Still Not Dying

That was the view from the window of the endoscopy unit yesterday. It looks kind of magical, with those rooftops and spires beyond the trees. But isn't that a gloomy sky? I had several conversations yesterday with people whose first impulse was to complain about our wet and chilly spring. It's 55º F (or 12.7º C) this morning as I write.

Today's the last day of school, when we have our annual luncheon with speeches for the leavers and that kind of thing. Normally it's mighty warm -- I've been known to wear shorts and short-sleeved shirts in past years -- and we prop the doors of the gym open for more air. But this year, I'm thinking not! In fact yesterday I wore a sweater and a jacket to the hospital.

So, yes, my colonoscopy went fine. The doctor found four polyps which he removed, and he said they didn't look dangerous. Interestingly, they were all in the ascending colon, the part nearest the appendix, which is not usually where cancers develop. The transverse and sigmoid segments of my colon were clean. He took a few random tissue samples for biopsy to try to see why my calprotectin levels were abnormally high on my recent blood tests. I'll get all those lab results right before we leave for Argentina and Brazil at the end of the month.

So here's what I think all this means. I think the root cause of all my discomfort and inflammation is too much stomach acid, exacerbated -- as much as I hate to admit it -- by alcohol and coffee. I think it has affected my lungs, giving me a chronic cough and the slightly thickened airways (bronchiectasis) we've seen on past CT scans. I think it flares up into acute gastritis at certain times, like when I fly to L.A., forget my stomach medication and drink a lot of martinis, and then takes a while to settle down. I suspect the calprotectin was elevated because of the gastritis.

And of course in my mind I turn all of that into cancer, because, well, I'm crazy.

I have one more medical adventure, and that is an ultrasound on Sunday (!). The doctors want to take a closer look at my spleen, which has been shown by several scans to have some sort of cyst or bump on it. It was the only abnormality flagged on my CT scan from early May -- they called it a hemangioma, a benign growth of extra blood vessels, like a birthmark -- but the bottom line is no one's quite sure what it is. I'm not too concerned because primary cancer of the spleen is rare and everyone seems pretty certain it's benign, but it might still need attention. Such growths usually don't cause symptoms but I suppose I might be feeling it now and then. Who knows.

Isn't this fun? Talking about my spleen?

I spent yesterday morning partly in the garden, when we had a brief period of sun, and partly on the couch. I even got some things done around the house, like vacuuming and laundry. I felt pretty darn productive considering all that was going on with my abdomen!

I did indeed have beef broth for lunch, and I was actually surprised that I felt so normal. I can see why some people like to fast. It was kind of liberating not having to think about food. Maybe I'll make it a habit! (Probably not.)

As you can see, there's still lots happening in the garden, despite the chilly weather. The pink Asiatic lily is just opening, and that foxglove (above) is possibly my favorite out of all of them. If I save any foxglove seeds it will be those.

The actual process of the colonoscopy didn't begin until 4 p.m., but I had to be at the clinic by 3:30. I had a very chatty Italian nurse named Marta who told me all about her most recent pizza delivery in which apparently the drivers ate one of her two pizzas, and then insisted the restaurant had only sent one. "I'm never getting takeaway again," she declared. I told her I'd never heard of such a thing, but come to think of it, Dave's tortilla chips didn't arrive from Chipotle last night. Hmmm...

A Family Story

Another day, another flower. This is one of our peonies. We got varying results from the peonies this year -- the yellow intersectional peony went crazy and had more flowers than ever before, at least ten. The peony above has managed two blooms so far. And the "Bowl of Beauty," which did so well in previous years, has not a single flower or bud. You just never know.

I am in the middle of preparations for my colonoscopy, so needless to say I'm not going to work. I started last night, and the procedure is at 4 p.m. today so basically I have to sit around all day with an empty belly, which I'm not thrilled about. I'm taking Moviprep, the powdered drink mix "cleanse." It's not too terrible if you drink it quickly, but it makes me feel incredibly cold.

Anyway, I'll be glad when all this is over.

