Our RV Adventures

Since I’m probably still in the hospital after my spinal surgery today, or not up to posting a blog anyway, I thought I’d schedule this repost of one of Jan’s Bucket List highlights, Alcatraz, the Rock.

May 10, 2010

The Rock…

This morning we left about 9 am headed for prison…

Alcatraz, that is.

By 10 am we were parked at a parking lot right across the street from Pier 33 on The Embarcadero, the street that runs along San Francisco’s waterfront

We were suppose to be in line to board our ferry at 10:30 am and I thought I had allowed plenty of time, but I didn’t count on it taking 20 minutes to pay for our parking.

This was one of those parking lots where your parking spot had a number and you go to an automated machine, enter you spot number, and feed machine cash or a credit card. The problem was that many of the people trying to pay were foreign tourists who apparently didn’t read English very well. And they were having a lot of trouble with the machine. So there was a long line at the machine.

Luckily, since we were right across the street from the dock, we had time for a quick bathroom break before picking up our tickets and getting in line.

While waiting in line, we could see Coit Tower up the hill behind us. This was neat because we just say Coit Tower in the closing episode of Amazing Race on Sunday night, where the contestants had to climb the side of the tower to get their next clue.

Our ferry, the Alcatraz Clipper left the dock about 11 am, right on time and headed toward Alcatraz Island, about 2 miles away.

Off to our left we could see the Golden Gate Bridge that we had crossed earlier emerging from the fog.

And then Alcatraz itself started to become visible.

The “Indians Welcome” sign is left over from the Indian occupation of Alcatraz in 1969.

The first thing we noticed was all the lush vegetation around. Lots and lots of flowers, shrubs, and ground covers.

We made the quarter-mile, 130 foot vertical climb up to the cellhouse and began our audio tour using headphones, narrated by former guards and inmates.

Here’s the shower room for the inmates. Guess you couldn’t be too shy.

The three levels of cells.

And here’s a typical cell. 5 feet wide by 9 feet deep by 7 feet high.

And here’s Jan being locked away in one of the high-security detention cells.

The gouges and holes in the floor were made by grenades dropped into the cell blocks by the US Marines during a botched escape attempt in 1946.

Looking back at downtown San Francisco from The Rock.

One of the actual cells that the three inmates used spoons to tunnel thru the concrete and disappear from Alcatraz in 1962. They were never found, nor were their bodies. The FBI concluded they had drowned, but other inmates and guards who were there at the time think they all escaped to South America, since they had all been studying Spanish via correspondence course.

That’s the hole underneath the sink.

After watching a very good 20 minute film on the history of Alcatraz Island.

The island became Fort Alcatraz in 1858 and remained under direct Army control until 1907 when it officially became an Army prison.

In 1933 the Army closed their prison facilities and transferred the island to the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Then it 1934 it reopened as America’s highest security prison. Over the years, it was home to many famous inmates, like Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelley, Alvin Karpis, and Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz.

On March 21, 1963, Alcatraz was officially closed, and the remaining inmates transferred to other Federal prisons.

We caught the 1:35 pm ferry back to the dock and headed for the car.

Then we headed over to Joe’s Cable Car Diner. We had seen this place on Diner’s, Drive-ins, and Dives and wanted to check it out.

They mainly serve hamburgers, or as they say, “Ground Steak Burgers”. And talk about fresh ground!  They grind your burger from fresh chuck as you order it.

And Joe, the owner, is adamant about his burgers. He was sitting at the next table when got our orders, and when he saw Jan start to put mustard on her burger, he said, loudly, “No, No, No. You must taste it first. Don’t put anything on it before you taste it”

Jan and both agreed this was absolutely the best burger we have ever eaten, bar none.

As we were leaving the restaurant about 3:45 pm, Jan talked to our daughter Brandi as we headed back to the rig.

Getting home about 5 pm, we settled in.

Tomorrow we’re going to take a DUCK Tour of San Francisco, ride the cable cars, and eat at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Another busy day.
   

Thought For The Day:

The Truth and the Whole Truth are not always the same thing.

or Adventures in ACDF.

Our faithful readers may have noticed that for the last month or so my blogs have been short, spotty and even non-existent.

Well, there’s a reason for that.

About six weeks ago, I went to bed one night feeling fine, no problems that I knew of, and then woke up the next morning with a stiff, sore neck. And during the rest of the day, in fact the next 24 hours or so, I pretty much became, I guess you could say, severely handicapped. And I have the newly-issued blue handicapped placard to show for it

I have difficulty walking. My legs are weak and rubbery and I have no sense of balance so I have to have some sort of support when I’m when I’m walking. And, unfortunately my legs weren’t the only problem actually.

The upper part of my body is worse. I’ve lost pretty much all feeling in my hands. I have no grip strength, and my arms won’t go up any higher than my shoulders. And this goes back to why the blogs have been so spotty, because I really can’t really type anymore. I’ve gone from being a fairly accurate, fast touch-typist, to falling back on hunt and peck, which has degenerated into hit or miss with emphasis on the ‘miss’.

I cannot feel if the keys have been pressed, I have to watch each key press, so each blog every night has been pretty much as far as stuff that I comment or say, been pretty much an exercise in futility.

