Body Breakdown...

 

Well, as we get older and our bodies break down, things happen we don't expect.

I've been a fat person most of my life, and took up walking seriously about 10 years ago. While it didn't really help me lose weight, I wasn't gaining weight, my back improved dramatically, and it gave me a lot more confidence about what I could do. I walked 16 miles in a day on two different days in 2015, and at least 10 miles a day a few dozen times over the years. My average was 4-5 miles a day over 10 years.

 

The last few years, I've not had the energy to walk as much as I'd like. My legs hurt or just felt funny. 

 

The first few times this happened, it seemed to be due to being on statins for a long time. I was on statins for 11 years without any side effects, and then started taking statin breaks. After a few weeks, I'd start feeling better and I could increase my walking. But then my cholesterol would zoom back up again so I'd go back on statins.

 

Yes, I have improved my eating habits. But that's no enough.

 

Anyway, last year when I took a statin break, it took 4 months before I started feeling better, which was weird. I also had very severe pain in my legs at night a few times. My old doctor sent me for some testing (including a nerve conduction test, yuck). Everything came back normal. 

 

I felt better in September and October, got a new doctor, and went on a statin-like drug (Xetia) which is supposed to not have the side effects that statins have. But within a few weeks, I was having trouble with my legs again. At Boskone, I could not keep up with a group walking a few blocks away for dinner one night and I had leg pain all weekend long.

 

After dithering, I went back to my new doctor, complaining about the problems I was having. She wanted me to have another nerve conduction test which I resisted since the one last year added up to nothing. But she told me to get a spinal X-ray and a bunch of blood tests. And then she said she didn't think I was having side effects from the drug, she thought I might have spinal stenosis.

 

Got my blood test and my X-ray. X-ray confirmed spinal stenosis. It basically means some nerves to other parts of my body are getting compressed by the vertebra. It's degenerative, but for severe cases (and mine is just mild), sometimes they do surgery. A hallmark of this condition appears to be back pain, which I haven't had; so far it's mostly been leg pain. All the blood tests came back fine, so the constant fatigue seems a little odd - my sleeping has generally improved over the last 2 years.

 

This is a very odd condition, because some days I feel pretty good. But just 2 nights ago, I had pain bad enough I couldn't get out of my chair to get aspirin, I had to ask Jim to get it for me.

 

Just 5 years ago, we hiked for 3 days on the Dingle Penninsula. I'd hoped I could still do hiking like that, but since the fall, I've been having trouble standing for 2 hours of volunteer work.

 

The good news is, we have excellent insurance and a house where I can mostly avoid stairs. But I would rather spend our retirement money on travel than on rehab.

 

Today I'll be calling the physical therapy folks at the nearby hospital to set up some PT sessions.

Barbie vs. Bella. (Spoilers Galore)

I saw Barbie last summer and really enjoyed it.  It was charming, delightful and a bit threatening.  It had the production design of a Malibu Barbie Dream House. Margot Robbie gave an excellent performance.  It had two very touching moments - the famous America Ferrara speech (which most women were silently cheering as she spoke) and the "Blue Fairy" scene with Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler, made Barbie a real, live person.  As I was never a Barbie kid, I didn't expect to like it as much as I did.

The ending:  Funny, Barbie makes the choice to be an utterly mundane women.

I saw Poor Things last fall and really enjoyed it.  It was sometimes charming, fascinating and very threatening in places.  It had the production, costume and make-up design of a crazy child, as if Bella herself was designing the movie.  Emma Stone gave a very raw performance.  Poor Things wasn't touching in the way the Barbie was, but it was much more dangerous.

The ending: A bit creepy but mostly uplifting.  An average rich Victorian afternoon with overtones of The Freaks.

Both movies have a very similar theme - a woman creating herself.

Poor Things was a better movie as it's much more audacious than Barbie, but Barbie was very enjoyable and much more accessible.

Post 2024 Oscars:  I predicted Poor Things would win Best Make-up, Best Costumes and Best Production Design.  I really enjoyed Emma Stone's committed performance in Poor Things, but thought Lily Gladstone would win for her very quiet performance in Killers of the Flower Moon.  But the Oscars followed the BAFTAs in almost all ways and Emma Stone won.

Even though it won only 1 Oscar, the cast/crew of Barbie made the Oscar Ceremony more fun than it had been in years.  Ryan Gosling's "I'm Just Ken" was an absolute riot and it was great to involve the audience the way it did.

A Long-Ago Death Too Soon...And One Lucky Woman

I just cried over a relative I've never met.

Been doing some genealogy, and found a relative I was particularly fond of had no mother listed in his records (haven't found his birth records, but she doesn't appear in later census records for his family). I thought that was strange and perhaps she'd left the family and that was why she didn't exist on paper.

Nope.

Just poked a bit and found her death certificate. She died leaving young children.

She died before WWII of staphylcoccol septicemia. This was not a terribly uncommon thing to die of before there were antibiotics to fight blood poisoning. 

But...there was also this phrase "septic abortion - natural."

This meant, she'd had a miscarriage, but not all of of the embryo or fetus was expelled as part of the miscarriage. It's the sort of thing that American women generally haven't died from in 50 years, between the availability of antibiotics and the fact that most doctors check a woman who's had a miscarriage to make sure whether there's any pregnancy-related tissue remaining in the uterus. Because if it isn't all expelled or removed, the woman can die of blood poisoning.

As this relative did.

