Review: "Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic"

Now that I’m retired, I’ve gotten back into reading about a book a week, which is impressive considering I now spend half my day trying to remember where I put my reading glasses (so I strategically placed half a dozen readers around the house). 

I’ll be posting reviews whenever I stumble across something interesting, though lately I seem to be drifting heavily into history and historical fiction. Apparently this is normal as someone once told me “When you get to a certain age, you either get into smoking meats or historical wars.” 

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I read Rubicon as a historical companion to Robert Harris’s historical fiction "Cicero" books" (Harris actually recommends Rubicon himself, along with a long list of other works in the appendix). Reading Rubicon I found Harris followed “real” history quite faithfully, adding flavor here and there, of course. (Tiro, Harris’s narrator, was a real historical figure, though very little is actually known about him.) In that sense, this book feels a bit like re-reading the Cicero series (which I highly recommend) in a more condensed, purely historical form.

I do wish Holland had gone into greater detail about the major battles as he tends to gloss over them, so I’ll need to pick up a separate military history book for that. He also delves quite a bit into the psychology of ancient Rome, which, while insightful, is inevitably speculative. I liken it to someone 2,000 years from now trying to reconstruct “American psychology” from a few surviving texts: probably close to the truth, but worth taking with a grain of salt. I found he focused a bit too much on this theme in both this book and the follow-up volume I am now reading, "Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar", which covers Augustus to Nero.

That said, none of this detracts from the overall experience. Holland makes history engaging and enjoyable, enough that I wish a series like this had existed back when I was first learning about Rome in high school.

Surviving a Near-Fatal E-Bike Accident and the Road Back

 

 

The Accident 

On August 17 I was in a near-fatal e-bike accident that ruptured my large intestine.  I won’t go into details, but if things had gone just a little bit differently and I didn’t make it to a Level II trauma operating table in time, I would not be here writing about my experience.  

I will say that it is true that in a major event like this that time slows; that there seems to be plenty of time to correct what is obviously going wrong, but it still happens, so I was watching myself go through the air in slow motion and wondering why things were transpiring like they were.

The Surgery and the Tubes

The doctors went into surgery not knowing what they’d find. A quick CT scan showed my bowels leaking into my internal cavity, but they were not sure how bad the break was. If the leak were small, they could go in with a fiber optic and small robot arm.  If it were large, they couldn’t use the robot, and the surgeon had big hands. 

When I woke, I was told it was the worst-case scenario and I had a 6-inch vertical incision going up from about my belly button (like splicing a burst hose, they cut out two inches of intestine with the break, then sewed the two ends back together.  Plus as SOP, while in the area they went ahead and took out my healthy appendix as a precaution from going in again in the future).  And I found six tubes coming out of me: an IV (of course), a nasogastric (NG) tube going up my nose and down into my stomach draining bile (a torture I would not wish on anyone), a wound vac (to speed healing of the incision), a catheter (which thankfully came out before the general anesthetic wore completely off), and two Jackson-Pratt (JP) drains pulling fluid from deep inside where they repaired my intestine, with the tubes coming out of holes near my belly button and emptying into fist-size drains attached to my gown. 

I couldn’t move because of the six-inch incision down my midsection had cut my core muscles. I couldn’t eat because my bowels had shut down during surgery (a condition called ileus). And because opioids slow digestion, they limited the heavy painkillers. Restarting my bowels was the number one concern.

As I lay there in pain, unable to move or eat, my first thought was that dying would have been easier, at least for me, if not my family.

And although I was miserable, in pain, and helpless, I was also thankful to be alive.  If just a few things had happened differently, I would not be in that recovery room.  It might be called a near-death experience, but not in the sense that I was ever unconscious or saw a light, but in the realization that I was lucky to be alive, was thankful to God, and reminded we need cherish the life we live as it can be snuffed out in an instant in the most trivial of circumstances (as I saw in the news when I was recovering). I did a lot of praying those first days, asking God for strength to get me through.

