Freddie and Me

So what does a
soon-to-be sixty,
semi-retired,
semi-handicapped
guy with the personality of a capuchin monkey and the work ethic of a Galapagos tortoise do to make a few extra bucks? Working while on disability is the ultimate Catch-22. You're allowed to make some money, but not too much. So you wind up telling potential employers that they can't pay you a lot. One would think that one could find employment as a brain surgeon under those circumstances, wouldn't one? Well, one would be mistaken; an offer of such a position has yet to be tendered. My singing voice, for the most part, has deserted me (I'm planning to post about it soon), so playing the ol' nursing home circuit is not an option, at least for now. While bringing in some extra cash is nice, it's not the only reason for this sudden urge to be a contributing member of society; sitting home all day can drive a fellow totally bonkers. After all, how much "Judge Judy" can you watch?? Yes I know; I just posted about how I'm making my life meaningful, visiting holocaust survivors, yada, yada, yada. Well, that's gonna be just once or twice a week, and it don't bring home the bacon (figuratively speaking, of course). Well...remember when you were a kid the adults were always bugging you about what you wanted to be when you grew up? I always suspected that in the back of their jaded, overworked little minds they wanted to hear your grandiose dreams and then shoot 'em down: "yeah kid, dream on about being an astronaut...you'll wind up staring at a computer monitor in a teensy little prefabricated cubicle from 9 to 5 like the rest of us drones (cue evil laugh: hahahahaha!!)." Anyway, a lot of us answered that we wanted to be a policeman or a firefighter. Romantic, exciting occupations, to be sure. Personally, my response was always the same: I was going to be a veterinarian. After all, being a firefighter was pretty cool, as long as you didn't have to deal with burning buildings and stuff. I'd much rather have helped animals live long, meaningful lives, achieving their goals and fulfilling their dreams. Sigh. Where was I? Oh, yes, I wanted to be a vet. Or a musician. Or a mannequin. I had very low expectations for myself. Fast forward a few decades and I'm selling semi-precious stones. Yawn city! What ever happened to that wide-eyed nature boy who came home to the bungalow every day in his mud-caked Keds and dungarees, triumphantly displaying his latest frog or turtle or snake to his mom, who was just about ready to stick her head in the oven? Reality tends to get in the way, you know? Thank G-d for my buddy Heshy. Heshy got involved somehow with a program where they teach fire safety to little kids in schools. One day he approached me and asked (with a straight face, no less) if I was interested in being a fire truck. No, I replied, I'd rather be a locomotive. Then he explained himself. He had a $10,000 robot called Freddie the Fire Truck and needed someone to operate it. Finding someone to work the remote controls (driving, flashing lights, siren, eyes moving and blinking, etc.) was easy, he said. He needed someone to do the talking; he needed Freddie's voice. He explained that Freddie talked. He has a built-in voice modulator that can make James Earl Jones sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Whoever is doing the voice speaks into a headset mike in another room and watches the action through a camera. He thought I'd be perfect as Freddie's voice. He was right. We shot a video with Freddie and a kid we called Mayer rolling around the neighborhood talking about fire safety. We covered concepts like staying low to the floor during a fire, stop, drop and roll, stuff like that. Then we wrote a script and hired a real, live firefighter named Paul to banter with Freddie (me). I try to enunciate very clearly so my Alvin voice is understood by the kids, and I also over-inflect, like Barney (the purple dinosaur; or is that wife #2?). I think I have the inflection down pat, which is good because otherwise I'd have to put Bacitracin on it and cover it with a Band-Aid. We've already done this a few times in some local schools and I had a blast. So did the kids, and they came away with some crucial information as well. So I never grew up to be a vet. Perhaps I never grew up at all. Fact is, when someone asks me what I do for a living now, I can respond truthfully with an answer you just don't hear every day: I'm a fire truck!

Firefighter Paul

Here I Go Again...



One of the reasons I'm still alive.

