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August 27, 2006June 21, 2008

Grandpa Ed [8/20/1909 – 8/18/2006]

(Sorry to post two entries in a row about death, but the only coincidence of this occurance is life itself. I’ve been too busy to write, and as emotions would have it, I’ve only been inspired to write when someone I knew and someone I loved passed on.)

Two days shy of his 97th birthday, my Grandpa Ed passed away. In the photo here to the right, he’s the guy all the way on the right. His sister Martha is in the middle, and his other brother Carl (who needless to say needs his own domain name and book devoted to him) is on the left. Carl used to say that in this photo, he looks like Paul Castelano two days after he got whacked. 🙂

My Grandpa lived a great life, and he will be missed by all. Born in Chicago in 1909, my Grandfather worked hard his whole life. By the age of 5 in 1914, my Grandpa and his family moved from Chicago to Brooklyn, NY where he lived until 1977. Until 1970, my Grandfather worked as a butcher for Swift Meats, now a division of Conagra Foods. My Grandpa was one of the few people I knew who worked hard and lived harder through the Roaring Twenties, and also during and after the collapse of the economy in 1929. Stories he used to tell me from the ‘hard days’ make anything anyone is going through, now pale in comparison. By 1977, he and his wife moved out to Long Island with my parents and myself. I was 2 at that time. He loved it out here — he had a tomato and basil garden, and loved to sit on the back deck drinking a bloody mary or two.

I’m sad, and I know it’ll take a while for me to get used to the new normal. My circumstances are a little different because I lived with my grandfather since I was 2 years old, and right now, I’m 31. I was around him my whole life. He was basically my second father.

Luckily, I have lots of wonderful memories, and even though he passed on while I was away on vacation, I did say “goodbye” to him like I always would before I leave for a trip. So, I do have some comfort in that.

I also have comfort in the way he died. He was mentally sharp right until the end, and he did not suffer in death. He ate pizza, beer and ice cream with my parents while watching the NY Giants (win and play well to boot) the night before he died, and he then passed on in his sleep – peacefully.

My Grandfather was a special man. He took care of his ill wife for many years until her death in 1996. He had a passion for cooking and baking, often dinner for himself and family until about 2 weeks before he died.

He stopped driving only 3 years ago, when he made the decision that he no longer could drive safely.

He cleaned his place himself, and in general he was very independent.

He loved to travel, and go on cruises or to Las Vegas with my parents, as well as take trips to Rhode Island to see his Son, Ed.

Boy, he loved to eat. And he loved to cook. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, he was always up for eating and also eating anything from ice cream to slices of pepperoni at 11PM. As I’d walk in the house sometimes at 10:30 or 11 at night, throwing a laundry in before I’d throw myself in my bed to sleep, he’d be bent over, looking deep into the fridge for something – anything – to eat before bed. It didn’t matter if it were ice cream, pickels or pepperoni, he loved it all.

He loved playing on the computer, and using the computer in general. He would watch TV at night until about 10:30, and then he would retire to his bedroom where he’d play an hour of solitarie, check his email, read Wikipedia, use www.howstuffworks.com, or order his medication online. For someone 96 years old and playing solitaire and ordering his meds online, I consider that highly impressive.

Most of all, I know he loved his grandchildren. Just as myself, my brother and 2 cousins were able to have him a part of our lives, he was able to see 4 grandchildren grow up. The oldest being myself at 31, and the youngest being my brother at 25.

I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world for having him in my life for as long as he was.

It’s always hard to imagine someone gone when they are still alive, and when they pass on, it’s even harder to imagine them gone. It’s only been a week, and I’m still struggling with the notion of the empty apartment downstairs. Everything down there is how he left it when he went to bed – it’s like a time capsule.

While I’m not a large believer in God, I do believe (hope) that there is something after this life, something better. Someplace of eternal peace and happiness for the soul, where all the people that have passed on will be reuinted. While I am in no rush to get there, I do think about the date when I will see my grandfather again. And when I do, it’ll be great.

