Month: November 2007

Early Tuesday morning I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I sat at this very computer trying to find something to bore me into slumber but it just would not happen. What did happen was a funny feeling in my chest. It didn’t hurt so much as it felt pressured and the longer it went on, began freaking me out.

Eventually I walked the couple of blocks to the hospital emergency room and told them I was having chest pains. I finally was put into a room and there I remained for more than six hours while doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with me. During that time, the doctors juggled other, most likely more challenging, patients. Some guy across the hall was screaming” “You’re killing me!” on numerous occasions while someone, a cop perhaps, threatened to “light you up if you don’t shut up!”

One guy — close to me in age — was brought into the bed next to me and it was quickly determined he had suffered what would be his fourth heart attack. The doctor was quick about getting him into a cardiac catheter suite to get his heart open and running smooth again.

That same doctor arrived at the conclusion after blood tests and an EKG that he was “90 percent” certain I had not experienced heart trouble but given my history — high blood pressure, former smoker, relatives with heart disease, etc. — thought I should be observed overnight. He said that if I was going to have a full-blown heart attack it would likely take place in the first 24-48 hours after chest discomfort. I agreed with his recommendation. The only problem was that I was a Department of Veterans Affairs patient and would have to be looked after at the Houston VA, about 90 miles away.

So, I was loaded up in an ambulance and taken, non-emergency, to Houston. It wasn’t that bad of a trip with the exception of a a few places in which there were some major highway rough spots. I told the paramedic riding in back with me that it was the first time for me to ride in back as a patient. I had been in the back of an ambulance a number of times while training to be an EMT and also after I had become an EMT I had made a few emergency runs with paramedics. It is kind of different seeing the world looking backwards. At least you can see where you have been!

At the VA, I spent about four hours in their emergency room before they put me into a regular room. It was maddening. There was a bell on seemingly every medical machine and/or monitor in that room and it seemed like they all made different noises. Sometimes it would be DING-DING-DING-DING, beep-beep-beep-beep, then DING-beep-DING-beep. God I was glad to get the hell out of there.

I was put into a room and the next morning had a full-blown medical TEAM a’la “Grey’s Anatomy” visited me since this is a teaching hospital for Baylor College of Medicine. A professor came in with a medical student and resident, both of whom had introduced themselves as well as give me separate, in-depth goings over the day before. Several other interns tagged along as well.

The professor amused me somewhat. He started launching into this lengthy discourse about heart sounds after listening to my heart at several different points of my neck and torso. With his lecture he began making various vocalizations as a way to differentiate between the sounds — kind of like how an internal combustion engine sounds at various states of operation and with or without a plug or two missing. It reminded me of this lawn mower repairman we had in my hometown when I was growing up named “Bugger Red.” He used to could make all these noises to point out how the mower should sound or how it might sound if a plug wire was gone or if a manifold gasket was missing and the mower had been driven into a cave full of Jello and struck with a machete.

My nurses weren’t the best in the world either. They were somewhere between indifferent and assh**e deluxe. Finally I had this test in which they injected dye into me which circulated around and wound up in my heart, along with shooting in some medicine that simulates your heart working as if exercised. I think I might have been allergic to something they had shot me with as my lips began swelling. The nurses didn’t seem to think anything about the fact my upper lip looked as if it was containing $20 worth of pennies. Even I could tell it was the result of an allergic reaction and could ultimately lead to a type of shock that can kill you dead. I finally had to call one of these nurses’ superiors, a person who is the top nurse person in the facility. She was none to pleased to hear of just how crappy these nurses were performing.

You have to think about this. I was in the hospital for three nights and none of the nurses offered me a towel with which to take a shower, something this nurse boss asked about and was appalled to find out what had not happen. Also, no one ever changed the sheets the entire time I was there. I thought, in addition to being just plain unsanitary for a hospital, it was just … I don’t know … creepy? And the nurses swab your nose when you come in and out of the hospital for MRSA, in order to track the staph superbug infections. I wonder if the state of their hospitals might contribute to incubation sites for such maladies?

Alas I found out my heart was okay. It’s likely I have an acid reflux problem and probably will be receiving one of those very unpleasant visits by video machinery crawling through my colon fairly soon. But I am okay now. And that’s what is important. Thanks for asking, if you did.

A short while ago I returned from a three-night, all-paid stay at the Houston VA Hospital after being taken there early Monday afternoon by ambulance. It’s not really as dramatic as it sounds and fortunately nothing was seriously wrong with me, of course I suppose some would debate that. I shall write more about my medical misadventure as soon as I am returned to my (half) wits.

Texas House District 19: Deepest of Deep (South)East Texas.

Since I do research of some form or another in both my profession as a writer and in my part-time job as a federal government data geek, I sometimes would rather not dig deep into some topic to find something that might or might not be significant or insignificant. So I don’t know whether Texas Republican State Rep. Mike “Tuffy” Hamilton of Mauriceville is the first GOP member from Newton, Hardin and Orange counties to ever serve in the Texas House. There always is that period in history my irritated grandparents (or for you younger folks — great-, or great-great or you get the picture) called “Reconstruction.”

It is safe to say what now makes up Texas House District 19 had not been occupied for at least 50-some-odd years (since I am 50-some-or-perhaps-a-lot-odd) years by a Republican until Hamilton, who owns popular Mauriceville eatery “Tuffy’s,” was elected in 2003.