 

The Candy Strip(p)er and the Morning Vampire

The next four days were a mix of pain and boot-camp. The nurses, drill-sergeants in scrubs, ordered me out of bed to walk the halls in hopes of jump-starting my intestines.  After two nurses lifted me out of bed, they would hand me over to a vivacious, chatty and pretty candy striper (if she were in a G-string I wouldn’t have noticed or cared in my state), and I would hobble down the hall, my IV stand and wound vac trailing me like a bridal train. 

And I found out then why tennis balls are on the bottom of walkers: I tried scootching the walker along, but the rubber feet kept sticking to the tile floor.  The Striper noted that if there were tennis balls on the end I could scootch it, but without them I would have to bring the stoppers off the floor. Try that with a six-inch incision through your core.

Adding additional misery, at 5am each morning the “vampire” nurse would visit, taking the daily blood draw to get the results in time for the 10am doctor rounds.  They moved the location of the blood draw each day so by the time I checked out I looked like a junky.

Most everyone else who was conscious in the trauma wing got breakfast shortly after the blood draw, but since I was still waiting for my bowels to restart and couldn't eat, the vampire visit would just lead to one of the staff sergeants ordering me to another lap around the wing with my pretty Striper, and I could smell bacon, eggs, and pancakes wafting through the halls, which would have made my stomach grumble if it were working (noticing my hunger the Striper cheerily recommend that that I not watch the Food Channel on the hospital TV until I was allowed to eat)

 

The Light and the End of the Tunnel

Finally my intestines restarted, so the NG tube was yanked out of my nose and I got a cup of apple juice, my first intake other than ice chips in five days.  It was like ambrosia hand-squeezed by the gods of Olympus themselves. The Jello I got an hour later was better than a $100 Wagyu ribeye from a steakhouse.

I was in the hospital another day as they kept an eye on me as they graduated my food from liquids to soft to solids rather quickly.  As everything seemed to be working I was sent home with a portable wound vac and one last JP tube emptying fluid from deep inside my stomach cavity, with a home nurse visiting three days a week

 

Recovery at Home

The wound vac (with its own special brand of pain during bandage changes) was cancelled two weeks later along with the removal of the last JP tube (the doctor just yanked it out: six inches of tubing came out of a hole near my belly button, bringing a new and strange sort of pain to the wide pantheon of pain I discovered and experienced the previous three weeks).

Today about five weeks after the ordeal I am still recovering, with my main incision still open.  They don’t “stitch” up large incisions anymore (news to me), they just leave them open and let them close on their own, one layer of skin cells at a time, using a wound vac the first few weeks to speed things along.  It will take another month or so for it to close completely, then it will start its long process of fading into a faint 6” scar over the course of a year.  It will be impressive, and my plan is to tell people it is from a knife fight I got into at an El Paso bar since “e-bike accident” doesn’t sound impressive outside of California.

 

What I Learned

So how has this experience changed me?  My first thought is a greater appreciation of the hospital system and staff.  I literally would not have made it using an “urgent care center”, or if the trauma center was out of driving range.  The staff (despite my joking) were dedicated, professional and caring, and they all went out of their way to make me more comfortable.

And like most everyone with serious accidents or near-death experiences, there is a special appreciation for the life I have and what is important: family, friends and faith.  “Work” and "career" never came up in my thought process during recovery, and if anything, this incident is allowing me to transition from semi-retired to full retirement without regret so I can focus on the things that really matter.

 

When You're The Last One in the Picture

One of the tasks that came with unloading my dead father’s house full of crap was sorting through old photos. He himself never cared about photos - he didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body.  The box was left by my mother, the family archivist who died two years before, and my father just shoved the photos into a closet to be dug up after he died.

Being the OCD type, I unpacked, sorted, labeled, and mounted the physical versions, scanned all of them into a digital library, then uploaded a few onto a public tree on Ancestry.com so distant and future family historians could have documentation of what people on the extended family tree looked like.

