Good news first

It has been snowing again and I am frustrated by how difficult it is to get out of the house. But at least yesterday and today I had outings which, though exhausting, ended up positive: my first follow-up examinations three months after completion of treatment for the bladder cancer showed no evidence of disease.

Meanwhile, just to keep me on my toes, as we were trying to leave the house early this morning I noticed an odd smell which, long story short, turned out to be coming from my oxygen concentrator, which was actually not functioning. It appears that there was some sort of meltdown in the mechanism. Fortunately, I have plenty of cylinders and a portable oxygen concentrator so I am using those until a new one will be delivered (after numerous phone calls) later today. My mobility around the house is rather limited with this portable equipment so I am anxious for the new one to be delivered.

I have been keeping reasonably warm in this frigid weather wearing the Canada Goose coat I bought a couple of months ago. It often seems to happen that when you buy something you suddenly seem to see it everywhere, and that is how it has been with this coat. Apparently, there is no shortage of people in New York, both men and women, who are willing to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a coat. In my case, it was helpful having a husband who was determined to try to make me more comfortable to leave the house. Maybe I am just seeing a lot of imitations, but this is New York City after all and people are accustomed to spending a lot of money on things. I have to say that, so far, it has proven its worth.

Stay warm!

Love,

Rebecca

The joy of basketball

We had a great weekend up in Sharon with the family. We spent Shabbat afternoon with Dina and Aaron and the two little ones; Joshua was away for Shabbat and Ella spent the day at a friend’s Bat Mitzvah celebration. On Sunday morning we headed up to Maimonides School in Brookline to see Joshua, who is now on the Maimonides Middle School Basketball Team, play a game. They won against JCDS (Jewish Community Day School, another Jewish school up in Boston)!!!

After the game we headed over to Pure Cold Press, a vegetarian restaurant in Brookline. 

http://www.purecoldpress.com/

Barry and I had been there once before. Then we headed back to Sharon. Barry watched the football game with Joshua and Ella while Dina, Aaron, and I took the two little ones with us to look for some furniture. We all met back at their house and gave Dina and Aaron a chance to go see a movie while we helped Ella and Joshua with the little ones. All in all, a fun, if exhausting, day.

We headed back to New York this morning. It is Martin Luther King Day and the children have off school, but we had to head back today because tomorrow and Wednesday I will have my first bladder cancer follow-up appointments. Hopefully there will be nothing to report.

Our little Noah is now 15 months old!

Have a great week.

Love,

Rebecca

Is imitation the highest form of flattery?

Charles Caleb Colton (1780–1832) was an English cleric, writer and collector, well known for his eccentricities. One of his most famous quotes was published in 1824 in Lacon: or, Many things in few words:

Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.

I got to thinking about this when I heard about some confusion that has occurred over the recently published book by Michael Wolff:

It turns out that there was a book with the same title published in 2009:

 

Mr. Wolff’s book sold out so quickly on Amazon that many people, not realizing they were not ordering the book they had intended, ordered Mr. Hansen’s book.

Not surprisingly, there are many books that share titles. Sometimes titles differ by the use of “the” or “a” but I have included only those that are precisely the same. Here are just a few:

Title	Author 1 (year published)	Author 2 (year published)
Life After Life	Jill McCorkle (1995)	Kate Atkinson (2013)
Forever	Judy Blume (1975)	Pete Hamill (2003)
A Person of Interest	Theresa Schwegel (2007)	Susan Choi (2008)
Great Expectations	Charles Dickens (1861)	Kathie Acker (1982)
The Double	Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846)	José Saramago (2002)
The Cave	Tim Krabbé (2000)	José Saramago (2003)

Amazon lists over 1,800,000 titles for sale, so it is no surprise that there are many duplicates! There is a new book listed on Amazon every 5 minutes, which corresponds to over 100,000 books every year. It would probably be nearly impossible for authors to come up with unique titles for every book being written.

Having said all that, for those of you kind friends who have repeatedly suggested that I try to publish this blog, you can see that the market is a bit overwhelming!

Happy reading!

Love,

Rebecca

All the Money in the World

After essentially hibernating since Thursday, the weather finally eased enough on Sunday for me to get out of the house long enough to do two things: go to synagogue, where I have been trying hard to go every day to say kaddish (the Jewish mourner’s prayer) for my mother, and to see the film about J. Paul Getty, “All the Money in the World.”

