Second post-afib week* wearing a heart monitor. First week was in July, third and final will be in April. That will leave enough time for my chest hair to regrow. 😉
* I have been informed they would like me to wear it for two weeks, this time around. Fine, whatever.
Winter preparations are underway. Water from the gutters on my house goes underground and exits through pop-up drainage emitters. When I checked on them today, two of the three emitters had disappeared into the ground. When I uncovered them, they were completely clogged.
I pulled them off the pipes then cleared everything out. Then I raised the emitters using a couple of pieces left over from when the drainage systems were installed.
The third emitter was also clogged, but it hadn’t gone into hiding. The tube on the right is visible from the street. I’m thinking of making it shorter with a hacksaw.
Here it is again, the heating season. Keeping the house warm from October-April costs up to $5000/year, when including year-round hot water and the service contract. Now that the furnace is almost thirty years old, I am worrying not only about the replacement cost, but whether or not to get another oil burner.
There is no gas service on the street. The all-season porch has eight feet of electric baseboard heat along one wall. That thing by itself can kick up the wintertime electric bill by almost $200/month. I can imagine how much it would cost heating the entire house electrically.
I’m not convinced that heat pumps will do the job in winter, without supplemental electric heating elements. The house has forced hot water heat, so there is no ductwork. Which means each room would need an unsightly, wall-mounted fixture.
Ye Olde Commonwealth of Massachusetts is determined to see old oil-fired furnaces replaced with heat pumps. But when the air temperature is freezing or below, where will the heat come from for the transfer? Going underground is an option.
My utility is Eversource. Not very far from here, in Framingham, Eversource has a geothermal pilot program.
This scene from episode 2 of The Penguin TV series depicts a “drophead” getting his fix.
That was me 25 years ago, dosing up my left eye, during the early months of recovery from my hellish eye surgeries for a detached retina. The first surgery, by a hack specialist in Worcester, MA, was a failure. The second procedure, by a world-class retinologist at Boston’s Mass Eye & Ear Infirmary, was successful.
Prednisolone, or Pred-Forte, is an anti-inflammatory steroid eye drop. I was on the stuff for such a long time that I became a Pred addict. Between doses my eye began to feel “unsettled.” As soon as I took the drops as prescribed it quieted down, but as with all addictions, the need grew in both intensity and frequency.
My doctor asked, “How are you doing, tapering off of Pred?” I’d tell him it was slow going, and he was willing to prescribe a couple of extra refills. The fact was, my eye felt like it was going to crawl out of my skull. Seriously, this was a real problem for me.
Instead of tapering, I was holding to the original schedule, and even using in between. I’d be at work and have to run to the men’s room to do my drops, like the guy does in the video. “Oh, yeah… that’s the stuff!”
The low point was when I lifted a couple of Pred sample bottles from the doctor’s exam room. I knew he wouldn’t refill the prescription again, so I used those to finally taper down and get off of the stuff.
I was effectively blind in my eye through all of that. Two-and-a-half years later, after cataract replacement surgery, my vision was restored.
Years later, I had an appointment with a Boston ophthalmologist I hadn’t seen before. She looked through my history, paused, turned around, and said, “Oh. You’re THAT Mr. Pratt!” “Uh… what does that mean?” I asked. “You were fully detached for ten days, and now you have perfect visual acuity in that eye. That does not happen!”
A funny birthday present from a friend.
A couple of turntable belts I intended to gift myself confirmed what I feared; Thakker in Germany isn’t shipping to America. Thanks, Donald, for your uncompromising stupidity.
I am very pleased to say that I was wrong. I take back what I said 18 months ago. My running days are not over!
For two months, I had physical therapy for my ankle, and I was making good progress. Just when I was about to move up to practicing on a treadmill in preparation of returning to light running, I was slammed with the combination cancer/AFib diagnoses.
The last time I went for a 3+ mile run, it took the time shown on the left. Now I am cancer-free and an ablation has taken me out the AFib. Having not gone running since February, 2024, today’s time for the same route is on the right.
My persistent AFib was asymptomatic, and although I never felt short of breath, I was struggling to get my time back under 10 minutes/mile. Today, I did it without even trying. The AFib must have been holding me back after all.