Bye for now, Grandpa. Thank you for being such a wonderful part of my life, and you will be missed by many. I’m glad I was able to say that to you in person many times, not just reflect upon it at the time of your death. Until we meet again, be well, and say hi to Grandma and the rest of the bunch for me. Remember to tell Grandma that ‘yes’, Alex Trebeck is still doing Jeopardy!, and Pat Sayjack & Vanna White are still doing Wheel of Fortune! 🙂

—–
In Loving Memory of Edward
Born Agust 20th, 1909
Entered into Eternal Rest August 18th, 2006

God grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change….
Courage to change the things I can and
Wisdom to know the difference.

Amen.

———–

May 31, 2006August 27, 2006

Tribute to a Man

Sorry that I haven’t posted anything in about 30 days, I’ve been busy with both my day and night jobs, some family get-togethers, and some damn nice weather that has limited my personal computer time. 🙂

The post today is a sad one, and is a happy one at the same time.

I work for a national healthcare company that specializes in intraveneous (IV), injectible (IM), and inhalation (INH) therapies at home. On service with us, we have people with simple infections that will heal, and we have other people that are terminal and will die any day. Yet, no matter what the disease state, we provide patients with a bit of normalcy to their lives — they don’t have to stay in the hospital for the length of their therapy, or more importantly, they can die at home, at piece and with their family. We provide more than medications — we provide normalcy for patients, and that is such a good thing.

I can’t (and won’t) mention names here, and even first names have been changed to protect the identity of the people in question.

We have a patient on service for about 3 years now, and her name is Michelle. She’s in her early 60’s, and her husband – John – god bless his soul – takes care of her from daybreak to sunset, and all of the time inbetween. Michelle has been on many, many antibiotics with us through the last two years, only because the doctors don’t know what the root cause of her symptoms are. Basically, they don’t know what she has, but they keep trying things to see what works.

Michelle has been stable for quite a while, living a somewhat normal life at home. Sometimes, her WBC counts would get down too low, and she would have to go for a transfusion. John, always by her side, and always acting on her behalf as her spokesperson, morally, ethically, sensibly, and lovingly.

He would e-mail or call me once or twice a week, to let me know how she was doing and to see if we could do certain things, pending insurance clearance or pending MD orders. Or, he would give me the heads up about something happening a week from now, that I might have to handle for him — getting lab results ready, organzing a discharge from the hospital so she could come home over Christmas, or just simply letting him know what he leb results were so he could make a determination on whether or not Michelle needed a transfusion.

This past Thursday, I helped organzie the paperwork and the set the “wheel in motion” so that Michelle could come home over the weekend. She had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and with the doctors not being able to figure out her diagnosis much less a treatment, we were all working against time. Michelle came home on Thursday, went on an antifungal medicine, and the holiday weekend started.

Michelle died, quite peacefully in bed, and in the arms of her husband on May 30th, 2006.

I received a call today from John. Barely able to make complete sentences without breaking down, I could feel the love he had for his wife and I myself, started to lose it a little. Luckily, he asked me a question that I didn’t have an answer to because it’s not my call to make, so the HOLD button here was a lifesaver for me, as I needed to compose myself as much as he. After I found the answer, I told him and he began to tell us how professional we all were, how much we helped Michelle, how much we helped him, and to us, he was forever grateful. He had some other nice things to say about our company and the specific people in my team.

I however went on to thank him. He spent nearly every waking hour caring for his wife, and I thanked him for doing that. My grandfather did the same his wife – my grandmother – for most of her life until her death, and if it’s one thing I admire, it’s devotion to the one you life. I told John this, and after telling him to call or write any time he needs to, whether it’s personal or business, we said our last goodbyes for now, and hung up the phone, both of us not completely composed.

It’s the people like John and Michelle that make the job worth it. Many people care for others, but no one cared for anyone like John did for Michelle. Not at least in my 7 years there have I ever seen anything like it.

John, good luck to you, and Michelle, enjoy the ride and I know you’re in a better place.

“I’d like the memory of me to be a happy one, I’d like to leave an afterglow of smiles day is done. I’d like to leave an echo whispering softly down the ways, Of happy times and laughing times and bright sunny days. I’d like the tears of those who grieve to dry before the sun, Of happy memories that I leave behind when day is done.”

