Pressure on

Was able to catch the last 15 minutes of Shorewood tonight after attending a symposium at the UIC medical campus on the subject of the Affordable Care Act.  The lecture hall was filled with med students and various instructors.

The moderator said as part of her introduction, “I hope you were pleased with the election results . . . and if you weren’t, well, there’s nothing you can do about it.” The crowd laughed.

When my dad was a practicing physician he and almost all of his colleague friends were conservatives. He even used to play classic patriotic songs in his office waiting room. Kate Smith to Tennessee Ernie Ford were piped in over the stereo system from LPs my dad would play on a turntable and flip over himself from the hallway next to his office. Later on, he had me make cassette tapes where I was given the creative freedom to put together my own compilations from his dozens and dozens of albums of hymns and patriotic tunes.

My dad would be so disappointed to see me today, so overweight and in the middle of a health crisis. I am now having daily, prolonged spells where I feel so hot and start perspiring. Sometimes it feels as if  my blood must be boiling. I have high blood pressure and the pill I’m on isn’t working, but instead of giving me a different one, my doctor just gave me a higher dosage. The next thing she said we will talk about is hormone replacement therapy.

I was scared enough by my symptoms in the past week that I seriously considered the need to go to the emergency room. Fortunately, just today, I was able to get an okay to take a week of vacation and will go home to Ohio Friday to have my mom (and my furry baby brother Murray—who is actually big) help bring my anxiety down as I concentrate all day long on eating and exercising to lose weight, etc., without work to raise my stress levels. I can also work on my writings and my book. I’m really up against it right now so praying for relief!

Here are some classic hymn lyrics that Jordan reminded everyone of tonight that certainly give me a lift!

 “Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.”

According to the cyberhymnal, the  song stanza was taken from a Jewish poem known as “The Haddamut,” written by a Jewish man named Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai, who was a synagogue singer (AKA Cantor) in Worms, Germany.

“The writers of the hymn, Frederick M Lehman and his daughter Claudia L Mays, found this poem penciled on the wall of a patient room in a mental asylum. It was obviously written during the period when the patient was sane. They added the first two stanzas and the chorus.”

Write more tomorrow.