The Hump

If you're not a fan of the movie Young Frankenstein, please don't read any further.


Not long ago when my brother, JC was having cataract surgery done at our local hospital, one of the nurses remarked,”I know a rather brilliant surgeon. Perhaps he can help you with that hump.”
“What hump?” JC asked.
The male nurse introduced himself:
“I'm Bill Blucher, (somewhere in the distance a horse whinnied) and I think Doctor Stein could help you.”
“Who's doctor Stein?”
“Doctor Frank Stein is the foremost hump remover on the Oregon coast.”
“I'll think about it,” JC answered, shaking his head, “What hump?” he mumbled as he left the hospital.

Several weeks later while we were sipping wine on his deck, JC surprised me by saying, “I think I'll get this hump removed!”
“What hump?” I said, trying to be polite.
“You know, the one on the left side of my back.
“I thought it was on the right side,” I said.

I first met Doctor Stein in the pre-op room at the hospital, just before JC's operation. He was a frail man, but the fire in his eyes showed a glimmer of his genius. He introduced himself and then began a speech that I felt he had given many times.

“From that fateful day when stinking bits of slime first crawled from the sea and shouted to the cold stars, "I am man,"our greatest dread has always been the knowledge of our mortality. But today, we shall hurl the gauntlet of science into the frightful face of death itself. Today, we shall ascend into the heavens. We shall mock the earthquake. We shall command the thunders, and penetrate into the very womb of impervious nature herself!”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” he said, seeing the confused look on my face, “I'm afraid I get carried away.” He carefully drew an arrow to the hump on my brothers back with a magic marker. “This is just so we don't make any mistakes,” he said, “Sometimes these humps can be quite elusive.”

As nurse Blucher rolled JC into the operating room, I thought I heard the crackle and hum of electricity, but it was probably just my imagination. I retired to the waiting room and read several out dated issues of Family Circle, Time Magazine, and Neurology News before I finally gave up and went out to the parking lot and my car.

I opened a book I'd borrowed from JC and read until my butt got tired of the car seat, then I walked back into the waiting room just in time to hear the receptionist call my name.
“Doctor Stein wants to talk to you,” she said, “Do you remember how to get to the surgery pre-op?”
I told her that I could find it in my sleep and after getting lost and asking for directions twice, a nurse led me to my meeting with Dr. Stein.

The doctor told me to sit, and then began: “From that fateful day when stinking bits... Oh wait, wrong speech. Your brother's fine. The operation was successful and we removed the hump from the left side of his back.”
“I thought it was on the right side,” I started to say, but thought better of it.
“He'll be fine, he just needs to take it easy for a couple of weeks. I've written a prescription for antibiotics, pain pills and electroshock if he needs it.”

I resisted the urge to yell, “It's alive!” as I opened the curtain to my brother's recovery cubicle and watched as nurse Blucher removed the IV's and helped JC get dressed and into a wheel chair for the trip out to the parking lot. At the car he shook the nurses hand and thanked him for his help.
“Blucher,” (a horse whinnied in the distance,) where have I heard that name before?” JC asked.
“Oh my grandmother was famous in the old country, but please don't say my last name anymore. I get tired of hearing that damned horse whinny!”











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A good day on the lake

Yesterday was a good day on the lake.

I decided to make a quick, early morning kayak-fishing trip as soon as I saw the stars shining down from a cloudless sky. Around seven I grabbed my little tackle box, stuck it on its Velcro strips in front of the kayaks cockpit and dropped my ultralight rod, with a reel which I've had since 1958, in beside my canvas creel and the new net Brad gave me for father's day.

It only takes about 5 minutes to drag my nine foot kayak on its little lawnmower wheeled cart from our house to Eckman Lake. The put-in that I dug out several years ago is getting overgrown with weeds and grass, so it took a little effort to slide in, but soon I was gliding across the smooth, glassy water. The sun was just starting to peek over the trees on the east shore, so I stopped in a sunny spot to rig up my rod. I've used the same home made spinners for years now; the orange and black beads and brass blade seem to work better than anything else I've tried. A few days ago I'd decided to bend down the barbs on the treble hooks to make it easier to release fish without harming them.

