A Small Piece About Summer Rain (sort of)

If you're reading this from elsewhere, Bloomington is in the grip of consistent rain, overcast skies, overall bad dog and cancer weather. 

I have been ignoring the world outside this week trying to teach myself how to win a game of Empire: Total War, which I bought on Steam's Summer Sale for 5$. It's an interesting game to be certain, I'm just not sure it's endorsed for such uses as ignoring society and alleviating weather based angst.

This is the real problem with summer rain of such glaring proportions: it forces out the little lizards of ugliness that live in everyone's crevices. It has exposed my iguana, desperate for a patch of sun, of hermetism....my Garbo moment, my desire to be alone. It's true, I don't want to see people right now. I don't want to type, I don't want to be brave, or not brave, or admired or complimented for my warrior attitude. I'm sick of it, I'm tired of how I look, how I have to live, and I'm tired of people not knowing that about me. 

I say that knowing that some people who read statements like mine--all perfectly true--then go to the other extreme and believe I'm depressed or that I've given up on the fight, neither of which are true. Rain is an obscuring event when it comes fast and hard, and so is just being so damned tired of being who you are.

I'm a bit stuck in a flash flood here--just by writing it out I can feel the wheels grip a bit better, the car moving back out of the water, but I'm not there yet. The rain continues tonight a bit, and even though I'm dry, typing this on my iPad on the bed with two fingers (there may be typos), I still shudder at the thought of actual real human interaction. 

I suppose the only exception to this is my weekly chemo visit, always enjoyable. Otherwise, I loathe the every other day dressing changes with home healthcare, the weekly physical therapy for my shoulder, the doctor's appointments--I feel caged, a parrot who says "I'm fine, I'm fine, pretty bird" in response to everything. A gimp bird with a pre-recorded message for a voice.  

The little frustrations keep falling down upon me, rain of their own.  My insurance suddenly thinks a chemo drug that I use isn't working, probably because it costs 6200$ a week. I've sent the same appeal letter twice and received no response. The student loan company gives me a repayment amount based upon income which I have to renew--I don't have all the documentation they require so they raise my payment--modestly--but I'm now a fixed income guy. I write them six times begging them to email or text me. The only way I've gotten a response is to pay my old payment amount instead of the new one. Finally a message: you are in danger of default. 

I begin to wonder why I had to have the cancer that took away functions that I can't operate well without having available. Everyone has a 1-800 number but I can't use it. I can't do everything through Charles' voice--he has need of it too.  Tonight as he ate one of my favorite dinners, Zatarain's Dirty Rice Mix (seriously, don't judge, I love it), I wondered why I couldn't have had some manageable prostate problem instead of no tongue, no jaw bone, and a mouth that hangs open with skin that has no feeling, all freakishly hidden by a stupid mask I wear every damn rainy day and every damn sunny one too.

At night, I try to direct my dreams to what will happen in the afterlife for me, but they end up elsewhere, muddy, indistinguishable from what the backyard is like these days. I want to see myself, as I sleep, with Shake Shak followed by Dairy Queen, but I only achieve that in twilight, and only in a Plato's Cave sort of way.  Not cone not Blizzard quality, as I wish it to be.

My recovery from surgery continues, it creaks along like a six legged spider compensating by lumbering sideways. I finally seem to have a grip on my hemoglobin, or at least the hint that I have some control.  My graft wound is healing beautifully the nurses tell me, the one ray of sun that no cloud is obscuring.  Yet I have a yard full off gardening I thought I'd do and I'm too damn tired to even push a vacuum over the carpet.  I thought I'd die cleaning the toilet. I'm just not there yet.

So this is what happens in summer rain, when the lizard needs its sun but makes do with lamps. When guys who try too hard realize there's no one watching the tap dance. When you have to face the truly boring notion that every day in your life now requires your best effort just to live it, forget improvement. That's a word I don't use in quite the same way as I did before. Sometimes I'm not certain where that word went.

