Tag Archives: Synchronicity

After the Failed Bi-Pap Experiment

07 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Disabilities, Health, Learning from mistakes, Uncategorized

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From their own positive experiences, several people were helpful and encouraging to me about the use of C-Pap or Bi-Pap machines, and I am grateful for that. We learn along the way much about ourselves, minds and bodies, and sometimes we learn that one size does not fit all.

Shortly after my last blog report, I learned more about my failure. I had “complied” in every respect with the advice to use my Bi-Pap machine, averaging seven hours of use per night at the end. The result was paradoxical. I was suffocating, and my blood oxygen level was declining, resulting in the 70% levels referenced in my last report, and increasing unstable angina during the night. I began with a moderate obstructive apnea, aggravated by chronic sinus problems. I ended with a serious central apnea, in which the connection between brain and breathing diminished. That is not desirable. I asked that question when the process began, “Does the use of a C-Pap machine sometimes replace the body’s own natural automatic impulses to breathe?” and I was told “No; that does not happen.” As it turns out, in special cases, it does. I am special.

Maybe it has something to do with the odd electrical wiring of my heart, which has two blocked fascicles, the electrophysiologist tells me. That has probably been the case almost all of my life, and it is not easy or safe to change. The nerve blockage at least complicates the issue of brain to heart and pulmonary system operation. I am all for easier solutions.

Finally, I was told to stop using the Bi-Pap device entirely. After a few nights I returned to the earlier pattern—no central apnea, and moderate obstructive apnea. Meanwhile I had gone to a dentist who was trained in fitting “oral appliances.”   (She was very kind and sympathetic.) The process is similar to fitting a set of dentures or braces—molds are taken of the existing teeth. A device is prepared that covers both upper and lower teeth, and the covers are connected so that the lower jaw can be gradually moved forward, using the upper and lower teeth as the anchors. Moving the lower jaw and tongue forward opens the airway in the throat. Combined with simple inserts for expanding the nostrils, this old “mouth breather” suddenly became a nose breather with expanded access to my windpipe. Adapting to the device was relatively simple, compared to the Bi-Pap machine. The oral appliance fits securely, so there is no problem with ever-shifting masks. The oral appliance is also very quiet. Gradually over the past four months the airway space has enlarged from my natural relaxed position to 7 mm larger in diameter. The resulting beneficial impact on apnea has been substantial.

I returned the BiPap machine. No hard feelings. Someone else will benefit from it—maybe even you. But if you feel like it is trying to suffocate you, even when the technicians increase the settings for the machine to work harder, it probably is.

The Nightmare of Talking Money

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in Church, Citizenship, Events, guns, Learning from mistakes, People, Racial Prejudice, Words

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dock at sunset

The nightmare began when the court declared that “money is speech.” It was a variation of the old saying that “money talks.” The door opened for many wealthy people to set up and use pseudo tax-exempt non-profit organizations to take part in partisan campaigns. Then that idea spread into the churches. Individuals who wanted to endorse candidates for office funneled money through tax-exempt churches for partisan support, expanding the cash available that was unreportable and unaccountable to public interests. This was all in the name of the First Amendment.

A candidate appeared who had his own wealth, who could go where he wanted, stay where he wanted, and say what he wanted. He lied often, long, and loudly, and captured an extraordinary share of media attention with his outrageous antics, and he didn’t need to raise funds from anyone else in the ordinary course of campaigning. Wealthy people could go elsewhere and spend even more to prop up candidates who would do their bidding and who would be accountable to them personally. The singular wealthy candidate was just another form of “money speaking,” since he could not only use his own resources, but he could use his unusual platform to increase his own resources without needing to answer to anyone else, reveal his conflicts of interest, or follow the customary ethics of transparency and disclosure. His party shielded him from investigation and exposure of foreign entanglements in the hope that they could carry out their own platforms of experimental political change and revolution while he was in charge.

The candidate pretended to be the voice of common men overlooked and ignored by the rapid transformations of global economies. Wealth sought the cheapest labor and the highest rates of return without regard to the public interest where goods were manufactured or where they were sold. His decisions, once he was elected, simply cleared the way for more aggressive domination of the multitudes by moneyed interests. Money continued to talk with a louder voice. Soon it was understood that speech was not free in any form, not in the press, not in electronic media, not in the Internet, who were all controlled by a small concentration of special interests. The old principles of the First Amendment were hollow. Personal freedoms were identified with the freedom to force others to obey the conscience of the person who chooses to discriminate, instead of the freedoms of the person who is the target of discrimination. People with money had the freedom to oppress people without money.