She had a miscarriage on about 8/22. I don't know when she first went to a doctor (again, she had young children at home and I don't think the family had much money). Her death certificate states that she had an operation on 8/27. I'm guessing by that point, a doctor could remove an incomplete miscarriage without being accused of giving her an abortion. But it was too late and she died on 9/8. Just 16 days from miscarriage to her own death.

We're in a situation in some states where more women will die like this again, making doctors fearful to check whether a woman has had a complete miscarriage. At least women in those right-suppressing states in that horrible situation might be able to get antibiotics and pain pills and might get to live.

My own mother was in a similar situation decades later. After three miscarriages and three children, the fetus she was carrying died five months into her pregnancy. She went to her doctor who told her "I can't do anything until you go into labor."

My mother, being overly polite in 1960, did not scream "What do you mean, there's nothing you can do? The baby is already dead." but went home to wait.

She had to care for 3 children under the age of 4. She had to tell people who congratulated her on her pregnancy that her baby was already dead. She had the risk of going septic while she waited.

She was lucky - she went into labor five weeks later and delivered her stillborn baby. She did not go septic and leave three young children without a mother. 

 

 

Improving Your Investments: How NOT to Be Dumb Money (Usually), Part 3

Part 1

Part 2

By 1993, we had lived in Massachusetts for 11 years, had investments in stocks and 401ks and had bought our first house.  But, we felt we needed a change, and Jim had an opportunity to work at a small software company in Pittsburgh.  Our challenge in early June of that year, just after Leslie had finished 7th grade, was to find a house in the Pittsburgh area, then pack and prepare our Massachusetts house for sale.

We gave ourselves one day to find the new house so we could return to Massachusetts.

Since Jim had grown up in the Pittsburgh area and I'd lived there for four years, we knew we wanted to live in the South Hills.  We wanted to be close to mass transit since Jim's new job would be in the city.  We made one decision that was simultaneously good and bad.  We had savings but not enough for a house down payment.  So Jim chose to cash out his 401k which would give us about $40,000 for a house down payment, some new home fix-up, and for the extra taxes we'd have to pay the next year on cashing out the 401k.

Pittsburgh houses were cheaper than Massachusetts houses, so we knew we could find a house for less than we'd paid for our first house.  I'm not sure how many houses we looked at that day; at least 6 and maybe 8.  We looked at houses in Mt. Lebanon, Upper Saint Clair and Bethel Park.  Our agent kept driving by a little house for sale which was across from the high school in Mt. Lebanon.  We finally looked at it late in the afternoon, a bit reluctantly as it looked too small.  It turned out to be larger than we expected - the attic was finished and it had a master bedroom addition off the second floor.  While it was about a 70 year old house, it was in reasonable shape and shouldn't need too much work.  We put in an offer for full price which was accepted.

Three weeks later, Jim moved to Pittsburgh to start his new job; he lived with his godparents for a few weeks until he could start to move into the new house.  I remained in Massachusetts, working on packing and getting our house ready for the market.  Once Jim closed on our Mt. Lebanon house, I put Leslie on a plane to Pittsburgh so she could adjust to her new home.

In 1993, the usually hot Massachusetts housing market had cooled a bit.  We got an offer on our old house that was a little low, but we took it so I could move to the Pittsburgh area.  The inspection found a couple of minor problems - we needed to rebuild the wooden stairs into the house.  I hired a friend to rebuild the stairs, then quit my job and moved south.

But...almost as soon as I got to Pittsburgh, there were more problems with buyers.  Now they were demanding cosmetic changes.  It was one thing after the other and so...we pulled out of the deal.  That was a risky decision - we now had two mortgages to pay.  We thought the Massachusetts house would sell pretty fast.

We were wrong.

There weren't a lot of tech writing jobs available when I got to Pittsburgh.  I think I only sent out one or two resumes, and I needed a job immediately so we could cover two mortgages.  It turned out, we were only 2 miles from a Borders Book Store that was looking for a new bookseller.  I did the math and realized the Borders job would just about cover 1 mortgage each month.  I aced their test and found out they really wanted someone with computer experience to oversee their computer book section, so I was hired and started the next day.

We were very cautious with money during this time.  Since I got a book discount, we bought more books.  And we went to the movies.  That was about it.  Jim's new job had a 401k so we started investing in that as soon as we could.  We still had some Stratus stock, but I learned I was a terrible market timer.  We held onto our Stratus stock until it fell to $2 a share - way too long.  Eventually, the company was bought and disappeared.  But because we were very careful, we managed to avoid adding non-mortgage-related debt at that time, even if we weren't expanding our investments.

Eight months after we pulled out of the deal on our Massachusetts house, it finally sold but for even less than we expected.  The new price covered what was left of the mortgage; I think we got a check for about $500 after the mortgage on the old house was paid off.

I stayed at Borders about a year, then found another tech writing job.  It wound up being kind of an odd job with very strange politics.  When my boss and his assistant quit a few months later, I decided to leave with them.  I'd had an introduction to the World Wide Web at that job, and learned HTML right away,  I started building Web pages.  For a few months, you could make $30 an hour if you could code HTML, so I made a little money at that.  Soon, there was software that would edit HTML for you, so HTML coding quickly became a minimum wage job.

Found another tech writing job with a miserable commute.  I only lasted there about six months as the commute was pretty wearing.

Finally got a tech writing job that I liked at an interesting company called ANSYS.  The pay was good, and the company had a stock purchase plan as well as a 401k.  I was able to invest in both.

After about four rocky years, we were able to save and invest more seriously.  We started to travel and set money aside for Leslie for college.

I remember in the 1970s there was a book called something like "Your Wealth-Building Years."  For us, our wealth-building years were finally starting.