I decided to try a few casts, even though I was still quite a way from my favorite spot. On the second cast a big trout hit my lure, hard! My reel handle was spinning backwards, (the drag hasn't worked for 20 years!) and the kayak was turning, starting to follow the fish. I hope he doesn't jump, I thought, remembering the barbless hooks and how easily they came out. Then I could feel him shaking his head and suddenly he was gone. I reeled in and exchanged the spinner for another one with barbed hooks.

I paddled to my “sweet spot,” lining up a bush on the south shore with a power pole on the north side, a cat road on the west with a road sign on the east, and I was ready to fish! It was still in the shade so it felt much cooler, and there were clouds of steam rising from the water.

I used to think that my “sweet spot” was the old creek channel, but after running some temperature checks with a digital thermometer I found just one tiny spot that was ten degrees cooler than the rest of the lake, so it probably is a fresh water spring and the cold water attracts the trout.

A few casts later, I hooked into a ten incher and he did a typical Rainbow Trout fight, a couple of fast runs, splashing and jumping all the way. I reeled him in and released him by grabbing the hook with needle nose pliers, turning it upside down and letting him flop loose without touching him. They come off much easier with barbless hooks, but then as I had just found out, so do the keepers.

A slight north wind had started up, blowing me past my spot. I paddled back to the south far enough so that the wind would carry me back across it and started casting.

Another big fish hit, and as soon as the kayak started to follow him and my reel handle began its knuckle busting, backward spin I knew it was a keeper. I saw the taut four pound test line began to rise and I knew he was going to jump. He cleared the water and I got a good look at him before he took off on another run that made my line sizzle through the water. This is a good one! I thought, as I slid my Father's Day net out and put it in my lap.

He had towed me over to shallower water and then he did something that Rainbows seldom do, he went for the bottom. The bottom of the lake, especially in the shallow water, is covered in great blobs of moss and I tried to keep him from getting tangled in one. He managed to get a fair sized glob tangled in the hooks and then took off for deeper water, pulling me and my boat behind him. I began to think that there was no way I could ever land him.

He jumped again several times, and he kept trying to get behind me, spinning the kayak around in a circle. I could tell he was tiring, he was fighting both me and the glob of moss hanging from the lure. I usually try to land a fish on the left side of my boat but this one just wouldn't co-operate, so I switched my rod to my left hand and picked up the net with my right. Several times I got him in close enough to make a stab at netting him but he was almost too big for the net and I kept flubbing it. Once I had him in the net, but he flopped out before I could lift him into the boat.

Finally I got it right and put him, still in the net, between my legs on the kayak floor, broke down my rod and paddled for the boat dock where I always take out, and home.

The beautifully colored Rainbow was 19 inches long and weighed 3 pounds. I had a half of one of the bright orange fillets for lunch today.

The Lake

The weather's been so lousy and I've been so lazy, that I've either been in front of the TV or the computer for weeks now.

I had almost forgotten how great it is to drag my kayak over to the lake, the little home made wheels rattling over the roadside gravel, sliding it in through the grass and reeds, and heaving a sigh of relief as I glide out onto the early morning, glassy water.

Usually there are streamers of mist rising from the warm surface and some mornings there's a fog bank sitting over the lake, until the sun rises far enough to burn it off.

My senses welcome a flight of Canadian Geese honking overhead, their wings beating the air, the deep thrum of a large Bullfrog somewhere along the shoreline, the warning cry of a mother Osprey when I near her power line nest and the splash of a feeding Rainbow trout as I stop paddling and let the north wind push me to my favorite fishing spot.

Sometimes I don't even fish, I just sit and relax, watching Kingfishers diving for minnows or Otters poking their heads out of the water and curiously looking at me before submerging (and probably catching more trout than I will.)

When I let the wind carry me into the shallow water at the lakes edge, I can watch schools of minnows and tadpoles, clouds of freshwater shrimp and insects swimming through the moss and water plants, and once in a while a startled turtle will slide off of a log where I interrupted his enjoyment of the morning sun.

