Collecting On The Beach

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Fossilized shark’s tooth, found by my sister-in-law.

The beach is a wonderful place for people who like to collect interesting things. When I’m out walking on the sand, I often see people carrying bags or buckets of shells. The shore offers an enormous variety of sizes, colors, and shapes, along with the possibilities for all sorts of craft projects.

Several members of my family like to hunt for fossilized shark’s teeth, and a “hunt” it is. They’re surprisingly numerous but difficult to spot because small black chips of shells can look remarkably like the. Spotting a shark’s tooth takes a trained eye, considerable time, and extraordinary patience. I’ve never mastered the trick of it, possibly due to lack of patience, but also likely because my poor eyesight makes it difficult to discern the right shapes in the sand.

I do have an interest in sea glass, but a nice piece is a rare find these days, probably because more people are looking for it and fewer glass bottles are being used. If a relative does happen on a nice piece they’ll save it for me, and I even found one myself a year or so ago. I don’t spend a lot of time hunting for it.

In fact, I don’t really try to collect anything on the beach other than ideas and experiences. There are tons of treasures and I take pictures to remind me of all the interesting things I see. Some of them spark ideas for stories. Some of them just spark awe and amazement. All of them give me a unique pleasure in just contemplating them, but I don’t need to keep them. Below are some of the most interesting things I found and saw on the beach during our week’s visit.

(You can click on the pictures for larger versions.)

Shell bed

Pen shell. An ordinary, very plain-jane shell unless it’s wet and has the sun shining on it when it glitters like a Christmas ornament.

Jellyfish that washed up on the beach

The way the foam from the ocean blows around is fascinating. This only seems to happen at low tide.

The receding water carves interesting patterns in the sand. This, too, seems to happen only at low tide.

These fishermen caught a Bonnethead shark. It’s actually fairly common to catch “Bonnies” there. They removed the hook and tossed it back into the ocean.

More info about the Bonnethead shark: Bonnethead – Wikipedia

More info on Pen Shells: Pinnidae – Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

Shell be

Beach Retreat

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Not too long ago I went with my family for a week on the beach at Edisto Island. Twice a year, late spring and early fall, we do a coastal retreat. We all need some time out after the stresses of the previous year, and for me it meant a break from thinking about Covid and working on my recovery. Fortunately, I was in pretty good shape at the time, several weeks past the last relapse and functioning well. I was up for those long walks on the beach, even if they’re not as long as they used to be pre-Covid.

Edisto Beach is a quiet, family-oriented place. Unlike many other nearby beaches, it has no amusement parks, no live entertainment, no real events other than a few local arts and crafts fairs, only a few restaurants, and very little night-life.

What it does have is the ocean and a wonderful beach. We make our treks there on the shoulders of the main season, sometime in May, and again in late September or early October, and at that time, the beach is rarely too crowded. The space between water and dunes narrows at high tide, forcing people together more, but there’s still plenty of room and quiet. The weather can be a question mark, sometimes too cool and too windy for comfortable walks. But picking those almost off-season times lets us afford a house right on the ocean-front.

The fall trip can be dicey. A few years ago a hurricane devastated the island, forcing us to cancel the trip. Several times hurricanes, recent or predicted, have made it questionable whether we’d be able to go. But it’s worth the wondering for the times we can get there.

The island has intriguing biking and hiking trails, a few gift stores worth exploring, a small but nicely curated local bookstore, and suppliers of locally sourced fresh seafood, which on its own is enough to make the trek worthwhile.

We go primarily for the sound, feel, and sights of the ocean, for walks on the beach, for quiet periods to read and meditate, time with family, and for the food. Fresh shrimp is always on the menu at least a couple of times, along with whatever fish is available. There are usually several good options.

We all take our laptops and make sure we rent houses with Internet connections, but we don’t spend all day staring at them. Checking email and news aside, we leave work, worries, complications, and most of the myriad tasks of daily living behind.

It’s a time to relax, catch up on reading, renew the acquaintance of family members and just give the brain a break.

