Today was the first day of the rest of my life

Yesterday the folks in my office gave me a terrific send off as I entered what I am choosing to call retirement.

It is a retirement in the sense that I stopped working a regular job.

It is not a retirement in the sense that I am collecting social security or any other kind of pension. Lucent Technologies put me on the road to this situation in 2001. Many of you may still recall the collective gasp heard from we employee/stockholders as the Lucent shares turned into comic books and then compost. I can only be proud to say that I and the rest of the class of 2001 were pioneers while everyone else waited until 2008 or 2009 to begin their futile attempts to builds condos out of toilet paper.

Ah, alas.

But, why would someone in my circumstances leave employment with the Great City of New York and it's really cute little mayor?

The best reason in the world.

James, my three-month oldngrandson.

Today I began my duties as his loving (if somewhat bumbling) daytime care giver. I will blog more on this as indications of my success or failure arise.

However, James reminded me today that pertains to the title of this blog: Being Real.

Being real is not easy.

The only way to get there is to learn from someone James' age. He has not learned to pander or to use euphemisms. When he is happy, he is just clearly happy. When he is sad, his frustration is equally unadorned.

There must be some way of growing up without losing that.

Be real,

Hap

How much trouble can Hap get into in a hospital with a cell phone and the BBC

I continue to convalesce at home. No pain except if I move the wrong way or cough or the like.

I thought I would share one of the incidents at Morristown Memorial which showed how easy it was for a geek like me to get into even when more or less bed-ridden.

I was taken down to the lab to have an echocardiogram on Monday. (This particular echo because I have agreed to be part of a study that will track recipients of my kind of valve for 8 years.)

While the technician was sticking probes to my chest, she pointed to my right shoulder and said "What is that!? Does your nurse know about THAT!?"

"THAT" turned out to be a blister about the size of a silver dollar on my shoulder…right about at the top.

Flashback to the night before: As I prepared for sleep on Sunday night, I set my Palm Pixi Smartphone to stream the BBC World Service. Since the speaker on the phone is not very loud and since the headphones I brought with me were in the closet and since I was popping in and out of bed on my own yet and since I felt silly calling out to people who were otherwise busy keeping others alive to get a piece of my geeky stuff, I decided to balance the Smartphone on my shoulder (yes, my RIGHT shoulder) and listened to the voices from London.

Why was I listening to the BBC?

Flashback about 5 decades to a stormy July 3 at my maternal grandfather's house in Little Rocky Hill New Jersey, a little North from Princeton on the Lincoln Highway.

At that point my Grandpop Kuderka was living alone in a house that used to accommodate a family with 7 kids. I don't remember the exact details, but I was detailed to spend this particular July 3 night in the house with him. Whatever the arrangements, I am sure I was not told that a midsummer thunderstorm was also fixing to join in the fun.

The thing hit sometime around 10 PM when I was already alone in the North Front Bedroom when the storm hit.

I grew up in the city, Perth Amboy, NJ. I had visited this country house often, but I do not remember being cognizant of being there during a violent nighttime storm.

In the city (except for the one time that lightening struck my father's 27-meter vertical ham antenna and blew out the Blitz Bug…but that's another story), lightening would flash and sometime later thunder would sound. Sometimes it was a BRIGHT flash and a GREAT cracking and roll, but always like that: Flash…silence…crash.

Not out in the country on that night. The lightening and the thunder arrived TOGETHER. Not just once but persistently.

The phenomena produced an effect most appropriate for Independence Day. You would see a bright light in the windows and hear an accompanying SWISHHHHHHHHHHHH followed by a BOOOOOOOOM.

The downstairs phone (a 20 party line, I think) would rind. The few lights in the house would go out. And one city boy would be wide-eyed and unnerved.

I had one consolation. I had bought one of the first Lafayette Electronics six-transistor radios. I turned it on and tuned. Amid all the crackle, I found WOR, a 60kW Class A Clear Channel station with a transmitter in Carteret. (I knew it well because in Perth Amboy you could pick up WOR on a bad filling.)

That was the night I discovered Jean Shepherd. Jean got me through that night and many others.

And since then I have not been able to get to sleep without the sound of someone talking on the radio.

Flashback to last Sunday night.

So I am in this hospital bed with a magic air filled mattress regulated by a robot somewhere in a way that is supposed to protect your skin but has the effect of cause your body to slide constantly downward toward the footboard. I can only lay on my back, have a CPAP mask on my face, and catch quite see or reach the bed adjustment buttons. (BTW, the robot bed also weighs you.)

And I have the Palm Pixi perched on my right shoulder like a pirate's parrot.

Here's what I am doing with the Palm Pixi: I am charging the battery through an outlet in the wall behind me which I have never actually sign but whose existence I take as a matter of faith. I am streaming the BBC World Service through the 3G data network. I amplifying the sound of the BBC stream through the little amplifier in the phone to drive the teensy speaker, AND I am using the phone as a wifi hotspot for my iPad.

The greatest problem designers of portable electronics deal with is heat. Everything you do on an electronic device produces heat. For some examples consider: Charging a battery. Stream Internet audio. Amplifying a signal. Processing data.

And, consequently, my little Pixi heats up. I have noticed it before. Not the OUCH kind of hot but certainly at the "is that thing working right" level, which is just slightly below "hand me the marshmallows."

Yes, I found minimally invasive a way, while stuck in a hospital bed after aortic valve replacement surgery, in an environment just nuts about controlling injuries and infections, to give myself a second degree burn with a Smartphone.

Hap

Going home today.

Sunday A Day to Start Walking

I am up sitting in a chair waiting for breakfast after being hosed down by thie very pleasant medical tech. (I have given up all notions of modesty. The tech says the same. She has seen them all she says.)

I had one weird and frightening thing happen in the Cardiac Anesthesiology Recovery Unit (don't call it the ICU.) I was there a for a few hours and felt a bit of nausea and, as any Bojsza would, suppressed it. Then I fell asleep although not in a good way. My pulse dropped and, apparently, I would not respond to the staff. I finally came to with eight people yelling my name and my field of vision filled with that visual white noise you used to see on a television that wasn't tuned to a station.

That freaked me out. I was afraid to fall asleep for a bit after that.

My attending cardiologist says that the wiring that keeps the heart pumping runs passed the site of the aortic valve and that could cause such a reaction. Since the valve is slightly swollen at first it can mess with the wiring.

Today I will walk walk walk, I am told. I M looking forward to it. I am on track for going home on Thursday.

Hap

In my rroom

Well, I am in my hotel like room in the Gagnon Cardiovascular institude at Morristown Memorial. It is room 332. The policy of the Gagnon is no flowers please. Edible arrangements I don't know.

I am sitting upright in a chair waiting for regular food for dinner.

Cardiologist says I may be able to leave On Thursday. Perhapd I already said that walking starts tomorrow.

Hap

Ok in recovery. In a regular room this afternoon. -hap

Hap is awake and talking and does not remember anything after joking with the o are staff. All is well.