MichaelandChrissy.com

I found out last weekend night that my Dad had suffered a heart attack on Saturday.  Not a chest-grabber, just a recurring pain that made him want to visit the hospital.  I was kind of shaken up about it; I don’t see my Dad nearly as often as I would like to, but I hoped that he was all right.  He was recovering nicely by the time I found out about his episode, so I made plans to visit him the next day.  Babies are not allowed in the ICU, so Chrissy would have to stay home with Aiden and Gavin.

I got to the hospital to see my Dad just before he was discharged on Sunday.  He was doing better, with no permanent damage, just some new medications and an order from his doctor to eat better and exercise more.  Both of our doctors say that we need to eat more healthy and exercise (I will get back on the bike, really).  It’s always nice to catch up with my Dad.  We swapped health concerns and talked about our family health history.

It turns out that my Dad’s Dad died of a stroke when I was only two years old.  That would have made my Dad about twenty at the time, a year older than I was when my Mom died of cancer.  So I’ve got all sorts of genetic markers pointing toward a death-inducing illness.  I’m sure that I’ll survive a bit longer if I follow my doctor’s advice, but I’ll have to keep in touch more closely with my Dad in the future so that we can update each other on our healthy lifestyle improvements.

Aiden is a smart little boy.  He shows good problem solving ability and is able to follow multi-step directions.  He has an easy-going nature and is very loving to his baby brother.  But Chrissy and I are worried because Aiden has a speaking problem.  He used to babble a lot as a baby, but he never quite grew out of that; the sounds never formed into coherent words.  We’ve come up with some ways to cope, but his language skills are barely past single syllables.

Children are supposed to learn a dozen words by eighteen months, and should be able to string two or more words together to make simple sentences by the age of two.  Aiden started off with a couple of sounds by eighteen months, but words never followed.  It’s hard when you take him someplace to play with other kids his own age, and he’s the only one in the room that isn’t speaking.  We still strive to put him into social settings, but we tell people that he’s “shy”.

Chrissy started to be concerned when Aiden was only a year old.  She picked up a book on the subject, “The Late Talker: What to Do If Your Child Isn’t Talking Yet“.  The book deals mostly with Apraxia, a particular speech disorder, and what to do if you child has it.  We don’t think that Aiden is Apraxic, but we did find out how to get help for him.  At the very least, we took away from the book the need to have your child tested early to rule out bigger health problems.

We contacted “First Steps“, a child health group, and they came to do an evaluation on Aiden when he was seventeen months old.  They claimed that Aiden had excelled on all counts except for speech, but he wasn’t far enough behind to warrant therapy.  Aiden’s pediatrician then recommended that we test his hearing at the local hospital, and he passed those tests as well (we knew his hearing was fine, but did it just in case).

Aiden’s vocabulary didn’t progress farther than “mom”, “dad”, “eat”, “uh-oh”, “ball” and “bye”.  First Steps came out again for a re-evaluation when he was twenty-three months old, and this time he qualified for speech therapy at home.  He currently gets one hour of “play therapy” with a therapist per week.  We think that this is helping, but the results are slow in coming.  He now makes car noises and some animal sounds, which is good since mimicry is an important step towards speech.

Aiden has augmented his communication skills with sign language.  He loves the “Baby Einstein” sign language videos, and he recently got “Baby Signing Time“.  He has gotten pretty good at it, and can sign “car”, “ball”, “mom”, “dad”, “eat”, “cereal”, “cracker”, “cookie”, “candy”, “drink”, “milk”, “juice”, “water”, “baby”, “bath”, “bedtime”, “I love you”, “kiss”, “more”, “open”, “book”, “cat”, “dog”, “please”, and “thank you”.  He has even started using multiple signs to put together ideas (”eat cracker”, “drink milk”, “more please”).

Although the sign language is a big help, we would prefer that he talk out loud.  Chrissy has enrolled Aiden in speech therapy at St. Xavier University, where they teach speech therapists.  This is a little pricey, but we’re serious about helping him speak properly.  We’re hoping that Aiden will get better with more therapy and eventually catch up to other kids his age.