Long Haul Covid – Talking to the Pulmonologist, Test Results, and What’s Next

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I’m late in getting this posted and I don’t really have a good excuse other than that I got deeply into my fiction writing for a while and didn’t want to come out of it.

But the battle with Long-haul Covid is still on, and I’m still fighting.

I had the appointment with the pulmonologist a couple of weeks ago now. Basically, all my tests have come back mostly normal.  The pulmonary function test results are within normal parameters. The six-minute walk showed nothing too alarming. The CT scan indicated some minor, probably non-Covid-related damage that shouldn’t interfere with anything. As far as the tests go, I appear to be quite healthy.

But the pulmonary doctor does realize that I’m not. Unfortunately, other than treating the symptoms there’s not much they can do. He was sympathetic as he explained that there appears to be something more behind a lot of the Long-haul Covid symptoms people are experiencing, but they don’t know what that is yet, which means they don’t know how to treat it beyond trying to mitigate the symptoms. Those are different for different people, so he considers each case individually.

I do like this man quite a bit. He takes me seriously and is trying to look at the big picture, which hasn’t always been the case with some of the medical people I’ve consulted. I know from being on forums with other long-haulers just how rare and valuable that is. Too many have had their varied symptoms dismissed as just depression, anxiety or hypochondria.

The doctor had already referred me for pulmonary rehab. I have an inhaler and a prescription for steroids, should I need them. Along with monitoring my condition and calling him if I have a serious setback, that’s the sum total of treatments recommended based on results from the tests.

Next I’ll report on the pulmonary rehab.  I’m hopeful it can help.

Long Haul Covid – Testing, Testing

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a CT scan of my lungs, a pulmonary function evaluation, a neurological evaluation the orientation for pulmonary rehab.

I won’t know the results of the pulmonary function evaluation or the CT scan for a couple of weeks when I have my return visit to the pulmonologist.

The neurological evaluation was interesting and somewhat reassuring. It involved all sorts of tests of various facets of memory, expression, and reasoning. Reinforced what I already knew – I’m not a verbal learner. Read me a list of 15 words and ask me to repeat them I may be able to do 6. Maybe. I do much better with remembering things I’ve seen. In discussing the results, the neurologist said the tests indicated no sign of cognitive decline. Considering my age (and the fact that I’m currently at the exact same age my father was when he started showing signs of dementia), I find that very reassuring.

It doesn’t help explain or provide any way of dealing with the occasional bouts of brain fog. That seems to be a problem mostly during relapse phases and can interfere with my ability to write. I’m not sure there is any cure for that, so I mostly roll with it, as irritating as it is.

The last thing was the intake evaluation for pulmonary rehab. They did a bunch of standard tests, including taking my blood pressure several times, testing oxygen, grip strength, and ability to walk for six minutes. They talked about the kinds of exercises I’d be doing and taught me one interesting breathing technique (pursed lips breathing) to try when I was having trouble.

Like several of the other docs, the people I talked with at the Pulmonary center felt that their rehab program would help me get back into shape, at least as good shape as possible. Over the past few weeks I’ve been feeling increasingly better, so I’m hopeful. I may never be able to walk the distances or at the speed I used to, but if I can get to the point of being able to walk several miles without collapsing, I’ll be grateful.

Unlike some of the other docs, I’ve talked with, the nurse and the therapist at the rehab center were entirely sure (based on my symptoms) that I had had Covid last year. The things I was telling them about my condition and issues matched very closely to what they’d been hearing from many other Covid19 patients. They can’t offer a cure but they do feel like they’ve been able to help some of those others.

I’ll report back after I’ve had the next appointment with the Pulmonary doc. But in the meantime, it still feels good to be tackling the problem and doing what I can to get back closer to normal.

Long-haul Covid – An Appointment with the Pulmonologist

Karen McCullough Posted on by

After talking with my Primary Care Doc a couple of times and a visit to the newly set up Covid Long-Haul Clinic in my area (neither of which was much help), I got an appointment with a local Pulmonologist who has a special interest in post-Covid care.

