Sunday, September 13, 2020

Baptizing Grandsons

Today was a very momentous day for me and for our four Christman grandsons. I’ve shared before how I was able to lead the two youngest ones to Christ. But recently, I was talking to two of them and they expressed a desire to also be baptized. I checked with the others and they all said they wanted to be, but only if I participated in the ceremony.

I’ve been making arrangements with the pastors from our church – first with our Executive Pastor, Dave Schoen, then being passed on to Dave Schlonecker when Pastor Schoen realized he had a conflict because of a wedding of his nephew this weekend, then being passed on again to our Youth Pastor, Jared Burkholder, when Pastor Schlonecker had a stroke two weeks ago. Because there were not going to be any others being baptized today, I made arrangement with Jared that he would do the introductions and read the boys testimonies and I would be the one in the baptistry with the boys asking them the necessary questions and then immersing them.

It was an emotional time for me. I also realized afterwards that I may be the only non-pastor in our church who has ever performed a baptism. That’s not an issue since I’ve been an elder of our church for 38 years and am fully qualified to do so, but it’s still not typical.

I’ve copied each of the boys testimonies below as well as pictures from this morning. What a great day of celebration!

 

Ethan Christman Testimony

I became a Christian in 2015. I was on my bunkbed and my brother Isaiah was sleeping on the bottom bunk. My mother was in the room talking to me. I don’t remember everything about the conversation, but we were talking about the church and other related subjects. Mom asked if I wanted to pray, so she started and we prayed together.

I believe that the Bible is true and I want to follow Jesus’ example the rest of my life.

My favorite Bible verse is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

 


 


Isaiah Christman Testimony

I became a Christian in May 2018. I was brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed and decided that I needed to have Jesus in my heart so I could be part of His family. I just stopped right where I was and prayed to Him. It was just a private time between me and God, but I’ve never questioned my decision since then. 

My favorite Bible verse is Isaiah 12:2, “Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid.”


 

 

Caleb Christman Testimony

A few days after Christmas of 2018, I was in the living room with my grandpa and we were talking about church and spiritual things. I knew that God and Jesus loved me and that I loved them, but I wanted to ask Jesus into my heart so that I could be part of his family. So my grandpa and I prayed to God together.

Now I’m happy that I’m a part of God’s family and that he looks after me.


 

 

Asher Christman Testimony

When our whole family was at Pinebrook this summer there was one day that I wasn’t feeling well and so I was lying on my bunkbed instead of going to the evening children’s time. My grandpa stayed with me and was lying next to me on the bed. We were talking about God and Jesus. I asked if we could pray together and so we did. I asked Jesus to forgive me and let me live with him forever.

Now I have two birthdays just 5 days apart – my physical birthday and my spiritual birthday! I’m happy that I will get to live forever!


 



 

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Small Medical Adjustments

I’ve shared before some of the major medical events in my life before (*1, *2, *3). But life contains not only these types of major events, but small events (adjustments) as well. I’ve had three of them during the past six months that have had some impact on my life – and will continue to have going forward.

  

Wearing a CPAP

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of my medical appointments were via telemedicine. One of them was my annual visit with my cardiologist. One of the things that he believes is that there are a lot of connections between the various medical issues that people have and that adjustments to one of those issues can impact others. Based on my medical history and some questions he asked during that meeting, he wondered if I would be willing to participate in a sleep study. I agreed and he arranged for the equipment to be delivered to our home.

Sleeping with a small microphone near my mouth (to record breathing and snoring noises), and a finger “cuff” (to record blood oxygen levels, pulse, etc.) is an interesting experience. I did this for 3 nights, then mailed all the equipment back. The determination was that I had very mild sleep apnea (and which was confirmed by my wife that I do not snore nearly as much as I did many years ago). My cardiologist called a few days later and recommended that I consider using a CPAP machine (which would be covered by my Medicare insurance). I agreed to follow his recommendation.

