Talking Loud and Saying Nothing

What kind of a Christmas morning is it when James Brown doesn't Get Up?



Thanks to those classy Aussie's over at triple j, we can all put a little Funky Drummer into our New Years. For those of you who, like me, are spending Boxing Day at your desks instead of at the malls, plug your headphones into your PC and check out this James Brown Mix Tape (don't let the few seconds of distracting garble at the beginning throw you).

Make It Funky, y'all.

Pre-Kids, Part 2: Our Own Christmas Miracle

Then

My cat has heart disease. My cat, Orville, who makes me laugh every day (which not even my husband or Garrison Keillor can do) has a problem with one tiny valve in his heart. His huge, perfect heart. And it beats too fast. His Big Heart beats almost twice as fast as it should—as it reasonably can. A heart is only designed to go so fast, to work so hard, and if a heart works too hard, things thicken and harden. Hard hearts don’t beat as well as soft, supple, healthy hearts. Hard hearts don’t, in fact, beat at all.

I found all this out a little over two-and-a-half months ago at our local veterinary medical teaching hospital. Our regular vet had found a Heart Murmur and referred us to a Specialist for a Full Work-up: chest x-ray, EKG, and an echocardiogram. I made an appointment and we saved our money—two car payments-worth. My parents said we were nuts; my mother in fact said “Well, you can always get another cat.” But this was our cat—our Pre-Kid. Orville was our responsibility. We adopted him. We agreed to be responsible for him—for his health, for his well-being. We didn’t say that we would sometimes be responsible. We didn’t say that we would be responsible as long as it didn’t cost too much. I mean, if we didn’t take care of him, who would?

When The Specialist told me that Orville would be on beta blockers for the rest of his life, I tried very hard to understand her. “Why beta blockers?“ I asked. “Isn’t that what people with high blood pressure take? Does he have high blood pressure?”

“We used them to slow down a patient’s heart rate,” she said. “Orville doesn’t have high blood pressure, he has mitral valve dysplasia—he has a misshapen valve. And right now that’s leading to prolapse—the valve isn’t closing properly, so his heart is leaking a little bit. That’s what’s causing the Heart Murmur.”

“Leaking?”

“Not bad, but a bit. See, blood in the heart is only supposed to move in one direction. The heart pumps and forced blood through the valve and then the valve shuts behind it, like a flap door, keeping the blood from flowing back the way it came. But Orville’s valve isn’t closing properly.”

“So how do we fix it?”

“Well, we can try the beta blockers. His heart is definitely beating too quickly—we can at least take some of the strain off the muscle and see if that helps the valve. Ideally, if we can control this through the medication, the valve won’t thicken and will perhaps have a chance to work more normally than it does now.”

I asked her if we could get the medication in a liquid. We could. The pharmacist would even flavor it. Like liver. My cat would be taking 0.63 cc’s of liver-flavored beta blockers twice a day for the rest of his life. Actually, he wouldn’t be taking them: Expat and I would be administering them. Twice. Daily. And oh, by the way, they would need to see him for another heart monitoring echocardiogram in about two to three months, just to check on the status of things. Just to tell us how much longer his heart might work.

I called Expat on the way home from the teaching hospital and told him the news. We both hoped that the beta blockers would work. Expat said, “He has such a Big Heart. I hope that Big Heart doesn’t kill him.”

And so, every twelve hours for the next three months Expat and I dutifully chased Orville out from under the bed or the sofa or the dining room table, sat on him (well, more like crouched over him, keeping him immobilized with our knees), and squirted 0.63 cc’s of “liver juice” into the corner of his mouth, much to Orville’s dismay. The first week was rough—he hid from us, eyed us warily when he wasn’t hiding from us, and seemed generally edgy and unhappy. By the second week, things had calmed down a bit; Orville no longer glared at us from under the bed as though we were interrogators at Gitmo. By week three, he seemed to resign himself to the fact that this was just how it was going to be: that his loving Pet Parents were just going to periodically sit on him and squirt icky stuff down his throat while telling him that he was a good boy, and the rest of the time he could get away with murder. Not such a bad rap, all things considered.

