one point in the movie, Conspiracy Theory, Mel Gibson’s character tries to tell Julia Roberts that he loves her, and starts speaking the lyrics to the Sting song, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” starting with, “I resolved to call you up a thousand times a day...”

As a brief note, I’m a big fan of the message at the end of the Monk movie. I don’t want to give any of that away, so I’ll leave it at that. (This is a little faux painting I created from that ending.)

I don’t know if this is a Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) thing or something else, but I just ran across this picture of how my arm reacted to a clear plastic bandage that was on my arm You can read more about it in my Diverticulitis - symptoms, testing, and treatment story if you’re interested.

The thing about this is that it was before I was diagnosed with mast cell disease. If it happened now I’d just think, “Oh well, another weird MCAS reaction,” but back then I had no idea what was going on.

January 8, 2020: I met with my cardiologist yesterday and long story short, he said it’s dangerous to keep taking indomethacin for a long time. He said it’s like a very strong aspirin, and besides causing blurry vision, it can also damage your stomach and kidneys. So he wants me to reduce the dose I’ve been taking, and eventually stop taking it altogether.

The reason I’m writing this blog post is to note that when you stop taking indomethacin after you’ve been taking 100-150mg per day for a while — and I’ve been taking that since November 4, 2019 — you can get a horrible rebound headache/migraine. This is the second time they’ve tried to reduce my indomethacin dosage after the pericarditis, and both times I’ve had horrible migraines and a very uncomfortable feeling in my eyes, and the first time I also vomited twice because of the severity of the migraine.

That pain lasts for a while — maybe six to twelve hours — and as I write this later in the day I feel much better. I just wanted to note that in my experience, indomethacin withdrawal can lead to those symptoms.

January, 2020: The one good thing about the chest pain due to pericarditis is that I’ve never meditated as hard and consistently as I am right now.

If karma is defined as “cause and effect,” here’s a little karma of the last 4-5 months:

• In early November, 2019, I suddenly started having severe chest pain.
• I happened to be standing next to my computer, so I quickly disabled comments on alvinalexander.com. In case this was something I couldn’t come back from, I didn’t want other people to have to worry about dealing with those (because many of those comments were from spammers, and a huge waste of time).
• (At the hospital I would find out this was pericarditis, i.e., inflammation around the heart.)
• Over time I realized that “no comments” meant less stress and less work, so I kept them turned off.
• One day I realized that if I was going to keep comments turned off, there was no reason to serve pages dynamically with Drupal 8 any more.
• I took a week to write some Scala scripts to convert Drupal 8 blog content to static web pages.
• My server CPU use has dropped significantly, so I can reduce my server costs by about $400/year.

“That was a lot of kidney stones.”

~ the surgeon, October, 2020

On December 23, 2019, after spending a couple of days in the hospital, I had a heart procedure. That’s not something you forget, especially two days before Christmas.

A bit of personal health history, including having a PICC Line in my arm:

April 24, 2014: I learned that I’m going to have my thyroid removed tomorrow because of thyroid cancer.

April 24, 2015: These days I spend 40 minutes each morning administering intravenous medicine to myself via a PICC Line that has been inserted/installed in my arm and chest. You can read about the whole experience in my diverticulitis diary if you’d like.

April 24, 2016: Doctors think I may have a pheochromocytoma, which has a 10% chance of killing you when they try to remove it.

April 24, 2017: Today marks the 11th consecutive month that I haven’t required a trip to the ER, which is pretty much a record for my last four years.

Ah, the memories. :)

Today I heard the song Seminole Wind, by John Anderson for the first time. It’s pretty, sad, and haunting all at once. From SongFacts: “The lyrics reference the Seminole war chief Osceola, whose ghost cries out over the destruction of natural resources for financial gain.”

Today it reminds me of this very long dream I had about being a Native American and being killed by a white man.

I’ve been thinking lately that my biggest personal mistake is not finding a realtor in Colorado to find a small house for me, maybe back in 2013-14 or so.

That being said, I started going unconscious at that time (syncope) and had no idea if I was going to live, because doctors had no idea then that I had a rare blood disease. So in my defense, I didn’t know if I would die one of the nine times I passed out, or the four times I had “fake heart attacks” — blood flow reduced to my heart because of the blood disease (allergic angina, also known as Kounis Syndrome).

What I did instead was “loan” money to one of my sisters so she could buy a house, and now Zillow says her house is worth twice what she paid for it, so that worked out well for her.

I also spent all my savings on my mother’s caregiving expenses, and this combination of reasons is why I don’t live in Colorado anymore. (At the time of this writing, you can now find me in Kentucky.)

There are a lot of songs about the relationship between fathers and sons, but this song named Fathers & Sons by Yusuf (nee Cat Stevens) hits pretty hard for the wonky relationship between my father and I:

How can I try to explain, cause when I do he turns away again
It’s always been the same, same old story
From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen
Now there’s a way and I know that I have to go away
I know I have to go

After learning that the Sage Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico has bed bugs in 2023, I’ve been trying to learn more about them. I asked ChatGPT how long bed bugs have been around, and it provided this answer (which I edited a little bit for brevity and clarity):

Bed bugs have been around for a very long time, with evidence suggesting they have been associated with humans for thousands of years ... Historical records indicate that bed bugs were present in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. They have been mentioned in ancient writings, including early medical texts. Bed bugs became more widespread in Europe during the 17th century and reached their peak infestation levels in the 18th and 19th centuries.