Things are getting exciting here, with only seven more days before the arrival of our new son, Gavin James Wilson.  Since Aiden was born by an emergency C-section, Chrissy opted to deliver Gavin the same way.  The hospital has asked that Chrissy arrive at 5:15AM on July 22nd to “prep” for the surgery, as the doctors are scheduled to begin cutting at 7:30AM.  We are not thrilled about doing this first thing in the morning, but that is when they told us to be there.

Aiden was born around 4:30PM, the late afternoon being perfect timing for Chrissy. She was in the recovery room until about 6:30PM and then got to visit with family until the end of visiting hours at 8PM.  It was nice to see Aiden and visit with Chrissy’s family before going to bed.  After forty-eight hours of back labor, Chrissy was happy to sleep the night away, heavily medicated.  Everyone was shocked at how quickly she recovered and was soon up and moving with little pain.

Since Gavin will be born so early in the morning, Chrissy will unfortunately spend the entire day in a drugged stupor as family and friends come in and out.  She would rather sleep off the anesthetic overnight like she did last time.  We have already requested that visitors wait until the next day, but that, of course, doesn’t include our immediate family (who will probably be there before she gets out of recovery).  If only we could reschedule until later in the day.

I will still be calling everyone to propagate the good news though.  And although the birth won’t be simulcast on Twitter, I will definitely be posting timely information on our web site.  And photos, possibly movies this time too.  Watch this space for details!

I’ve been trying to lose weight for the last several months, and the recumbent bike in our basement has been a big factor in my plans. I was sticking to my schedule for a while, trying to get on the bike at least two or three times a week. When I went to C# training last month, I was worried that I would have to wait a week to get on the bike again, but the hotel had an exercise room with a stationary bike. A very old, rickety stationary bike with no foot clips and loose wheels (read: deathtrap).

After my second try on the old stationary bike, my left ankle started hurting. I was limping around by the weekend and trying to stay off of it. Unfortunately, I had to stop riding at home so that my ankle could heal. After about two weeks, I felt much better and started exercising again. This would prove to be a mistake. My ankle hurt even worse after another week, so I decided to go to Dr. Bison, the podiatrist who diagnosed my foot pronation.

The problem turned out to be swelling under the bone in my ankle. Dr. Bison said that I should have stayed off of it for four weeks instead of just two. The pain had gone away after the first two weeks of being off of it, but it takes four weeks to completely heal. I also learned that foot X-rays are expensive, but we needed to make sure that I hadn’t cracked the end of my fibula, right where it meets the ankle. Luckily, the only issue was the swelling. I ended up in an ankle brace, and I can’t ride my recumbent bike until the brace comes off.

So now I’ve got a McDavid tie brace on my ankle. It’s got its own Twin Ion Engine. Kidding — it actually ties up in front (no spaceflight involved) so that the steel supports on the sides can hold your foot still. It’s just a little uncomfortable in my work shoes, so I might have justification to switch to my Nikes for the next few weeks. Interestingly enough, this is my first exercise-related injury in recent memory. At least I didn’t crash into anything.

When I was a wee baby, I developed an allergy to milk, or so I’m told (this is all second-hand, mind you, because I was too young to remember it). My parents did the best thing that they could think of (it being the early 70’s and parenting magazines not being invented yet): they served up ice cold “Coca-Cola” in a baby bottle. When I was old enough to walk to the refrigerator and open it myself, I could fetch my own bottles of pop from the bottom shelf. It was agreed that this was a win-win situation for all involved.

Fast-forward a dozen years or so. I’m no longer allergic to milk, but I’m easily drinking an entire two-liter of “Coke” in one sitting. But I was young and invulnerable, so nobody seemed to mind. Go forward another dozen years, and I’m trying hard to wean myself off from my crippling caffeine addiction. Drinking so much pop was bad for me, but attempts at quitting the cola had caused awful withdrawals: headaches, shakiness, and jittery thoughts (”can’t… think… slowly…”). Bringing us to the present, where I am down to two cans of pop per day, one for lunch and one for dinner.