As an aside, let me say that there are times when I feel like a fraud as a Covid Long-Hauler. I can’t prove that I ever had Covid-19. Testing wasn’t freely available when I’m pretty sure I had it in March, 2020, so I never had a positive test. My primary care doctor said the symptoms sounded like Covid-19 but that’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to a diagnosis. An antibody test done five months later was negative. But I do know I had something remarkably like Covid-19 last March and a year later I haven’t fully recovered from it.

Dr. M., the Pulmonologist, read through all my written notes about my symptoms and the timeline of my illness, and I could tell from his questions that he took it seriously. I told him that I was looking for a way to get back to myself, the self who could and did sometimes walk for hours and hours a day without getting short of breath or collapsing from exhaustion. He was honest in return, telling me that medicine has no real answers for long-haul Covid at this point. But he would help me try to sort out the problem and do as much as we could toward a solution.

To that end, he scheduled me for a pulmonary function evaluation, a CT lung scan, a neurological evaluation, and pulmonary rehab.

At this point I suspect the problem with my breathing and energy probably isn’t really in my lungs, but the PFE and CT scan should help sort that out. Of course, if there isn’t an actual lung problem, that leaves an issue that’s harder to understand and deal with. But at least I’ll know and maybe it will help shape the approach to a solution.

The neurological evaluation should get some perspective on my episodes of what others call “brain fog.” That doesn’t really describe my problem, which is more that I find it hard to concentrate at times. It’s not constant but happens often enough to be disturbing. And it really bothers me when I’m trying to work on the next novel, and all I can do is stare at the computer screen, unable to make myself write the next sentence. It’s not exactly writer’s block because it’s not that I don’t know where the story’s going next or what to write. It’s more that my brain just refuses to do the work to get the words together, even when I know what I want to say.

I’ve had a couple of the tests and others are coming up. I won’t get results from the breathing tests until my next appointment with Dr. M, which won’t happen until late May.

In the meantime, the last relapse has passed, and I feel mostly okay. I still have to be careful not to over-exert myself, to prevent a collapse that will take me out for at least the rest of the day and sometimes into the next day. Oddly, even trying to force myself to concentrate on a task for too long will bring on that kind of collapse, though it involves no obvious physical exertion.

And though I know that there are likely no easy answers for my problem, I’m happy to be doing something to tackle the issue. I’m not good at sitting around doing nothing.

BTW: I apologized to the doctor for the two pages worth of written notes and timeline I’d brought as I thought it might be an over-abundance of information. (I’m a writer, after all.) But he thanked me for it and said he wished more of his patients would do something similar. It gave him a much better picture of my problem than just a few questions in the office could do.

The Fight to Get Back to Myself

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I’ve talked before about my suspected case of Covid-19 in March, 2020. I say suspected because I’ve never had a test to confirm it. Testing wasn’t available at the time unless you were in the hospital and I wasn’t that sick. An antibody test done six months later was negative. So I can’t prove I’ve had it. I wrote about it at the time here.

But I know I have had Covid-19, just as I know I now have Long-haul Covid, current officially designated as PASC (Post Acute Sequellae of SARS-Cov-2). I’ve blogged about that as well here.

I’m more than a year post-Covid now and I’m not back to what was normal before. Worse, I’m not really any closer than I was two weeks post-acute-Covid. And I’m tired of it. Literally and figuratively. I’m tired of being tired too much of the time. I’m tired of having to be extremely careful every time I go out for a walk to be sure I don’t go too fast or too far, lest I bring on a collapse that will make me useless for the rest of the day and possibly the next couple of days. I’m tired of the relapses that bring on another round of coughing, pain, extreme fatigue and set me back to square one on the recovery process.

I’m tired of trying to nurse myself along, thinking that I’m making progress, only to have another setback push me right back to square one. After a year of trying to recover myself, I’ve realized I need help.

Which is easy to say but hard to put in practice. The search for medical help has been frustrating. I’ve been to my regular doc twice now when symptoms were bad. He was sympathetic but really had no idea how to help.

