OneFinger

Went my Dr today. He felt the chest pain was NOT PE since it is not ong-going. Told me to keep track of chest pain / traveling. Since I'm already on blood thinners, he felt PE was not likely. But, I'm going to keep track and followup if it continues near flight times.

Flew back to Portland without any problem or muscle pain. Have appointments in January with my multiple doctors. Will discuss with them my pains / weakness after flying. Very curious that I didn't have those problems on my last flights.

Went my Dr today. He felt the chest pain was NOT PE since it is not ong-going. Told me to keep track of chest pain / traveling. Since I'm already on blood thinners, he felt PE was not likely. But, I'm going to keep track and followup if it continues near flight times.

Went my Dr today. He felt the chest pain was NOT PE since it is not ong-going. Told me to keep track of chest pain / traveling. Since I'm already on blood thinners, he felt PE was not likely. But, I'm going to keep track and followup if it continues near flight times.

https://www.myfairladyontour.com/
 
Caught this at the Kennedy Center last night. It's based off the LCT revival from last season.
 
I had wondered how they would tour it, seeing as the version at the Vivian Beaumont was nearly in-the-round with a massive, two level set piece that would roll on and off from the very rear of the stage. Thankfully, this tour was not much scaled-back and Higgins's large home rolled on and then functioned as a turntable just as it did in NYC. Impressive touring stagecraft, for sure.
 
First off, the orchestra sounded large, lush and they did the score massive justice.
 
The cast was uniform and very, very talented. For a first stop, they all seemed polished and as if they had been doing this for years. Shereen Ahmed as Eliza was beautifully sung and found a ton of strong comedy in the show I never saw with the LCT cast. Laird Mackintosh was the standout as Higgins: His vocal rythyms were a bit like Rex Harrison, but clearly he could sing. His words were bell clear. His movements crisp (as he was a former ballet dancer). I really enjoyed his take on the role.
 
Highly recommended if it's in your neck of the woods.

Flew back to Portland without any problem or muscle pain. Have appointments in January with my multiple doctors. Will discuss with them my pains / weakness after flying. Very curious that I didn't have those problems on my last flights.

Flew back to Portland without any problem or muscle pain. Have appointments in January with my multiple doctors. Will discuss with them my pains / weakness after flying. Very curious that I didn't have those problems on my last flights.

Flew back to Portland without any problem or muscle pain. Have appointments in January with my multiple doctors. Will discuss with them my pains / weakness after flying. Very curious that I didn't have those problems on my last flights.

Flew back to Portland without any problem or muscle pain. Have appointments in January with my multiple doctors. Will discuss with them my pains / weakness after flying. Very curious that I didn't have those problems on my last flights.

"Feels irrelevant" in the sense that no matter where I go or what I do, I don't have to be "out," because no one takes it for granted than I am straight (the usual default mode). People are sophisticated enough not to assume that because I wear a wedding ring, I must be heterosexual, as happens in most other places when I interact with strangers. In other words, I don't have to assert my homosexuality, because it's a non-issue.

If you bought a finger oximeter, be aware the increased pressure in the cabin may throw off the reading. I tested it once for someone. At 36k, I couldn't get the number above 88%. As we decended back down, the reading steadily rose back up to normal levels. I only did it once so this is completely anecdotal, but you may want to ask your doctor if this typical.

The pressure in most flights is like being at 8,000 ft altitude, and the pressure is 560 mm Hg. Sea level is 760 mm Hg. Air is 21% Oxygen. So the partial pressure of Oxygen at sea level is 160 mm Hg, but at 36k feet it’s 126 mm Hg.
 
8,000 was chosen so as to give the smallest pressure gradient across the fuselage, to reduce metal fatigue. The Boeing 787 uses composite materials that don’t suffer fatigue, and is pressurized to 6,000 feet. Apparently, additional lowering or altitude ( thus increasing the internal pressure) has no additional benefit.
 
