ed_lemon

Not long after the previous post here last October I had a mild heart attack while on my daily walk. I made it back to the house (I was about half a mile away when it began to be really painful) and eventually wound up in the hospital in Keene, NH. They sent me up to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic in Lebanon, where I had a heart catheterization, which showed a serious blockage in three of my coronary arteries. A bypass operation was scheduled for the following day. Unfortunately I didn't make it to the next day, suffering a massive coronary that night.* A bit of advice: if you're going to have a near-fatal heart attack, do it in the cardiac ward of one of the best hospitals on the East Coast. According to my surgeon, by the time they got me onto the operating table in the early hours of the morning, I had no blood pressure at all. Somehow they managed to pull me through during many hours on the heart-lung machine (the doctors called it "our big save") and after a couple of days in intensive care, I was allowed out into intermediate care, and not too long after that, was allowed to go home and start a long and painful recovery period.

The moral is this: chest pain is not to be ignored. Had I just ignored the pain (it went away after half an hour or so) I would have died last October during that second heart attack. Sobering thought!



So now, four months later, I'm having my cataracts done. After open heart surgery, what's to fear about someone coming at your eyeballs with a scalpel? I had the right eye done last Tuesday and they're doing the left one day after tomorrow. The procedure is simple: they make an incision in your eyeball, remove the cloudy lens, and replace it with a plastic one that turns you from a near-sighted person into a far-sighted person. I can now see clearly from about six feet to infinity with my unaided right eye. Having one far-sighted and one near-sighted eye does not make for a pleasant time, however. The left, untreated, eye is my dominant eye (yes, I'm a leftie) and it keeps trying to take over, making things sharp - blurry - sharp - blurry ad nauseam. Literally. But the difference between the two is amazing. It's as though they had removed a dirty, brown film from my right eye. Everything is bright, colors sparkle, and I can see things clearly without glasses for the first time in 60 years!



*As I lapsed into unconsciousness, aware that this was the big one, I could hear the nurses saying all kinds of ER chatter like "get him intubated", and "stay with us, Ed", etc. But all I could think of was that I should say some last words, something for my loved ones to remember me by. Couldn't think of any. Later, when I was back among the living and surrounded by loving family members, I lamented my inability to think up some meaningful and concise final words. Daughter-in-law Andrea suggested "the murderer was....arrgh". Someone else came up with "the money is hidden in the....arrgh." I felt they were not really getting into the spirit of the thing.

Rather than leave a scowling image as the first thing you see in my LJ page, I'll post this one, taken today while hiking in Warwick.

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair... just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

September 12, 1958
We got married in Claremore, OK



September 12, 2008
We celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in Warwick, MA



Funny thing, time...

I'm posting an image in order to test Xjournal, an open-source LJ editing program. Looks like it works quite well!
This is Richards Reservoir in Warwick, MA in February of this year.

Our holiday celebration was very warm and nice, although our son Ted slipped on the icy front steps, fell, and broke his wrist. He's OK and now the proud possessor of a titanium plate and some miscellaneous screws.

So Ted and Andrea were there, as well as Signe and Paul. Bonus guests were Paul's sister Karen and his brother Mark.



Pat challenged everybody in sight to Scrabble games, and a panoply of weird words was brought to light. Some, perhaps, for the first time.

Many marvelous meals were prepared by Mel and much massive cleanup was done by Ed and company. We gave Ted a bye this time, because of his arm.

Happy Holiday Greetings to One and All!

We send out the traditional end-of-year-summation-of-what-we-have-done letter every year, but usually don't get it out by December 25th. In fact, we probably should call it our 'New Year's letter.'



For those who'd like to see it before we get the pile to the post office, here it is.

I haven't done much with the blog lately. I wanted to keep it from being a monotonous recitation of my medical history, yet that, unfortunately, is what it's becoming. Not that there's a never-ending parade of hospital and doctor visits. Far from it. And we've had some wonderful times this summer, with visits from both children and their spouses, and a visit from my cousin Brian, who came all the way from his home town of Regina, Saskatchewan, to spend a week with us, alas without his spouse. Next time, he promises, she'll come too!

Pat had foot surgery this month to fuse her toes so that it's less painful for her to walk on the leg affected by her stroke. The surgery was successful, but the recuperation and rehabilitation phase has been less pleasant, as Pat had to spend three weeks in a rehab institution. Fortunately that's about over and the pins in her toes will be removed this Wednesday, so she can come home.