When I heard that my local hospital system was starting a dedicated clinic for Long-Haul Covid, I was thrilled and set up an appointment right away. Sadly, the visit didn’t go well. The person I saw seemed to concentrate entirely on my symptoms at the time. I was in a relapse phase and had a cough but did try to make it clear that I wasn’t really bothered by the cough itself. It would go away once the relapse cleared again. (As, in fact, it did.) But I came away from that visit with a bunch of prescriptions – most of which I didn’t get filled or didn’t take – and, thank goodness, a referral for a pulmonary evaluation.

The person I saw didn’t even think it was necessary for me to come back for a follow-up exam. That’s how seriously they took my problem.

But I do believe that pulmonary evaluation referral is going to prove extremely helpful, even if the Covid clinic wasn’t. Stay tuned….

Goals 2021 Update 1

Karen McCullough Posted on by

At the beginning of the year I posted a few goals for the year. You can find that post here.  In the interests of accountability, I’m posting an update to keep myself on track.  As of right now (about 1/3 through the year) I’ve written 3 new short stories (of the 5 I set as a goal).

I’m at 16,000 words of No Time for Mistakes, one of the two novels I want to finish. This will be a fairly short novel, 45,000 – 50,000 words, so I’m about a third of the way through it.  It’s due to the published on August 1 for publication sometime in September.

One thing I didn’t make a goal, but has since become one, is to start working on my Long-haul Covid status. I don’t know if I can ever recover completely the energy and stamina I had before Covid changed my life, but I’m going to do what I can. That means getting help and I’m embarking on a path that I hope will lead to improvement. More on that coming in the next few days.

Covid-19 One Year Later

Karen McCullough Posted on by
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the day my doctor told me (virtually, of course) that it sounded like I had Covid-19. Because I didn’t need to go to the hospital and couldn’t verify that I’d been in contact with anyone with a confirmed case, I didn’t qualify for testing at that time. But the symptoms made both of us confident I had it.
It’s been a long year for me because my symptoms didn’t stop after I ‘recovered’ five weeks later.
I wrote earlier about how I likely got it and my experience of the disease so I’m not going into it here. You can read about it here.
The past year has been an up and down one. I have Long Covid, now officially designated as PASC (Post Acute Sequellae of SARS-COV-19). For me that has meant almost constant, low-level breathing problems and bouts of exhaustion, particularly if I try to exercise too hard. I also have periodic relapses of symptoms that seem to occur at irregular intervals and last anywhere from three to ten days.
I’d planned to make this a little report on how much better, finally, I am. Because my symptoms have improved and I’ve had only two very minor relapses over the past few months, one of which came after getting the first dose of the vaccine.
However, two days ago I started coughing again, my chest hurt, and my head was pounding. It was worse when I woke up yesterday and persists this morning. Not only do I ache all over, but fatigue is sitting heavily on me, so here I am with another full-blown relapse. I hope this one won’t last long.
I’m also hoping this is the one step back in the two-steps-forward, one-step-back trajectory that has characterized my slow recovery.
The good news is that I’m back to writing and mostly managing to live my life as I want (under Covid protocols, of course), and feel reasonably well most of the time. And I’ve learned how to deal with some of the issues. I’ve found that I can exercise as long as I pace myself carefully. I can keep going for a long time as long as I don’t push too hard. If I try to walk at too fast a pace, I start having serious breathing issues. My walking mileage has gradually increased but I can’t do it at the same pace I used to. I don’t know if I ever will.  But I’m grateful that I can walk

Website Redo

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I will shortly be unveiling a new and, I hope, improved version of my website. I still like my current site, but it’s been around for ten years or so, and it’s starting to look dated. The narrow main column no longer suits the wider screens of today, and the technology I use is old and had limitations.

I’ll be moving the site into WordPress, which provides a number of advantages. It’s much easier to update and make changes across the entire site, and it also provides mobile- and tablet-friendly versions, which makes Google’s search engine ranking happy. And finally I’ll be implementing https technology, which provides end-to-end encryption of all communications between visitor and site for enhanced security.