                                                                       Sometimes I think I've started repeating myself in these posts.  After all, how much literary fodder could there possibly be in one measly near-death experience?  I survived, right?  Big deal.  Who cares anymore?  I go through my days like everyone else, perhaps a little more short of breath, but otherwise reasonably functional.  How do I hold onto that sense of wonder that I felt when I first left Silver Lake seven months ago?  As a relatively recent retiree, my life is obviously different than it was before that fateful day in May of 2009 when I was laid off.  But everyday life can get monotonous and mundane if one isn't careful.  That's why I've resolved to do things to make life more meaningful.  To wit: I've volunteered to visit a holocaust survivor regularly.  There's an organization called Connect2 which matches volunteers to survivors.  They're not sure yet whether I'm getting Hymie or Oscar (the survivor, not the bird), but does it really matter?  Ever read Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning"?  If not, read it.  Today.  Dr. Frankl was a psychiatrist who spent time in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and somehow survived.  His experiences in the camps were the foundation for a whole new concept in psychiatry: the driving force behind the survival of any human being is his search for meaning to his life.  Simple, yet utterly profound.  So I'm trying to give my life as much meaning as I can muster, definitely more meaning than selling (or should I say not selling) semi-precious stones.  Speaking of meaning: every so often something comes along that I used to take for granted which has now become so very much more significant.  We had our annual Chanukah party on Sunday night.  There we all were, the usual suspects, most of whom were in attendance last year as well.  All the little rugrats had grown into larger rugrats and, of course, there were the new arrivals as well.  There was Moshe Yaakov, the newest Lieberman, happily clinging to Feige and meeting all his Zweig-side cousins for the first time (which pale in comparison to his Deutsch-side cousins!).  And then there was Meira.  This kid has become the mystery child of the family.  Living on the Lower East Side as she does, it's rare that she makes an appearance in the Borough of Kings.  And there she was in the flesh, taking it all in with those saucer-sized black eyes of hers.  Meeting Meira, if you recall, was one of my raisons d'etre while wallowing in my nearly bottomless depression of the ICU, the other being attending Menachem's Bar Mitzvah.
And there I was with granddaughter firmly in hand.  Suddenly my breathing was fine, my walking was strong and easy, my hands were steady and sure, my hearing clear.  Well, not really, but who cared?  For one brief and shining moment Meira and I were one.  As George Gershwin said,
"who could ask for anything more?" 

Caveat Emptor

My ears have been ringing since I woke up from sedation about ten months ago (see "Will Someone Please Answer That @#$%* Phone?", August 20th). To be more accurate, it's actually only my right ear. Thank G-d my particular case of tinnitus is not too debilitating. The consensus among the medical community is that there is no cure for this; you just have to learn to live with it. As I said, mine isn't really horrible, but it is quite annoying. Back in July, I asked my friendly neighborhood pharmacist if he knew of anything that worked. "Try Lipo-Flavonoid," he said, and proceeded to sell me a bottle of 100 for $28.00. Acording to the directions, you're supposed to take these caplets three times a day. In fact, they actually have the gall to write, "for faster results, take two caplets three times a day." If you're being conservative and take just three a day, it comes to roughly .85 per pill. That wouldn't be outrageous if the product actually did something. After swallowing the stuff faithfully for a few months, I noticed absolutely no improvement whatsoever. That's when I went back to the box and read the fine print. There's a question printed in bold type: "Ringing in the Ears?" Then in smaller letters it says things like this all over the place: "If you have ringing in the ears, Lipo-Flavonoid provides nutrtional support to improve circulation in the inner ear"...asterisk! They have asterisks sprinkled all over the box like confectioner's sugar on a bundt cake. If you examine that sentence about "improved circulation in the inner ear" carefully, you'll notice that nowhere do they claim that this will help your tinnitus. It's just an assumption you'd naturally make if you hadn't read it carefully. Pretty sneaky, huh? I went back to John my pharmacist and told him that I thought this stuff was bogus. In fairness to him (and I love John; I've been dealing with him at least thirty years), he never guaranteed results. Indeed, he seemed a bit skeptical himself when he told me about it. John informed me that you have to take it for six months before you see any improvement. I went back and read the box again. This time I read the side of the bottle too, and there it was: "for best results, use for at least six months". Lipo-Flavonoid is distributed by a firm called DSE Healthcare Solutions, LLC, in Edison, New Jersey. New Jersey. Of course. DSE probably stands for Dom, Sal and Eddie (AKA Fat Eddie AKA Eddie the Fish AKA Mister Ed) whose pinky rings alone are worth more than my car. Of course I have to take this glorified placebo for six months...I haven't even paid for Dom's latest sharskin suit yet! P.T. Barnum famously said, "there's a sucker born every minute". Now, does that count someone like me who, months after being snookered once, actually considers continuing to fall for the same scam just in case the stuff will actually magically start working after six months? Do I come under the heading of a sucker being
re-born? Two conflicting adages simmered in my tired old brain: "in for a penny, in for a pound," and "don't throw good money after bad". Well, no need to worry, faithful readers;
I stopped taking the stuff well before I got to six months.  I'm sorry Sal's son, Sal Jr., won't be making bail after all, but hey...them's the breaks.