There’s an obligate gradient between alveolar oxygen, which is about 713 mm Hg (humidification is about 47 mm Hg). This gives most people a partial pressure of 713 mmHg in the lungs, and 95-100 in the blood. This corresponds to a saturation ( what the pulse oximeter measures) of 98% or so.
 
At 8,000 feet, the alveolar oxygen will be about 80 mm Hg, to give an arterial partial pressure of oxygen of about 60 to 65.
The oxygen dissociation curve is rather non-linear. A PaO2 (partial pressure of oxygen) of 60 will give a saturation of 90%, and (for the sake of example), a PaO2 of 30 will give a saturation of 60%.
 
This is in normal people. When I had my pulmonary embolism, I had no perfusion to three out of five lobes of my lungs, and scattered occlusion in the remaining two lobes. [Yes, it should have killed me.] Off oxygen, my SpO2 (pulse oximetry measurement of oxygen saturation) was 85% or less.
 
It isn’t an increase in cabin pressure, it’s that the cabin pressure is reduced, and thus the oxygen content in flight.
 
Just to clarify “ ... the increased pressure in the cabin ...” in the quote above.
 
(I was an anesthesiologist in another life, and we had to know this stuff.)

Looking into gracilis potential. Never heard of that before. But I did have a psoas abscess about 3 years ago that extended into my upper legs. However, that pain didn't involve arms or chest. As for airline seats, I've been flying 1st class exclusively for the past year.


 
Hadn't considered pinched nerve or disk issues. I did have a cervical / lumbar MRI in July and a PET scan in August. But, this could be disk or nerve-related. I'm confused that it only happens after a flight.

 
A year ago I started having weakness in my legs, loss of balance and was falling 2-3 times per week. In April my right foot became paralyzed and I now have a leg brace. Dr. recommended starting PT after the holidays.



 
About 7 years ago I got bilateral PEs from a DVT I didn't know I had. Have been on blood thinners since then. I immediately thought PE but pain in chest subsides in a couple of days. And, the pain from 7 years ago was in the back (shoulder-to-shoulder). Flying back to Portland on Friday. If this happens again, I definitely going to ER immediately.
 
I also bought a pulmonary oximeter to measure my oxygen levels during flight. If it drops, that could account for the symptoms, too.
 
Thanks so much for the swift and caring responses. I'm concerned with my health and you guys provided some thoughts and insights that are helpful.

Certainly way more than bromance...

Woof, woof. And here I am at a sporting event without a harness, collar and leash for him.

After I told my parents I was gay, the relationship became very "cold". But things warmed up and stayed that way for the rest of their lives. Never had a problem with aunts, uncles or cousins.
 
Had a wonderful experience this June at Utah Pride. It happened I was in Utah that week and mentioned to my straight niece I was going. (She and her 2 boys share my Utah house with me.) Her immediate response was to ask if her family could go with me. So, we loaded up the car and headed down to Salt Lake City for the parade and festivities.
 
I was so excited to go to Pride with 3 generations of my family. FYI, my niece's oldest son (15 this month) told us in August he is bisexual. Not sure if Pride gave him the courage to come out to us. But I think that could have been a factor. He also told us he had his first boyfriend last school year and school staff / classmates knew. No one in the family blinked and for us, it's no big dealing. That's also the attitude / way it's handled in the school.

I decided if they rejected me when I came out I would move away and cut them out.
 
But they sort of got it. Could be worse.
 
My Mom became a volunteer at the AiDS service office in town. Perhaps that was some kind of magical thinking that her service would bring me good karma. I guess it worked.
 
The brother that lives in Colorado and screams lock her up while watching Fox News allowed me to stay at his place with a "friend". But he clearly believes marriage equality is an example the Constitution being hijacked by reactionary judges. I haven't asked him how it is having a gay governor.
 
I moved away from the homeland anyway, after I came out, eventually to a place I said I would never live. But one can't predict life's circumstances. Karma I guess.