In July 1973, John Paul Getty III (known as Paul), the 16-year-old grandson of billionaire J. Paul Getty, was snatched off a street in Rome by kidnappers demanding $17 million in ransom. In her divorce from her husband some years earlier, Paul’s mother had agreed to forego a financial settlement in order to maintain custody of their children. The kidnappers told Paul’s mother to get the money from the boy’s billionaire grandfather (the father of her ex-husband), who in turn responded, “If I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren,” which must have sounded every bit as heartless then as it does to see reenacted now. Truth be told, I do not remember much about this because it all happened just after Barry and I were married on July 1st, 1973.

The back story to this movie is that it originally starred Kevin Spacey as Getty. But following allegations of sexual misconduct some months ago, he was replaced by Christopher Plummer, who required a good deal of makeup to film scenes of Getty’s earlier life, but was absolutely chilling in this role. Michelle Williams plays Paul’s mother, Gail, and Mark Wahlberg plays Fletcher Chase, a former CIA operative working as a security advisor to the senior Getty. Getty’s kidnapped grandson is played by Charlie Plummer, apparently no relation to Christopher.

I am not sure just how accurately the story is told, but needless to say there are many twists and turns in Gail’s effort to secure her son. There is one rather gruesome scene in which the kidnappers cut off the boy’s ear; I actually cannot stomach such scenes to I shielded my eyes. Since this movie is based on a true story we know how it ends so we know that the boy will eventually be returned to his parents. It was, however, sad to read that Paul died in 2011 at the age of only 54, having struggled with drug and alcohol addition during the years following the kidnapping and suffered a stroke in 1981 that left him largely disabled. All the money in the world surely cannot guarantee happiness.

https://youtu.be/KXHrCBkIxQQ

We saw this movie at the Loew’s Lincoln Square Cinema on Broadway at 68^th Street, a theater which often shows movies of interest to us. But we were quite disappointed to read recently that our beloved Lincoln Plaza Cinema, the only theater exclusively showing foreign and independent films on the Upper West Side (UWS)of Manhattan, will be closing its doors sometime soon. That leaves only a few such theaters in Manhattan: Film Forum, Angelika Film Center, Quad Cinema, and IFC Center, all located downtown.

Just to orient those who are not familiar with New York City, we live in Riverdale, which is a small slice of the Bronx just north of the northern tip of Manhattan. Our home is just off the Henry Hudson Parkway, which becomes the West Side Highway when you cross the bridge into Manhattan. Lincoln Plaza Cinema is on Broadway between 62^nd and 63^rd Streets, about 10 miles away. The other theaters, such as Angelika, are 13-14 miles away, which may not sound that much further but, trust me, three or four extra miles in Manhattan can be an eternity. Click on this link to see a map of the route from our home to a couple of these theaters here.

Independent movie theaters in Manhattan

Maybe one of the other theaters on the UWS will devote more screens to foreign and independent films. That would be nice.

At least the wickedly cold weather seems to be taking a break. There is supposed to be a fair amount of rain this weekend but we are looking forward to spending time up in Sharon with our grandchildren.

Love,

Rebecca

Hibernation

Hibernation is a state of inactivity and metabolic depression in endotherms. Hibernation refers to a season of heterothermy characterized by low body temperature, slow breathing and heart rate, and low metabolic rate. (Wikipedia)

It has been so cold the past few days that I have been unable to leave the house. And that got me to thinking, can humans hibernate?

I found the following answer to this question on the Popular Science web site:

Involuntarily? Yes. On purpose? Maybe. In February (2012), for instance, Swedish snowmobilers found a man who had been trapped under snow in his car for two months with barely any food. After he was rescued, local doctors suggested that he had survived by adjusting his core body temperature downward to about 88ºF and keeping still, the same process bears use to hibernate.

Some people, such as those who practice meditation, can enter a hibernation-like state on purpose. When a person falls asleep, his body's oxygen use typically drops by only about 6 percent. Herbert Benson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has studied Tibetan monks in deep meditation and found that they can decrease their oxygen needs by as much as 64 percent.

