Time to consider getting contacts I think.
I can’t read the computer screen wearing my glasses. I get glowy blurry double vision. I can read it just fine with my left eye without glasses, which is essentially what I do.
But it’s tiring.
(No, it’s not my prescription. The glasses work just fine when I’m reading a book or even my tablet screen. There’s just something about the brightness or frequency of the laptop screen that messes with my focus.)
Today’s adventure in chauffeuring my grandfather around took us to Seattle Cardiology (at Swedish Cherry Hill campus) for a follow-up visit after his recent hospitalizations. Gramps wanted me to accompany him into the rooms for the actual checkup. Usually Gram goes, but today was her pinochle game. Gramps wanted me to go in so he could have a second set of ears on what the doc said. The better to remember everything.
The first hour we sat in a darkened room as a technician applied a hand-held ultrasound device to Gramps’ legs, looking for blood clots. We knew there was one, because that’s what his emergency room visits told us. But where exactly and perhaps even how many we didn’t know.
What I didn’t know was that they could use this device to look for clots. It appears to be much the same device used to take images of fetuses in the womb. Stick some goop on the end, push against the skin, see a cross-section of the insides. In this case, the leg.
I could see on the screen black spots, which the technician told me were veins and arteries. A clot sort of looks like a filled in spot. In addition, the technician would press on Gramps’ leg near the ultra-sound wand. You could see the spots squish. He said a blood clot wouldn’t compress like that.
Anyhoo, the technician found the clot. It doesn’t change anything Gramps has to do, but I suppose now they can better monitor it over the six to twelve months a blood clot is supposed to take to dissolve
naturally. I put that in quotes because it doesn’t dissolve, but despite being told the process, I can’t repeat it particularly accurately.
Another technician also downloaded a bunch of information from Gramps’ pacemaker. Hang an electronic ring of some sort of my grandfather’s chest, and it reads information transmitted from the pacemaker. They didn’t tell use anything about what they read this time.
Actual visit with the doctor resulted in keep following the discharge instructions and we’ll see you in 4 to 6 weeks
.
Image by Greg Younger used under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license. This is not a picture of anyone checking my grandfather; the device is similar but not quite the same.