When I'm fishing I release most of what I catch, sometimes keeping one for breakfast the next day, or if it's a really big one, taking it home to brag about. My casting skills are deteriorating as the Parkinson's advances, and as far as tying a blood knot with my shaky hands, forget it!

I'm just glad that I can enjoy myself on the lake, whether I'm fishing, or just drifting with the wind, watching and listening.

Roadkill Raccoon

No, Carol didn't hit me!

My old droopy eye lids were sagging down over my eyes so much that my peripheral vision was just about nonexistent. (Gravity seems to be the enemy of getting old.)
The eye doctor had suggested that I get a Blepharoplasty ( Easy for him to say!) over a year ago, but I kept putting it off. Finally, a couple of weeks ago I gave up and made an appointment for the surgery.

He explained that he'd cut away the excess skin that was drooping over my eyes and after some healing I'd be like new again, and look years younger! “As long as I don't look like the runaway bride!” I told him.

I remained semi awake through most of the surgery, floating happily along on the anesthesia. The swallowing problems I have because of Parkinson's caused me to start coughing and gagging at one point, but it passed and he didn't cut off my nose or anything, so I guess it wasn't a big problem.

At home after the surgery, I faithfully applied ice packs for 20 minutes every hour for the first day to keep down the swelling, and slept with my head elevated. The next morning when I looked in the bathroom mirror, a strange black and blue and yellow image peered out at me. It looked like a raccoon that had been in an accident... a roadkill raccoon!

Carol and I are going to our great-grandson Aiden's fourth birthday party today and I think I'd better keep my sunglasses on, or great grandpa might just scare the heck out of him!

Hero

Carol retired from driving the ambulance last month.

She's been on call five days a week or more since May of 2001, sometimes answering as many as four or five calls in one day, sometimes none. She has logged well over 2,000 runs since she started and she's received countless compliments and thanks from patients for her kindness while helping the paramedics.

Tony Mooney, the head paramedic and assistant fire chief, credits her with being "the smoothest driver he's ever ridden with." (Contrary to popular opinion, speed isn't the most important thing in driving an ambulance.)

The days when Carol was impatiently waiting, and her radio stayed silent were the most difficult, but when the Waldport "tone" sounded she would grab the radio, her fire department jacket, give me a running kiss and be out the door. One time she got in the car with the TV remote control instead of the radio but I caught her in time. Taz even learned to recognize the Waldport tone and when it sounded he would start barking, adding to the excitement.

It's nice knowing that whatever we're doing, like eating lunch or her giving me a haircut won't be interrupted any more, but I know she misses it dearly.

Noodling

The other day I watched a TV show about "Noodling," which is essentially sticking your hand into a big catfish's mouth and wrestling him out of the water. It brought back the memory of a hot summer day on the Verde River in Cottonwood, Arizona.

Carol was sitting on a half submerged lawn chair in the middle of the river, drinking pop and lazily fishing, while Rick, our youngest son and I were swimming and goofing off downstream. We splashed our way around a bend in the river, when Rick yelled, "Hey dad! A big catfish just swam under the bank over here!"

I dog paddled over, but even though the water was fairly clear I couldn't see anything.
"He's right under there!" Rick said.
We had heard about noodling from some of the old-timers, but I never thought that I'd want to try it.
"See if you can catch him, dad!"

I summoned up some courage and carefully reached down under the bank. My fingers brushed up against the slippery side of a big fish and I immediately yanked them back .
"Yep, he's there all right!" I said shakily.

"I heard that if you tickle their belly, it hypnotizes them, then you can stick your hand in their mouth and just pull them out!"
Rick was trying to make it sound easy, but I didn't see him sticking his hand down any giant fish's mouth. In fact he had backed a safe distance away. I reached down again and tentatively slid my hand under the fish's belly. I was just barely able to keep my mouth above the water while I attempted to do my best fish belly tickle.
"Boy, he is big!" I gurgled.
"Is he hypnotized yet, dad?"
"It's kind of hard to tell, Rick. He sure seems to enjoy being tickled, though."