I know I seem paranoid about my gut health, but there's a reason: 

These are my paternal grandparents. I never knew my dad's father, who died at age 59 in 1964, a few years before I was born. And I barely knew my grandmother, because they lived in Riverside, California, all the way across the country from where I grew up. When I was a small child I went to California with my parents twice, but then my brother was born and my parents got divorced and my dad got remarried and there were step-siblings and everything was complicated, so we didn't go again until 1983, when I was 16. That's the only time I really met and talked to my grandmother as a semi-adult.

Anyway, people say I look like my grandfather, and I think that's true. I also think I have his body type, and I'll be 58 this year. So I am careful about gut health because of the way he died.

He was a mailman and a Boy Scout leader, and was generally very fit. He didn't drink, he wasn't overweight, he only smoked an occasional pipe (as opposed to cigarettes). So it was a surprise to everyone when he awoke one night in excruciating pain, an ambulance was called, and doctors discovered that his colon had spontaneously ruptured from undiagnosed colon cancer. He lived only a short time after that -- a matter of days, I think. He told my father he'd had no alarming symptoms -- no bleeding, no pain, no discernible weight loss. His only clue that something was amiss was that sometimes, on his mail route, he'd need to urgently find a bathroom -- and apparently that issue was never severe enough to raise a red flag.

Now, all of this is second-hand information from 60 years ago, and almost everyone who witnessed his death is now dead themselves. So who knows what really went on. But still! Scary!

To the best of my knowledge no one else in my family had colon cancer except my great-uncle on my mom's side, and that wasn't until he was a very old man. (And he beat it.) But I have had other family members with cancer, and of course my dad died from it -- though he smoked like a chimney and it was lung cancer, not colon.

So, yeah, I'm paranoid. I keep an eye on things.

I imagine I'll be lying around all day, reading and killing time. I had beef broth for dinner last night and I'll probably have beef broth for lunch today. Unlike my last colonoscopy, when I went out and bought Jell-O and ginger ale and some other stuff to see me through, this time I didn't prepare at all. So I'm just working with what we've got here at home. Clear liquids is the rule, until 2 p.m., after which I can't have anything at all.

Thank god I can still have black coffee this morning!

Mock Orange and a Hail Storm

Here's our Philadelphus, or mock orange, which is flush with blossoms at the moment. We had it trimmed when the tree guys were here in February, but you'd never know it. It's gigantic and it has basically consumed the hideous camellia. Which is fine with me.

I'm glad you all liked yesterday's mystery photos. If you'd like to see the full assortment of images I bought on Saturday, they're here, in an album on Flickr. You'll see I have a weakness for almost any photo featuring a dog!

I made fun of that woman yesterday for being proud of her dead sunflower -- and yes, I realize she was actually showing off the enormous seed head. (I still think they should have taken the picture when it had petals, but whatever.) I'm just as bad, being proud of my teasels -- which would probably continue to grow even if I tried to kill them. I'm just fascinated by these plants. They're almost five feet tall now, and the cups formed by their leaves hold a surprising amount of water -- a whole little ecosystem, as you can see.

The "flesh rose," at the side of the garden, gave us a flower this year! It's not a very healthy rose bush -- in fact at the moment I think it has three leaves -- but it did manage to squeak out a flesh-colored blossom. (And yes, I realize there are many shades of flesh, but that's still the best description I have for that color.) I cut it off so the poor plant can focus on keeping itself alive. We really should have pruned those roses to reinvigorate them.

Finally, we had a rather dramatic hail storm on Monday afternoon -- dramatic by our standards, anyway. I looked out in the garden just in time to see old, loose roses exploding from the force of the falling ice. Some of the other flowers got a bit beaten down but everything has more or less survived, from what I can tell. 

I'm still working on getting back overdue stuff. I'm down to nine pages, including teachers, which is a pretty drastic reduction from last week but still far too many for the last day of school. (Yes, students are done today! Teachers and staff have two more days, though I'm out tomorrow for medical reasons.) Hopefully even more of it will be back today.

Mysteries Not My Own

Here are some of the old, forgotten photos I picked up at the street market on Golborne Road on Saturday. These were all in a box together and it's entirely possible they're all from the same family.