The Death of Kiss and Slap?

Awhile back I wrote a post about the kiss and slap cycle, the proclivity for bad news to immediately follow good news here in my cancer world. A scan would show me cancer free and my pits would erupt with lumps; no cancer found in my lungs, and the old krakatoa tumor on my chest (Rest in Hell), would erupt with bloody fury. It got so that I'd hear the doctor say something positive thing and I'd just nod and say wait...

Lately though we might have broken the old cycle--or not, it's not definite yet. Post surgery, full on recovery misery, I found a goddamn lump under my right arm. But it wasn't typical, it hurt when you pressed it, and the first one I found disappeared. Angry lymph node. I tucked that away and kept it to myself. A few days later it was back but in a new place. Still hurt, I stayed silent. I watched and waited. This wasn't kiss and slap though--I felt like shit anyway. The surgery had gone well, but the slap was the fact that I felt like I was on a deathbed anyway. I didn't have to find another.

The second one went away. Fluid back up in the system, perhaps. A few clear days follow and then BAM, third time's the charm, a full on lump, but still hurt. That hurt is a good sign that it's an infection, it's an inflamed node, it's an inconvenience, not a killer. This time I spoke to the doctors, they said, it sounds infected. Let's watch. And so we do, we watch. We wait, we poke it to see if it hurts and cheer when it does.

Cancer will always be with me, and the lump will come that doesn't hurt, that is silent and confident. It may signal a need a change of chemo; it might be the last lump. I don't know. I don't wait around for it, but I'm vigilant. I want to know. I don't want to be the cancer equivalent of the woman who has a toilet baby.

But this may be the end of the kiss/slap cycle, and I welcome that. I'm growing up, I'm batting harder and pitching to hurt back. I thank cancer for what I've learned from the experience at the same moment I'm bitch slapping it down to manageable size. Balance is coming more easily, regret is slipping away from me. I think fondly of hamburger but it no longer moves me. I wish I could sing, but I never could sing for shit, so we're all better off. The people in my life who enjoyed me before cancer enjoy me now, in a different way, and I mean something different to them. I who didn't look or particularly act vulnerable now very much look it, and even allow people to know how vulnerable I actually am. I acknowledge fear, but I don't fear it.

The other night my dream was dominated by the landscape I was in, one like that Robin Williams movie, What Dreams May or something like that. I was in my after life, mine. I had a nice cottage in the mountains and a few miles away from the house, a ring of fast food joints representing about every kind of food done in a few minutes or less and I was in hog heaven. I personally love fast food because it's there, ready, and I can start scarfing in moments.

There are obviously different realities we all inhabit. I don't revolve in the world of my nieces and nephews with their own kids and concerns and extended families and arguments and what not--I'm just a subset that interacts occasionally, on our shared basis, our Priceness. Otherwise, they see the world and experience it completely differently than I do, as do my neighbors, and my friends, and everyone.

We do not move to the same groove and think alike, go the same places at the same time or have the same desires. Ergo, our worlds are very different, our experiences of them different, we are different. If we come together, we operate as subsets in each others bag of daily experiences, good, bad, indifferent.

Yet we all understand each other's triumphs and tragedies through the lens of our own experience and think of them as shared or discrete. I've been blessed with many people who understand cancer and why it sucks, and can understand the painful side of it, the part that occasionally needs someone else's kiss, whether physical or verbal. That's not something I'm conditioned to ask for, or to tell people that I need, so all along when it's happened (and thank you all, it's happened a lot), I feel the gratitude of knowing that I know great people.

The last two years have been a grind. A terrible one. I've been hooked like an ox to a water wheel and I walk in continual circles, some creep always behind me whipping my ass forward. At first I pulled hard and walked fast and was simply defiant, but I couldn't keep that up and it made no sense. I started to amble a bit. Let my head hang occasionally, and looked at the view I could make out. The chemo washed over me and I felt no change, but change was happening. I started to forget some small facts, names started to fly away. I struggled to remember things that happened to me as a kid, things that I'd never forgotten before.