The only Constitutional Amendment that would could not be abrogated in any form was the Second Amendment, and the more weapons and the more powerful weapons that one possessed, the more political power a person had. The resulting condition of a heavily armed population was neither “well-regulated” nor controlled by any police or military force serving the common interest. Private military units and paid bodyguards became the norm for those who could afford them. The random, careless, and accidental use of arms to injure and kill accelerated to become the leading cause of death among all people. People had developed the habit of scapegoating strangers and different ethnic groups; finally they turned on each other, neighbor against neighbor.

Society descended into chaos. The social contract was broken. What began as the security of wealth became the reinstatement of the “law of the jungle,” and life returned to being the “nasty, mean, poor, brutish, and short” life (as Thomas Hobbes had described it) of the “good old days.”

These were thoughts of the middle of the night when the mind entertains what darkness hides. The dream does not have to end this way. The creative mind can move the ending in another direction entirely as the day dawns.

Celebrating Pierre Trudeau’s Election

14 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by in Citizenship, Events, Growing up, People

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When Pierre Trudeau was elected Prime Minister of Canada in the winter of 1968, Rick Kelsey and I were at Ann Arbor, Michigan, at a Canadian-American Conference, representing the Illinois Wesleyan political science department. I had never taken a poli-sci course at IWU, but Rick was the star student, my friend, and he persuaded Dr. Brown to take me along. Trudeau’s election electrified the conference. The status of Quebec and the possibility of its independence was one of the issues tackled by the conference, against the background of increasing division over the war in Vietnam in the USA. Trudeau was a French Canadian and an intellectual, committed to a united Canada as fully as he was to a multilingual nation. Quebec’s separatists were seeking a vote and sure to get one. Trudeau would seek to bridge the gap and keep Canada whole (which he did when four years later the vote for separation was defeated).

Canadian and US academics, students, and politicians joined in presentations and debates about the future, made murky by the hostility and polarization disturbing each of the neighbor countries. We might not be able to help each other find solutions, but at least we could commiserate and share our concerns.

A philosophical voice belonged to the leading American politician present there, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.  He was both realistic about the severity of the problems and optimistic about the likelihood of resolving them, uniting Canada with the new leadership provided by Trudeau, and finding a way out of quagmire war in Vietnam, with the growing awareness that US efforts could not accomplish what the Vietnamese people themselves did not support.  During that year he would become the Democratic Party vice-presidential candidate, and, as doubtful as I was about Humphrey, I felt hopeful about the man Muskie I met in a small group that evening. The Labatt ale tasted good, too.

The confidence in Trudeau was well-placed, as his leadership became an inspiration to many people around the world, providing major improvements in Canada’s welfare and economy. The political divisions continued in both countries, but persistence did resolve the issues that seemed intractable for the next generation at least.

I learned that a young man of my age, with my same name, would soon be residing in Toronto, seeking Canadian citizenship and avoiding the draft. I was in no danger from the draft, but his actions would place my name on a suspicious list for a few years. Other US citizens would trade their citizenship for the that status in Canada, and somewhat more rarely some would come south.

Fifty years can give some perspective, and make us pause and ponder. Justin Trudeau now serves in his father’s office, and Canadian separatism appears quiet for the time being. Partisan division in the US has returned with a vengeance as war and fear again provoke American reactions, and the newly elected US President brings baggage in corruption and questionable motives that remind us of the President elected in 1968. The University of Michigan still sponsors forums for commiserating with each other’s problems, and Labatt ale is still good.

The Storm’s Unpredictable Wind

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Faith, House, Nature, Yard

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redwood trees

“You hear the sound of it but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes…”

I was sitting in my overstuffed chair last Wednesday evening, working on one of the online philosophy courses that I teach, when a great wind blew with the sound of crashing, followed quickly by the storm warning siren and pouring rain. Putting my laptop computer aside, I jumped from the chair and headed toward the kitchen where Jan was, just to make sure she was okay. She was. The only noise to follow was the sound of heavy rain, so I went to the basement, not for its supposed protection from the wind, which quickly subsided, but to check on the water that might be invading. Sure enough, the water was bubbling out of the drain, because the city sewer could not handle the volume of the downpour. I monitored the water level for the next two hours, but the electricity did not go out and the constantly running sump pump kept pace with the invading water.

The next morning, I again checked the house for damage, which the darkness could have hidden the night before. No problems showed up.

Early in the spring I had noted the two large limbs of the tulip tree that overhung the house, knowing that sometime this season I would need to make arrangements for the tree surgeon to remove them. Friends in Zion Church had given the tree to me when my mother died suddenly twenty-six years ago. It was one of her favorite tree species, and it grew quickly into a lovely specimen. But those two limbs had to go.