And all things considered, the medicine seemed to be working—at least, from our very nonexpert vantage points. Expat and I both agreed that his wee heart rate was slower and we chided ourselves for never recognizing his old, rapid rhythm as abnormal. He was just easily excited, we said. He was always hyper, we thought, and hyper cats must have hyper pulses. But once that initial phase of distrust wore off and Orville started sitting on our laps again, we knew how wrong we had been. When he fell asleep on my chest and I felt a slow, relaxed, easy thump as his little ribcage rose and fell, I knew that the butterfly beats of old were wrong. I felt guilty—how could I have missed it? How could I not have known?

Now

Given our dutiful attention to his medication schedule, I expected to get at least some good news when I took him back for his three month check up last week. Maybe the vet would think his heart rate was much better. Maybe his Heart Murmur would be a little less pronounced. Maybe his valve would be okay—maybe it wouldn’t have thickened all that much. I was Thinking Positive.

The Veterinary Resident who did the preliminary exam was a very nice man about my age who seemed a little nervous but who handled Orv with such care that when his eyes widened and he looked up from his stethoscope and my writhing cat and said “I cannot find The Murmur,” I just assumed he hadn’t been pressing the stethoscope to Orville hard enough.

“Do you want me to try holding him for you?”

“Please.”

He tried again. He placed the stethoscope on Orville chest and stared at it, as if willing it to hear the irregularity for him—as if maybe he could look through Orville with his x-ray vision and see The Murmur.

Nothing.

Orville, meanwhile, with his cat’s way of morphing into water when he didn’t want to be held, wasn’t making anyone’s job any easier.

“Look,” I said to The Resident as I dragged Orville for the third time from his carrier—which he despised five minute earlier, but which was now his favorite hiding place—and placed him back on the examining table, “What if his Heart Murmur is gone?”

“Gone? That Murmur was a four on a scale of six. It was very pronounced. A four is a Very Pronounced Murmur. I cannot understand why I cannot hear it. . . Let me listen again.”

After round three, The Resident threw up his hands and announced that he would be back in a few moments with The Attending, who would talk with me further about Orville’s condition, what we needed to do today, and what might be happening with the Very Pronounced Murmur.

“The Murmur is gone!” The Attending looked up from her stethoscope and smiled. “This is wonderful.”

“Can it do that?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Yes, yes. This is the best case scenario. This is what we hope for when we put a patient on beta blockers.” She smiled and handed Orville back to me, who promptly spilled through my arms and down the front of my shirt, and vanished into his carrier.

“So do you still need to keep him today?”

“We’ll still need to do the echo to see what the heart actually looks like, but we’ll skip all the other stuff today. You can come pick him up in a few hours.”

So I left him there and went to work. Orv was ready later that day. The Attending and The Resident came out together and handed me the carrier.

“He was a model patient,” The Attending told me. “We didn’t even have to tranquilize him to do the echo. And his heart looks wonderful. That valve is closing properly and everything seemed to be flowing beautifully.”

“And his Heart Murmur?”

“Gone. Completely.”

“Completely?”

“Completely.” She smiled. “Of course, he will have to stay on the beta blockers for the rest of his life, but given the success we’ve seen with them, I’m going to say that you don’t need to come in for another check up until next December.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She shook my free hand. The Resident shook my free hand. “I’m glad you couldn’t hear The Murmur,” I told him.

“Me too.” He smiled. “Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”

I paid the bill and left with Orville. I needed to get him home; it was almost time to give him his medicine.

Shepherds Ask for Flannel; Wisemen Stay Inside

We here in Scooter Nation are confused, befuddled, and generally stumped. We do not understand the compulsion of otherwise reasonable adults to don bed sheets and tie hand towels to their heads and rent pettable livestock and stand around in 10 degree weather (negative 3 with windchill), looking at a plastic baby doll. We are simply flummoxed by the idea that there are enough people willing to don bed sheets and towels and rent pettable livestock that this bizarre event can take place—sometimes simultaneously—in multiple churchyards by the side of multiple roads in multiple counties in multiple Midwestern states, all with varying degrees of below-freezing temperatures.