The technology in the latest machines is quite amazing. Besides being able to give different pressures (or even ramping up the pressure gradually), it can preheat the moisture it puts into the delivered air, etc. It also has cell phone technology built into it that sends the daily results on usage back to the company which supplies the unit (I hesitated allowing this type of intrusive technology into the house, but eventually decided it was acceptable).

Based on an online questionnaire from the company that I filled out first, their recommendation was for a standard nostril feed rather than a mask which would cover both the nose and mouth. Because I have always been a mouth-breather, they also recommended a chin strap that would keep pressure on my chin and keep my mouth closed (it’s a light pressure so you can still open your mouth if needed, but when the muscles are relaxed in sleep your mouth stays closed).

It took a few weeks to get used to everything (and they require at least 4 hours 70% of the nights in a 30-day period before Medicare will reimburse them). But now I’m using the machine nearly every night for anywhere from 4-8 hours (I often take it off after I get up for my early morning bathroom run).

There are two main benefits. One is that whatever low level of sleep apnea I had is now gone – and that’s what my cardiologist was seeking to change since that relieves any possible strain on my heart. But the other is that since I am no longer a mouth breather during the night that my oral health has improved. I used to take a nightly Therabreath tablet that would keep my mouth from getting dry while I slept as mouth breathing had a negative impact on my gums and contributed to periodontal disease. Now with my mouth always closed my gums don’t dry out. And since I breathe through my nose at night, I’ve noticed that I tend to breathe that way during the day as well. Double benefit!



 

Intermittent Fasting

In late summer I had a second cardiologist visit so that they could conduct an EKG to monitor the health of my heart (something you can’t do during a telemedicine visit). As we talked afterwards – I appreciate the personal level of care that he gives – he mentioned some of the other life factors that he considers as having an effect on one’s overall health and thus on one’s heart health. One that he was particularly keen on was called “intermittent fasting” (IF). He talked about all the other diet routines – Weight Watchers, Atkins, Jenny Craig, Noom, etc. – but he likes IF because it does not require any particular change in foods eaten, special purchases, etc.

That appealed to me, because unlike many individuals my age who have some control over what foods they buy, we eat together as a family with our daughter and four growing grandsons. The pattern that my cardiologist uses is to do IF three days a week (M, T, Th) and keeping eating to just an 8-hour window (11am-7pm) on those days.

I starting doing the same the week after my visit, but quickly found that my body was strongly objecting to this pattern. I’ve always been taught that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and I have either a bowl of cereal or a few pieces of toast each morning. Skipping those and not eating until lunch time played havoc with my system – my stomach was growling, I started having a consistent headache, and I was out-of-sorts all morning trying that pattern. After less than two weeks I knew that I could not follow his example.

But knowing that I wanted to do something, I instead just stopped any snacking after supper (I often had a small dish of ice cream in the evening), cut back having seconds at supper, and thus established a 12-hour “fast” that I was able to do seven days a week instead of an 18-hour fast three days a week. My body was able to tolerate this and I’ve stuck with it for about 3 weeks now. I’ve since learned that this is not unusual (*4, *5), In fact, one quote in (*5) is “Some may find that a 12-hour fasting window is all they can do without major discomfort. … For beginners, start with 12 hours and build up from there.”

I have not yet taken off a lot of weight – only two pounds in three weeks. But I don’t have extravagant goals either – if I can take off just 20 pounds over the next year that’s all I really need. That’s a far cry from a friend of mine who has used Noom to take off 40 pounds in just 27 weeks, but that’s fine.

However, I have also noticed some progress in other areas, in particular my blood sugars (I do a finger-stick every morning since I’m mildly diabetic) is down a consistent 20 points since I started doing this. It’s still higher than I’d like it to be, but I’m willing to take it slow and easy since that will be more sustainable in the long run.

