My Brother Rick (aka Dikes, Rich) Condition Post-Stroke

06/21/201306/22/2013 ~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 3 Comments

Last Thursday, a few minutes past noon, I called my brother Rick in Milwaukee (it had become a ritual of sorts especially while driving), and he answered in an odd tone which gave me pause. He began to complain of escalating nausea to which I urged him to see his personal physician. He failed to remember his physician or the terrible diabetic wound which almost led to amputation or his two-month in-patient hospital stay. I told him I’d call 9-1-1 and ask that he be taken to West Allis Memorial Hospital ( policy dictates patients be taken to the nearest hospital). However the paramedics discovered atrial fibrillation (fluttering heart beats) which alternately peaked and diminished and therefore paramedics informed me that they were headed to a critical cardiac unit at St. Luke’s Medical Center.

However, St. Luke’s didn’t have a bed open, so Rick was taken to Froedert Lutheran Medical Center. After tests and a CT scan the ER team began antibiotics to stave off a small area of pneumonia in his right lung. Rick remained on the general medical floor until the results of an MRI showed he’d suffered a severe ischemic stroke (an obstruction within a blood vessel supplying blood to the brain) in the occipital lobe (at the rear of the skull and is responsible for vision). On Sunday afternoon he was transported to the Stroke Unit (one of just astroke2 a few in the U.S.) where he was resting comfortably.

On Monday, June 18 Rick suffered a significant seizure which greatly diminished his short term memory and eliminated the peripheral vision on his right side. I’ve visited and talked via telephone with him this past week. The cadence of his speech has slowed, he’s practically immobile, he’s approaching clinical blindness, and finds difficulty in fundamental motor movements like holding a cup. But as he told me earlier this week, “I ain’t going to be like this forever, you know!”

I’d like to ask that anyone reading this post to consider sending him a get well card. I’m sure your sentiments would help replenish a hopeful spirit during difficult times. For those of you who send cards, thank you; for those that haven’t, please reconsider. Send your cards to:

Richard Didrickson
Froedert & Medical College of Wisconsin
5-NW Nursing Unit
9200 W. Wisconsin Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53226

What’d you say about a stroke? (optimismandme.wordpress.com)
Imaging Tests Used to Diagnose Stroke (everydayhealth.com)
Types of Strokes – Hemorrhagic and Ischemic (everydayhealth.com)

My Brother Once Said, “My Life Was Determined By Another’s Lie.”

06/21/2013 ~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

“A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.”

Rick willfully shouldered a self-imposed burden his entire life. Unsettled by our Dad’s violent outburst’s (routinely targeting our mother), he began to peek behind, beside, and beyond our parent’s staid alibi about their colorless and urgent courtship which usually quelled curiosities. Except for one widow that pursued, with neighborly caution, my mother’s dire dodging. “It was simple math,” he’d once said, “Simple math and the ordering of month’s to quickly calculate the truth. He was proud of his steely pursuit, wishing there was a merit badge for exposure of parental lies. “Then suddenly,” he said, “the whole enterprise soured. The recently decoded shameful and moral secret they’d disguised as hushed urgency, longing, and the mid-fifties moral compass was, in fact, his birth which occurred five months after their City Hall nuptials.

It was then, at that inconceivable denouement, that his conception was the root cause of bout after bout after bout of unbridled and disgusting epithets often followed by a round of brutish, physical taunts which, my mother learned too late, that if you retreat to the broom closet or the empty cranny next to the refrigerator, you raise your arms to protect your face like exhausted boxers stuck in a corner. Fear and submission killed my father‘s blood lust as though he’d been fed a syringe full of Ketamine. Oh, but those few and far between times when her self-respect outweighed her self-preservation, her repressed anger putrified to man-slaughter. She charged at him, disgust followed by anger followed by critical injuries helped to ignore his devastating kidney punches followed by multiple precisely aimed and explosive back-handed slaps which buckled her knees; by now, in his cold eyes she’d lost any humanity and devolved into the recipient of his fully expressed hatred for her.

My mother’s marriage, a litany of lies: loathing thinly veiled as affection; irritation disguised as intimacy; and an escalating and violent blame for Marge‘s moonless flight with their three children through thorn bush and brambles, and following her husband’s business partner who liquidated their company’s assets that afternoon. Later that evening my father received a brief call from Marge confirming that all three children were safe and in her care. And sternly warned my father that if he pursued them, she’d kill all three of them rather than spend another minute with you, then abruptly disconnected the line. It was then that my father accepted that he’d been abandoned, ruined, and penniless. My father was incapable of keeping his promises, especially when it came to monogamy whether married or single. But worse still was his continued punishment of my mother for Marge’s inconceivable disappearance into the thicket behind their home. Marge later confessed that it was his barefaced screwing of the nanny. Who, coincidently, was our mother.

Rick witnessed just one of those bloodsheds and cursed his responsible birth as cause for these vengeful and sadistic rituals. So he heaved the imaginary and backbreaking potato sack stuffed with the rubble of our mother’s self-esteem and character; up to his waist, hesitated, then at once swung the unbalanced sack up to his shoulder while tucking his short ageless frame beneath the load like a tire winch. From there he strained and distorted and drove the shifting load skyward until his swollen knees snapped open like a toy jack-in-the-box and steadied his load . . . for the rest of his natural life.

Marge Simpson ‘inspiration’ dies (bbc.co.uk)

Rare = “$$$$$”

06/09/201306/09/2013 ~ Harlan Didrickson

rare: adjective

DEFINITION: exceptional, extraordinary, rarefied, recherché, scanty, unimaginable, few, admirable, A-OK, cat’s pajamas, commendable, cracker jack, exquisite, hunky-dory, meritorious, praiseworthy, superior, valuable, worthy, superior, 24-karat, elite, exclusive, exquisite, popular, precious, top-drawer.