The word "detente" is an accurate depiction of my upbringing. Parents were divorced, Mom had custody, every other weekend at Dad's except when he was working out of town (railway engineer), so 98 percent of life was at Mom's. Eldest child of six, both parents eldest children of their families also, so life was lived under the microscope of a lot of folks- we lived across the street from Mom's parents, in a small town. Looking back, it was a recipe for disaster, could have turned out really ugly.
 
I'm fairly sure Dad figured it out first, unless Mom put him up to this: He would leave old Playgirl mags and such n the seat back pocket of the Celica for me to find on the weekends that he was in town for visitation. I must have been 9 yrs old, about 1973, I don't recall being particularly effeminate as a kid, but who knows- anyway, I guess he thought it might help me figure things out. I always read them in the back seat, left them in the car at the end of the visitation. Didn't think about taking them back to Mom's with me.
 
Forward a couple years- age 11, in 1975 &76. Dad is remarried, new wife is NOT interested in having reminders of her husband's previous marriage, so visitation becomes a one-to-two hour outing every three weeks or so. Thus, no surreptitious magazine viewing anymore. I had a morning paper route to earn my own ducats; as long as I put half in my savings account, and show Mom the bank book proving the deposit, the rest of the money is mine to spend. I found that, if I added a copy of Playgirl to the few things I would pick up at the 24hr Osco Drug on Saturday mornings at 5AM-( that's where the paperboys picked up their papers, their covered loading dock), the cashier never gave me any guff. The mags were behind the counter, below the cigarette rack, and even at age 11, I was close to six feet tall, so I guess they assumed I was of age- aah the Seventies!
 
Altho I was tall, puberty was not quite finished for me, so after looking at the mags I would throw then in the trash bin. Then one weekend at my friend Mark's home, I was introduced to the concept of masturbation, solo and mutual, and things became much more clear! So the mags started coming home with me, sometimes after a few days with Mark, sometimes right away. With many younger brothers in the house, privacy was not on the house menu, so Mom's solution was to give each of us a metal tool box and a combination lock. The things we wanted to not share with brothers went into the locked box, and GOD FORBID anyone break into your brother's box!
 
Little did we know that she had kept a copy of the combinations for herself "just in case you forget". I didn't tell her when I suspected that Mitch had gotten my box open, and I swapped locks with my school locker. And because I was generally a good boy, I never gave her any reason to need to see inside my lockbox, unlike my brothers- who each had their boxes opened after some transgression or another, and finding smokes, knives, etc. She had made a couple of us open the box in front of her, but Donnie refused to, so she just opened it herself, boy was that a surprise! Anyway, the lock box idea died away, but I still had mine deep in my closet, filling slowly with printed proof of my (and slowly growing circle of confidantes) increasing sexual awareness
 
Of course it all comes to ahead finally- Easter Sunday 1976. Dad is in town, and Grandma wants the have all the grandkids over for Easter brunch. Mom bundles all us kids into the VistaCruiser to take us across town to her ex-mother-in-law, warning us to be on our best behavior, "don't you DARE embarrass me in front of your Gramma Dottie!' When we got home, we scattered after changing clothes. Before late supper, Mom calls out, "I want all your dirty clothes to do laundry, Lennie come help me."
 
So we gather things in my little brothers rooms, the she heads into my room (being the oldest I had my room to myself) and goes straight into the closet. Calls out with a tone to her voice, "Lennie, get in here!" I see that my lockbox is out in the middle of the closet floor, not where I left it on the top shelf, and the lock hasp has been twisted off, the now useless lock hanging off to the side. "You wanna tell me about what's in this box?", she says , with a cold edge in her voice that I don't ever remember hearing before- she sounds like when Grandma Lena has been drinking and wandering around the neighborhood. It dawns on me that she has taken the opportunity of having all the kids away from home for a full afternoon to do some snooping (in a way I can;t blame her, we are a wild bunch) .
 
