This one has it all! Conflict! Romance! Prairie Schooners! Injuns, friendly and not! Survival against the elements! Mother-in-law jokes!
Ward Bond makes a couple of brief appearances with his pal John Wayne, in 1930’s The Big Trail, in its original, 70mm Widescreen presentation.
For the half-dozen of you who visit here, new postings are probably going to be slim for a while. As I approach next Friday’s cancer surgery, I’m stressing much more than I did with the melanoma six years ago. That was on my head, and this is where the sun don’t shine. As a bonus, I have a-fib to worry about.
You want to see what recovering from cancer looks like? Here. I won’t embed it.
https://dograt.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ScalpWound.jpg
That was well into the healing process, after plastic surgery. When the wound was closing up and looked good.
A couple of helpful things came my way this week. First, an actual get well card, sent by snail mail. You know who you are. Thank you!
Second, word got around about my diagnosis at my former place of employment. Yesterday, I exchanged messages with a former colleague who, it turns out, had the same diagnosis, and who happened to have the same surgeon I found. The final result in that case was, no chemo was needed. Here’s hoping I have the same luck!
An important point is that I have regular Medicare with a Medigap plan for Part B. This means I don’t need no stinkin’ referrals. Medicare Advantage plans, aka Medicare Part C, are administered through insurance networks, and referrals to in-network medical providers are required.
If I had needed to go through that rigmarole, who knows what doctors I could see, or how much of a delay and additional hassle there would have been? What I don’t know yet is how much my out-of-pocket costs will be, between the cancer and a-fib. For now, I don’t want to know!
One week from tomorrow will be my cancer surgery. Watching my fake fish will help to keep me calm.
I have cancer. Six years ago, I had melanoma removed from my scalp. It left a deep scar, but at least the treatment was quick and limited to the surgery. From what I’ve been told, this time around I probably won’t be so lucky.
Whether or not I will continue running this site depends on the extent of my illness, and I don’t yet know what that is. Writing about my “cancer journey” isn’t something I’m interested in doing.
The destructive influence of the thoroughly corrupt Roy Cohn persists long after his death, in the person of Donald Trump. A subtext of this documentary is that Cohn was a “self-loathing Jew” who was ashamed of being gay.
Like Cohn, Beatles manager Brian Epstein was Jewish and gay. But what he helped to present to the world was as positive and happy as Trump is negative and hateful.
I have persistent A-Fib. I don’t know how long this has been going on, but it has to be less than 18 months. That was when I had two EKGs done.
First, during a physical — or was it a Medicare wellness visit? — then, weeks later, during a follow-up echocardiogram. Heart murmur? Yes. PVC? Yes. A-Fib? No.
But wait! There’s more. These are the results taken after my usual indoor workout. F’in NORMAL, and my pulse dropped by 20 beats per minute. I’ll be interested in hearing what a cardiologist says about this.