And doctors may someday induce a drastically low body metabolism and temperature to keep trauma patients alive. Reducing oxygen needs could decrease tissue damage in cases where the body can't get as much oxygen as usual, for example during a heart attack. Mark Roth, a biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, is working on a suspended-animation treatment that could do just that. He has shown that having mice inhale air infused with hydrogen sulfide decreases their breathing rate by 92 percent and also drops their body temperature. After he revives them, they recover completely and behave normally.

We spent part of this time reading this new book:

Under no circumstances should any of you readers cite my writing as evidence of correct usage of grammar, spelling, or punctuation. It took only a few minutes for us to start finding errors we routinely make. But the book is fun nonetheless.

Stay warm!

Love,

Rebecca

A cold beginning

Even with the best of pulmonary function, the current weather has been brutal. We were in Sharon this past weekend but we never even left our apartment over Shabbat because it was just too cold for me to be outside long enough to go anywhere (either using my scooter or a wheelchair). This upcoming weekend is supposed to be even colder, so although we had planned to be in Sharon and we are anxious to see our other daughter and her family who returned from Israel a couple of days ago, we have decided to stay put in Riverdale with the hopes that the predictions for somewhat warmer weather to follow are accurate.

Meanwhile, we were able to park our car right outside a Manhattan movie theater on Monday (New Year’s Day) and saw “I, Tonya,” the movie based on the life of figure skater Tonya Harding, the first American woman to complete a triple axel in an Olympic competition. Although we never followed the events religiously, we certainly remember the famous incident a few months before the 1994 Olympics when Ms. Harding’s main competitor, Nancy Kerrigan, was attacked while leaving the rink following practice. [Side note: Ms. Kerrigan did recover sufficiently to compete and won a silver medal, which seemed quite impressive to me but was portrayed in the film as unbearably disappointing to a young woman who likely would have won the gold.] The main focus of the film was on the relationship between Tonya (Margot Robbie), her husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), and Tonya’s mother LaVona Golden (an exquisite performance by Allison Janney).

This was yet another movie in which a character was using full-time supplemental oxygen. LaVona was portrayed from the start as a very heavy smoker, so the need for oxygen in her later years comes as no a surprise. Having said that, search as I have this morning, I was not able to find any mention of this nor any pictures of the real LaVona Golden showing her with supplemental oxygen. This makes me wonder a bit about what the filmmaker was trying to say about the character. What do people think when they see a person dependent on supplemental oxygen? My guess is that they assume that he or she is a long-time heavy smoker who essentially brought this burden on him- or herself. It should come as no surprise that I find this realization extremely troubling, to put it mildly.

(movie trailer)

Meanwhile, stay warm, and have a great 2-0-1-8 (a little jingle there).

Love,

Rebecca

A terrific end to a not always so terrific year

I would be hard pressed to think of a better way to spend the end of any year than with one or more of our grandchildren, and we were especially blessed to have this chance to make up for the summer week we had missed with Maya.

We kept so busy – we built a Lego kit of the London skyline, 

saw the new animated movie “Ferdinand” at a Manhattan theater with large, plush, seats, 

had dinner at Noi Due, 

spent a day at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, including the newly opened planetarium, 

went to the annual train show at the New York Botanical Garden, 

saw “School of Rock” on Broadway, 

spent a day at The Jewish Museum where Maya made a dress inspired by the exhibit of wedding apparel, 

and had dinner at Corner Café in Riverdale. 

Each evening we watched (on our DVR) “The Price is Right.” Barry and I find this game amusing and watching it has become a part of the visit for each of our grandchildren. Maya does amazingly well despite the fact that she has not bought too many kitchen appliances, electronics, or cars.

One of Maya’s charming attributes is that she is quite a conversationalist. She enjoys chatting about all manner of things and asks many spot-on questions. We ended up spending quite a bit of the ride back to Sharon talking about the “match” program that selects medical school graduates for residency programs. I cannot quite remember how we got on to that topic but once we were there she was completely engaged in it. That is Maya.

It has not been a particularly easy year and there are so many things about which to be concerned. But I am filled with deep gratitude for my wonderful husband and daughters and those six pairs of eyes staring into what I cannot stop hoping will be a bright future.

Have a happy and healthy 2018!

Love,

Rebecca