Re-doing the site has given me a chance to redesign the graphics. I still like my dark blue and silver color scheme and will be keeping it, but I have a slick new logo and images to illustrate the different genres I write in.

I’ve also taken a look at my information architecture (a fancy term for how the menus and page relations are structured). I decided I didn’t need major changes but made some small tweaks.

I hope the new site will be interesting and inviting.

For Love of Calvin & Hobbes

Karen McCullough Posted on by

This past Christmas my daughter, her husband, and four sons all isolated themselves for two weeks so that they could visit us safely for the holiday. Thankfully, no one got sick in that time. It was still a more restrained Christmas, with fewer activities and visitors than in a normal year, but we were thrilled to be able to have them with us for a couple of weeks.

The nine-year-old is a proficient and voracious reader. The seven-year-old reads well enough, though he’d rather be building things, and the five-year-old has made a good start. Even the three-year-old enjoys looking through books. We try to have a good supply of age-appropriate literature around for them.

But, in fact, the overall favorite books for all of the boys is their Grandad’s treasured set of Calvin and Hobbes books. Their love for those books is so strong, permission to read them serves as a reward – they’re allowed to look at them only after cleaning up all the toys they’ve left scattered across the floor and every other available surface.

Even the three-year-old, who doesn’t read yet (as far as we know), seems to adore them and will look at the pictures for as long as he’s allowed. I’m not actually surprised. Some of the appeal has to be the marvelously adorable drawings, which are detailed and expressive enough to tell stories on their own.

The older boys will giggle, laugh, and frequently bring certain strips to adult attention, reading the dialogue out loud while attempting to contain their amusement long enough to get the words out.

They understand and appreciate Calvin’s wry sarcasm and wild imagination on some levels. The adventures of Spaceman Spiff and his other imaginary alter egos tend to be favorites. They ‘get’ that many of Calvin’s imaginary scrapes are mirroring real-life unpleasant situations. And they seem to understand that Calvin is using his flights of whimsy as a way of dealing with a world over which, as a child, he has very little control, though of course, they haven’t the words to explain it.

I can see aspects of each boy’s personality in Calvin. The oldest is probably the most similar. From a small child his favorite companion animal has been “Mr. Monkey.” By the time he was able to read (he taught himself to read somewhere around his third birthday) and began to expand his world, he also began to make up stories about Mr. Monkey and his adventures. Those finally expanded into “Monkeyland,” a huge and richly detailed world that occupied much of his thoughts for many years.

His next brother, the seven-year-old is more physically oriented than his brother, but still has a rich and vivid imagination. His favorite stuffed animal companion is a bear and we’ve heard many adventures in “Bearland.” But he’s also the kid who shimmies up doorways and will climb anything he can reach. Any tree that has a foothold he can get to, sometimes with the help of porch furniture, other play equipment, or even his bike, is fair game. He’s the kid who climbs on top of the playground equipment. When it comes to heights, he’s fearless. Calvin on his madcap sled-rides and in his treehouse remind me of him.

The five-year-old is the charmer of the family. He resembles Calvin in his very definite opinions, expressed with great confidence. If anyone in the family would conduct a survey on Dad’s popularity with the younger set, it would be him.

The three-year-old… I don’t know. He’s a bit too young to call. On the other hand, for the last year or more, he’s been insisting he’s a cat and will frequently meow. Yet he does it with a sly little grin as he clutches the stuffed kitty-cat that is his favorite companion animal.

As an adult I still love reading the comics, too. There’s something both gloriously innocent and wryly wise about Calvin that reminds me of just how broad the world can be. And it reminds me that as a kid I created and explored strange lands in my own imagination. In my writing, I try to continue to do so, struggling to shake off some of the limitations decades of dealing with the real world has tried to impose.

By sheer coincidence, while I was writing this post, I happened on this story in the Washington Post that makes some of the same observations, but talks more about the universal appeal in ways I hadn’t considered:

‘Calvin and Hobbes’ said goodbye 25 years ago. Here’s why Bill Watterson’s masterwork enchants us still. – The Washington Post