March 3, 2006March 3, 2006

Don’t Blame Me When the T-1 Goes Down

I don’t work in the IT department at my day job, but yet I do work in the company’s largest national branch in an unrelated field. We do not have any on-site IT staff – the closest we have is Totowa, NJ. Easily doable in 90 minutes, but if something goes wrong, most likely it won’t be resolved quickly.

It’s funny too, because our business is healthcare. If our computers are down, it’s really hard to dispense medication and ship product to patients.

In the last month or so, the IT department has changed. Actually, they used to call them self the “MIS Department”, but they later changed that to the more cool-sounding “IT Department”, or “Information Technology”. Part of the whole new IT department is upgrading the per-branch circuit capacity of their Internet connection. Instead of most branches having fractionated T-1’s, each branch is given a T-1 for data and another T-1 for voice.

I’m the guy in the branch that knows the most about computers, so everyone comes to me for help. I help when I can, but for the really big shit, I pull the reins in a bit, and say “whoa, someone has to come out here to do this.”

This was the case this week. Dave, an IT Engineering Field Tech from our Totowa branch e-mailed me and asked me to work with him today to remove a WIC card from our router, replace it with a new WIC card, and run a cat5 cable through the dropped ceilings to the new Verizon-supplied T1’s. (For those non-technical people, the hardest part would be running the wire up the wall, through the dropped ceiling and into the router. Removing the WIC card from the router (about the size of a credit card) only involves unscrewing it at two points, sliding it out, sliding another one in, and rescrewing the card back in. If you’ve ever added a PCI card to your computer to expand the capability of it, doing what I was asked to do today was 100x easier.)

At first I said sure, no problem. Then, I thought about it. I’m not in IT, but they want me to take down the whole router, run cat5 cable, and basically be responsible for the state of the Internet connection during the work.

I thought about this for an hour or so, e-mail Dave back and said “Hey man, I’m not trying to be a dick. But this is a biggie you’re asking me to do. I mean, potentially the system may not come back up, and I don’t know the first thing about Cisco routers. I’m going to have to get it in writing from someone at IT (Kal, April, whoever) that they’re OK’ing me to do this, and I’m not responsible for broken equipment or extended T1 downtime.”

Dave e-mails me back…”Are you kidding around or are you serious? I’m just trying to save myself from coming out there…besides, the ISDN should come back up when the T1 goes down…”.

My reply: “Well, people are getting tossed out of this branch for much less then taking the T1 down. I’m really going to have to insist that you come out here for this. I’ll help you as much as I can, but you’ll be driving the bus. And as far as the ISDN, I don’t have too much faith in that. In theory, the ISDN is supposed to come up as the T1 goes down…”

Of course Dave couldn’t get that in writing for me, so instead of me saving him a trip to Long Island from NJ, he had to come out here today. And a good thing he did too, because the upgrade failed. Almost two hours of downtime today because the IT Enginneer in Chicago who gave him the new code for the new WIC card for the Cisco router gave him the wrong code. It was for the wrong WIC card. So the old WIC card didn’t work and the new WIC card wouldn’t work.

When I asked Dave “Are you ok?” as I see beads of sweat dripping off his face in the 85 degree server room, he says “I’m in a world of shit.”

Oh, and the ISDN did not come up. 🙂

He finally called a senior network engineer (Kal), who, mind you had a day off today, and after hooking up the router to accept incoming connections via remote dialup, was able to get new code to the new WIC card so the router now worked with our new T1.

If Dave hadn’t come today and I did the work, not only would the connection still be down, but the router wasn’t properly hooked up to the remote dial-in component, making remote help impossible. We would have been stuck, and I most likely would have been fired.

Sorry to bore everyone here with my trivial nonsense, but the moral of this story is that always go with your gut instincts regarding a decision. If you think something isn’t right with a situation, you’re probably right. In order to get to the correct situation, you may have to inconvienence and/or piss someone off.

In this case, Dave had to take 1/2 a day to drive to Long Island and back, but heck, it all worked out in the end.