Cardiac Adventure

I’ve had several people send me an email asking about my recent adventure with a heart attack.  Well, here’s  the story.

On Wednesday night at the Think Tank I had a heart attack.  I remembered what happened to my friend Peter Capstick when he had his collapse after a speech.  People remember his collapse, not the speech.  I did not want to leave that conference by going to a hospital for emergency care and be remembered as the guy who had a heart attack at Think Tank II.  I self-medicated with nitro tablets and my pain meds.  I made it through the next day’s meeting and then at noon the host of the Think Tank arranged a limo to take me to Union Station in Chicago (more on the whole conference thing later).   Once on the train I managed to keep everything together for 14 hours.  I then drove home (very early morning, before traffic, which isn’t much on the roads here in ND).  Once home I brought in my luggage, computer bag, bag with meds and fly fishing tackle, then collapsed in the living room.  I couldn’t wake Michelle from living room so I went upstairs (really tough climb) and woke her.  She drove me to Fargo (I refused to go to the local hospital because the “only” thing they can do for serious cardiac care consist of liquid nitro drip and stronger pain med (morphine) then send you to Fargo on expensive ambulance ride.)  I still had nitro and oxycodone to treat myself.  She drove to the Fargo VA, I walked in to the hospital, past the check-in desk (they take too long then put you in a line) and straight to the Urgent Care desk, placed my bag of meds on the desk and said, “Are you the folks who take care of vets having serious chest pain—as in heart attacks?”

“Yes,” the nurse said.

“Well, my dear, here I am.”

Within a minute I was on a bed, getting my shirt off, getting an IV with a drip of nitro and blood drawn from the other arm.

“So, on a scale of 1-10 what is your pain?” the male nurse asked (while Michelle frowned at his efforts to get an IV inserted in veins stuffed with high blood pressure.)

“Well, sir,” I said, “last night and yesterday I had it down to an eight or nine but Wednesday night it was at least a ten.”

“When do you think you had this heart attack?”

“Oh, that’s easy, Wednesday night about midnight, that is when I puked and was sweating buckets.”

“And you are just coming in?”

“I was in Chicago and didn’t know anyone there.”

“There is a VA hospital there.  You could have called 911.”

“Figured I’d come home to get it taken care of.  I prefer my doctors here.”

“How’s the pain?”

“About ten, can I have more drugs?”

A team arrived to take an X-ray.  A minute later the doctor came in, looked at some early test results, listened to my heart, watched the BP (very high).  I recognized him because he has treated me before. 

“Galen, I am going to get you an angiogram.”

A couple of minutes later, with the male nurse trying to stop the bleeding of the first attempt to insert an IV, the ambulance guys arrived.  The other hospital, Sanford, felt I should go straight into the cardiac OR for the angiogram, so an ambulance was sent.  Once inside the ambulance they flipped on the lights and siren, great ride!  We went through two red lights! I asked them to go around the block but they wouldn’t do it.  When we reached Sanford hospital the time from the moment the wheels of the ambulance gurney hit the ground to when I was in the cardiac OR was maybe a minute.  Inside the crew was waiting, had everything from the VA (via Internet) including X-rays.  The procedure for angiogram was started, they found one of those little blood vessels that was 100% collapsed.  Took them a bit of time to get the thing back up then get the stints in but they did.  Oh, the doctor who was in charge (not the surgeon who did it) was absolutely stunningly beautiful.  She was leaning over and explaining what was happening then asked me if I had any questions.  All I said was: “How did you get such incredibly beautiful eyes?”

She shook her head and walked away.

The nurses (entire staff, but two nurses in particular--Krista and Jenny) were wonderful.  Best part of being in the hospital!

So, all is repaired.  I need to let it sit without stress for another couple of days.  I’ve been lectured by every doctor and nurse.  Robert K. Brown (SOF) has said he’ll kick my ass if I ever do such a thing again.  He also said he does not know very many people who could do it.  One of the Cardiac Critical Care nurses said I must have been a good Marine because only a Marine could make it through that kind of ordeal, or do something that crazy. She must be a former Marine herself.

I am doing much, much better and I’ve even managed to get out and search for sharptail grouse with Cookie.  Tried to stretch the barrel for a long shot but couldn’t do it so came home with a gun that doesn’t need cleaning.

