How We Spent Our Valentine's Day

We worked! ORB at Wells Branch community center. And Jan used our Flip camera to make this, which turned out to be the last tune of the night.

We'll be at their July 4 party again this year. Last year I had my implant for 3 whole days. I played, though.

New Mexico: My Heart Problems Come to the Fore

From Blogger Pictures

I'd walked off the Queen Elizabeth 2 in Los Angeles on the 30th of March with a bit of a cough. Here’s a whole blog about my QE2 experiences and the great musicians who worked on her when I did. Then here are two links ( here and here ) that’ll bring you up-to-date, to where this episode begins.

It took a couple of weeks to gestate into something really impressive, with phlegm enough for an army, all day long. By then I was in Atlantic City, playing alto in the Ratpack show at Harrah's for a three-week run.

Returning to Texas, It took me until the middle of May to get an appointment with my doctor back in Austin. He chose Cipro—the Republican drug of choice when the Anthrax scare was happening—wrote up a 10-day course for me, and off I went to the H-E-B pharmacy.

I had about a week between arriving home from Atlantic City and leaving for New Mexico. I love New Mexico, and so does my spouse. She loves the quiet and getting away from her job. I like to rest. We stay at a place called Casita de Chuparosa in Abiquiui, which is about 40 miles north of Santa Fe. Marilyn and her son Jeff run the place so well that we just drop our bags and start decompressing as soon as we get there.

This year, we were leaving on Memorial Day, Monday.

The beginning of the weekend, I had a couple gigs with the family enterprise band. Saturday night was in San Antonio. I usually take a bunch of cats in my van, but this particular time I only had the trombone player, so we took my little black sedan. We stopped at the Starbucks just south of San Marcos for a break and I ordered something that seemed to have way too much whipped cream in it. As we approached San Antonio I started to feel very queasy.

I pulled into a parking space in the old bakery that had been converted into a party venue. I got out of the car to finish putting on my tux, and suddenly I was too weak to move. I was hyperventilating.

I called my brother, who had set up and was about to start, and told him I wasn’t feeling well. Because I was playing the King of Instruments, my baritone saxophone, the horn section could carry on without me. I told Jim I’d be up if I could. I was spitting a massive amount of phlegm, and kind of stumbling around the car in half a tuxedo. I could hear the band, but there was no way I could even crawl up the steps to where I could hear the band playing. The young trombone player was scared by what was happening, but I told him to go on upstairs and play the wedding. I spend maybe a half hour stumbling around the parking lot, spitting into the ivy. I then fumbled my way to the car, loosened up my bow tie, and lowered myself into the driver’s seat. I lowered the seat to nap, but I couldn’t nap because I was panting.

I didn’t make it out of the parking lot until the gig was over. The trombone player drove us home to Austin, and by that time my breathing had gone back to normal, although I still felt my heart was racing. I continued to spit phlegm out the passenger window all the way up I-35.

My initial thought was that it was a reaction between what I drank for Starbucks and my Cipro, which was down to two tablets at that point. Of course, it could have been something more serious, but it was a holiday weekend, so I decided to ride it out and not call my doctor through his service. I come from a long line of self-diagnoticians, and, hearing no objection from my long-suffering but very sensible spouse, I rolled over and slept. When I woke up, I knew we had another wedding, this time in Austin, at the Mansion on Judge’s Hill. I decided I was ok to play the gig, and told my brother I was when he called in the morning.

This wedding was the last gig with Tommy Poole and Casey Daniel, husband and wife saxophonist and singer (canary) so I was on baritone again. (Tommy and Casey moved to Kentucky.) I loaded up the van even though nobody was driving with me, and headed over to the Mansion. I was actually feeling pretty good and managed to squeeze out a 4-hour gig, although I noticed a certain lightheadedness and had difficulty concentrating.

By the time we were getting ready to go on vacation, I had taken my last Cipro. I wasn’t feeling much better.