The Midwestern obsession with the live nativity is, in a word, insane. For a people known for their farmer-like practicality and polite but firm rejections of anything that is not “normal” (i.e., Chick-fil-a: “A fast food place that only sells chicken sandwiches? Chicken biscuits for breakfast?! Well, I guess if you like that sort of thing.”), they seem quite content to throw sheets over their Columbia jackets and wade out into the snow to pet donkeys and ogle someone’s supposed Jesus-look-alike Bitty Baby American Girl Doll. Never mind that Jesus was born in the Middle East in the desert where it’s warm and definitely not in Wisconsin or Minnesota or North Dakota or anywhere remotely close to the Canadian border and the Great Lakes Snowbelt. Forget the fact that Jesus was actually, in all probability, born during the summer months and that the only reason we now celebrate his birth in December is most likely because of a neat tie-in to the pagan calendar and the winter solstice. And what about the fact that Jesus probably looked nothing like the pasty white doll wrapped up in someone’s old twin top sheet?

Admittedly, Midwesterners do not cast aside all of their practicality for these events. If you can look past the obvious absurdity of the situation, you will find that live nativities (at least, the ones witnessed by your friendly local Scooter Nationalists) are organized with a drill sergeant’s precision and timing. Participants—well, human participants—work in shifts of 30 minutes each, sort of like a tag-team event. Every half hour, one team of shepherds and wisemen and angels and Jesus-bearing parents troops inside to thaw and eat cookies while another team of shepherds and wisemen and angels and Jesus-bearing parents takes their place. I have never actually witnessed the changing of the guard, so I am not 100% sure of the tag-team logistics. It’s like a religious quantum physics problem: can two Marys exist, even temporarily, within the same plywood-and-plastic-tarp stable? Two Josephs? Six wisemen—or wise persons, as some more inclusive churches might call them? Does Team One slip out a handful at a time, like people discreetly leaving a lame party? Or do the 10 paint-lights illuminating the scene black out for a moment and when they’re flipped back on, a new cast is suddenly standing there in the old cast’s place?

Down along the Gulf Coast of Alabama where my mother lives, live nativities seem to make a bit more sense—at least climatically speaking. Typically, the stable is set up next to that one palm tree on the church property to lend some vague Middle Eastern essence to the scene. Visitors to the live nativity can get away with wearing just a light jacket or a glitter-painted, iron-on-appliqué Christmas sweatshirt. In the Deep South, Mary and Joseph don’t have to tag team with anyone to prevent hypothermia from setting in, and the shepherds, angels, and wisemen don’t have to fret about freezing extremities. No on wears mittens. And every once in a while you’ll see a real live baby (albeit a 6 month old instead of a newborn) wrapped in some swaddling clothes over its footy pajamas, sleeping away while a young Mary earnestly watches the manger to make sure the rented cow doesn’t get any ideas.

And maybe that’s why the Midwesterners do it. Maybe once upon a time some well-meaning transplanted Southerner decided that it was high time Mary wore mittens. Maybe they do it to prove to the rest of the country that hey, a little snow isn’t going to stop the baby Jesus. Maybe this whole live nativity obsession is bigger than we at Scooter Nation ever thought, and the Midwesterners are just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak—what if they’re wearing bed sheets up in Canada right about now? Or Greenland? Or Russia? And what if they aren’t insane? What if the one question that Saint Peter asks you when it’s your time to go is “What part did you play in the live nativity, my child?”

Which is why we here at Scooter Nation are seriously considering putting our hands up next year. We may not understand the Midwestern obsession with the live nativity, but you don’t have to understand something to respect it: consider brain surgery or my all-wheel drive automatic transmission, for example. I can handle a 30 minute stint in the snow—I’ve got long underwear. Just sandwich me between a few sheep, I’ll be all right. And make sure my sheet’s flannel.