This reduction in caffeine intake, by itself, sounds like a great accomplishment in this context. However, I’m not a scrawny teenager anymore, and the doctor says that I have to lose weight. Those two cans of pop per day hold upwards of 300 calories that I should be cutting out of my diet. The problem is that “Diet Coke”, and any diet cola in my opinion, tastes nasty like Aspartame (”NutraSweet”), which is neither nutritious nor sweet. Worse yet, the Aspartame aftertaste won’t leave your mouth, thus ruining the taste of the rest of your meal.

I decided to try “Coke Zero“, an alternative brand of Coke that claims to have no calories, but has just as much caffeine as the original. No sugar, no carbs, and no trans fatty acids. “I bet it tastes like Aspartame though! It’ll suck!” I wanted to have a can of the “real” Coke nearby just in case I needed to cleanse the palate out quickly. It turns out that Zero wasn’t bad at all. There’s a hint of something different there, but not so bad that I can’t overlook it. Now I’m thinking of heading down to Meijers for a case of Coke Zero, and perhaps a case of “Vanilla Zero” (I loves me some “Vanilla Coke” too).

I’m really glad that I finally went in for treatment of my fatigue problems. I used to be tired all the time. I think that it started at about the time that I started working in Chicago. The long commute and the fast food diet collaborated against me, and I started gaining weight. I went from my college weight, 135 pounds, to my current weight of 205 pounds within six years. You can see the transformation in our photos over that time span (”Hey, it’s Niagara Falls. That was back when I had a neck!”). The added weight caused a thyroid imbalance and severe snoring, which combined to create problems greater than the sum of their parts.

I didn’t want to get help. That would take time and money that I didn’t think I had.  I had convinced myself that it wasn’t really a problem at all, I was just abnormally fatigued.  Eventually, my boss at the University of Chicago suggested that I go to a sleep therapist. He noticed how tired I was all the time.  After a battery of tests and sleep studies, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and severe sleep apnea. I got a prescription for thyroxin (artificial thyroid hormone) and a new CPAP machine to wear while sleeping, both of which I would come to rely upon.

Now life is very different for me. I don’t fall asleep during the work day any more, and I don’t have trouble staying awake during my commute. Related problems, like my elevated cholesterol levels, seemed to disappear. One major change is that I moved my work hours from 9-5 to 8-4. I could barely wake up in the mornings before, let alone an hour earlier, but it has been pretty easy now. As a bonus, I’m able to get home an hour earlier to spend quality time with Aiden. I have more time and energy to play with him now; we take care of his “bath, book and bed” before his bedtime at 7 o’clock.

My doctor said that I should be exercising more, so I’ve really made an effort to use our recumbent bike downstairs. The additional energy helps. I’m keeping a log of my exercise bike activities in an Excel spreadsheet (might put that online some time down the road). With any luck, I’ll lose weight now that I’m back on track. It’s not easy to cut calories, but dinner salads and Coke Zero are suddenly looking like viable options. I’m happy that my life has undergone these changes, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.

When you switch from job to job every two years or so, you end up having to change health care practitioners as well, depending on who will accept the health insurance that your new job provides.  I’ve jumped around to a bunch of dentists in the last decade.  When I came to the University of Chicago, I found out that Chrissy’s family dentist accepted my dental plan.  This was great, since I had never had a “family dentist” before. 

About a year ago, I went to the dentist complaining about pain in my upper-left back teeth.  We did a bunch of x-rays and he examined the area, but he couldn’t figure out what the problem was.  My teeth are generally in good shape, so it was odd that I was having trouble at all.  The fact that there was pain at all is cause to believe that something is seriously wrong.  The dentist told me that the best that he could do was to give me some antibiotics and see what happens.  I wasn’t happy about that, still being in pain, but the discomfort stopped after a week or so of the pills.

Now I’m having the jaw pain again.  The family dentist had taken a sabbatical, so he was unavailable.  Chrissy had recently needed some prenatal dental care (developing babies drain calcium from your body), so she went to another dentist.  I decided to give this new dentist a try too, since I didn’t have any other options.  I got in pretty quickly.  It turns out that my back molar on the top-left side is infected and there are signs of periodontal disease around the sides of the tooth.  There is a problem with an old filling and the infection is underneath it. 