Jan and I woke up early and headed to the Austin airport. We went on Southwest, stopping in Midland. Arriving at the Albuquerque airport--with the differential of altitude--I couldn’t go up the jetway with just my backpack and my alto. Jan and I took it real slow and easy, and in time we were in the terminal area. I had problems walking. I was winded. In time, we made it to the rental car. me making some excuses about the altitude. Jan drove our mini-SUV through the back roads to Santa Fe. We stopped in a tourist-trap art town and walked around, but I spent most of the last leg into Santa Fe sleeping. By the time we got to Abiquiui I was panting again, rather like one of my dogs when they were running in the summer heat. It was worse--far worse--when I tried to sleep, I alternated between hacking and panting. In the morning I called the doctor back in Austin and told him what was happening. Me, and him, for all l knew, were still thinking I had an infection from the ship.

As anyone who watches House on the TV knows, there are a great many things that can stand in the way of a true diagnosis. In my case, I had a bacterial infection that was masking a far more serious problem: Congestive Heart Failure caused by (we think) a viral infection of the heart muscle.

So I went to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Santa Fe and had an emergency chest x-ray. The results were shared with my GP back in Austin, and when I called my doctor in Austin his Physcian’s Assistant told me I’d better go to the ER and check myself in, because there was my heart was swollen and they had to figure out what was happening before I could be released into my vacation or fly home.

Jan, as always, swung into action as I was attempting to process the implications. When we arrived at the hospital I was wired for monitors to a fare-the-well. It was obvious that my heart was beating a lot faster than was normal and safe and that the rhythms were irregular. Jan had the good sense to let me make a joke of all this, and there were chortles among the staff, easing the get-acquainted period.

But the monitors I was rigged up to told a very serious story. I had a serious arhythmia happening. The first order of business was to drain the fluid from around my heart, which was accomplished through Lasix, a drug that could produce water in the Mojave desert. Or so I was told. My body reacted to Lasix not nearly as advertised, taking me nearly an hour to pass some water. (This was the beginning of my I AM LASIX RULER OF THE UNIVERSE routine, because it seemed like we were leaning a little hard on the drug with the Norse god name.)

After a couple of hours struggling with the monitors, their wires, and those for whom their results were a stock in trade, it was beginning to get a lot less funny. Jan left after dark to settle things with our hosts in Abiquiui, and I was in a ward room with a former lineman who had 20,000 volts go through him 20 years ago and was having a heart condition taken care of. I had to keep track of all the fluids I passed, and when I fell asleep it was like a cue for the staff to come in and take my blood or check my “vitals.” (I would have made a joke, but as I said this was starting to get non-funny.

Come dawn I was introduced to the Hospitalist--another of the twisted uses of languages that the medical profession has come up with recently. Marc was really a swell guy who obviously cared way too much about his patients. At this point I was being forced fluids through an IV (not an easy task for me, as my veins roll over and play dead better than my dogs). I was peeing into a measuring cup so the nurse could see how much was going out. I could use a little humanity, and that was Marc the Hospitalist. A hospitalist does the rounds for the docs who don’t. My observation is that you’re not getting out of there unless the hospitalist says so. Besides, I’d told my story to enough doctors that it was becoming an absurdist narrative. It seemed like Marc would be my last audience until I got home.

I stayed another couple days at St. Vincent’s, a hospital that benefits enormously from the nearby ski areas in the winter. Turns out that Marc used to practice in Austin, and once I was sorted out and drained, he made an appointment with the best cardiologist in Austin. Jan had moved into an motel room near the hospital and changed our departure on Southwest, and there I was squinting in the morning sunlight 4 days after checking in, at the patient pick-up circle. We spent the last night of our vacation in the nearby motel, then drove to Albuquerque in the morning.

Our flight stopped in Lubbock, but we had no change of planes.

Some vacation.

Forebodings Ashore

Back?