Life is passing by me faster and faster, and this is ok. I'm readjusting to my post surgery life by sitting on the back deck in my rocker every day for a few minutes, watching my shade garden go native because I can't pull all the weeds. I start Physical Therapy this week because my left shoulder got effed up a bit in the surgical pull. I do not look forward to it. P/T people are like a cross between Scientologists and Bolsheviks, pulling all the fanatacism and none of the humor that each potentially represent.  YOU WILL MOVE THAT ARM LIKE THIS LIKE THIS LIKE THIS!

Every once in awhile, I think I'll close my eyes and nap and try to get back to that afterlife dream, that Popeye's chicken joint, the Inn-n-Out and Whataburger down the road. I never waddle home afterwards, you don't gain weight there! You just think a better life and there it is, kind of like here.

Miscellaneous: Cancer style

I'm now about two weeks into what I figured would be a month of recovery, post surgery. In some ways it's going really well, and in others, the picture is more mixed. I now have a home health nurse that comes everyday to change the dressing on my surgical site, and attend to an open area where the graft failed to take.  Of course, there had to be a new hole, after all, it's me we're speaking of here.

My stay in Bloomington Hospital of two days was alleviated by a great nurse named Nancy who was smart and engaging. It wasn't so bad. I had my own room, a big bathroom, no view, but more channels on cable than I get at home, so I watched House Hunters until I could no longer stand: "oh, it's so small", and "I don't like that wall color", and "but where are you going to put your clothes" (in a closet the size of a house in Mexico, of course).

What surprises me is how old I feel, how this surgery, this time, really knocked me back on my ass, physically. It will go this way, now. I'm not the guy I was in 2013 when surgery was like a whatever on my way out of Cancerland. I know more, a lot more, and I'm about 1/2 the size of that fellow. So I shuffle around the house in slippers and a robe, sweats sometimes, usually no shirt under the zip up sweater I got from my good friend Polly Prissypants on my last birthday.

I've been on percoset for pain control, but pain has been happily very limited. I use it more for the excrutiating sensitivity I feel when the home care nurse is cleaning some of my surgical site, where the nerve endings are raw, occasionally exposed, and not very happy about it. The percs, as you might imagine, put me to sleep, and what where naps are now more like day sleep. I'm living a semi-Dracula life, but I've mostly been able to sleep at night, too. I sleep so much of late that my blood pressure is tacking lower, which feeds into the sleep cycle.

So, I'm taking some measures to prevent falling into an accidental coma from my love of Big Z. A bit more coffee to raise my blood pressure, a small project each day to complete to keep me from being completely useless. Reading (between Venetian history and a sweeping survey of the Plantegenet kings and queens of England, and upcoming, Chris Bayly's book on the birth of the modern world, thanks to a recommendation from Michael Dodson, the very kind and competent Director of India Studies at IUB).

I am older, and I am older than my age, and this has happened so gradually that it didn't occur to me until I faced it wounded, tired, and needing to heal. So I find my strategies have to change to reflect this reality: I have to work in smaller units; I need to rehabilitate slower, more patiently; my goal posts must be closer together.

Tomorrow, I go back to chemo one week earlier than I expected--it's a good thing socially. This is where I get my biggest kicks of the week, usually. Messing with the nurses, running the joint, playing Salt-n-Pepa videos on the Ipad as they push the 5FU into me--it doesn't sound like much I'm sure but it truly is a place I feel safe, and confident, a place where I'm accepted with my quirks that draw no discernible judgement. More importantly, it's a place where we all have one goal, to save me. I hope you never have to find out how important such a place is to have in your life.