I grew up in District 19, or at least one of the counties. But I don’t live in that district now and haven’t since a brief stay in 1996. I really have no “dog in that hunt” as we rustic Southeast Texans say. I’ve talked to Hamilton a few times and he seems like a really nice guy. I also don’t know if Hamilton has done anything highly objectionable to me other than push for a law making certain prescription drugs harder to access which may eventually have some effect on my well being, or not. Nonetheless, the Texas Legislature has become a Republican institution and one that is seemingly more interested in partisan matters than helping the public. So, I am interested when a Democratic candidate comes along who might defeat the incumbent.

Attorney and former Vidor mayor Larry Hunter is expected to announce tomorrow he will seek the Democratic nomination for the District 19 House seat. And Vidor, is a name that sets off a number of bells for those friends of mine — black, white, brown, chartreuse, et. al. — who really are unfamiliar with this area.

The rather benign description of the town’s history in the “Handbook of Texas Online” pretty much obfuscates Vidor’s past as a hot bed of Ku Klux Klan activity. Hunter and other latter-day Vidorians have tried for years to sell Vidor as not being that redneck place. But it continues to happen because the town does have its rednecks. Most recently, CNN did a special devoted to racial relations and Vidor was a focus because of some remark made by some redneck chick in a local restaurant (Not Tuffy’s.)

A town hall meeting was held by CNN’s Paula Zahn, that took place in the larger and nearby city of Beaumont, which is just across the Neches River.

Vidor’s biggest problem is its image. It has been for many years. And it doesn’t help that it has a minority of truly ignorant, sometimes violent, redneck ass****s for residents. But just as black people pose the biggest threat to other people, so is it that dumb-s**t white rednecks pose the biggest danger for white people, not to mention their own well being.

What does this have to do with Larry Hunter? Not a thing. It’s doubtful that race, should both Hamilton and Hunter receive their respective party’s nomination, would be a major topic in their candidacy. Race is a topic I feel neither candidate would want to discuss should both seek the Texas House. It wouldn’t be bad for either to speak on the subject of race relations because Mauriceville and Vidor are only 10 or so miles apart from each other on Texas Hwy. 12 and if you believe your grandmother and football coach, the apple usually doesn’t fall far from the tree. But either candidate will most likely not bring up any subject with the “r-word” unless some distraction surfaces forcing the candidates to do so.

Hamilton, like his longtime predecessor Democratic House water policy guru Ron Lewis, by and large, has followed the informal House rules and has been largely been seen and not heard in his early years in the Texas Lege. Hunter is just preparing to announce. So we don’t know if either will win their party’s nomination, much less be elected to the Texas House. But unlike the days of my youth when there was only the Democratic party in Texas, partisan government now reigns supreme in Texas and it is as rotten on the local and state levels as it is on the national scene.

If I still lived in either Newton or Hardin counties — two of the counties in District 19 and the two in which I have lived — I would take advantage of any opportunity given by the House candidates to ask them questions. And if you have the opportunity to ask, don’t be afraid to ask them hard questions, such as those on matters of race and rednecks. This is the 21st century. Such inquiries are okay. They might be unwelcome to those running for office, but one probably won’t have a cross burned in their yard anymore should one ask. That’s what I hope, at least.

Permit me a final thought about the Eagles new album. After posting last night I came across a “Rolling Stone” review of the Eagles’ latest work. If the one song I heard on “Long Road Out of Eden” had a familiar sound — other than the fact it was done by the Eagles — it is because “How Long” was penned by frequent Eagles songwriting contributor J.D. Souther. It turns out the song was as the review put it a: ” previously unrecorded relic of the group’s early-Seventies live sets.”

The old old is the new new. Or is it the new old is the old new? I always get those mixed up.

Driving back to Beaumont from Nacogdoches on Friday I kept punching the radio buttons to find a station that didn’t suck. I happened upon a so-called “country gold” station out of Houston. Where that station really is, its call letters or whether or not what they were playing was really country and/or gold is irrelevant.

What is pertinent was this great song playing that I’d never heard before. I have to admit that I am not a country radio music fan. That is not to say I don’t like country-western-just-country-western or what the hell. I just think that we have entered into one of those periods like the late 1970s and early 1980s when, to put it into Babs Mandrell’s own words, damn it, “country wasn’t cool.” It wasn’t cool because it wasn’t country. It was pop and pop music that stunk. Had not Emmylou Harris, ol’ Merle, Wylie Neilson, Jerry Jeff and those who didn’t bow down to Nashville’s insanity been around, country music like the fabled “Minnow” of “Gilligan’s Island,” would have been lost.

The song I heard on the country-music-gold radio the other day reminded me of works from some of the country rock bands and performers who became so distinct in the 1970s — folks like Gram Parsons, groups like the Eagles, Pure Prairie League, and so forth. I thought to myself after listening to this rocking country-like tune that if this was country gold, I wondered why the hell I never heard this particular song before. It wasn’t until watching “60 Minutes” this evening that I discovered why that was. It was a new song.

That song, “How Long,” is a single off the Eagles first album of new material in 25+ years. The album, CD or whatever the hell they are called these days, is titled “Long Road Out of Eden” and after watching the interview on the CBS news magazine, I went online to order it, which with shipping came out to be about $17-some-odd.

This is not the first time I have bought a record due to the strength of one song. I probably have bought most albums after hearing one or two songs. I don’t think I ever bought an album or CD without hearing a track. But after hearing this one song — which is as good or better than “Already Gone” but will never be “Take It Easy” — I decided to live a little and buy the CD. I doubt this arrival matches my eagerness for a new Tom Robbins (not TIM but Tim is an okay actor) novel which seems to only come ever 5-6 years, but after 25-something years with the collaboration of Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Tim Schmidt and Joe Walsh, I think the wait may just be worth it. If not, at least “How Long” is a great song.

Who says those TV news magazines are a waste of time?