Good. I left the service of QE2 on March 30, 2008, at the Port of Los Angeles, underneath the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a few hundred feet from where my career as a cruise ship musician was started in the early eighties. That doesn't mean to imply that getting off the ship was easy. Due to the incredible incompetence of one shipmate in particular in the crew office, the guys in the Princess entertainment office did not receive my request for an early out when we were as close to LA as Osaka.

I had to refile the form and more or less walk it through the stations of the cross. While I never served in the military, this is the kind of situation I thought only a branch of the armed services could botch this badly. One of the things I had to do in order to get this thing off the dime was to actually appear before this individual in the Crew Office. He was argumentative and defensive, aside from the general propensity toward advanced ignorance. And, he had a pronounced speech impediment, which caused him in his fury to ask, when I told him I had a plane ticket for Austin and would be leaving whether they had a replacement for me or not, "Are you fretening me?" Indeed I was not. I was just informing him, in the interest of advancing the cause. Fretening was the furthest thing from my mind.

No matter. Once the Princess office had the paperwork in hand it was a small matter to plug in a replacement for me. Los Angeles is a city noted for its out-of-work saxophonists and its international airport, so either bringing in someone local or flying someone in so from faraway places with strange sounding names is not trivial, but easy.



When we were in Hawaii, I was within range of my Sprint phone for the first time, so I arranged to have 2 parties pick me up: Steve, my trombonist buddy who I've been playing with since junior high or whatever it's called nowadays, and the family of my sister Cindy--Joe, her husband, a native of the recently-visited Kingdom of Tonga, and their son, Evan, who had been signed to play football for Southern Methodist University while I was gone. My thinking in the matter was that if I had two cars coming to collect me and bring me up to LAX, one would certainly show. (As it turned out, both vehicles showed up at very much the same time.)

The formalities for getting off the ship took two hours. My goodbye collection of photographs was taken entirely in the Staff Mess, where we tended to congregate whenever there were great waits in time to be tolerated. Of course, we had just cleared customs four days before in Hawaii. but no matter. We're fighting terrorism, and that means plenty of waiting around when it comes to cruise ships.

Finally we loaded up and headed out. Steve showed up in his early seventies Porsche 911, and my sister's family, not to be outdone, rolled in in a very fancy Mercedes Benz.

From the time we were in Singapore I was coughing. It was really nothing new, as the QE2 has a 40-year-old ventilation system. We all tended to pick up upper respiratory infections, a common ailment among the musicians on any ship, more so on the venerable QE2.

Thinking nothing of it, and not wanting to complicate my exit, I chose not to trouble the ship's doctor, but rather thought I'd be better off bringing my cough to my doctor in Austin. Trouble was, I had just a couple days in in Austin before heading to Atlantic City for a three-week gig at Harrah's, in the big showroom, playing the English ratpack show.

Jan and I only had a day and a half together before she jetted off to look after her folks in Alabama, who are in their nineties. The folks desperately need Jan to show up and do what she does best: organize.

As soon as she left, I started feeling bad. Sleep became difficult. But what could I do? I had to catch a plane the next day for Philadelphia, and then a limo--A LIMO--to Atlantic City. Three weeks work was nothing to sneeze at, and that was the deal I made with myself: the reason I left QE2 early was that I had booked these three weeks, to compensate for the lost wages.

My health, well, I'd take care of that when I got back to Austin. In the middle of the three weeks in Jersey, Jan flew out for a visit. I was short-winded, unable to sleep through the night, but I was really digging the gig. The headliners were American, the MD a very swinging Brit, and the remainder of the band was cats from New York City. I was playing alto, doing my best to do an authentic 1950's Marshal Royal lead sound. The trouble was getting from the bus to the venue was a bit of a struggle.

What I did not know was that my heart and lungs were filling with fluid, a process that must have started aboard QE2 with my presumptive upper respiratory infection. I was unable to walk distances or to sleep through the night because I was on the verge of Congestive Heart Failure.