I was shocked! I brush my teeth every day, but the decay was under my tooth. The dentist pointed it out in the x-rays so that even I could see it.  Shouldn’t this have been caught a year ago, when it started?  Now I have to get a root canal.  I am seriously unhappy with my old dentist right now.  Unbeknownst to me, I have a tooth that is rotting out of my skull, which should have been fixed long before it got this bad.  So, I’ll be going to the new dentist from now on. Chrissy likes the new dentist too, so we might both make the move.

The sleep doctor set me up with a CPAP machine, so I’ve been trying to get used to it for the last couple of nights. So far, I usually wake up about six times during the night to fight with the mask. I’m just not used to sleeping with something on my face. On the bright side, the mask is much more comfortable than the lab version that I had to wear during the sleep study. Still, it’s very cumbersome. Chrissy loves it; I don’t snore and she has background noise to sleep to.

One unanticipated benefit is that I don’t wake up all congested. I breathe through my mouth at night, so I usually spend five minutes clearing out my throat when I wake up (hack hack!). The CPAP has a filter on the air intake, so I’m not breathing in anything that will get stuck in my throat. I still wake up groggy and it takes me a few minutes to get fully awake, but I bounce back quickly without the choking.

Each day has been progressively nicer than the last. I still yawn a couple of times during the day, but far less than usual, and I haven’t had any narcoleptic episodes. I hated falling asleep at inopportune moments (you learn to put the car in park when you stop for trains). So if I can only get used to falling asleep with the mask on and remain asleep with the mask on, then my quality of life should improve significantly.

I got a call from the Sleep Clinic to schedule a return visit. They say that I have severe apnea, and wanted to schedule another night to monitor me while I wear a breathing device called a CPAP (see-pap). It turns out that my oxygen levels drop to 85% during the night, whereas 96% is good. The study shows that I have oxygenation issues (I stop breathing) up to 400 times a night, some as long as 90 seconds, so my body tries to rouse itself so that it can breathe. The CPAP should help me sleep better.

I went in a few days later and I got the same technician as last time. She took me to the same room that I had last time. I got all wired up with electrodes to my head, face, legs and hands. And that is where the similarities ended. This time, they fitted me for a clear plastic face mask that would force air down my throat while I slept. The idea is to keep the airway open so I can breathe through the night. The mask was uncomfortable and made wakeful breathing difficult. It took forever to fall asleep with it on.

Last time, I fell asleep quickly and slept through the night. Although I had sleep issues, I still woke up refreshed. This time, I woke up a dozen times to adjust the mask and then woke up in a stupor. I felt like I hadn’t slept at all. I’m told that my oxygen levels were back up to 96%, but I wasn’t feeling it. I guess I just have to get used to the CPAP mask; once that happens, I shouldn’t fall asleep in meetings ever again.

The sleep study on Tuesday night was actually a nice experience. I got to the clinic at 9:30 PM and they had me fill out some paperwork. They showed me to my room, which was small by comfortable. I’ve had worse hotel rooms, and this one had cable. The bed was firm, but comfy, and I almost fell asleep before they attached the monitoring devices.

After about twenty minutes, the technicians came in and hooked me up. I had close to two dozen electrodes attached to my head with adhesive paste, a couple on my legs and a bunch on my face. I also had a tube around my nose and a microphone on my neck. If I snored, they would know; if my legs twitched, they would know; if my breathing slowed, they would know. I didn’t know how I would get to sleep like this, but I found that it wasn’t too hard to move around.

I watched some Family Guy on the television and then fell asleep. It took a little longer to pass out than usual, but no longer than ten minutes. I think I woke up a couple of times in the night, but I usually go to the bathroom before I go to bed (I was wired up to the wall by that time though, so I couldn’t). I was a little groggy when they woke me, but my circumstances roused me quickly.

The technician told me that I have definite “sleep issues”, but she said that only a doctor could diagnose me. It takes about two weeks to work through all the data, so I’ve got an appointment with the sleep doctor in three weeks. At that point, he should have some suggestions on how to get me to sleep better.