I’ve never owned or bought or inherited or found or stole any thing that’s been classified, determined, researched, and stamped rare. The arareobect2

moniker rare is itself rare! According to the free website, Rarity Guide (www.rarityguide.com), the nomenclature “Rare“ is far more than the number of units produced. “Instead, we factor in many additional factors including popularity, demand, age and collectibility.” On their website they stress educating the public and collectors about collectible objects. The sobriquet rare is mentioned only when an object reaches the threshold of eighty-one percent (81%) to one hundred percent (100%): The most sought after objects in a collectible category.

Except in medicine where a condition or disease when codified rare indicates under-funded research meaning that the tightly budgeted, yet interested researchers exhaust their paltry budgets thus terminating further research and flatten the idyllic hope for a treatment long before it’s ever presented to the prudent pharmaceutical companies.

It’s simple: It’s unprofitable to manufacture a treatment which less than one percent (1%) of patients living with these diseases will be prescribed.

So, diseases are rare as well, but no one is a collector. Now, what am I going to do with the four I have?

New Blog Highlights Treatment of Rare Diseases (medmeme.com)
The kakapo -A rare Bird (piczload.com)
Rare Launches Sustainable Fishing Campaign (thejakartaglobe.com)

The Time Spent To Read This Post, Equals The Time You Have To Save Your Life

05/16/2013 ~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 4 Comments

Back in 2008 when the shit storm incinerated the first 20 years of my adulthood, I made an oath while dragging what’s left of a . . . of a bespoke walking stick through four inches of gray ash – some sizeable went aloft and rode a breeze – only to land in some other year; this oath was directed at loss, or better, surviving loss which is always, always more painful than the combustion of mortality which is hard-wired to flee extinction.

Appointed to this life: Two tiny, perpendicular scratches amidst millions of other’s noting everyone’s start and finish on (what we’d like to believe) linear straight-edge of time. And my time – time as living – a selfish amalgamation of loneliness, caution, exposure, intimacy, maturity, judgement, patience, learning, strife, letters, confessions, achievement, and the likely propagation of another generation or the unlikely dog-eared page noting a dead end by a period placed unerringly after the last letter of the last name annotating The End, A Willful Extinction. The simple decision to stop production thus beholden to past generations, or, the decision of propagation thus bound to the future.

We’re putting a stop to this tributary of our bloodline; my older brother never purposely or haphazardly discovered the merits of fatherhood, and I, being of the gay-persuasion fell in-love when fatherhood and matrimony were simply off-limits; thusly denying my partner and I any marginal hope to have children. My partner yearned to have a child, Jack (because I simply grew tired of our constant referral to “It”), but by the time the stork delivered to same-sex households, I, in all honesty, was too old and too tired and too responsible to entertain my partner’s fundamental need to nurture. My father was well beyond my reach; that life, that engaging and interested life, was at least a decade before I consciously understood that I was bereft of any gargantuan, mitt-like hand to hold. And that sadness burrowed deep, deeper than any other heretofore denial ever tunneled. And honesty foretold of my family’s dearth in the health department by my adult-life diagnosis of a mental illness, a disease, not a sickness or an infection or a fever but a disease, not an alien landing, not a vampire, and not a plague, but a disease nonetheless. Mental illness is handled, not treated but handled by this nation’s body politic. It’s a dispassionate and treacherous handling, like the negotiating cop that placated the felon’s demands until one, perfectly aimed .32 caliber round stops the demands. “They” know how to dilute the alleged discrimination; the mistreatment of patients in county facilities; blaming us, the patients, for their on-going ignorance and antiquated seclusion as a “well-informed, empathetic, and public safety response” to the irrational and grossly illogical . . . blah-blah-blah. . . Um, hello, hello? (is this thing on?) mental illness is a disease as bona fide as cancer or chronic kidney failure (except mental illness lacks a “celebrity endorsement).

And yet, we’re not alone: patients-in-general have devolved into a 15-minute generic; that is, the disappearance of importance, the disinterest of ailments, suffering, and cause. Today’s Western Medicine Patient has become an Accounts Receivable entry in the ledger; a doctor’s statistic of efficiency; appointment number 58. We as patients have been reduced to a test result followed by a prescription or passed along like a troublesome foster child to a series of specialists and more tests and more prescriptions.

It’s a cold and alienating model of efficiency and profit, and we, the patients, the commodity are fought over by insurers and institutions chanting “To Hell With Life!”

Yet Again, I’m Blogging About Mental Health (ewokmama.com)
Why will half the U.S. population have a mental illness? (maniacfire.wordpress.com)
“Mental illness is an illness like any other”… it’s not true and everybody knows it (prideinmadness.wordpress.com)

“The Looking Glass:” A Modern Answer Besides Your Nose

04/21/201304/21/2013 ~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 4 Comments

It is with great satisfaction that I’d like to present to you my latest woodworking project aptly titled The Looking Glass.

The Looking Glass is borne from an on-going dilemma: Eyeglasses should be on hand yet out of the way and yet still be part of something grander. The Looking Glass hopes to eliminate the second most asked question “Where are my glasses?” by placing an elegant, modern and inconspicuous composition of glass and wood during daylight hours; and at night, an elegant, modern and conspicuous lighted from within composition of glass and wood. In the evening the polished glass and plexiglass quietly glow; no sound, no movement, no promises. What began as a search to stop the irritating question about eyeglasses evolved into a simple and translucent construction of glass, plexiglass, hardwood, and LED lights. I’ve researched current options for eyeglass stands and discovered an abysmal selection. The Looking Glass has hundreds of variations using simple construction. It is, in a word, radiant.