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September 26th, 2006
10:57 am - Another short one . . .
I was thinking about Mike Ford this last weekend, when I went to get my eyes checked. It's been, well, way too many years -- ever since my Lasik surgery -- since I had them looked at. Not good; diabetics -- whether non-insulin dependent, like me, or insulin dependent, like Mike -- should get their eyes checked yearly. It's both a quick look into your circulatory system -- without anything being cut, which is kind of neat -- and a way to watch out for macular degeneration in particular, a very bad sort of thing that gets worse the longer it goes untreated. Mike, eventually, had to have some serious laser surgery to cauterize burst blood vessels and save his vision.
I don't mean to be dramatic about this; my exam went just fine. No sign of troubles; there's stil the three scars in my right retina from the cryo and laser surgery after old Joe Piscatello punched holes in it with a pretty remarkable backfist back in 1979, and they've still got the retina tacked down. My left eye remains 20-20, and my right eye has very slight astigmatiscm and farsightedness; nothing worth bothering with getting prescription glasses for. I'll get by on cheap drugstore reading glasses with no problem, and continue to have a few different strengths depending on how tired my eyes are on a given day.
But it did remind of of Mike, for a number of reasons. Skipping regular care was something he was far too prone to do as long as I knew him, although it got better when he and Elise got together, and better still when Lynn and Victor started insisting he do better. For a lot of things, it became essential after he got the kidney transplant -- miss just a few doses of antirejection drugs, or don't have them quite tuned, and it gets real, real bad.
But the damage had been done in the early years. I'm guessing that the autopsy will show a myocardial infarction -- his third, at least; he'd had two silent MIs that I knew about, a long time ago -- and that it will suggest that it was very very quick. Which is a good thing. We had discussions, years ago, about dialysis, and his unwillingness to start . . . long before he was on dialysis, which was a different technique and not nearly as bad as he feared.
Mainly though, this morning I was thinking about a conversation we had, maybe ten years ago, about Robert Heinlein.
"Sometimes, just after I've woken up, I wish he'd just finish with this being dead thing and get back to writing."
A snort. "I was thinking just that this morning."
As was I, this morning, about Mike.
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03:40 pm - Another Mike story . . .
So there we were, both of us having recently moved to Minneapolis, on our way to Shinon's in St. Paul, to meet Felicia and a bunch of other folks for a sushi happy hour.
If you're not a Minnesotan, you probably don't know about St. Paul: it's a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there. I avoid it, not only because of my well-known bad sense of direction, which amazes even me -- there was the time, sometime later, when I was, in fact, turning right at the time, I understood why Pamela Dean was shouting, "No, go right, right, right." If I was supposed to go right, seven gets you two I was going left; she was just playing the odds.
( Read more... )
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