I’ve got a couple of deadlines to meet and then I’ll tell you about the Think Tank.

glg

I am back from the Orion Think Tank and I am feeling really juiced about everything that was talked about, over, and someitmes argued (usually me).  I had the pleasure of meeting Jim Posewitz, an author whose little books on hunter ethics are game changers in our world.
All that said, the old man here is a little tired and going to call it an early night.
More to come later.
glg

Cookie's Day

Dove season opened today. For me, here in North Dakota, the first day of dove season is the opening of the hunting season. Next week the season on grouse will open and it seems that every week or two thereafter another season will open, in some cases the new season replacing one that is closing. The sequence of seasons opening and closing is something that I truly enjoy. However, in this household I am not alone because Cookie, my German Wirehair, suddenly finds a new purpose in life--the hunt.

For the past several days Cookie has been like a tight clock spring. Every few minutes she would walk around my desk and push her muzzle under my arm and then try to flip my hands off the keyboard. If that didn’t work to get my attention she would start looking around on my desk for something to “retrieve,” usually one of my fountain pens. She doesn’t pick up ballpoint pens and rarely grabs a pencil but when she finally settles on something to retrieve she grabs it, sometimes working herself into a semi-standing position to get what she wants. Her game then is to go around the desk, with the pen in her mouth, and then “bring” me the pen. I don’t know if it is the change in temperature, or like the deciduous trees when the hours of sunlight changes it triggers their change of color, the sunlight somehow tripping Cookie’s awareness that it is nearly hunting season, but something does trigger the change.

As August counts down to September she becomes increasingly fidgety, wanting to get outside, get in the Suburban and do something. She wants to be active. Usually the opening of dove season finds me up early to get in the fields. Today everything had to wait until I had taken care of other business, and I don’t know if Cookie could read my desire to go hunting, or there is a mysterious connection between us, but she knew. This afternoon, when I walked over to the hunting vests hanging on one wall Cooke came unglued. She began jumping around the office and one minute she would be sitting by the door and the next she was right beside me. Suddenly, when I picked up my shotgun she calmed down and went to the door and sat in front of it. Her tail was wagging furiously across the floor and her legs were quivering and she was staring at the door as if she could open it by sheer doggie willpower.

Normally, when I open the office door and Cookie “escapes” into town she runs a few laps around our block, giving my heart another reason not to work as intended because she has no appreciation of cars on the street, but this time she went to the Suburban and waited. I let her in, clipping her leash so she couldn’t get in the front seat, and then I loaded Buster (“her” Basset hound, that’s another story).

After putting my shooting bag and shotgun in the front seat we were off. Cookie was calm, or at least as calm as she can be, while I drove to a prairie road between roost trees and a harvested field. Somewhere between leaving my office and reaching my hunting spot, a place where I could make a blind for pass shooting at dove, I decided that it was Cookie’s day. I arranged my shotgun, possibles bag and all important Thermos of coffee while Cookie and Buster were clipped to the Suburban. Then I was ready. I turned them loose and stood back to watch. Buster started on a heading and his stumpy, fat, legs blurred as he ran across the stubble field. Cookie immediately started hunting. She had her nose down and began coursing, but just as I had earlier decided that it would be her day, she decided to have more fun. She found water, chased the blackbirds out of the cattails, and when I shot at a passing dove she turned to see if it would fall (it didn’t).

Today was Cookie’s day. She ran, she swam, and she hunted, and generally enjoyed life. That is what it is all about, enjoying our world. I fired one barrel of my muzzle loader double and I missed. Okay, who cares? I don’t. Maybe I am becoming older, or less critical of myself, but whatever it is I had more fun watching my dog bound across the stubble field, charge into the cattails and then splash and swim. She shook off the summer and prepared herself for what is truly her season--the autumn, when colors of celebration burst throughout the tree lines, farmsteads and along the rivers, and deep inside those color filled days is the time of the hunt--Cookie’s time--our time. I suppose that is what separates us from those who don’t hunt. All they can do is look at Cookie’s time; those of us who hunt are part of her time. It really is a big difference in how we are living life.

Think about it. glg

Nonresident Issues

I am not a big one for writing and posting from odd places that I find myself hanging my hat for a day or two, but this is coming from the VA hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. I actually completed my appointments a couple of hours ago but the hospital has free WiFi for patients so I thought I’d take advantage of that and post something that has been on my mind for a couple of days.

North Dakota restricts nonresidents from waterfowl hunting for the first two weeks of the season. The logic is to provide residents an opportunity to enjoy the state’s abundance of waterfowl before the state is inundated with nonresidents. I disagree with this policy. I do not believe that any state should have the power of restricting the legal access of hunters to any migratory game that routinely crosses state borders, whether it is annually or otherwise. I do not have any problems with nonresidents being required to pay extra for their hunting license, but in the same breath I do believe that some states charge nonresidents excessive fees.