I did not notice at first, when checking the house after the storm, but those limbs were indeed gone. Where did they go? Forty feet away in the small space between the crabapple tree and the garage, one large limb was planted rightside up against the fence, the large trunk of the branch into the ground. Behind it, the other large branch sat upside down with the heavy trunk on top.   

The wind had removed both eight inch-diameter branches close to the trunk, without damaging the roof or breaking windows, and placed them so neatly in the yard that they almost looked like they belonged there.

I think I owe the Great Tree Surgeon in the Sky big time.

‘Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread’

02 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in Faith, Growing up, Learning from mistakes, Prayer

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Chicago Old Town

I spent much of that May evening in 1971 walking in a park and praying about my wife and baby daughter and my future. My year as an intern pastor was coming to a close, and finding a job to support us and a place to live and enough money to return to seminary in Chicago were on my mind. So far I had no idea how these issues could be resolved. We had spent all of our savings, meager as they were, during the intern year, replacing a failing vehicle, and paying daily expenses. There was nothing left, even to pay for a small U-Haul truck to move our stuff. Every option I had investigated during the previous three months had gone nowhere. We would soon be out of time as well as money, as the internship ended in two weeks. My mood was bleak.

In the next afternoon, a knock on the door opened to a man who was active in one of the churches I had served. He said his wife and he had been praying together the evening before, and they thought of us, and they wanted to help. He handed me a check for $100. On the evening of the next day I met with a study group I had organized during the year. They wanted to thank me for the many evenings we had spent together; they had collected $150. The next day I finally got word that a small apartment would be available to us, and I had been awarded a fellowship that would pay for our housing, tuition, and living expenses at seminary; the seminary had received an unexpected donation to organize its archives, and the fellowship supported me to do that, with my experience working in the seminary library and prior graduate history studies. In the next few days more gifts came from several co-workers in the churches.

We had enough, just enough, within a week of my night of despair. It was a lesson that would be repeated in many circumstances in the following years, but none more dramatically for us.

To Hide from Storms at Shannondale

05 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by in Events, Life along the River, Nature, People

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We were camping at Shannondale, and I made arrangements for our group to take an evening tour of Round Spring Cave, courtesy of the National Park Service staff. The only problem was that the number of tour participants was limited, and we had one more person with us than the available slots for the tour. Art Klein had stayed at camp, and another youth or two, who were not fond of caves, had stayed with him. Dean Moberg volunteered to stay above ground and let the rest of us go on this spelunking adventure. He had gone before, and, although there is always more to see in such a dynamic and complex cave, he was willing for the rest of us to enjoy it this time. There would be another trip and another opportunity to tour the cave.

As the time for the tour approached we gathered near the cave entrance, and Ranger Ruth entertained us with some colorful stories from the area lore about sinkholes, caves, and Ozark culture, and we were glad to be in the cave overhang area when the rain began. Still, Dean dutifully stayed outside when the rest of us followed our guide into the cave. Some of our group were a bit jealous of Dean’s choice during our squeeze through the narrow channel of the first hundred yards, as uncountable numbers of bats flew past our ears on their way outside for the evening’s mosquito harvest.

Dean, meanwhile, returned to the parking lot and our cars and observed the onset of a powerful windstorm, maybe even a tornado, wondering whether the wind would do more than scatter tree limbs and branches and rock the car that was his only available shelter.

An hour or so later our group emerged to a different environment, with evidence of the storm all around us. Dean greeted us and assured us that everything was all right, although he had wondered for a while whether he would be blown away. We returned to our campsite and found the tents in various degrees of collapse and disarray, which Art and his crew had tried unsuccessfully to remedy. We decided to take advantage of Shannondale’s more dependable shelter for another night, grateful that most of us had been able to spend the time of the storm oblivious to the world outside and enjoying the amazing and utterly quiet world below.

We were grateful, too, to those who had braved the elements on our behalf. We could always count on Dean and Art.

One More ‘Stupidest Things I Have Ever Done’

04 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in Events, Faith, Learning from mistakes, Life along the River, People

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Rock Creek Wilderness, Oregon

Returning to Shannondale along the Current River in Missouri was one of my fond dreams when I came to Zion Church in Burlington. Dean Moberg said that he also was eager to return, with his pleasant memories of getting to court his wife-to-be at that camp. Therefore, we planned a trip with Dean and Jeri, Art Klein, and several fine high school young people. We camped at Peaceful Point at Shannondale the first couple of days, did a service project—cleaning up and painting some camp facilities, and proceeded to canoe the river, putting in at Cedar Grove, canoeing to Pulltite in the morning, and reaching Round Spring in the late afternoon, a  twenty-mile trip  on the first day.

