The Online Photographer

For those of you still reading, I'd just like to thank you sincerely for your patience over the past few months! Life—and work—got difficult for me starting in November, when this bout with heart failure kicked in. It's amazing how many health issues a sick ticker will cause. I was really mystified.

I am happy to report I am lately running on battery power! A fancy Lithium-hybrid CFx silver vanadium oxide battery smaller than the one in most cameras, to be precise, the lifespan of which, on average, is 13.7 years. So I'm an Energizer bunny now. More than a common scribbler and scrawler, finally; a bionic scrawler.

The sense of succor is palpable. The worst of a long list of problems, laborious, shallow breathing, has vanished. Not being able to breathe takes a lot out of you, as I hope you do not know and never have to find out. It's odd to do nothing more than walk across a stretch of yard or up the stairs and feel breathless and spent. I've now lost a whopping 17.7 pounds of water weight since the peak on January 6th, 23 days ago. I'm sleeping straight through the night now, a great blessing, and, last night, from a high of 44 sleep apnea events per hour, the machine tracked two. Much better.

Most noticeable of all is mood. A month ago I was lost in a swampy fog of pessimism and portent, a feeling of doom seeping like sludge into every thought and task. Facing the requirement of writing something every morning (which is usually as easy as, well, breathing) felt like having to climb a snow-topped peak dressed in Bermuda shorts and sandals, with my legs wrapped in a layer of pork fat. After only six days with a pulse rate of 60, I'm as cheerful as Mary Effin' Poppins.

It's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Small empiricist
Speaking of Mary Poppins: the year I turned six, we lived in row of smart, two-story, midcentury-modern style apartments in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a hop, skip and a jump from the River Charles, while my father was completing his second year at Harvard Business School. I think the apartments have gone the way of all things now, as I can't find them on Google Street View, although I remember every corner of that vanished neighborhood in great detail. The apartments had a fenced, common backyard, down at one end of which was a shed where I presume the maintenance implements were kept; I don't know for sure because it was padlocked—I snooped into everything, and would doubtless have known what was in there if it was available to be explored. Anyway, after my mother read Mary Poppins to me, I smuggled an umbrella out of the house, climbed to the roof of the shed, deployed the umbrella, and jumped off. Of course I plummeted to the ground and landed with a rude jolt. I didn't hurt myself, fortunately, but I remember thinking, "that didn't work at all." The umbrella didn't soften the fall in the least that I could detect. I was also glad that I had been too chicken to attempt what I thought would have been a better test, which was to jump off the roof of the five-story apartment building next door. It would have been a little embarrassing to have my truncated existence forever stained with a listed cause of death of, "Mary Poppins experiment gone awry." When the movie came out a year later, I was able to lean over and sagely inform my friend in the seat next to me, in a whisper, that "that doesn't actually work."

I was an empiricist from early on, it seems. Most experiments and experiences are interesting, though. And this one has been as well. At any rate, what I am saying is, I hope things will be looking up around here, and I'm grateful to you for not losing faith and wandering away.

More, as they say, to come.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "Regarding your Mary Poppins experiment, it is surprising that so many of us lived to be senior citizens. I remember seeing an article in some magazine in maybe 1969 about hang gliders, with images of people running to the edge of cliffs and flying like birds. This was years before they were available commercially, and these daredevils made their own from makeshift materials...so I did the same. Three bamboo poles with a bamboo cross member and garbage bags stapled to the structure. My vertical fall from the garage roof was very quick, and my lack off engineering knowledge was made clear by the substandard strength of staples holding the plastic bag material. Somehow, I later became a pilot."

Mike replies: Your last line, after what went before it, made me LOL.

Steve Rosenblum: "As you know, I share your experience with the effects of finally having a pacemaker placed for a chronic heart rate in the low 40s (and I am no marathon runner). I dragged my feet for several years because I wasn't fainting and didn't think I needed one—this despite the fact that I used to put them in people! After I finally did have one placed I had a similar life renewing experience. I really regretted having waited.

"I am also an empiricist from a young age, but my gravity defying experiment was with our poor cat, Ivan. I had read and heard that cats always land on their feet. So I took poor Ivan to the top of our basement stairs and dropped him over the side in an upside down position. As advertised, he did correct his position mid-air and landed on his feet but then ran for cover where he remained for a long time knowing that one of his people was clearly trying to kill him. I still feel bad about that. Poor cat!"