 

Medication Adjustments

I also appreciate my current primary care physician. Unlike my two prior PCPs who were my age and retired so I had to find someone else, she is pretty aggressive in making sure that I am healthy. Earlier this year she added a CBC (Complete Blood Count) to my periodic blood work. There were no recommendations based on the first one, since she wanted to see a pattern, but she was interested in seeing the results from the second one several months later. There are 21 different items measured in a CBC – and 20 of them were in the normal range (great news!). The one that was out of range was my platelet count which was in the 85-95 (thousand platelets per cubic millimeter of blood) range when “normal” is 140-350. Accordingly, she scheduled me to see a hematologist for further review and recommendations.

I saw him a few weeks ago. He indicated that platelet counts in the 90 range, while lower than average, are generally not an issue. As the count continues lower, there are certain things that cannot be done (for example, below a certain level they will not perform any brain surgery due to the risk of uncontrolled bleeding, below another level they will not perform open-heart surgery, etc.). But he wanted to perform other tests to see if they could determine the cause of the lower-than-average count.

All the initial tests (which they do right in the office) did not identify anything, but as he reviewed my medication list, he noted that I have been taking Zetia (ezetimibe) for the past few years. He was aware of some recent studies where ezetimibe was indicted in cases of thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), including one in a 72-year old man (*6) – gee, that age sounds familiar!

He has scheduled me for a few additional tests in October before I see him again later that month. But in the meantime, I contacted my PCP to get her permission to suspend taking ezetimibe for the next two months to see if that solves the problem. I’ve been taking the ezetimibe for about two years as a cholesterol-lowering drug. It has lowered my total cholesterol from about 140 to 90. But since 140 is still a reasonable value (should be less than 200), we feel that we might be able to do without it.

Results still to be determined, but if my platelet count goes back up to normal range and my cholesterol stays in range, then I’ll be able to take one less medication. The interactions and side effects of taking multiple medications is a complex topic and I’m glad that there are medical professionals to help navigate this area.

 

Notes:

 

*1 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/03/surviving-kidney-stone.html

*2 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/02/surviving-heart-attack.html

*3 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/05/scenes-from-my-hospital-bed.html

*4 - https://www.popsugar.com/fitness/Intermittent-Fasting-Mistakes-43992178

*5 - https://www.eatthis.com/intermittent-fasting-results/

*6 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18252832/

 

 

Saturday, September 5, 2020

Genealogy Story – Vera Estelle Levy

In 1870, the population of the town of New Milford, CT was only 4000. But even so, it was the largest town in northwestern CT – an area that was mostly rural and filled with tree-covered hills. It was here that the many of the major events of my grandmother’s life were to take place over the next several decades.

Maurice Levy was the son of Jewish immigrants from England. He had been born in Brooklyn in March of 1870, but the Levy family had moved to New Milford when he was just a few months old.

Caroline Canfield Northrop was just a year younger than Maurice. Like him, she had been born elsewhere – in her case, Lee, MA. The Northrop family had moved to New Milford when she was two years old. The Levy and Northrop families only lived a few blocks apart and so Maurice and Caroline, then known as Carrie, attended the same small school in town.

After having grown up together, it was only natural that Maurice and Carrie decided to get married – which they did in 1893. He was 23 and she was 22. But Maurice’s aspirations were larger than New Milford and the young couple moved back to Brooklyn, the place of Maurice’s birth and where Maurice’s older brothers, Joseph and Benjamin, had also moved a few years earlier.

It was here that Maurice and Caroline began their family. Vera was born in June of 1895. When she was 3 the family expanded with the birth of her sister Irene in January of 1899. Vera had the lighter complexion and light blue eyes of her mother, but Irene had the darker complexion of her Jewish father. They lived in a three-story, three-family tenement building surrounded by many immigrant families – from Germany, England, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Scotland, Sweden and Holland among others. There were two other children born to Maurice and Caroline in the following decade, but neither of them survived. For a while, Caroline’s youngest brother, Carl, also lived with them and apprenticed with Maurice.