                                    

Greatest snake-oil salesman of all time.

Playing Telephone

I'd like to believe that most people are basically good.  We all have our vices and our shortcomings, to be sure, but I think most of us still posses a moral compass and a conscience.  Yet when a juicy chunk of gossip is presented to us, more often than not we'll eagerly absorb it.  What's more, chances are we'll pass it on as well.  Remember "Telephone", that funny game we used to play when we were kids?  We sat in a circle and someone whispered something to the kid next to him and that kid whispered it to the next kid and on and on until it had come full circle and back to the kid who started.  Invariably, what was said at the end bore absolutely no resemblance to the initial phrase uttered.  If it started as, "Let's go see the Mets play tomorrow," it would end up something like "Less goat seed the less pay tomorrow".  And then we'd all laugh.  But you know what? Apparently we adults have continued the tradition.  We're all aware that people gossip.  But how in blazes do things get changed and skewered and mixed up?  How do rumors with virtually no basis in reality get started?  I ask all these esoteric questions because of an interesting exchange I had a couple weeks ago with a total stranger.  I met this guy on the street and he knew me but I didn't know him.  I get that a lot; people remember me from Pirchei* or camp or the music business and I have no idea who they are.  I gave up on pretending long ago and now just say, "I'm sorry, I don't know who you are".  After this particular person identified himself, I still had no idea who he was.  He told me he had heard that I had been very sick and was glad to see that I was up and around again.  When I mentioned pneumonia, this odd, quizzical look crossed his face.  "But you didn't have pneumonia," he informed me.  I thought it was really quite nice of him to set me straight like that.  After all, I had apparently been operating under the mistaken assumption that I knew what was wrong with me all these months.  Really?  Hmmm.  And what exactly did I have, I wanted to know.  A fair question, don't you think?  "You had Guillain-Barre' Syndrome".  Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather...hopefully not from an African Grey.  Naturally I wanted to know where he had gotten his (mis)information.  He didn't know.  He had just "heard".  I was intrigued; how does something like that get started?  When he couldn't shed any light on his sources, I went home and looked up Guillian-Barre' Syndrome online.  Apparently it's a nasty little illness in which the immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system, which can lead to almost total paralysis. 
Here's a link, if you're interested:
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/gbs/detail_gbs.htm
After reading about this truly debilitating disease, I actually almost felt fortunate, having been struggling with a mere case of C.O.P.  Don't be ridiculous, I told myself, you would have been luckier not to have been zapped with anything.  Then a week or so later I was introduced to a fellow, a contemporary of mine, who I surmised was either suffering from Alopecia, a disorder in which you lose all your hair, or was undergoing chemo.  Turned out to be the latter.  Turned out he'd been struggling with cancer for several years.  Turned out I was right after all:
I have been pretty damn lucky.

* Pirchei = Pirchei Agudath Israel, a Jewish youth organization
of which I was a leader way back in the days of my horse-and-buggy youth.