I go through flea market photos pretty quickly, usually glancing at them for no more than a moment before putting them in the "buy" or "discard" pile. (And then I go through the "buy" photos again, and often discard some of those on the second pass. I try to be very selective.) It's hard to say what makes me rescue one picture over another. It's more a feeling I get than anything else. I like a sense of spontaneity -- as in the sunny backyard scene above. I like a photo that expresses liveliness, or seems to suggest some mystery or tell a story.

A successful picture, to me, engages our interest but doesn't need explaining. It stands alone in such a way that we don't need to know who the people are.

I liked these kids' expressions, and also the fact that they're happily eating fruit. So healthy!

This little picture is very mysterious. It's clearly cut from a bigger one, and it's folded in the middle as if it were carried in a wallet or locket. When folded, it's smaller than a postage stamp. And yet that kid looks so glum! Who carried it? Why this photo? Who's been cut out of it? Why is the kid's leg wrapped up that way?

On the back: "Ladywell, July 1926." (Ladywell is a neighborhood in South London -- maybe that's the Ladywell they mean?)

Imagine what these people would think if they knew this photo would be made electronically available to the whole world almost 100 years after it was taken. They'd be gobsmacked.

A typical sunny day on an English beach -- with a blanket and a sweater! I have another photo on a different beach, featuring a different person, with that same blanket. Clearly it was the family beach blanket.

These folks sure look like they're having fun, despite the weirdly industrial background. They appear to be on a boat. Are the women comparing their sweaters?

On the back:

The Chrysler Eight
The farm garage
Myself
Wilbraham Mountains in background

The only Wilbraham Mountains I can find online are in Massachusetts, so perhaps this photo is American. Not sure how it wound up at a flea market on Golborne Road!

"Why yes, I am inordinately proud of my big dead sunflower."

A Casualty

That pretty much sums up life on our bird feeder at the moment -- starlings and parakeets. With an occasional woodpecker, robin or tit thrown in for good measure.

Here's what it looks like when they're all chowing down and squabbling with each other over the food, as they do constantly:

I had to put music with that video because I shot it through a window while Dave was behind me eating potato chips and Olga was sleeping on the couch. You wouldn't have been able to hear the birds, but you would have heard a lot of crunching and snoring. Hence, music.

We had a springtime casualty in the garden yesterday. I was sitting out with Olga, reading my New Yorker while she slept next to me in the sun. The starlings were mobbing the feeder, and I watched one young starling -- so young it was still a bit fluffy and wobbly on its feet -- wander out into the grass and begin preening its new feathers. It was away from the others, and rather oblivious to any danger, it seemed to me. I smiled at how cute it was, but I also thought, "You are making yourself vulnerable."

Then I went back to my magazine, and not ten minutes later Olga appeared beside me with the young starling IN HER MOUTH. I yelled, "No! Drop it!" And she did, but the starling was not in good shape. It seemed whole, and it was breathing, but it was also twitching unnaturally. There was a bit of blood. I set it in a flower pot hoping it would revive, and I checked it over the next hour or so. It was still breathing but it couldn't stand or move much. I called a wildlife rescuer who told me to take it to a vet. I called the vet, and they said they didn't do starlings and I should call a wildlife rescuer.

I moved it to the grass beneath the bird feeder, thinking the other birds would help revive it or at least investigate. No. They ignored it completely and went on jamming their beaks with suet. Birds are cold.

After another hour, it became apparent the starling was suffering. I had to play executioner. Never mind how I did it. I'd rather not relive the memory.

I still can't believe Olga caught it. I mean, she's about 800 years old and arthritic, and although I've seen her go after pigeons, she never pays much attention to the starlings. I knew that bird was vulnerable but I was thinking of hawks and cats, not Olga! The only other time she's killed anything, as far as I know, was when she caught a young squirrel in the cemetery about nine years ago. I guess animals can't help their instincts.

After that rather traumatic morning I mowed the lawn and tried to beat back the jungle a bit. Here's the great hunter on patrol afterwards, looking for her next quarry.