To help write this I’ve been using an Android app called Otter, which is a very good, and free, Speech To Text converter. It allows me to dictate my thoughts and export them as text files via email, which I then paste into the blog.

At this point, I’m using a walking stick, called that because I refuse to call it a cane yet.

It’s one of a set that Jan and I took to Europe back in 2019. And so that gives me enough support to kind of weeble-wobble along, as Jan calls it, from place to place as I do now.

I also purchased one of those rollators, I.e. wheeled walkers, that you can sit in when you need to. I bought that specifically for when we went to the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit last month. And it worked great.

And I had planned to use it at the Nutcracker Christmas Market today, as well. But Jan and Brandi cajoled, I.e., threatened me into not going, and just resting up for tomorrow. More about that in a minute.

But I will use it for our second Van Gogh exhibit on the 21^st of this month, if necessary.

Now to the cause of all this.

So after two sets of X-Rays, and MRI’s on my cervical and lumbar areas, it shows severe deterioration at the C4-5, C5-6, and C6-7 areas of my neck, as well as the L4-5 and L5-S1 areas in my lower back.

In other words, it seems my spine has started to come apart at the top and the bottom.

Now according to the radiologist report, some of the damage may be ‘congenital’, which to me means ‘from birth’. So it took 73 years to show up?

But when I ask my neurosurgeon about that, he said it really just means ‘a long time ago’.

Now it’s true that in my ‘wild and crazy’ youth, in my ‘PJ’ era, (Pre-Jan. Somehow, ‘BJ’, Before Jan, just doesn’t work here.) I got, well, let’s just say, majorly banged up a couple of times. And when I explained those circumstances to my doctor, he agreed that they might be a contributing factor.

But that’s all under the bridge now.

However, the most important thing he said was that, due to the fast progression of the symptoms, I was at risk of becoming a paraplegic, or even a quadriplegic, if something wasn’t done pretty quickly.

Not words you want to hear, believe me. So I was happy to hear that my Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion (ACDF) was being scheduled for the following Friday, November 5^th.

Breaking it down, Anterior means they get to your spine by going in through your neck under your chin. Cervical means in the neck area. Discectomy means removing a disc, and Fusion means fusing the vertebrae back together afterwards.

Now, in hindsight, and reading about the symptoms caused by disc deterioration, it seems that I’ve actually been experiencing some indications of the coming problem. But in my case, never having been 73 before, I attributed them to the fact that this was what being 73 was supposed to feel like.

My symptoms are caused by the deteriorating discs, the pads separating the vertebrae segments, coming apart and bulging against the spinal cord that runs down the center of the spine. In addition there may also be bone spurs involved, small bone growths also pressing against the spinal cord.

So the procedure will consist of cutting a hole in my neck, probably on the left side, to avoid the esophagus, and then scraping out the bad discs on the 3 levels, C4-5, C5-6, and C6-7, and removing any bone spurs they find.

After the missing discs are replaced with plastic carriers containing a slice of cadaver bone, I will be bolted back together, using a titanium strap and screws.

Titanium, because it is inert to the body, and doesn’t show up on airport scanners, though some people have said this was not so for them.

So instead of “I see dead people”, I guess it’s going to be, “I am dead people”.

The titanium strap is actually only there to hold everything together until the cadaver bone and my vertebrae grow together and fuse into one solid piece. To facilitate this, I will use a bone growth stimulator on my neck for 30 minutes several times a day for a couple of weeks or so..

And I will have to wear one of those hard plastic cervical collars for two weeks afterwards, which means I won’t be able to drive during that time. So Jan will take over driving duties for a while.

As I said, under the circumstances, I was happy to hear that my surgery was scheduled for the following Friday, the 5^th of November. But that was not to be.

At the Pre-Op conference on the Thursday before, it was suddenly discovered that . . . Oops, my surgery not been scheduled at all. And that there were no openings until the following Friday, the 12^th. In other words, tomorrow.

Major finger pointing between the doctor’s office and the hospital going on.

I’m not a happy camper, believe me. Especially since my symptoms have been progressively worsening during the ‘lost’ week. And the longer things go on, the more possible it is that some of the nerve damage might be permanent.

So tomorrow’s the big day, and I was supposed to be at the hospital at 6am, but I just got a call a few minutes ago, pushing it back to 5:30am.

Well, I wanted it as soon as possible so I guess I can’t complain.

What’s funny is that though Jan is allowed to visit me during visiting hours, she’s not even allowed to wait ANYWHERE in the hospital during the operation, except the parking lot. So she’ll come home and wait for me to call when I’m out of recovery and in my room, I’ll call her to come up. And even though I had to have a CoVid test to be operated on, Jan doesn’t need one to visit me.

Though this is nominally a one-day outpatient operation, my neurosurgeon wants to keep me overnight to monitor changes in my nerve symptoms. So though my 3 hour procedure should be over before noon tomorrow, I won’t get released until sometime Saturday.

Finally, I can’t say enough about my beautiful wife and how supportive she’s been in all this. I know it’s probably trite, but she has been my rock. I don’t know how I could have gotten through this as well as I have without her help.

Sweetie, I love you so much!

Depending on how I feel I’ll try to post an update tomorrow, otherwise I’ve got a revisit to a past favorite scheduled to post. 

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