Lately, the mail has been bothering me because every iteration brings a new message from the insurance company. They've managed to request information on virtually every thing I've had done to me this year. They've contended, tried to reject, pushed, pulled and popped every objection they could find to just paying the damn bill. News flash, Anthem BC/BS: I have stage 4 terminal cancer. I will never be cancer-free. My cancer has not progressed, it's simply persisted--so please stop trying to reject paying for the chemo that has allowed me to achieve that balance over a highly aggressive killer strain, ok? It would do wonders for my overall health if you would just shut the fuck up and pay--I mean, come on--doesn't the CEO make a heft multi-million dollar salary with flagrantly enormous stock options? Please don't try to poor mouth me to an early grave. Trust me, you won't win.

Too, I'm now eligible for Medicare which takes effect in August. So, I'm getting all those mailings about signing up, choosing a presciption plan which I believe will be like getting plowed dry, no kiss afterwards. I want to tell them, thanks, but let's wait to do this when I feel more competent, and less overwhelmed, but the grind of bureaucracy never fully meets the reality of individualism. I will say this--they are being incredibly efficient about it, so it's best I think if I take my own advice, STFU and motor on through the process.

I have met reality, I think, and I'm likely better for it overall. I've had some dark thoughts about this recovery because my expectations of myself are not tempered by any parameter of Mark with Cancer--I'm still Mark who Aspires, not Mark who is OLD AND TIRED! I'm still the guy who wants so much to know Turkish better, to finally not have to look up declensions of French nouns, who wants to flesh out my ancient German from early undergrad, who wants to know the modern world.

In my mind, I'm mowing the grass and gardening, and laughing and talking and the dogwood tree in the backyard is beautiful as I'm doing all of that. Rally is running away and I'm chasing him full speed, and when I put a leash on him, we go to Cascades Park and ramble around the stands of trees for an hour or so, up and down the steep ridge. Oddly, that vision doesn't depress me at all, as I sit in a very different reality; it gladdens every part of me. That I had that life, at one point, and enjoyed the hell out of it, makes moving into a new phase more exciting, more interesting, more provocative. I wonder how I will accommodate this new Mark, how he will figure out the method to a full life going forward always, with cancer, like a marriage that works but no one knows quite how.

A Brief Message 'round Midnight.

I surprise myself again. Today I was down to two Percocet from the allowed six.  I'm not having pain so much as scrapes and chronic aches.

I've been sleeping a lot but dreaming of what?  I couldn't tell you. My head is alive in an alternate universe at the moment. If you see me driving a car, get out of the way.  I've been spending the days in my bed, which at the moment is charming and warm. I know I'll chafe against the bars soon enough; for now I just want to heal.

The day Charles brought me back from the hospital was glorious--80, light everywhere. Even the ruins of last year's garden looked good. Rally was sweet, he could see that I was hurt and he kept--and keeps--both company and watch. He treads me carefully.

I have a drain, a huge amount of gauze and pads soaking up the afterglow of surgery. I don't know when it will all fall out or be satisfied that it has drained and wasted me enough.

I was touched, very much so, by all the well wishes from so many healthy faces on Facebook. A simple recognition beats a complex social game every time. And simplicity is my new theme.

Today I saw the plastic surgeon for follow up, which meant tedious dressing changes, but he ended up 95% happy--5% witnessing a hole develop at the top of the graft where the muscle pulled away. It's to be monitored and cared for for the great ladies of Wound Care.  I have confidence.

That high percentage of satisfaction too means that I exceeded expectations yet again!  And he called me tough, which was a nice compliment.

Anyway, I thought a brief synopsis was in order and a bit of bragging and a big thank you for the real fuel that keeps me going.

The Joy in Mudville

It finally reached 70 degrees in Bloomington, which is the sign that we've nearly completed our transition from Winter to Spring. There may be freak snow, a bit of frost across the grass in the morning, but we are on our way to 100% humidity and 90 degrees.