But one of the things that kept hitting at me as I handled those photos was: I’m the only one left in this picture.

It’s a humbling feeling, looking down at a past Christmas and seeing my parents, uncles, aunts, the odd cousin - all gone - except for me as a kid or teenager, beaming into the camera.

The feeling that came over me wasn’t grief, it was a perspective-shift that makes mortality less abstract, a physical reminder that one day someone will look at the exact same pictures and say, “Everyone in that picture is dead.”

The Death of Blogger Z-Man

I started reading blogs around 2002, which after reading a few I decided to start my own.  I blogged very regularly for the first ten years - about once a day - but have taken a lot of the old content down as it was too topical (political stuff which seems ancient now), too personal (hey look at this picture from Japan), or too revealing.  Remember blogging was before social media, so it was the outlet for everything.  Over the years social media took over, so the personal stuff is now on Facebook, microblogging on X, and so on.  Due to these changes I took a lot of my old posts down, so you will see 20-year-old posts to the right, but just a small fraction of what I wrote.

Today this blog is basically where I jot random thoughts as I flail about in retirement.

But although I got out of regular blog writing, I didn't stop reading blogs, some of them shown at the links to the right (a once very long list that gets shorter as writers move to social media, stop blogging, or in this case, die).   They are a part of my morning coffee ritual along with the news and stock market. 

One of my favorites was "Z-Man", a contemporary who did a lot of deep thinking into the political theory of the conservative movement.  I would say I aligned on about 90% of his political thinking, and being about the same age with similar histories (a business professional doing blogging on the side), made me feel close to him, and I looked forward to reading his weekday posts and listening to his podcast when I was on the road.

Around late June he didn't posts for a few days, which I figured was part of an extended July 4 weekend, but then the non-posting lasted three weeks...then four...then I got a bad feeling.  Doing some X searching I indeed found out he passed away of "natural causes" at the "ripe" age of 59.  Ouch.

What I am finding is that a lot of the people who started blogging some 20 years ago are dropping away as it was done mainly by adults - not young adults - at the time.  So along with ZMan there was American Digest writer Gerard Vanderleun (who I immensely enjoyed), and a few others who have passed away over the past few years.  

Just another example of mortality and change, which basically sucks.

Set Adrift Between Layoff and Revenge

My “forced retirement” wasn’t my first layoff, but it’s the one that stings the most because it came from a company that prided itself on “never doing layoffs.” So I definitely wasn’t looking for that iceberg.

Previous layoffs were easier to handle.  My first layoff was from a startup that completely shut down, so everyone was let go and we were all piled onto the same life raft together, the entire ship lost.  For my next layoff the entire division was cut, so again we all drifted away together, waving to the ship we once sailed, but with lots of company.

This time the layoff was more selective, and everyone – but me – stayed on the big ship sipping cocktails and playing shuffleboard while I sat alone on a raft, watching them recede into their wake.

 

The disappointing part was that no one onboard threw me a life preserver, offered any help.  I am talking about rank-and-file people I partied with at trade-shows, knew about their kids and families - they all just pretended I never existed.  No lifelines. Not even a text.

Maybe it was survivor’s guilt. Maybe they thought helping me would get them tossed overboard too. I’ll probably never know. But I know this: when I was on the ship and someone went overboard, I always reached out.

As I sit adrift on my raft, I see Retirement Island in the distance, and it is an easy navigation to its shore. In the other direction, the periscope of a familiar U-boat cuts through the waves: an old rival, now circling my former ship. I’m tempted to flag it down and join in, to help torpedo the vessel that cast me off.  But the old war no longer interests me, and I know my former enemy will win, with or without me.

So after more than three decades in the trenches, I realize the best revenge is found not in battle, but in a beach chair on Retirement Island, sipping Margaritas, watching from afar as the ship I once served capsizes slowly beneath the waves.