I spent the afternoon scanning my rescued pictures from Saturday, organizing all my other media and reading on the couch. This morning it's cold (50º F) and rainy. Back to work for one final week!

Portobello

I woke up yesterday thinking I'd have a day of rest. I puttered around the house, poured some cereal and sat out in the garden with Olga reading "Under the Banyan Tree," a short, rather simplistic book from our school library about a runaway teenager who moves to (and ultimately helps save) a Key West motel. I checked it out because the Florida storyline appealed to me. It wasn't bad but I read the whole thing in less than two hours. Not a lot of depth.

And then I began feeling like I really needed to get out of the house. After my exhausting week, I wanted a day on my own, out and about. So I decided to head over to the Portobello Road Market to find some old, unloved photos to rescue. I haven't done a rescued photo post in a long, long time!

I took the overground and in short order found a guy on Golborne Road with boxes and boxes of old photos. I bought 26 of them -- including a few old postcards -- and now I have material for some upcoming posts.

I took my time walking down Portobello Road, which was my old stomping ground when we lived in Notting Hill. Many of the shops are different now -- for example, the mysterious Still Too Few is vacant and for rent -- but the market as a whole is the same. I wandered into an antiques arcade where I found a beautiful old print of a moth, which I considered buying until I asked the price -- £95! "It's hand-painted," said the vendor, as if that made it any less insane. (It was not hand-painted. Hand-tinted, maybe.)

I wandered right past our old flat at Longlands Court. Hard to believe we've been gone from there for ten years. I remember romping there with Dave and young, puppyish Olga in the courtyard. In the photo above, Longlands Court would be to the right where the trees are. (Yes, it was crazy living there on Saturdays, which is market day. There was a music dealer who would blast "That's Amore" by Dean Martin at top volume every single Saturday morning, over and over. I didn't see -- or hear -- him yesterday. I guess no one buys music that way anymore. He was an anachronism even ten years ago.)

I went to Daylesford, a restaurant and organic market in Westbourne Grove, for lunch -- another old stomping ground. I had a chopped salad with blue cheese dressing and then walked back to West Hampstead, through Queen's Park and Kilburn. All told I think I walked about seven miles.

This fun little creation decorated a front garden in Queen's Park.

And this little cat was the most affectionate thing I've ever seen -- it raced out of a front garden in Kilburn to give me a head bump and get some scratches, and then briefly followed me along the sidewalk before racing home again. It had otherworldly golden eyes.

Back home again, I organized my photos and caught up on blog-reading. Now I need to go back and answer comments.

Oh, and Dave and I think we've figured out the mystery of Mrs. Kravitz and her unexpected dinner delivery the other night. She and her family now appear to be out of town. We're thinking she gave us her leftovers before leaving on a journey. Which is fine, I suppose!

Grumpy

Someone slammed this closed Chinese restaurant on Finchley Road with graffiti over the past few days. I just noticed it yesterday afternoon walking home from work. Here's what it looked like before.

I'm surprised that this prime commercial space on a major north-south artery just sits vacant month after month. As I've written in the past, I will never understand commercial real estate and the lack of any urgency to find a tenant to occupy a property.

I don't have a lot of news today, but I sure am glad this week is ending. It has been brutal. Just busy as all heck and lots of needy people. I mean, I'm a library assistant, so helping people is my job, and I certainly don't mind it -- especially when they're kids. But I am always puzzled by adults who can't manage to use a catalogue to find out whether we have certain books, or can't figure out shelf signs to locate them, or who can't make their own copies, or who want us to essentially redesign our summer reading promotional materials to fit their own demands. I know I sound like a bitter crank. I think my quotient of patience is maxing out.

And overdues! Don't get me started! We only have three more days with students and I have 17 PAGES of overdue materials still out. (Eleven pages of students, the rest teachers, parents and faculty.) I have never, ever had such a terrible year for collecting stuff.

Just one more week. And really just four days, since I'm out Thursday for a colonoscopy. As I told Dave last night, you know it's bad when you would much rather have a colonoscopy than go to work!