1. I started out the day with an appointment with N.P. Linda Jo Yawn to look over the blood work I had done last week and talk about my current state of health. I had pulled up the record of my blood work on Tuesday and the numbers troubled and mystified me.
I've lost more kidney function. My tests show I have 14% function, meaning my function has fallen into Stage 5, commonly known as End Stage Chronic Kidney Disease.
But, in every other area my blood levels are great.
Now, if decisions about treating this disease were based only on numbers, I'd be starting dialysis soon. But, it's not numbers, per se, that determine one starting dialysis. It's symptoms: itching, metallic taste in one's mouth, fatigue, nausea, edema, and others. As of now, I'm not experiencing any symptoms of renal failure.
As Linda Jo Yawn put it: "You look great. I go to the grocery store and I see people whom I can tell without knowing them are kidney patients by how they look. When I look at you, I don't see a kidney patient."
I'm not sure what to expect. My kidney function has been declining more over the last 9-10 months than at any other period of time over the last fourteen years, and, yet, I don't feel any different. The levels of potassium, chloride, cholesterol, and other things are all within the normal range (somehow my blood is being properly filtered and regulated) and nothing bad showed up in my urine sample.
So, I see my nephrologist again in January. Linda Jo Yawn said she didn't need to see for six months unless I start feeling lousy.
I've decided that the best thing to do is wake up each day, assess whether any symptoms are beginning to show up, and, if none pop up, be grateful for another day of feeling pretty good, live it as honestly and fully as I can, and do my best not to get too anxious about what I can't do much about. Difficult days lie ahead -- but they aren't here quite yet.
2. Back home, I watched a couple innings of the Mets and the Marlins, but decided that what I was really wanting to do was watch more of The American Experience: New York.
Yesterday, in my 3BTs, I wondered if the documentary was going to plunge more deeply into the career of Robert Moses and the harm I've read his designs for public housing and building highways and expressways did to New York City, especially as these plans, once executed, devastated the neighborhoods of poor immigrants and blacks and other minorities.
It did.
The documentary's narration never used the phrase "systemic racism", but for anyone who doesn't understand this phrase or who doesn't buy into it, or, for anyone (like me) looking to understand the workings of systemic racism more fully and deeply, what this documentary explores in Episodes 6-7 paints a chilling picture of the systems of government and private enterprise (real estate developers, banks, property owners, and others) systematically treating racial and ethnic minorities as dispensable, as obstructions to progress, and as having neighborhoods unworthy of preservation and, in fact, in need of clearance. The discrimination, the racism is built into the structures and practices of power and in the enforcing of the destruction of neighborhoods and livelihoods. The consequences of what was called urban renewal were devastating and are long lasting.
3. Robert Moses stubbornly and fanatically pushed a plan to put an automobile expressway through Lower Manhattan. It required a wide swath of demolition in Greenwich Village and required demolition of Washington Square, parts of Little Italy, parts of Chinatown, and other neighborhoods across Manhattan. Led by the writer Jane Jacobs, whose writings argued against the current out with the old, in with the new urban renewal ideology of Robert Moses, the citizens of Lower Manhattan protested, jammed City Hall, and kept this expressway from being built.
Out these citizens' efforts and out of the grief New Yorkers suffered with the demolition earlier of Penn Station, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission came into being and, as a result, when we visit New York City today, Manhattan is not bifurcated or trifurcated by multi-lane expressways cutting through the island. Robert Moses' designs and efforts to build expressways through Manhattan were thwarted. And, thanks to this commission's work, such architectural wonders as St. Patrick's Cathedral, Grand Central Terminal, Washington Square, and many other magnificent structures are intact, functioning, and have benefited from restoration and cleaning (instead of clearing out) projects.
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