College Football Saturday & Rambling

This will be a very short post but I wanted to show you what the hounds and dogs do while I watch hours and hours of college football on Saturdays. It was another HUMID day yesterday but lower temps. Walter is not shown because I took all the photos while sitting on the couch during the game commercials. Walter was back in the cold computer room snoring. I start rambling after the hounds and dogs.

Ava is continuing to grow although being a female she will not be a huge German Shepherd. She weighed in at 47 pounds last month when she was spayed. There she is blocking one of the air conditioning vents with all the cold air blowing on her.

Henry had a second opinion on that growth on his tail last Friday morning. The vet thought it was benign as she looked and squeezed it. He never responded in any way when she did that. She told me if I noticed it start to drain or bleed, to take photos and text the only number to the vet. All vets and all vet techs see those texts. She thought he would be okay and would just live with it.

But ... if they have to remove it, they would amputate his WHOLE TAIL !!!! 

He did weigh in at 90 pounds!!! She laughed when she kneeled on the floor and Henry gave her a huge kiss with his tongue. He also had a lot of drool around his jowls from sitting right in front of the car air conditioning vent on the dash on the way over to the vet.

Henry stood on her knees on the floor to get right in her face. She did say that he had a very big frame and if he could lose just 5 pounds she would be happy with that. Henry did turn down ... the 5 small pieces of Science Diet kibble, that she laid on the floor for him as a treat.

They do move around as I watch one game after another, sometimes two at once (Directv only does 2 at once) and a lot of channel surfing to other games while commercials are being played on the games I am watching. 

You will notice my bar stool is moved to the end of Ava's crate. The other bar stool is on the other side of the crate. That keeps Walter from trying to break into the crate from the ends. Before I came up with the bar stool idea, Walter had unclipped that curled piece that locks in the floor of the crate someway. Once he pried that metal loop off the bar on the side he pulled out about 1/4 of the crate floor, in the crate space you slide the floor into.

With the hot temps outside and the AC running inside I had all four at different times lay and sleep on that cool tile so I might leave the bar stools moved where they are until cooler temps are a daily thing. 

Last year over 14,000 people voted this place to be the best pizza place in Bloomington Indiana. A few blocks from the IU campus it had fed generations of IU students for the past 70 years. Without warning last week the family announced they were closing immediately on Thursday. It was time to retire and they were wanting to spend more time with family. Their family had been the only owners of this place for over 70 years.

(Photos taken from the sales ad on Long's Realty in Sierra Vista AZ)

A similar closure out in Sierra Vista AZ. I spoke to the owner at length my last visit to the diner for lunch a couple of weeks before I moved back to Indiana in April 2021. The owner was in his 70s and had been working there since he opened it in 2006 from 7am to 9pm.

He told me his two cooks left without notice during the pandemic in 2020. He couldn't keep staff working as they would work long enough to get a check and then quit. Or they would call in sick. He said a few times he was doing it all ... cooking, waiting tables and busboy.  He was back to cooking full time since he had not found any cooks to hire at the time I had talked to him.

I talked to him in April 2021 ... their last day of business was January 27, 2024. It has been for sale since 2021.

Since I am talking of old businesses that closed or went out of business where the owners were old, it reminded me of a place where I use to live, the small town of Bloomfield Indiana. There I spoke to the owner when the word got out he was closing the Feed Store for good. He was old and sick, had no one in his family interested in continuing the business his family had owned for 78 years. Due to his age and health issues he had no choice but to close it.

Holtsclaw Standard sold everything you see on that sign with the addition of dog food, horse feed, any kind of farm animal feed. It was a morning meeting place for the "old timers" in town and it was my #1 dog food source for 19 years. I hated to see it close but I completely understood as the owner had been working while being sick for a long time.

To show you the type of man he was, even though my mom and dad grew up in that town as well as grandparents, cousins etc ... I had never lived there. I moved there in 1997 and I found out that people knew who I was the day I moved in even though I had not met them. In a small town news travels fast. Well I make my very first trip to buy dog food for Harry, Maggie and Maxwell. Two basset hounds and a bloodhound that were living with me at the time.

At the feed store I locked my keys in my car by accident and was close to two miles from home. My spare key was back home. The owner tossed me the keys to his car and said "I know where you live" and I was off to get my spare set of keys in my junk draw in the kitchen. I had not been in town 24 hours yet here I was driving his car to my house. He might let me walk in back with him where there were pallets of all kinds of animal feed and dog food but he always insisted that he carry it from his storeroom to my car or truck. 

The building was later sold to a young couple that made it into a nice micro brewery called Feed Store Beer Co.

This next subject will be controversial to some. A few readers might give me advice while others might voice their concerns. As you know I am my own doctor basically. I do not live in fear but base a lot of my decisions on facts that I gather, see and read about in medical journals at Harvard or Stanford Universities. I also have a friend with a medical background that helps me when I have questions.

I have talked to various cardiologists since 2019, a year that gave me the news about some heart issues I have. I had not known anything about them before, although in 1987 after a physical, I was directed by a cardiologist to take a treadmill test.

Now that was concerning at the time because my dad, a few months before, had quadruple by-pass heart surgery at 58 years old. I was a bicyclist back then too and may have been in better shape then than I am now, at least I was much much younger.

I passed that 17 minute test with flying colors and they told me I never got above 78% of my maximum heart rate. The cardiologist told me he thought with all the bicycling I had done the previous years that I had built a muscle around my heart that through the EKG off.