That year I had suggested  that we  do what I had done with other groups earlier, which was to carry food and gear with us in canoes, stay overnight on the river at one of the campgrounds or gravel bars, and canoe the next day another twenty miles to Two Rivers. The Current River’s… well…fast current, of course, had enabled this ambitious agenda with groups that were largely novices, as well as heavy rains on the days prior to previous trips. On this year of return, the river was quick, but not so quick, and the rains that came, came on the second day of our planned canoeing.

The second day opened gray and overcast, but seemingly warm enough, so “we” decided to go ahead with our planned trip, all the way to Two Rivers. (I don’t know if my enthusiasm was operative in the “we” or whether it was really a consensus.) We hadn’t been on the river more than ten minutes when the rain began, and, at first, it was gentle and warm. Not very long afterwards, it ceased to feel warm . Most of our group did not bring raingear. We stopped at a rock overhang and brought out the box of large garbage bags (along with duct tape, the other requirement for any trip we planned). At least everyone had an improvised raincoat for the rest of the trip. In addition to the dampness, the temperature began to fall.

Finding another rock overhang with just enough space for all of our group, and everyone beginning to be both tired and cold, we stopped for lunch.  We needed a break from paddling, the energy from the food and drink we had packed for the trip, and also warmth from somewhere. My matches were wet, but, fortunately we had smokers with us. Art used his lighter and the few items that were still dry to get a smoky fire going, providing just enough warmth to thaw us out a little, when we took turns standing near it.

We had no choice but to continue downriver. There was no place to pull out of this section of the river until we had paddled ten more miles to Two Rivers, where there was a store and a phone to reach our Shannondale driver, who would pick us up and save us from ourselves.

Our only hope to avoid hypothermia was to paddle like the devil and avoid the usual tipping of the canoes. Since these seemed too much to hope for, our only hope really was to pray like the…saints, even if we weren’t.

Never was I happier to have three determined adult helpers and a mostly good-natured and forgiving group of high school young adults. Together, urging each other on, we made it. When we finally reached Two Rivers and our Shannondale helper picked us up, I hurried to rent the Goat Barn for our overnight accommodations, instead of setting up our wet tents. We made liberal use of the hot showers and established the custom of closing our canoe trip with a visit to Salem’s Pizza Hut.

(Some readers may offer corrections to this memory and life-lesson; they are welcome!)

 

The Doors Came Home

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Church, House, People, Small town life

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Burlington house in fall

Our 1899 eclectic house was not built for the preference for open floor plans, but some former occupants decided that the next best thing was to remove as many doors as they could. The large pocket doors between the two living rooms disappeared, as did the door between the front hall and the dining room, and the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen, and the upstairs doors between the central sitting room and the front and rear hallways. Air flowed freely between all of the rooms, especially the cold winds of winter, and with the large loosely-double-hung windows on every side of the house, winter wind did not stay outside.

Between the front hall and the middle bedroom, not only did the door disappear, but the doorway did, too, giving access to that bedroom only through the sitting room, which could no longer double as a private bedroom for guests or anyone else.

Finding the alternative of removing walls and creating a modern openness too costly—the apparent solution for every remodeling show now on House TV, which had not yet appeared in 1988—the solution seemed to be replacing doors (and doorway). Restoration stores and preservation stations with old building parts had not appeared yet either, so I went begging.

Church members came to the rescue.  Dean Moberg mentioned that he had a set of big pocket doors stored in the rafters of his garage. A former owner of his 1900-era house had removed not only the doors, but the entire wall between his dining room and living room, giving them a nice open space.  That was another option, but the structure of my house still needed those walls. They were dirty and ugly, but the right size. Thank you, Dean! They cleaned up well, and I do enjoy refinishing. The doors required a new set of rollers to work on the track that still existed, but a renovation specialist helped assemble those.

Jim Ritters had four doors and a quantity of old woodwork in the attic of his house, which also matched our house for age and woodwork. He just about had to tear out a window to get them out of his attic, but they cleaned up so well that they didn’t need refinishing. The small wall that filled the old doorway came out easily, and the woodwork helped to shape an opening that matched the rest of the house. Thank you, Jim!

Work on insulation and tightening windows came later, but our comfort and enjoyment of “This Old House” increased enormously. It’s good to be able to count on the help and generosity of church people when you need them.