Cast Away

I rented the movie "Cast Away" the other night. By the way, that's

Wilson the Volleyball

how the movie studio spelled it. Personally
I would
have opted for
"Castaway," but hey, what do I know? It's about a Fedex efficiency expert named Chuck Noland who is the sole survivor when a Fedex plane goes down over the Pacific. He spends five years on an uninhabited island with only a volleyball for company. He survives on smarts and toughness and the love he holds in his heart for Kelly, his fiancee, to whom he proposed just minutes before he got on the plane. He manages to hold onto a pocket watch she had given him with her picture inside, and that sustains him emotionally. The volleyball was part of a cache of Fedex packages that started washing up on shore shortly after he did. He accidentally cuts his hand and throws the volleyball at the wall of the cave he's inhabiting in frustration. When he retrieves it he notices that he has left a bloody hand print and when he cleans off a few strategic spots, he's created a face. It was a "Wilson" brand volleyball, so of course he dubs his new friend Wilson. This movie is over two hours long and I'd venture to guess that at least three-quarters of it is just Tom Hanks and Wilson. As odd as it may sound, his conversations with Wilson turn out to be a powerful device he uses to maintain his sanity. Hanks was nominated for an Oscar, and probably should have won; he was absolutely amazing. They should have created a new category for Wilson...Best Supporting Performance by a Volleyball. You're probably wondering why I'm writing about this. Glad you asked. When he's finally rescued, Fedex throws Chuck a "Welcome Home" party in his hotel suite. After everyone clears out and he's left by himself, he starts surveying the detritus of the party. The tons of leftovers that could have sustained him without his having to learn the hard way that coconut milk is a natural laxative. The fish platter that could have spared him the ordeal of having to teach himself by trial and error how to spear fish. And finally, there's the electronic match. You know, those long gizmos people use to light things nowadays? It took him weeks to finally figure out how to get a fire started on the island. There's no one in the room with him and he doesn't utter a word, but you know exactly what he's thinking: we take everything for granted. It's gotten to the point in this blog (this is entry # 125!) that I no longer remember everything I've written about, but I think I might have posted about this already. I remember the first time I went to a Duncan Donuts with Chayie, a few weeks after I got discharged from Silver Lake. They have a drink called a Coolatta that I used to watch commercials for in the hospital. A couple of young, buff guys (ironically) playing volleyball on the beach. They work up a real sweat and of course they quench their thirst with a couple of Coolattas. Of course in real life it would be Heineken, but this is not their commercial. I very vividly remember lying in bed and absolutely believing that I was never again going to be able to do the normal, everyday things that healthy people do...I was never getting out of that room. And there I was, every fiber of my being transfixed by the sensation of my watermelon-strawberry Coolatta coursing smoothly and deliciously down my throat. Chuck Noland was right: we take everything for granted.

Pick Your Poison

Blood is supposed to clot. If it doesn't and you're bleeding, you keep bleeding. After my A-Fib episode in which my heart decided to change rhythms and upset all my doctors, They had a pow-wow and pincided (okay, decided) to put me on a blood thinner. I'm still not exactly sure why. I would understand if I had blocked arteries like Midtown Manhattan, but that wasn't the case. It was just my heart doing a foxtrot when it had been watusi-ing all these years. Frankly, I don't blame it; would you want to do the same dance for over half a century? So why does a funky rhythm warrant swallowing rat poison? And what made it even weirder was that Dr, Katzenelenbogen had been telling me for years not to

allow anyone to inject me with Heprin (yet another blood thinner;

don't these drug companies have anything else to do??) anytime I might be in the hospital, which in my case means every other Tuesday or so. I have a history of bleeding ulcers (from being an Excedrin junkie for years; see what happens when you're married?) and he was always very adamant about it. And here he was, jumping on the Coumadin bandwagon. Incidentally, Nuchi was once visiting me in the Rocky Zweig Memorial Wing of Maimonides when a nurse came in and started hanging a bag of something on my IV pole. Nuchi had the presence of mind to ask her what it was. This was quite a while ago, before patients routinely asked about what the supposed health professionals scurrying around them were downloading into their wretched bodies. When the nurse replied that the bag in question held Heprin, Nuchi informed her that I had bleeding ulcers and what are you trying to do, kill him? The nurse then realized that the Heprin was for the guy in the other bed. She mumbled some lame excuse, but she was definitely busted. With the possible exception of hanging around with me all these years, Nuchi is probably the smartest person I know. Remind me to tell you about the time she lost her engagement ring in a cadaver. But, as usual, I digress. In fact, I don't even remember what I was talking about. Oh yes, blood thinners. So I was on Coumadin and it's nasty stuff. If I even thought about banging into something, I would bruise like an overripe banana. As previously discussed, Coumadin is literally rat poison, so aside from all the fun side effects, there is also the ick factor: it's really creepy to know that this stuff that you're swallowing is the same stuff that has killed thousands, perhaps millions of defenseless rodents. Dirty rodents perhaps, but defenseless nonetheless. I desperately wanted to stop taking it. After another pow-wow, my cardiologist Dr. Plawes rather hesitantly switched me to Plavix. That made me feel better: at least Plavix has been heavily promoted and is prescribed more often than any other medication on the planet. Coincidentally, my son-in-law Amir used to work as a pharmaceutical rep and Plavix was what he sold. Of course if you've ever seen Amir, you know that he could sell ice to the eskimos. So I started on the Plavix a few weeks ago, assuming my body would no longer look like Ingemar Johansson's after Floyd Patterson got through with him. For all you youngins, that was an obscure boxing reference. Actually it's not obscure, it's just obscure to you. Anyway, no such luck. I still bruise at the slightest touch, in fact hematomas literally just pop up on their own with no coaxing from the edge of my desk necessary. Too*, I keep springing leaks. I tend to pick at anything on my body that's not supposed to be there; pimples, skin tags, warts, zlampoes, etc. Lately every pick is followed by a bleed that just goes on and on, like three or four band-aid's worth. So I guess Plavix is no groiseh metziah**, either. Moral of the story, kiddies? Stay healthy; otherwise you too could wind up poisoning yourself at your doctor's request. I'd offer some tips on how to stay healthy, but that would be tantamount to me offering marital advice, so I guess I'll pass.

