This has been one of those extraordinary days in America.
Two presidents — one white and former president and one black who is the president — spoke on the same page praising work of the five Dallas police officers killed in an ambush following a protest march on July 7.
A former Democratic party presidential candidate and the presumptive Democratic candidate embraced in a showing of party unity.
The U.S. attorney general was grilled by Republicans who demanded to know why she didn’t refer charges against the presumptive Democratic candidate in a politically-charged scandal over e-mails.
All of this took place today as I sat in the Parkinson’s Disease clinic at the Houston VA waiting to see my neurologist. Oh, I don’t have Parkinson’s, at least I don’t think so.
I began reading an interesting article on one major problem I do have, that is maintaining balance. The article was in “Neurology Now,” a title I previously didn’t know. But this magazine had an attractive cover layout that pictured the former California first lady, who also was once an NBC television news correspondent, and a member of the famous Camelot clan from which came a murdered, young U.S. president. That lady shouldn’t be former anything and proves she isn’t by speaking out on Alzheimer’s Disease.
The article, which I have yet to finish, suggests Tai Chi and other methods can help older folks to maintain balance. You, the reader reading this blog, may read this article before I do. I have had concerns over the last couple of years, since my balance had gone awry, that I might get stopped by police and asked me to perform a field sobriety test. I don’t drink and drive, anymore at least. Buy my balance is way out of whack and that would be the first thing I would tell police. Well, I would tell them right after saying: “No,” I would not perform any tests.
Before I finished the article my neurologist, a very nice lady who came from India to help veterans, gave me about 10 shots of Botox. The Botox shots — I have received about four or five sets — have been in my head, neck and face to attempt helping the great pain I suffer from my cervical spine and the osteoarthritis that has savaged my neck over the years.
The shots today were in the back of my neck in a peripheral area of my spine.
My neck felt better, for the first time since I have received the shots, although after the drive back from Houston the neck is back to its painful ways. My lower back has, in the interim, become much more painful among standing and walking. That has been attributed to the diagnosis I was given of a rare disease called “Arachnoiditis.” And as I must always point out, the disorder has nothing to do with spiders.
I will be checking in my self-examination mirror to determine if the Botox has made the back of my neck appear any younger. In the meantime, my doctor said she will say what, if anything, she will do about my lower back.
This was what happened in my day, another day in America.