An Incident on the High Road

23 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by in Miracles, Travel

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Gold Camp RoadWe were driving the high road from Cripple Creek to Colorado Springs, named the Gold Camp Road, nine miles following an old narrow gauge railroad bed. Actually Jan was driving, since she didn’t trust me to drive and sight-see at the same time. I do love the scenery, and it doesn’t get any better than the Gold Camp Road. It was a one way, one lane road beginning at Cripple Creek until a tunnel collapsed in 1988, and now it is a hiker and biker trail, so this event occurred before 1988.

The Alpine flowers were in multi-colored full bloom in mid-summer, the clouds were high and sparse for a rare rain-free July day, and the views of the mountain terrain and the distant foothills and high plains were forever. No one else was ahead or behind us for miles, and Jan was driving about 10 to 20 miles per hour on the loose gravel, since one side of the road was cut from the mountain rock, and other was a steep fall that had no visible bottom. Once in a while she would stop so that she could enjoy the scenery, take a break from a nervous hold on the steering wheel, and we could walk through the flowers.

In a few places the mountain rock was cut so that the single lane ran through a narrow canyon with rock on both sides. That would seem to be a secure place, but as we were driving through one of the longest of these narrow one –way passages, we saw a large dump truck barreling toward us at high speed. You could see the gravel dust billowing out behind the truck. It was not slowing down, although it was plain that there was not room for both the truck and our little Dodge Colt station wagon inside the defile at the same time. There was not time for Jan to back up, nor was there room on the shelf behind  us for two vehicles side-by-side.

Jan didn’t even have time to brake to a complete stop. The truck just kept coming at full speed.

This was one of those moments that seem to last a long time, because you know you’re going to die. You have time to review your whole pathetic  life in an instant.

Jan pulled the car against the right side until you could hear the panels scrape against the rock, and we both let out a loud groan in our prayers—not to become a can of sardines squished against the rocks by a truck that was large and heavy enough to destroy us without leaving so much as a dent on its bumper.

I don’t know how the truck managed to squeeze past us with just a scratch on our rear view mirror. I think it was divine intervention. We had some time left to mend our ways.

The Excitement and Fascination of Large Population Die-offs

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in Death, Events, Learning from mistakes, Nature

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

As Granddaughter Willow has spent several summers in recent years working at The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota, we have joined for many weeks in exploring the fascinating deposit of bones left by scores of mammoths and hundreds of other animals of many species about twenty-six thousand years ago in a warm water sinkhole. Few other specimens of the giant short-face bear have been discovered, and the skeleton found here is impressive. New finds occur regularly, and the excitement that accompanies the discoveries grows with the potential new information about life in another era. The mammoths are almost entirely young adult males who have wandered away from the herd and sought the late winter, early spring abundance of plant food at the edge of the sinkhole, only to slide in the mud into the water and be unable to get a footing to climb out.

Another fascinating location, directed by a former member of The Mammoth Site staff and friend of Willow, is near Waco, Texas, which the President recently designated as Waco Mammoth National Monument. There a natural disaster, presumably a flash flood, destroyed a large herd of mammoths and several other animals, including a camel and a saber-tooth cat, all at one time, 65,000 years ago. As excavators remove tons of earth from that site, even more information comes to light about animals, plants, and climate during that era.

The Gray Fossil Site in East Tennessee, whose vertebrate curator also serves as the new director of The Mammoth Site, provides a deposit of animal and plant fossils in a marshy area, as-yet-undated millions of years ago. So much information lies buried there, along with unusual species, like an extinct red panda, giant tortoise, tapir, peccary, alligator, and rhinoceros, that excavation is expected to continue for over a hundred years.

As a graduate student Willow now works in the collections of the University of Nebraska, including thousands of specimens from the Ashfall Site in northeastern Nebraska, where a plume of volcanic ash from a mega-volcano in Idaho killed animals, birds, and plants at a watering hole twelve million years ago, and left populations of rhinoceros, horses, camels, and many other species in the region extinct, and the land became barren for hundreds of years. Other discoveries in Nebraska and Wyoming continue to add specimens to a collection that will help to identify a long pre-history of information on interactions of climate and conditions with plant and animal life.

These locations join with others popularly known, like the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles or Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, in providing extraordinary locations for exciting discoveries that can change our perceptions of the world and its development through aeons.

The dark side of all of this excitement is the fact that each site is the remnant of the suffering and death of thousands of creatures. Without such tragic events we would know much less about the world around us. In the future, perhaps, we will care enough for our own human species to study and discover why tens of thousands of human beings kill each other with guns every year, with no personal or social benefits as a result. That should be of interest and fascinating, too, though it appears to be harder for us to get excited about understanding that tragic and unending story in our own era.