The most spirited of this blog’s users known that it has at last found a stable home that promises to deliver a service that will rarely be interrupted by ghosts in their or our machines. Last weekend, we fled Lunarpages for WordPress.com with ‘Roosevelt Way, 1946’ being the first feature carried by our new server.

Now, unexpectedly, and yet not so surprisingly, other ghosts have taken hold on one of the blog’s three soft machines that embrace like boxcars in the blog name DorpatSherrardLomont – the founders.

Paul Dorpat, at 75 easily the oldest among us, fell to the floor of his and Genevieve McCoy’s Wallingford kitchen after announcing, “I think I’m having a heart attack.”  His more than thirty years of hygienic luck stumbled with him.  First pounding his chest, McCoy then called 911, which soon arrived and sped the crumpled codger to the UW hospital’s ER, and the basement drive-in we, its neighbors, may hope to never visit.  With sirens wailing, (Paul notes that from the inside of a 911 ambulance these ear-splitting heralds are effectively muted–he’d often wondered about that) Paul arrived mid-afternoon last Thursday, February 6th, in what we might imagine as the crypt at the east end of the U.W. Hospital.  As of Tuesday the 11th, he was still there.

Paul’s diagnosis was wrong.  While an arrhythmic flutter in his heart contributed to the winter collapse, it was the milky way of blood clots in his lungs that gave the most to dropping him.  Together, his heart and his lungs were not delivering the oxygen needed to ascend even a single flight of stairs.  Now after a few days of beta-blockers, anti-coagulants, and procedures like the placing – directly thru his heart – of a filter shaped like the Eiffel tower to catch more of his left leg’s contribution of clots before they reach the heart-lungs-head (you might look it up), Paul is feeling not so bad for now, considering the alternative.  (We will make updates on the we hope progress of this soft machine later on.)

UPDATE

Paul was discharged from the hospital on Tuesday evening and is now home again. The overall news is very good, as his heart, while overclocking a bit to keep oxygen flowing, is doing well; the hope is that the embolisms will dissipate over time.  Currently, Paul is hard at work on his next Now & Then.