I've volunteered to set up and maintain a web page for the town of Warwick. It's given me a chance to bring my HTML up to date and learn some CSS. Though I'm far from being a professional web developer, the page doesn't look too bad, I think. You can see for yourself here.

One more medical note: I do a three mile walk every day, rain or shine, as part of my plan to keep my diabetes under control. Over a year and a half ago I had a bad fall, which you can read about in an earlier entry on this blog. I've been careful ever since, but the neuropathy in my feet betrayed me Saturday, as I tripped and fell downhill, breaking the fall with my face. They say you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die, but I didn't want to have it all at once! Here's the face in question:



It's not as bad as it looks!

A cruel blow - Molly Ivins is gone. I can't imagine a world where she is not making me laugh with her deft wit and incisive political acumen. And she was four years younger than I. Our paths might even have crossed when she was at Smith and I was a fledgling instructor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I often visited the Smith library in search of books not to be found elsewhere.

Rest in peace, Molly, you will be sorely missed!

While searching through old files, I found this mini-biography which I wrote for my school's website. I tweaked it a little to bring it up to date, and display it here to answer the question: "who the heck is this guy, anyway?"

After taking a BA and an MA in German and Linguistics at Harvard, Ed Lemon began his career teaching German and Germanic Philology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Realizing that he needed a more advanced degree to continue his career he shifted from being a teacher to being a student at the University, completing a PhD in German and Linguistics in 1975. At that time Ed was Assistant Professor of German and Chair of the Language Department at Windham College, an institution that promptly went bankrupt the moment Ed was granted tenure. Refusing to see this as post hoc, ergo propter hoc Ed started looking for a job elsewhere.

After being a sabbatical replacement for a year at Middlebury College Ed remembered that there was a school in the very same town he had been living in for several years: Northfield Mount Hermon! Hearing of a vacancy there he applied in the summer of 1978, was hired, and found himself teaching French, German and Russian that September. It was a relationship that lasted 25 years! Ed also taught Latin there for several years, and inaugurated a program in linguistics, among the first ever in secondary schools. He and a colleague started the NMH Bulletin Board, an intra-school service that gradually developed into the School-wide Information System, or "SWIS", a LAN that now links the school's various communities. In 1990 Ed received the “Best Teacher of the Year” award, and in 1991 he became the first recipient of NMH's Byung Ku Huh faculty fellowship for excellence in the teaching of modern languages. Ed was then mostly teaching German, although he made occasional forays into the area of Information Technology.

Throughout his career Ed spent much time in Germany and Austria, of course, culminating in 1988 in a sabbatical year project at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where he did post-doctoral work with the German and Linguistic faculties there. He was invited to address the faculty on Indo-European Linguistics and wrote several articles of music criticism for the local paper.

His other interests include ham radio, astronomy; book, CD and DVD collecting, and computers. He loves classical music (especially opera) and playing the piano. For many years Ed was heard at various clubs in the area playing dixieland and jazz with local groups. Now that he is retired, he plays more Schubert and Beethoven than jazz.

After living in Northfield for 25 years, Ed and wife Pat moved slightly to the North, to the little town of Warwick, where they enjoy the benefits of life in a location about 2.7 miles from "the middle of nowhere".

Found this on muse0fire's blog. Not a bad score, considering how long it's been since my high school years - in fact, let's just skip that thought entirely, shall we?

I live in northwestern Massachusetts, right on the New Hampshire border. In fact, you can practically throw a rock from my deck into New Hampshire. So when it comes to New England's famous fall foliage, I'm right in the middle of it. If you'd like to see what it's like, click here.

I took all of these photos within 500 feet of my front door. When I think that people come hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to see foliage like this, I feel pretty good about the place I choose to live in. In spite of those winters.

While they were examining what seemed to be every part of me when I was on the table at the Worcester Trauma Center last December, they discovered a growth on my thyroid. They told me to talk about it with my doctor; he sent me for an ultrasound last February, to see if the growth, or nodule, as he called it, had increased in size from when it had been discovered. Apparently there was neither increase nor decrease, and so he started the process of scheduling a biopsy to make certain there was nothing cancerous there.