Tiring of all the foreplay, I took a deep breath, slid my fingers up to his gaping mouth and grabbed his lower lip. The fight was on!

"I don't think I hypnotized him enough!" I yelled, as the big fish started thrashing back and forth. I thought he was going to yank my arm off, and I gladly would have let go, but he had clamped his mouth shut on my hand and it was a toss up as to who was catching who.

"Don't let go of him, dad!" Rick yelled from the bank, where he had found a safer place to watch the fight.
My arm felt like it was about a foot longer than it used to be, and I was sure my hand was missing some fingers. Gathering what was left of my strength, I made a mighty heave and flopped the struggling catfish up onto the bank beside a wide eyed Rick, who quickly jumped back into the river.

If you've ever caught a catfish, you know that they are hard to kill, and this one was no exception. I picked up a rock with my left hand and smashed it down on top of his head, which resulted in squashing my fingers, still in his mouth, even more. Finally he opened his mouth to gasp for water and I yanked my hand free. I laid beside the still flopping fish, rubbing my throbbing arm and counting my fingers.
“Are you OK, dad?”
“Oh yeah, that was easy!” I said, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice, “Let's go show mom!”

As we rounded the bend in the river, I held the big fish behind my back, hiding it from Carol's view. When she saw us she grinned and held up a stringer with several ten inch catfish to show us. When we got closer I showed her the big fish, and Rick proudly yelled, “ Look what dad and I caught!”

Family?

Recently I joined a group of Parkinson's patients to have my DNA sequenced. Normally this costs $299.00, but thanks to funding from the co-founder of Google, Sergei Brin, we were only charged $25.00. The purpose is to find if there are any common genetic markers in Parkinson's sufferers.
I received what they delicately labeled a "spit kit" in the mail, drooled into it and sent it off by Fed Express to" 23 and Me," a genetics lab. About a month later my results came back.

I found that my genes show that my Parkinson's wasn't inherited, so I probably acquired it by inhaling bug spray or laquer thinner or God knows what else over the last 70 years. Along with scads of data, there was a section on maternal and paternal chromosomes and family prehistory. It seems that mom's side of my DNA shows a pretty common group of Europeans originating in Scandinavia. However, when I looked at the paternal, Y Chromosome side I found this:

Haplogroup R1b1c9

Your Y chromosome DNA determines your paternal haplogroup.

Today R1b1c9 is found mostly on the fringes of the North Sea in England, Germany and the Netherlands, where it reaches levels of one-third. That distribution suggests that some of the first men to bear the haplogroup in their Y-chromosomes were residents of Doggerland, a real-life Atlantis that was swallowed up by rising seas in the millennia following the Ice Age.

Doggerland was a low-lying region of forests and wetlands that must have been rich in game; today, fishing trawlers in the North Sea occasionally dredge up the bones and tusks of the Mastodons that roamed there. Doggerland had its heyday between about 12,000 years ago, when the Ice Age climate began to ameliorate, and 9,000 years ago, when the meltwaters of the gradually retreating glaciers caused sea levels to rise, drowning the hunter's paradise. Doggerland's inhabitants retreated to the higher ground that is now the North Sea coast.

Dogger what? The lost continent of Doglantis? Truly, I could never have dreamed up a weirder family history.

JC's Awning

After our first Three Stooges attempt at installing an RV awning on the side of JC's mobile home, we sat back, sipped a little wine and slowly came up with several new plans of attack.
Then lo and behold one day when I walked up for my daily visit, there it was in all its glory!
JC had won the battle single handed!
Since then we've spent many enjoyable hours sitting on his deck protected from the rain and sometimes even the sun!

New project

I may have bitten off more than I can chew this time.

We've been keeping an eye on our ex-boss and friend's river front house while they spend the winter in warmer and less rainy places. Joanne moved to Hawaii and then when the volcano fumes got too strong, she came back for a short time, and then went to her brother's home south of San Diego. Laura, her daughter, went to their home in southern France.