I have always found the transition of these seasons to be difficult; my body feels like it's been cut in two and moves in different directions. This year, I suspect the difficult transition has made me constantly tired, constantly sleepy, sluggish when I'm up and diffident to depth when I sleep. My trach tube is full of the--wait for it--effluvia and difficult to deal with...for some reason none of it wants to leave. This is a nice house, it seems to say, and we are in it to win it. This, and only this, is why I fear death by choking,

The next surgery has its schedule--April 15. You pay your taxes, I pay my cancer dues. I'm apprehensive about the recovery period, how I heal where they take skin for grafting, how I heal where they put a drain in my back from the muscle they pull around the body, how it will be once Krakatoa, my personal volcano, is cut out of me. I suppose this is normal apprehension, but it feels like prediction--bad omens circle me (I've been watching I, Claudius, on Huluplus, so forgive me the Roman reference).

Good omens, though, come in the form of my niece who proposes to visit with her Batman-obsessed husband, and children, and another of my nieces, and potentially her boyfriend. So I get to make a lunch for Easter, an Indiana throw down of chicken and ham, potatoes in some format, maybe some steamed asparagus or cauliflower. The Easters of my far younger days were spent eating...ham, potato salad, those oddly sweet little gherkins, black olives from a can. All of my basket's chocolate in one day, of course, and part of my brother's.

Now that I can't eat or drink normally, I enjoy seeing other people do it. I'm like a tourist at a luncheon party, one who has visited before--I know where the landmarks are, and on this trip, I want to see how the natives live. I'm fascinated to see what people choose to eat, how much of it, what works and what doesn't in the cookery. As a cook, I want people to love what I make, though not being able to taste it is a great disadvantage--but no more so than those people on "Chopped" who inexplicably make sauces out of the grossest combinations of ingredients and then don't taste it before the judging. That's either excess ego or excess stupidity.

I haven't thought much of my life post-surgery this time. The last time, the major surgery, I saw myself as returning pretty much to normal, albeit 85% tongueless. I rather thought I'd just be Mark again. I woke thinking I looked the same, I acted as if I was him. I never want to go through the experience of such a let down again. So I don't think of what will be, I think of what is. I'll still have the Scream Mask mouth, I'll still drool, I'll still have the neck hole, I'll still have the numb feet. I'll still be the Frankenstein, and for a couple of weeks, my chest will resemble his rather full cloth. There will be surgical staples (ugh, gross), and drainage and whatever vulgarity cancer can throw at me.

What won't be--a tumor that is potentially releasing it's constant toxicity into my bloodstream and it's errant re-programmed cells into my bloodstream and lymph system. For this alone, everything is worth it. This is the first real step to control, given that frying me like a KFC special and bathing me in chemicals week after week have gotten us just to the point where this is possible. Control means the balance isn't just me on the light side of the seesaw. It means 70 is more possible than it was.

After two years of fighting, I'm amazed. That every day has required me to act and think 100% to the positive side, to physically ignore that I'm tired, to try to be part of life as it swims all around me. The surgery offers the possibility of a second gear, a place where I can rest a bit. By rest I mean my mind, the true battleground of cancer--there's the possibility I want have to manically support myself and cheer for myself and attaboy myself every damn minute of the day--that I can daydream, and wander and think and plan.

Lately, I've been walking in mud, living in Mudville, napping hours and hours per day. My mind needs some refreshment, some visual stimulation, something that the 14th Century, a biography of Catherine the Great, binge watching (rewatching) the X Files, or reading about Indiana's weird grasp of discrimination don't offer.

The joy in Mudville is that I've nearly waded through it to the outskirts. Where the normal people live. And if they chase me off with torches, so be it. My creators, in their shiny medical castles, will always welcome me back. I'm big business, and a whole lot of fun to chop up.

Looking for the Spring of Things

I am knee deep in garden porn, new variants of old favorite plants, bold colors that will lift my spirits and make my yard look better than the heteros who surround me. I know, it's not much of a brag, but you gotta do what you gotta do, and I gotta dig.

