1. Right now, I'm on an every three or four month schedule for lab work and a visit with nephrologist Dr. Bieber.
The time has come again to see him, next Wednesday, so Thursday I had blood drawn.
Today, I just happened to open my email box and already notification had dropped in from Labcorp that my lab results were ready.
So, I faced a moment of doubt.
Am I ready to face this report?
How about if the decline I figure must happen some day in my renal health has started? Do I want to face up to that possibility now?
Quickly, I cast my anxiety aside and answered myself: "Yes. I do want to face it."
I logged in, went to the "Results" page and clicked on "View".
The report came up.
With one exception I'll ask Dr. Bieber about on Wednesday, I could immediately see that everything was good. All the numbers that have been in range over the last many years were still in range.
The number that all my docs talk about with me the most is the GFR. It indicates the percentage of my kidney function. Every time is see the doctor, our hope is that this number is remaining stable, or improving. What we don't want to see is a big dip.
There are five stages of kidney disease. Stage 5 is the most serious. Often patients at Stage 5 must go on dialysis. Stage 5 kidney disease is determined by a GFR at 15 or lower.
Back in January, my GFR slid to 12, but I was feeling good and my other numbers were very good. My kidneys weren't function at a high percentage of function, but they were getting the job done. There was no need for dialysis.
My GFR increased to 15 in April, an encouraging surprise.
Since April, my kidneys have remained stable.
My GFR in this latest report was, again, at 15.
For me, this number was a great relief.
I've made it through another period of time between exams without experiencing severe symptoms of kidney disease and with feeling pretty good day to day.
I have a few things to check out with the doctor, but at least these numbers mean that won't dread my appointment on Wednesday.
2. I spent much of the day finishing up a filing project and am fairly pleased that I have placed every document and other piece of paper into the folder it belongs in.
For now, the paper side of our life is in good shape.
That, too, is a relief.
3. I hope I continue this habit I've recently taken up.
In the evening, I pour myself a not very strong cocktail in a pint beer glass and watch a movie.
Tonight, after a trip to Yoke's, where I bought a container of Double Fudge Brownie ice cream, I returned home, scooped some ice cream into a glass, added milk, hand stirred it into a milk shake, and added some brandy.
I took my drink into the Vizio room and rented Robert Altman's 1974 gambling movie, California Split, featuring Elliott Gould, George Segal, Ann Prentiss, and Gwen Welles.
I've never been able to summon up the language to describe what it is I enjoy so much about Robert Altman's movies.
I don't have that language today either.
Nonetheless, I'll take a few stabs at explaining what I experienced watching California Split.
I enjoyed how this movie was almost plotless. It moved fluidly, but not exactly randomly, from scene to scene, creating a world occupied by hustlers, gamblers, outsiders, a thug or two, and two sex workers. The prostitutes, Barbara (Ann Prentiss) and Susan (Gwen Welles) are roommates with Charley (Elliott Gould) and their household is a safe haven, stocked with Fruit Loops, beer, and the latest issue of TV Guide. It's a comfortable place where Charlie, Barbara, and Susan relax, comfort each other, and plan out their next hustle. It also becomes a harbor for a magazine writer named Bill (George Segal) who meets Charlie at a poker palace where they get drunk, assaulted, arrested, and become buddies.
The movie glides between scenes in the house, horse race tracks, parking lots, Bill's place of employment, and card rooms, not so much building a plot as creating a portrait of vacuousness, impotence, ennui, and desperation overlaid with a brittle veneer of enthusiasm and thrill seeking.
It's in this tension between the kinetic pursuit of success at gambling and conning and the underlying emptiness of it all that drives this movie. It's Altman's vision of the aimless and unfulfilling lives his characters lead that gives this movie its sobering power, but not in morose ways, not in cliched ways. The underlying emptiness of it all seeps into the movie while we are laughing at hilarious scenes, feeling tension about gambling success, and feeling tenderness toward Barbara and Susan as they try to ward off the hollowness of their sex work and the absence of love in their lives by extending support to each other. (They are not cliched "whores with a heart of gold". They transcend this trope.)
Altman's movies never follow any single line of development. Scenes of great variety emerge organically. These scenes create atmosphere, moods, feelings. In this movie, the melancholy mood is enhanced by a woman in a casino lounge singing standards like "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You" while playing the piano, serving as something like the Chorus in Greek tragedy, deepening the movie's feeling while, at the same time, commenting on action at the same time -- and some of that action is, on the surface exhilarating, in apparent contradiction to the songs.
I always have the sense watching a Robert Altman movie that, as a director, he sets actors free to improvise, follow their instincts, create the movie as it's being filmed. Elliott Gould is the perfect actor for this kind of filmmaking and his portrayal of the energetic, fast and non-stop talking, always hustling, resilient, unsinkable Charlie is a perfect foil to George Segal's more glum Bill Denny, who longs for thrills, but has deeper yearnings, and possibly, touches some of those same kind of feelings in Charlie, even as Charlie, by his perpetual motion and chatter, works to varnish over them.
I must enjoy, when watching movies, the experience of being knocked off balance, of not always knowing what's happened or what's coming, and of experiencing a melange of moods and feelings. Altman's movies do this. I think Robert Altman is always trying to get to the darkness of the American experience, to get at what lies underneath American optimism, its people's sense of greatness, its love of glamor, glitz, and pageantry: in short, the gloomier landscapes of the American Dream.
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