In 1910, tragedy struck the Levy family as Maurice passed away suddenly. Caroline, unable to support herself, immediately moved back to New Milford with her two daughters – then ages 14 and 11. She also took her husband’s body with her. If her connections with Maurice’s Jewish family were tentative before because of her not being Jewish, they were now totally disconnected when she had her husband buried in the Protestant cemetery in town alongside her Northrop relatives.

Moving from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn, NY, to the rural quietness of New Milford must have been a shock for Vera – especially at the vulnerable age of 14. And with losing her father at the same time, she apparently wanted a father figure in her life. In June of 1914 she married a local boy by the name of Erskine Russell. He was only 19 and she was 18. They moved from New Milford to the closest city of Bridgeport, CT – about 30 miles away – where Erskine got a job working in a foundry.

It was in Bridgeport that Erskine and Vera began their family, with Dorothy being born in 1916 and Vernon (my father) four years later in 1920. When my father was born, they lived at 754 Norman St., but that was their third address on Norman St. in the past few years as they rented and moved frequently.

But despite having children together, that was not sufficient and things were not going well otherwise. In 1922, when my father was not yet two-years old, Erskine abandoned his family and moved to Waterbury, CT where he began living with his father and step-mother (they had moved from New Milford to Waterbury a few years earlier). The next four years would have been very difficult for Vera with two small children and trying to support herself. During this time Vera’s mother, Caroline, moved in with the family so she could care for the children while Vera was working at a series of different jobs.

In mid-1926, Vera and Erskine tried to work things out again – he rented a house in Waterbury for the two of them and their children – who were now both in school. But that did not work out any better and after two years they once again separated and this time divorced – Vera moving back to Bridgeport with the children (and Caroline again joining them) and Erskine moving back home with his father and step-mother. Erskine would not see his children again for nearly a decade.

In order to have the children have stability in their schooling, Vera remained in Bridgeport for a while, but they had six different addresses over the next two years. Finally, in early June 1930, Vera married again, to Charles Rogers from Danbury, a man 30 years her senior – even older than her father. It appears that she really missed that father figure from 20 years earlier. They remained in Danbury for a year, then the following summer moved to New Milford, Vera’s hometown.

After a decade-and-a-half of instability, Vera finally had the stability that she craved. Although Charles was of typical retirement age, he was a self-employed watchmaker and continued to provide the family income for the next decade-plus. Vera could stop working, they could remain in one place for more than a few months, and she could spend time raising her children.

This situation remained for 4+ years. But when Dorothy was out of school and Vernon was a junior in high school, they both left home and moved to Waterbury where they began living with their grandfather and step-grandmother – the spare rooms in that house having been vacated by Erskine who had finally gotten remarried and moved out of his father’s house a few years earlier.

Vera and Charles remained together in New Milford for the next twenty years. It was not until the mid-1950s that Charles, then nearly 90 years old, moved into an assisted-living home in Woodbury. By then Vera, who had always been a bit unstable also needed to move into a nursing home, even though she was only 60. For the remaining years of her life she was moved from one nursing home to another until her passing in 1963 at the age of 68. I’ve shared that story before (see https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2016/01/shell-keep.html), so I’ll not repeat it here.

Vera had a hard life – growing up in a mixed-religion household, losing her father as a teenager, being abandoned by her husband, having to raise two children during the depression, not having a stable home life or even being able to stay in one location for many years, and even having her children move out prematurely. As I was able to visit her in the various nursing homes where she spent the last several years of her life, the visits were never happy experiences as she complained incessantly. But nonetheless, she was my grandmother and I still loved her.

 

[Very Levy]


[Charles and Vera with myself and my sister in 1956]


[Vernon, Vera, Charles - about 1931]


[Wedding to Charles Rogers in 1930]


[Younger Vera]

[Levy Family]