Move ahead to September 2019 when they do an echocardiogram the night before I had my hip replaced at 7am the next morning. They had found a murmur and an aortic valve slightly block where it would not fully open back and forth as blood pumped through it.

I don't know why I am telling you this ... but I am going to.

Long story short the hip replacement surgery was a huge success but was only caused by my bicycle wreck the day before. I hated laying on that table in the emergency room because now I was in the medical field system and to me that meant one problem after another in my future ... that was my fear.

On a side note, I read later in those medical journals that if a patient has a heart issue that is found before hip replacement surgery, they are to fix the heart issues first. Well after talking to a cardiologist (the best in Cochise County) three months after the hip surgery ... I am glad they decided NOT to fix the heart issues first, based on what he wanted to do in December 2019. My hip surgeon did call him that Saturday night to talk about what he had found in the previous September. 

I wasn't told why they decided what they did. I am guessing it was me being in good shape physically and a bicyclist that was a factor. 

When I saw that cardiologist in December 2019 he said as he walked in "so you are the guy" ... then when I asked what did he mean, he told me the story how the hip surgeon had called him months ago the night before my hip replacement. He also wanted me to stop riding my bike immediately!!!!

I have ALWAYS thought ... you think sick you get sick ... one doctor appointment leads to many doctor appointments .... so there I was about to be cut on because I needed a new hip. I wasn't happy with myself because it was all my fault, nobody else.

I am 72 and have never had any serious illnesses like others my age have or had. I am thankful for that and I don't ever forget that I am so fortunate for my good health at my age. I think with a good diet and exercise I can continue my good luck for good health for many years to come.

Yet ... those 11 notifications you see on that screen shot were last Sunday night while I was sleeping. The number of low readings was 'history' in a way. On occasion I will get a warning from my Apple Watch that my heart rate had dropped below 40bpm (default setting) for 10 minutes. Well a week ago those warning were coming so often it was waking me up with a sound and a big vibration by the watch between midnight and 3:30am, then a few around 5:30am.

The only thing that had changed in my daily routine, earlier that day I had rode my bike for 11.6 miles, easy pace but for the first time in 10 months. Was this going to be a new routine since I was planning to ride??? If I was going to continue to get those warnings I would make an appointment with a cardiologist as soon as possible. 

But I have not had a low heart rate warning since and I rode my bike three more times this week, same distance and at slow pace (9-10mph) as I get back into bike riding shape.

That "ms reading" was a record setting number as I had never been higher than 175ms while sleeping. MS is the milliseconds between heart beats and the larger the number the better. So I was feeling good about seeing that.

That resting heart rate is a little high for me. On average that is in the 40s when I am sleeping. Sitting at a computer it might get as high as 52bpm and after I have ridden up a small hill on my bike at 8-10 mph, the old ticker might get up to 130bpm, which is good. So far this week my average heart rate while riding for a little over an hour on each ride is 115bpm.

It's like I told that first cardiologist in September 2019 before they would release me from the hospital for my hip replacement ... "I have never had any of those 8 symptoms for AVS that you asked about and if my heart is as bad as you tell me it is, then I would NOT have been riding my bike for 25 miles, averaging 17mph hour and riding up over 2,000ft in elevation before I crashed." 

Three cardiologist did not believe I rode my bike that way. I offered them to look at my Strava app which records and keeps all that data for every ride I do. 

He was the first of four cardiologist I spoke to between 2019 and 2021. All of my bloodwork, my weekly blood pressure readings, heart readings at all times by my Apple Watch, show there is not a problem. Even that initial hospital report of 42 pages said in capital letters NO ARTERIAL BLOCKAGES .... I have had to remind two cardiologist of that fact. They wanted to do a cathorization and stints or bypass surgery!!

I have told all the cardiologist that when I feel the symptoms they ask me about I will call and get the valve replaced but not until then. I have confirmed and made a photo note of those 8 symptoms. 

Oh, my bloodpressure reading was 116/62 on Friday. For the month of August it averaged 118/64 and for the year so far in 2024 it has averaged 124/68 ... LOL, yes I have a spreadsheet to record every reading and have since December 2019.

I have had cardiologist telling me to stop riding and exercising immediately. I have had cardiologist telling me to keep doing what I am doing and ride as much as I can because I would feel the systems better if I were not a "couch potato".

In 2020 during the pandemic when they canceled my echocardiogram appointment a cardiologist I had never met, called me from that hospital. At the end of our call he told me I would be dead within the year if I didn't let him replace that valve. That year was up four years ago and I am still alive, still riding my bike and still getting some pastry at The Donut Bank here in Evansville. 

Of course when I was diagnosed with AVS I went to the Harvard Medical Journals and read that only 4% of those diagnosed with AVS had their valve replaced. YES I know it is a simple procedure but I don't fix anything if it is not broke. 

So that's my story and I am sticking to it. 

Our days in the 90s are now over. I will mow the yard outside the fence later today but I might also try to fit in a bike ride this afternoon. Yesterday the humidity was so bad that it was miserable and I cut my ride short at 11.6 miles. I see today the air quality is much better than yesterday and standing outside this morning with the hounds and dogs, it didn't feel nearly as muggy as it was yesterday.

Feel free to say what you want in comments for all I have discussed here. They will have to be approved first because that cuts down on a lot of spam I seem to get this year but I WILL approve all your comments, good or bad.

Who would take my hounds and dogs if I were to unexpectedly "bite the big one" ??? (die)

Another beautiful morning here in "the tropics" of southern Indiana.