Looking back through a forty-plus year lens, I can tell that this might have been the first time I felt, well, ashamed of being myself, in a way. Sure, I'd been made ashamed of some things in my childhood, as anyone would- that's how you raise a kid, gotta make them see right from wrong, punish when needed. Going back and apologizing to the toy store owner after stealing a Matchbox car, telling the neighborhood girl who is a thalidomide victim that calling her a flipper girl was a bad thing and I'm sorry. and many others are what turn savage untamed children into productive upstanding citizens. But this was different. Feeling ashamed of WHO I was, not just something wrong I had done, having to be judged as a "bad person" about something that I was beginning to see was going to be a permanent fixture of life. I now see that I aged from twelve to eighteen that day, there was no going back.
 
I spent the summer of 1976 taking a bus downtown Tuesdays and Fridays, talking with a therapist that my parents arranged. At first my walls were tall and strong, but eventually he helped me see things in reality, that life was going to be hard and I would need all my intellect to find my way thru to adulthood. As a twelve year old patient, he would have to report our findings to my folks,but he managed to do it in away that satisfied Mom and got her off my back. I was locked down hard that summer, but when school started (freshman year high school) the "detente" began, and what would now be called "don't ask, don"t tell" became the norm. Mom, new step-dad, and brothers moved across town my senior year, I stayed behind to finish with my graduating class, and then at sixteen,it was off to college in the Bay Area- another story for another time

After I told my parents I was gay, the relationship became very "cold". But things warmed up and stayed that way for the rest of their lives. Never had a problem with aunts, uncles or cousins.
 
Had a wonderful experience this June at Utah Pride. It happened I was in Utah that week and mentioned to my straight niece I was going. (She and her 2 boys share my Utah house with me.) Her immediate response was to ask if her family could go with me. So, we loaded up the car and headed down to Salt Lake City for the parade and festivities.
 
I was so excited to go to Pride with 3 generations of my family. FYI, my niece's oldest son (15 this month) told us in August he is bisexual. Not sure if Pride gave him the courage to come out to us. But I think that could have been a factor. He also told us he had his first boyfriend last school year and school staff / classmates knew. No one in the family blinked and for us, it's no big dealing. That's also the attitude / way it's handled in the school.

After I told my parents I was gay, the relationship became very "cold". But things warmed up and stayed that way for the rest of their lives. Never had a problem with aunts, uncles or cousins.
 
Had a wonderful experience this June at Utah Pride. It happened I was in Utah that week and mentioned to my straight niece I was going. (She and her 2 boys share my Utah house with me.) Her immediate response was to ask if her family could go with me. So, we loaded up the car and headed down to Salt Lake City for the parade and festivities.
 
I was so excited to go to Pride with 3 generations of my family. FYI, my niece's oldest son (15 this month) told us in August he is bisexual. Not sure if Pride gave him the courage to come out to us. But I think that could have been a factor. He also told us he had his first boyfriend last school year and school staff / classmates knew. No one in the family blinked and for us, it's no big dealing. That's also the attitude / way it's handled in the school.

I prefer my man's underwear be....in a drawer or on the floor.

After I told my parents I was gay, the relationship became very "cold". But things warmed up and stayed that way for the rest of their lives. Never had a problem with aunts, uncles or cousins.
 
Had a wonderful experience this June at Utah Pride. It happened I was in Utah that week and mentioned to my straight niece I was going. (She and her 2 boys share my Utah house with me.) Her immediate response was to ask if her family could go with me. So, we loaded up the car and headed down to Salt Lake City for the parade and festivities.
 
I was so excited to go to Pride with 3 generations of my family. FYI, my niece's oldest son (15 this month) told us in August he is bisexual. Not sure if Pride gave him the courage to come out to us. But I think that could have been a factor. He also told us he had his first boyfriend last school year and school staff / classmates knew. No one in the family blinked and for us, it's no big dealing. That's also the attitude / way it's handled in the school.

Ditto. Really liked this movie.

Absolutely agree. Weeks before he ever replied and no commitment. I have moved well past him.