Do excessive license and other fees imposed on nonresidents violate the spirit of the J-D and P-R Fund programs? Also, is it possible that these fees and restrictions on nonresidents actually develop such resentment among nonresidents that in their frustration when the fishing or hunting is poor after they pay the extra fees, usually in addition to the money they spend on other services and products within the state, they find themselves breaking the law or other actions that are detrimental to the outdoor sports? Over the past 30+ years too many times I have witnessed poor behavior by hunters (and anglers) in public places (restaurants, airports, etc.) and I’ve heard them complain (as justification for their actions) that they believe they have been gouged or screwed by the state’s nonresident fees and restrictions. Their poor behavior, whether it is just being part of a public spectacle, or actually breaking the law, always hurts the public image of both anglers and hunters.

Is the problem with the state as well as the individual and is it equally shared between them? Or, as some argue, it is the sportsman/woman’s responsibility to accept these fees and restrictions without public complaint/reaction?

What think?

glg

CRP Crisis

Lots of summer rain and warm, sunny days are a two-pronged attack on my leisure time. For me, a good summer is when I don’t mow my yard more than once a week. Unfortunately, I don’t have a direct line to Mother Nature so I’ve been stuck with mowing the yard once a week. I like my yard and I like it when it is trimmed and mowed but I hate the work. Maybe if I spent more time working on my book I could get a fantastic contract and afford to hire someone to mow it every week. Since that isn’t going to happen except in my daydreams I’ll just stick with reality and brave the weather--sunshine.

One of the rewards of mowing a yard is that I can mull over something that needs attention. A very serious problem that has had my attention for quite some time is nowhere near being resolved and that is the CRP Land crisis.

Twenty-five years ago the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program was signed into law. The idea was to reduce grain surpluses thereby jumpstarting commodity prices while at the same time decreasing erosion on the marginal tilled soils. Everything worked great and one of the beneficiaries of this program was wildlife. Ground nesting upland birds had a place to build a nest and brood their chicks. Duck hunters reaped a bonanza (that they are still reaping today) because ducks will often fly more than a mile from water to build a nest and hatch their brood. With a wet cycle in the northern plains the waterfowl had it made with ample water, good, high grass in which to raise their young, protected from most predators.

We have all benefited from the CRP program. By all I mean ALL. Even if a person never sets foot in the hunting field or picks up a binocular to go bird watching they aren’t choking on dust storms from those marginal fields and the water held back by the root systems of CRP land doesn’t flow into those low spots to join other water to erode the croplands.

What’s the worry? There are millions of acres in the program--right?

Sort of right because millions of those acres are scheduled to begin coming out of the reserve program over the next few years and at the present rate within twenty years the total amount of land in the CRP will be reduced to a very small fraction of its present amount. Here, in North Dakota, wildlife managers are predicting that by 2019 there will be only about 200,000 acres in CRP. That is down from a high of 3-million acres in 2007.

This is an important issue and it is one that is going to impact a lot more people than just those of us who hunt, but it also appears that the people who are going to step forward (once again) and seize the reins will be America’s hunters. Landowners claim that keeping the lands out of crop production is cutting into their ability to realize a profit from farming and when we translate that into how we keep those lands in the CRP the solution is “more money paid out.” Unfortunately we can no longer rely on the government to completely fund the program. I believe that solving the CRP crisis is going to require a stamp program not unlike the Waterfowl stamp. I know it is another hit on our pockets but better a hit than a total collapse of CRP and the corresponding loss of wildlife (game and nongame).

The Rocking Horse Effect

At last we have a real summer day, the mercury has climbed into the high 90s and with the humidity we’re having a heat index of 107. For us, that’s a lot of heat. We’ll be dropping back into the 80s and below in a few days so we will have had our “summer heat wave.”

One of my pleasures in life is thinking. I know that all of us “think,” but what I enjoy doing is taking a problem and putting it in my head, somewhere in the subconscious, and letting it percolate. After some amount of time I have my answer. This is probably why I am lousy at taking tests. I want to spend too much time looking at the problem before presenting my answer. This is the point of “The Thinking Hunter.” I am not interested in presenting quick answers to questions that are presented to me, but answers that I try to reach after working with the question. I like to research the question and the ramifications of the different answers before I settle on one. I am not saying that my answer to a question or problem is “the” answer, but that when I do offer an answer it is one that has been carefully thought about. Some questions have no viable answer because each answer creates a new set of problems that require different answers. Philosophers have dealt with this problem for centuries and while they understand it, have identified it and provide several different descriptive names and analyses for it, are no closer to resolving it. An example of this (in our world of the outdoors) is the question of wild geese. Regardless of the course of action taken to control wild geese numbers that have reached problematic population levels the action is going to produce both negative and positive results. Plus, if the action taken is emphasized to produce greater results, whether negative or positive, more negative results will be produced.