* I know. Using "too" at the beginning of a sentence sounds terribly awkward and wrong gramatically. But one of my favorite authors, Richard Russo (I highly recommend his "Empire Falls" for which he won a Pulitzer) does it all the time and I've always wanted to try it, so there ya go.

** Groiseh Metziah = Literally, "big bargain".

Blimie and Kalman Try To Kill Me!*

It's hard for me to imagine now, but in the five weeks or so that I was in Columbia Presbyterian, I couldn't walk.  Indeed, when a physical therapist came to see me, whatever exercises I did were done in bed.  There was one therapist who gave me two Poland Spring bottles and told me to do arm curls with them.  At the beginning (in the ICU) I was so weak I couldn't open a container of milk.  The double wrapped kosher food was completely out of the question.  When I got to Silver Lake, the first P.T. had me try and walk (with a walker) from my bed to the door and back; it wasn't a  particularly large room, and I did it with great difficulty.  It's truly amazing how quickly your muscles abandon you when they're not used for a week or so.  Apparently I had barely moved while I was sedated and when I came to, my muscle tone had turned to jelly.  I think it was apricot.  Anyway, this is all a long, convoluted way of setting the stage for the time Blimie and Kalman tried to kill me.  They were both there visiting one day, and together with the nurse-de-jour decided to take me on an outing.   Now, I love my children like crazy, but all I wanted to do was lie in bed and watch Judge Judy.  This particular nurse (I don't recall her name; let's call her Brunhilde) was one of these proactive, happy- and-peppy types that you just want to smack.  She made me struggle out of bed and sit in a chair.  Sit in a chair, for G-d's sake...can you imagine the unmitigated gall?  Then she and my two geniuses put their little well-meaning heads together and decided that it was time for me to escape my room for a little while: Blimie and Kalman would wheel me to the Columbia Presbyterian atrium.  If I recall correctly, it was on the same floor.  So once more I struggled out of bed, this time into a wheelchair.  I was sooooo very weak; I knew that in theory this was a good thing to do, but all I wanted was for everyone to just let me stay in bed and wallow.  So there I was, all settled in for the excursion when someone realized that I needed to be transported with oxygen.  There are wheelchairs that accommodate oxygen; they have tank holders attached to the back.  Unfortunately, this particular wheelchair was not one on them.  I guess the task of getting me out of one wheelchair and into another one was too daunting, so it was decided that they would get a rolling oxygen tank and Blimie and Kalman would roll the wheelchair and oxygen tank in perfect tandem.  Riiiiight.  And I have a bridge to sell you.  Our little trip started out innocently enough, with Kalman manning the wheelchair and Blimie rolling right along with the tank.  They were happily chatting and apparently not paying all that much attention to their poor ol' dad, because their lockstep synchronicity soon fell apart.  As a result, the tubing attaching the oxygen tank to my trach became tangled around my neck.  I took a moment to ponder whether I should say something or just let them do me in, but I figured they might feel guilty about it for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, so I decided to spare them.  Ever articulate, I cried "Mmmph!"  That got their attention maybe twenty minutes later, after they finished discussing Lady Gaga.  We made it to the atrium without further incident.  It was gorgeous as advertised, but the food that was supposed to be there wasn't.  Believe it or not, I was wiped just from the trip.  After maybe five minutes I told the dynamic duo that I wanted to go back to bed.  It was decided that they would switch roles, with Blimie pushing the wheelchair and Kalman on the oxygen tank.  About a minute after he had finished razzing her about her lack of rolling-oxygen-tank prowess, he proceeded to strangle me yet again.  "Mmmph!", I bellowed , figuring that by now they'd know what that meant.  "Oops" came the reply, in unison.  They both thought it was quite hilarious; I thought about pressing charges.

* While the gist of this story is accurate, I must confess that I may have exaggerated some of the details just a teensy little bit.