Starting Retirement

Starting Retirement

In 2004 I was still under the impression that my muscle problem was LGMD. Several trips to Kaiser Medical in Roseville to visit Doctors who accepted the diagnosis I had been given five years prior. It became apparent I was a little weaker and slower in my walking. One of my daughters was able to get a walking cane for me. It was very fancy and came from a distant relative that had recently passed away. It provided me some Mobility and became a constant companion on any walking distance. 

I enrolled in the local Junior College and a local exercise gym to keep myself busy. During my working life as an ELINT analyst. I became a self-taught Fortran programmer. Fortran and COBOL were the ‘sanskrit’ languages of programming, so I enrolled in a C++ class. During the next two years I also took several Unix classes and dabbled in PHP and Visual Basic. I even wrote a Yahtzee program in Visual Basic.  

In May 2006 I woke with a terrific pain in my side, Convinced I appendicitis, Jan drove me to Rideout Hospital. The next thing I knew I was on a gurney being prepped for an operation. Waking up in the recovery room, the doctor said he had removed some of my colon that had cancer. He mentioned removing the appendix also. After surgery, I Consulted with the same oncologist that treated my daughter-in-law. I did not feel comfortable with his post surgery plans for Chemo, and expressed my unease with the family. Encouraged, I sought a ‘second opinion’. 

A doctor from UC Davis agreed to give me a second opinion. He was from India and informed me that he had not read the opinion from the previous doctor. He talked to me for about an hour and finally told me that because of my muscular deterioration he suggested oral Chemo from a pill as opposed to PICC line Chemo. He indicated some ingredients of the PICC line chemo may add to my muscle weakness. He also told me that once I was through with the oral chemo, I should visit the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PMR) Clinic at UC Davis for an evaluation of my muscular problem. This was a significant ‘game changer’.

In April 2007 Jan and I purchased a Subaru Outback to replace a Ford Explorer that had gone through two transmissions. Getting in and out of the Subaru was fairly easy for me. Going to the local gym, walking in with my cane, I would exercise on different equipment, I thought would make me stronger but it didn’t. One time, after exercising at the gym, I fell getting into my car. A man came to my aid, noticed I was bleeding from a cut on my head, and drove me in my car to the hospital. There they stitched me up and I drove home.  I don’t think I returned it to the gym after getting the stitches. It was now time for me to use a walker which one of my daughters bought for me. I continued going to classes with the walker folded in the back of Subaru and the cane to assist me in walking to the back of a car to get the walker to go to class.

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