My January, Part III: Exceeding my recommended salt intake in Utah…

So as we learned last week, the barren nothingness that was South Dakota was only a warm up for the barren nothingness that would be Wyoming. The hundreds of miles of bushy weeds and ranchland gave me new appreciation for the lushness that is Lincoln County, Minnesota.
Understand, that I was still thoroughly enjoying myself, but what kind of blog would it be if I didn’t complain?
So, my hopes of getting a glimpse of Yosemite Sam never materialized on my sojourn across Wyoming. (Just a side note before we leave Wyoming…when you see those Verizon commercials on TV and the entire country is red except for an oblong stretch of white in Wyoming??? Yeah, I drove through most of that white.)
My spirits were jumpstarted as the “Welcome to Utah” sign stood out amongst the roadside brush. Certainly my stretch of endless Ponderosa was behind me. It’s no wonder the Cartwrights were always so crabby. (Sorry, that reference will only mean something to people late 40s and older.)
I wasn’t too far into Utah before I encountered my first of two bad weather events I would endure on the trip. Darkness had fallen and I was moving into the mountainous region just east of Salt Lake City. Several times I drove in and out of snow squalls and I got more than a bit nervous as they became longer in duration and more intense, making me rethink my plan to get as far as Salt Lake City before I stopped. A phone call home and I had Kathy and Lindsay looking for my next option for a hotel, and I ended up deciding to stay in Coalville for the evening.
When I was imagining how my trip would go before I left, I had visions of checking into my hotel each night and finding myself some good food before returning to my room, connecting to the internet to spend the evening answering emails, updating my family on the state of my problematic appendage and doing a little Facebooking. My Coalville stop at the Best Western was the start of bad luck for evening meals on the trip. The only other building in sight was the convenience store next door, and I ended up grabbing a blueberry muffin and a bag of Cheetos before heading into the hotel to check in.
The lady at the front desk told me she had a single room and said, “do you have an AARP card?” I looked around to see if anyone’s grandparents were checking in at the same time as me before realizing she was talking to me. I felt even worse when I realized I actually DID have an AARP card. “That will be $10 off,” she said.
She did NOT add, “…and by the way big boy, you don’t look old enough to be carrying an AARP card.”
My evening didn’t get any better when I got to my room. Despite following all the instructions and jumping through all the hoops, I COULDN’T CONNECT TO THE INTERNET!!!! I called the help line listed in the room info, and they told me they could not help me. (I resisted the urge to add the word “no” before the words “help line” in the hotel info.) I was told I had to have them reboot the router at the front desk.
So I trudged down to the front desk and she rebooted the router, to no avail. I still couldn’t connect. This issue actually ended up getting me another $10 knocked off the price of my room. Since the company was paying for my room, I would have gladly traded the $10 to be able to connect, but I resigned myself to digging into my spread of blueberry goodness and Cheetos and watch a rerun of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
I was living the good life.
At least I had an insulin shot in the leg and a lovenox shot in my stomach to look forward to…
Tuesday morning ushered in new excitement as the snow had cleared and the sun was shining brightly. That was good, because it was going to be a long drive to get to Tracy, California by evening.
So, I’m not really sure what my mind had imagined I would see in Utah, but again I was in for a surprise in just how underwhelmed I could be. Drop a load of Round-Up on Wyoming, and you have the scenery encountered in Utah. Miles and miles of…um…of…sandy-looking mushiness. If I were to have conjured a mental image of quicksand, that is exactly what I saw lining the roads of Interstate 80. This stretch is also named the Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway, no doubt because the lay of the land resembles old Ike’s desolate pate. (Again, those under 40, feel free to Google an image of our 34th President) I always assumed that the “salt flats” were a small area around some town named Bonneville, but the brown, watery blandness goes on for miles. If the pictures I’ve found online since my trip are any indication, they may possibly turn white when they dry out in the summer.
Many miles of this bland panorama was suddenly interrupted about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City, when I came across an odd, colorful sculpture protruding on the horizon (pictured). With road signs threatening me that I wasn’t allowed to stop, I grabbed a drive-by, through-the-windshield photo of the peculiar monument. It wasn’t until I got home a few days later that I would do some research and find out what it actually was. I had no idea what it was called, or where to start looking, so I went to Google and typed the words “strange monument in Utah by interstate 80.”
It was the first link that came up.
My investigation revealed it was called “The Tree of Utah.” One site I was on said that it was built and installed “between 1982 and 1986.” So, apparently it was only about 25 years ago, but nobody actually wrote down the exact date that it was erected. Somebody apparently drove by it one day, hypnotized by hundreds of miles of salt flats, and said, “hey, when did they put that thing there?!!!”
And somebody anwered;
“Well, I guess it was probably mid-80s…I know it wasn’t there in ’81, and I remember I first noticed it just before Christmas in 1986.”
The website said it was built by a Swede named Karl, who built it to bring “bold color and beauty to the stark, flat, salty landscape.”
I, too, was startled at the vast stretch of nothing, but leave it to a Swede to actually stop and do something about it.
Next week…the ghosts of the Donner Party live on. (Google THAT one, kids, but not before you eat.)

