Lime stalactites

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This morning, I woke up again at 4 a.m. It’s been over a week now that I’ve had this early morning wakeup and a difficult time falling back asleep. I eventually fell back asleep, but not before having a paranoid conversation with myself about the possibility of having sleep apnea.

Over the weekend, we went to a dinner party with friends, and one of them had one of those sleep tests to check if he has sleep apnea. He told me all about it in great detail, and I woke up with that on my mind.

You see, I had gasped from my nightmare when I awoke, and I wondered if I gasped because of lack of breath. So then I started working through my memory to find other waking moments to see if they were gasps too. I couldn’t remember, and that lack of memory scared me, too.

Tina and I have regular checkups scheduled for next week. And even though my blood pressure is consistently at or below normal, it freaked me out when my doctor put me on a BP med over a year ago and said, “Change your diet.” Many of you know, I’m not on that medication any longer. Tina and I eat fresh almost every meal, and we watch the amount of salt and other things we eat. We work out as much as we can.

Apparently BP and sleep apnea go hand in hand, according to this conversation we had the other night. I finally let it go after an hour.

The thing that finally put my mind at ease was that I remembered my friend saying his blood pressure was at 200 over 150s. And that shit is SCARY.

Neither Tina or I have been to the doctor in a year or more. We’re on new insurance, and we were waiting for this one doctor to accept our insurance. So now we’re good to go. I’m sure I’ll tell you all about it.

It’s thunder storming this morning. It’s so dark and eerily gorgeous. 

This morning, I took Talulah out to pee. She’s afraid of the rain. So I had to coerce her off the porch by leaving the front gate hoping she’d follow. She followed of course, without a leash, and finally peed. I told her we should have brought soap. We could have killed two birds with one stone. She said, “We could kill birds?”

We laughed and slapped five.

Healthcare

This all reminds me that I had a conversation about healthcare with my old man recently. He reads this blog, and for a second I thought I would change old man to some dude. But, hey, it’s not a big deal. I’m not ragging on the guy. It was a real conversation.

He was saying that Obama Care is bull, and that there are ways for people to get healthcare. From what I heard him kvetch about, he was saying that people aren’t going to be turned away from a medical center for treatment. I couldn’t think of a response on my feet, so I let him talk. But thinking about it again this morning, “getting healthcare” and “paying for healthcare” are two different monsters. Sure, no one’s going to say, “How are you going to pay for us to stitch up this severed aorta? … Oh, you can’t. Okay, have a nice death.”

The problem (in part) is preventative care. It’s giving people the sense of mind that we could monitor blood pressure before it reaches 200 over 150. It’s the idea that we could catch cancer before it riddles the body a death trap. It’s the hope that we can keep our loved ones around because the bills aren’t so goddamn exorbitant, right?

And maybe I misunderstand what Obama care is. But ideally, it’s providing a way for people to pay for insurance that helps them get ongoing, preventative healthcare as well as emergency healthcare.

Secular friendships

Above I talked about a dinner party we went to. At the party, we were a couple from Australia with their newborn, a hetero couple with their two boys, a gay couple with their dogs, and the Wittifinis (Tina and yours truly).

We had a great time. We talked. I took pictures. We had a few glasses of wine. We played games. It’s a diverse, respectful group, and you wouldn’t know it, but there was a great variety of beliefs and ideas among us. I mean, one guy really likes Martha Stewart. I mean, to the point of religious idolizing. I hate Martha Stewart. But we got along.

There’s one person who religiously idolizes Madonna. I don’t like Madonna. Yet we got along.

There were religious people in the group. And there were very non-religious people. Don’t you see? That shit doesn’t matter. Secularism takes care of all of that.

We all had different views, but we’re secular. We know how to get along despite differences in opinions and beliefs. This is what happens in my experiences with my family as well. Most times, it’s secular. And when it’s secular, it’s neutral and fun.

Ahh, secularism. What a dream.

By the way, the photo above was added just to get your attention.