Around the first of the year she called and asked if we would oversee the crew that was going to tear down their old dilapidated boat dock. We agreed, and told her that we would take pictures as the work progressed.

When the foreman told us that the wood would be taken to the dump to be disposed of, I asked if they could dump it off at our house instead, so I could saw it up for firewood. They happily agreed and a few days later the first trailer load showed up.

The old Cedar and Fir, rough-sawed timbers and dimensional lumber had been torn apart, loaded on a barge and floated a couple of miles down river to the boat ramp where it was winched on to a 26 foot flat bed trailer and then hauled by truck to our front yard. It was difficult backing the trailer into our driveway, but by stopping traffic on the highway and a lot of back and forthing they managed it.

After I helped throw off the first trailer load the foreman asked me, "There should be at least two more loads like this, are you sure you want it all?"
I looked at the huge pile of soggy, barnacle encrusted, nail infested lumber, swallowed, and said, "Sure, I'll take it!"

Now my work's cut out for me!

Medical Marijuana Test #2

3/11/2009

4:05 am:
Taz growled me awake, I got dressed, put the coffee on and we went outside for our morning pee.

4:15 am:
I got a fire going in the fireplace, poured a cup of coffee and sat down in front of the computer. While it was booting up I realized that it would be a good time to try one of the medical marijuana cookies I'd been given, to see if they would help with my Parkinson's tremors. The marijuana cigarette experiment a few weeks earlier had mostly been a failure.

4:30 am:
I washed the weird tasting chocolate chip cookie down with hot coffee while I was surfing my usual morning web sites.

4:40 am:
Right in the middle of reading the Drudge Report my eyes went out of focus.

4:45 am:
I realized that I'd been staring at the same out of focus article for about five minutes, and that I'd better go lie down. I tried to close down the browser and go off line but I couldn't remember how. I squinted my eyes really hard, concentrated, and managed to find the red X to shut down Firefox. I tried to stand up and almost fell, so I crawled on my hands and knees into the living room and up onto the couch where I started flying through the air. Unfortunately it wasn't that good kind of flying like Superman, it was more like uncontrollable tumbling.

4:47am:
Taz jumped up on my chest and licked my face. My vision cleared enough that I could see the digital clock in the TV stand. I closed my eyes and I was upside down going through bright bands of color, still rolling and tumbling. I didn't want to fight the weird sensations so I tried to relax, but the tremors in my hands increased and some new jerks and tics in my neck and legs started. About fifteen minutes went by before I opened my eyes and looked at the clock.

4:47 am:
How could that be? Now I was floating among the colors, lost in space somewhere. Taz began licking my hand, which usually drives me nuts because it tickles. I tried to move it but I couldn't move anything. I was paralyzed, and I was starting to get sick to my stomach. I concentrated on trying to move and all of a sudden the paralysis was gone, and I was back on my trip. In a little while I opened my eyes again.

4:47 am:
Either the clock had stopped or marijuana has the property of stopping time. Now I was really getting sick, so I struggled to get Taz off of me and stand up. I weaved around and staggered a step or two before I fell to my knees and crawled into the bathroom. I barely made it in time, and although I hadn't eaten anything since lunch the day before, I barfed up a Technicolor nightmare. I remember thinking, I never ate anything like that! I staggered to my feet and wobbled over to the washbasin to wash my face and rinse out my mouth, but before I could start I began retching, and had to kneel before the throne again.

5:00 am:
Using the support of the bathroom fixtures, walls, and furniture I got back to the couch, and shivering, I covered myself with a nearby afghan. The fire was dying down, but I didn't trust myself to mess with it. Taz hopped up to help keep me warm and I sank into a deep sleep.

7:00am:
I was supposed to wake Carol up at 6:00 am, but I was totally zonked out. I remember hearing her stoking the fire and I know she put her hand on my forehead, but when I woke up she was gone on an ambulance run. I alternated between sleeping and throwing up stuff I hadn't eaten the rest of the day.

I think medical marijuana test #2 was also a failure. For the next test, a small piece of cookie?