Wyoming: “We have sagebrush.”

When we left my story last week, I had just whined my way out of the hospital and was due to make a 27-hour drive to California.
A little background first.
Several weeks ago, I was asked by one of my superiors at work if I would be interested in taking some training to be certified to train new hires in general company policies and safety regulations at enXco. Always willing to try to add something to my list of reasons that the company might want to keep me, I enthusiastically said, “yes.”
“Great,” said Chris, the Area Operations Manager, “go ahead and book a flight to Tracy, California. You’ll have classes on January 19th and 20th.”
There…I had done it again. The guy who made it through the first 51 years without having to fly, was facing the unpleasant reality of flying twice in two years.
If you have been reading this blog since the beginning, you may remember what happened the first time I flew, back in 2009. If not, you can scroll down to the archives on the left side of this page. Find the July 2, 2009 column entitled “You Want Me to What?” Over the ensuing five columns, you can learn about my near-death experience with United Airlines.
So here I was, facing another flight and I felt that familiar nausea creeping into my stomach.
The timing of the trip got me thinking of ways to opt out of the flight. It happened that it fell on a week when I already had Monday off, for Martin Luther King Day.
What if, I thought, I left on Sunday and drove to Tracy, California. I ran the idea past the Powers That Be, and was told I could get compensation for driving out if I chose to do that.
Magically, my nausea immediately disappeared.
In addition, other than in pictures, I had never seen any of our fine country west of Rapid City.
After a little online Mapquest research, I found that it would be an1,800-mile drive to Tracy…about 27 hours. I decided to leave Sunday morning, the 16th, and make a leisurely drive, arriving at my hotel in Tracy late Tuesday afternoon.
And then the leg thing happened (see last week’s blog).
In order to get the official okie-dokie to make the trip I had to make the following promises:
1. Give myself blood thinner shots in the stomach twice a day.
2. Closely monitor my blood sugar.
3. Stop every one to two hours on the trip and walk for 10 minutes.
Even with those promises, I seemed to get a look from LuAnn Weber, P.A., that said, “I can’t believe you are walking out of the hospital and driving 1800 miles.”
This is only slightly better that a look that would have said, “I guess I can’t stop you from dying if you want it that badly.”
The two looks are similar, so she may have actually been conveying the latter…
By the time I finished my hospital obligations and took care of a few urgent matters I had ignored while in the hospital, it was after 1:00 Sunday afternoon. I was already four hours behind where I wanted to be.
I was required to stop in Sioux Falls to pick up the Lovenox, that was in charge of preventing any blood clots forming during the trip. Unfortunately, there was only enough Lovenox in the entire city of Sioux Falls to get me through three days. Fortunately, it would be enough to get me to California.
After leaving late and another delay while Lewis Drug called around town to see if they could come up with more Lovenox, I only made it as far as Rapid City on the first evening. This would leave a healthy dose of driving to get to Tracy at a decent time on Tuesday night. I was not discouraged.
I departed Rapid City Tuesday morning with a belly full of Lovenox and a great attitude. Shortly thereafter, I proceeded to cross over into Wyoming. Their state symbol is a silhouette of a cowboy riding a bucking horse, but that is most certainly a misrepresentation. It should be a silhouette of sagebrush. I think I saw six horses, but hundreds and hundreds of miles of sagebrush. Although all the men do wear cowboy hats. (Much more fashionable, I suppose, than sagebrush hats.) I did get a bit excited in line at a Wendy’s somewhere in the Land That God Forgot. I was standing behind a line of seven gentlemen wearing big cowboy hats, and one guy that was actually wearing a baseball-style cap. I got a little tingle. It was short lived however. When he turned, I saw the front of that baseball-style hat. It was embroidered on the front with a silhouette of a cowboy riding a bucking horse. Yikes!
I did think, as I was driving across this giant ranch, that it was kind of quaint the way someone had painted mountains in the far distance, looming over the sagebrush, that somehow never got any closer. They were just…I don’t know…there.
And so for much of the first day of my first ever trip to California. I saw hours of tumbleweeds-to-be, interspersed with thousands of those old windmills and an occasional butte.
I got more than a little excited as I approached the Welcome to Utah sign. Finally, a little variety to the landscape.
Next week: Utah, land that looks a lot like Wyoming, without the sagebrush.