Time passed, and no biopsy had been scheduled, so I sort of hoped that things would all blow over. After all, the doctor said that 4 out of 5 of such growths are benign, so the odds were pretty good in my favor. But then I started to think: that means that 20 out of every 100 nodules is cancerous. What are the odds that I drew the short straw? And don't we all worry about cancer at times?

Also, the biopsy procedure, called a fine needle aspiration, seemed rather unpleasant as described here.

So in late May, I had another ultrasound, with the result that a biopsy was scheduled for early June.

To shorten the narrative, I had the biopsy, it wasn't very pleasant, but the nodule turned out to be benign. And my doctor, bless his heart, let me know the minute he got the report from the radiologist, so I wouldn't spend an entire weekend worrying.

At about 3:30 AM Saturday morning, the power went out here. We're used to summer power outages, so I sleepily called Mass Electric to report it and went back to bed. At 7:00 AM when I got up, the power was still off, so I called again, to be assured that crews were working on my problem and that it might take some time. We finally got our power back around 10:30 AM, breathed sighs of relief and got on with our lives. It was chilly, so I didn't go for my daily walk until the afternoon. Imagine my surprise when I got to our property line and saw the road coated with sawdust and wood chips, with large hunks of tree trunk and branches on either side of the road. A fairly big tree had snapped during a strong wind gust, and brought down the power line as it fell.



Yes, we had had our first personal power outage, affecting only our house!

There was other evidence of strong winds overnight: our pool umbrella had blown over the fence and was lodged in our catalpa tree. Plants were bent down and petals were strewn everywhere. Fortunately, the damage was minimal and things are now back to normal in the garden.

Although it has been a fairly wet month so far, the perennials and lawn are loving all that lovely moisture! Over the years we've put in quite a number of flowering trees and shrubs, making our place look fabulous in the months of May and June. You can see some of them here.

I'm particularly fond of the weeping cherry. It's planted at the top of a slope, so the branches hang down in a most attractive way. Incidentally, the blue you see in the background of some of these pictures is the Warwick sky. It's almost unreal, but that's the way it can be out here in the middle of nowhere.

For those who would enjoy seeing some of the many spring flowers in our gardens, I've put up some photographs here.

Spring has finally come to Warwick. Each year we look forward to that time when the snow is gone (at least, for now) and the hundreds of bulbs we have planted over the years begin to poke through the ground. The crocuses were the first to appear, and now we have squill, anemone and daffodils starting to bloom. My favorites of late have been the miniature daffodils. Each of these flowers is about 4" tall.

In late January I flew down to Virginia to spend four days with my daughter Signe and her husband Paul. They live a few minutes from Dulles International, so it's only a ten minute drive to their house from the airport. Their town, Herndon, VA, is a great place to live, with restaurants, coffee shops, and supermalls within walking distance or a short drive away. There is a wonderful walking/bicycle path practically in their back yard, so that Signe (or Paul!) can easily accompany me on my walks. And they did.

It was a wonderful visit. I overindulged in my favorite ethnic foods; we had takeout from Indian and Afghan restaurants, and had lunch at a Vietnamese pho place.

I spent a lot of time exploring Paul's collection of opera DVDs. He has hundreds, if not thousands! We are both aficionados of classical music, particularly piano music and opera, so we do a lot of exploring and discussing. And did I mention Paul's grand piano? He (and his fabulous piano) are the motivators for my renewed interest in playing piano again. I developed an ulnar entrapment almost 25 years ago, and basically gave up my second job of playing jazz at local nightspots and for weddings. I had been trained as a classical pianist, but had never been able to earn money with that skill! Less than a year ago Paul convinced me to "play though" some Schubert sonatas, and I found, to my surprise, that I could play again, albeit only for short periods of time. But with daily practice sessions it turned out that I could play whole sonata movements without my right hand tiring. Of course I can't play them perfectly yet, but who knows? Maybe more practice...

The photo of me on the walking/bicycle path (last September) shows just how fancy it is. It was once a rail line, so it is straight and level, with bridges over major roads.

This is just a test. I'm trying to figure out how to display images in my LJ entries. Nothing to see here. Move along.

After the Fall I had several weeks of headaches and disorientation. My GP told me it was a concussion and that the effects would last for a while. But a couple of weeks ago things started looking up, so I began my daily walks once again. So far so good, although two miles (= 40 minutes) pretty much exhausts me. I'll build up to four miles daily again, I'm sure, but slo-o-owly. I'll report on last week's trip to visit my daughter in Virginia shortly. I promise!