For Example: If, in one population area, the action taken removes 500 geese and the positive result is a cleaner (but not completely clean) park then removing 1000 geese should increase the positive result. In fact, the result will depend entirely on the remaining population. If the number of remaining geese is too low to insure the population’s survival of the annual migration there are new problems to consider. Will the park’s aesthetic value be decreased by the lack of returning geese? Or, perhaps the value will increase because the geese were actually decreasing the value. The list of consequences for each action goes on.

So what am I getting at?

Recently I was in a discussion in which the primary topic was whether we (humans) could actually manage wildlife and/or nature. The center of the discussion consisted of the fires, floods, geese and of course wild hogs, all which were brought up by one side as examples of failures of human efforts, while the other side claimed that the present flood situation is a product of humans never having seen this much water, the fires are wholly nature’s doing because of the droughts, the geese populations are a success story and the spread of wild hogs is a benefit by providing meat (when on accessible lands) and income (guides, etc.). I retreated from offering an opinion because I wanted to think about the question: Can we humans manage wildlife/nature without creating such imbalances that nature’s corrections create an ecological rocking horse effect?

Think about it--I am.

glg

The Farm Connection

Yikes! I’ve been so wrapped up in working on the remodeling of our house I’ve ignored the rest of the world in favor of hammer, nails and wood. My project was to finish the built-in shelves between the dining room and living room--I did. Now I can begin working on the cabinets/counter that will be between the dining room and kitchen. Lots of work but something I enjoy. I like the feel of wood being transformed into something lasting and naturally beautiful with its own colors and designs. When I am working on wood I can block out the world and let my mind go through all the garbage that has been forced into it and toss out the junk--which is a surprising amount.

In addition to building the cabinets and shelves and general remodeling, I am collecting wood from Michelle’s family farm. I’ll be incorporating that wood into the dining room set for Michelle. When it is all finished it will be something that I hope will be passed down to future generations on her side, who will be told that it was made by “Papa-G.” Recently the project took on a little more importance because Michelle’s parents had to sell the farm. A brother (M’s uncle) who passed away a couple of years ago didn’t have a will so his interest in the farm passed to his wife, who also passed away without a will. They didn’t have any children so their interest in the farm (there is also a sister who owned the final third) passed to a niece or some such obscure relative who had no connection to M’s family, who saw dollar signs and not the intrinsic value of the farm. Fortunately, the buyer is someone who does appreciate the value of the farm and when I called to ask about gathering wood for my winter office heat, and cutting wood for the furniture for Michelle (and for her sister) he told me it wouldn’t be a problem and to continue as I have.

The value of something like a farm is an interesting and extraordinarily complex thing. I believe it takes someone who has at least a little experience with the pleasure of having a farm to understand that value. My family had a farm in Oklahoma (the farm has an interesting history--for another time) and while I never lived on it (some of my siblings did) I do have many memories of “going to the farm” in the spring and summer. First for planting a garden, then maintaining it and finally harvesting it. It was enough for me that when my parents sold the farm I somehow felt a sudden disconnection that exists to this very day. On my last trip “home” (Blackwell, Oklahoma) I drove to Lamont and then out to the site of the farm. I was secretly hoping to see some trace reminder of what had been “the farm.” There was nothing. Not a tree nor a bush and when I walked where I was reasonably sure the farmhouse had been I couldn’t even find a splinter of wood. Every inch of ground was cleared, plowed and part of what had once been the fields where my father had grown up and later farmed. Now it is all one field and the memories that should haunt it have all but drifted away.

Here in North Dakota Michelle’s family farm was not “my” family farm and yet I had developed a connection to it. For the past ten years I have cut a winter’s supply of firewood out of the farmstead’s dead trees. I’ve hunted ducks and deer on the farm and driven across the harvested fields to hunt other sloughs and dove in the trees. I’m sure the new owner will let me hunt deer in the trees and waterfowl on the slough and dove in the trees, but the connection is forever severed. I’ll cut the wood that I’ll make into furniture and eventually that project will be finished and I’ll be through searching for straight logs to cut into lumber. The only wood I’ll then be cutting will be firewood and finally that too will end. I don’t know if my deer and duck hunting will end before the firewood, or after, but they will end. I have to believe the new owner’s children will develop a connection that will lead to future generations of deer and ducks and hunters.

Think about it.