Another stay at the THC Hilton…

It seems that I have been slacking off in my blogging duties lately. Between a host of medical issues and traveling across the country, I haven’t set aside any time to write anything.
I’ve actually had a pretty eventful January…and not necessarily in a good way. The story starts back on Sunday, January 9th, when I came down with what I had diagnosed at the time as the flu, complete with fever and chills and about 36 hours straight of sleeping. After starting the year with a fresh set of five sick days at work, I had already used two of them by January 11th. I went to bed Tuesday night feeling much better and ready to get back to work on Wednesday.
I was about to change my diagnosis, as I think now, looking back, that the fever was a precursor for what would ultimately land me in the hospital.
When I got up for work on Wednesday, I was greeted by a swollen right leg from toes to knee, that was a sort of neon purple. In my divine wisdom, I decided I should go to work, as I had already missed two days that week, and made an appointment to see Dr. Snow after work.
Imagine my joy when the good doctor decided that I needed to check into a room for a few days. The diagnosis was an infection in my leg. The first 24 hours was wonderful…not. Wanting to keep my blood sugar stable, I was on an insulin pump, and I had to have my finger pricked every hour through the night and into the next day.
Complicating matters was the fact that I was scheduled to leave for California on Sunday for some training for my job. We needed to get me healthy and on the road.
It was like old home week for me. I got to hang with many of my nurse friends from previous stays. They provided their typical top-notch care and I racked up my typical amount of sleep. None. There is something about those beds…they are evil.
I have a history with my buddies at the hospital, where their names could show up in, at one time, a newspaper column, and now, a blog or a Facebook post. I have the advantage of saying anything I wish and their hands are tied for defending themselves due to the HIPAA privacy laws…right Charis? Unfortunately, they are all so good to me that it would be kind of thankless of me to taunt them. I hate having a conscience.
Whatever…the nice part is that they have to be nice to me. It is part of the job. I have no idea if they go to the break room and warn everyone that “he is back!.”
I’m probably a little more work than your average patient. I have to have my laptop, which requires a table and an electrical outlet, as well as my cell phone, which requires an occasional electrical outlet, and then of course a fan, which requires a chair and yet another electrical outlet. Fortunately there were still two outlets for my antibiotic drip and the insulin drip.
I will be the first to admit I am addicted to being connected at all times to the internet. Email, news stories, Facebook, opinion columns…it could be a full-time job if I so desired. When I’m not connected through my laptop, I am connected through my smart phone. During a nasty hospital stay in which I can’t sleep, it comes in handy. When I ran out of online newspapers, I had a stack of DVDs with which I occupied my time.
Whatever you may have heard, I have never asked for anyone to stand at my bedside and pluck grapes to drop in my mouth.
With a bit of begging and a few promises, I was able to be dismissed in time to head to California. On Saturday, I was able to talk a reluctant LuAnn into letting me check out so I could go home and get some actual sleep. I had to promise to come back every six hours through Sunday morning to get another bag of antibiotics. I slept like a rock in the comfort of my home.
After a week of being derailed with health issues, I had a few fires to put out at home before I could embark on my trip, and didn’t get out of town until after lunch, not a good start to my 1800-mile drive.
Next week, I’ll let you know how that went.