We are really about 3 weeks from prime digging time, and planting in this zone shouldn't take place before Memorial Day, but it always does. We really start to warm up in April, usually, though last year was not good. But May 1, and after, it usually moves from the tiny little mild Spring weather we have for 3 days, into humid and hot, consistently over 70, consistently annoying Summer. I say annoying because I burn, therefore I am.

This is one event, the digging time, that I look forward to all year. I put on headphones, I play The Smiths station or the Kylie Station or the Goldfrapp station on my Pandora list and just zone. I dig, fall to my knees, and pull the dead vegetation out of the clumps, break them up, move on. Dig, drop, declump, dig, drop, declump. It's a weird heaven, but that can't be fixed.

This year, my surgery now expected by the end of March, will take at least a month for me to normalize a bit afterwards; this interrupts my chi. This compresses my digging schedule into May, when I'd normally be early planting. In my state, in my old man-ism, the digging schedule takes place over two weeks or so--there's just so much I can do in a day, and I recognize that limitation. And this year my hagged out garden needs a lot of work, plus I finally plan to herbicide the shit out of it, because I can't keep up with how fast weeds grow when the rain is nice and steady and the temperatures are glorious, as they were last summer. Well, glorious as it gets around here.

Despite that relatively minor gripe, the entirety of the approaching time to plant gives me lift and optimism. Anticipation of pleasure, the wonderful running around looking for native Indiana species (my new passion), and a few of the old favorites (Asian lilies on sale at Lowe's for half-off after their normal flowering season has passed). This is the optimistic time when I conspire to fix a bed, or an area, and this year I plan to do a big fern planting in a new part of my shade garden and I'm so excited about his that I could pee.

I know I've written about his before but it bears repeating: I run on optimism. It's my gasoline, my internal fusion plant, and without it, I quickly revert to a worrying, fumbling, half-dead, idiot. I create, in my life calendar, reasons for it. I write this blog which reminds me of it. I tell people everything is fine when obviously I'd rather not look as I do, or live as I do, because those are just conditions, and talk counts when you're keeping your head up.

I have been both lucky and unlucky with doctors in this regard. I've met those who with one look wrote me off and refused to listen to me when I told them how unprofessional their attitude was--but of course that didn't make me patient of the year in their eyes--just another deluded patient. Yet in the relationships that count with doctors, I've consistently hit the jackpot. My oncologists, Dr. Kramer in San Francisco, and Dr. Dayton, here, have both proven to match and even exceed my own blue skyisms at times; when chemo works, an oncologist is truly a happy person to be around, and mine has worked wonders. To be clear, in my case, a wonder was living, and I'm doing that like villain.

It's been of late Dr. Dayton, whose joy in my upward ticks both amuses and inspires me, that has more than matched me in positive thinking. He's been the way I chart through what I hear in one place, read online, see in the New York Times, hear anecdotally, feel internally, wonder about with concern. And the point of this is that you need that person, that one person, who sits at the center of your health universe and helps you make sense of it all because it does not make sense.

Often enough, between insurance companies and doctor's offices, you need to translate variants of English that you didn't even know existed. In explaining procedures, their time needs, their expected outcomes and expected side effects, doctors often revert to Med School lectures at a verbal pace of whythefuckdoIhavetosaythisjustshutuplaythereandtakeitbecauseIknowbetterthanyoueverwill. In blue skyism the only possible answer to such a thing is: I don't think you do, but thanks for the laugh.

I continually find that the life of a cancer patient is so much more complicated than I ever expected. I had this idea that upon a diagnosis of cancer, one's life became like a series of Belgian tapestries, circa 14th century. A scene of shock, a scene of treatment, a scene of losing one's hair, a scene of recovery, a scene of an Odysseus-ish return to a new normal. It does not work like that at all.

So many roadblocks are thrown at you, so much pre-conception, so much judgment, that it shocks one. And then if the conditions you are working around are severe, like my inability to speak, it becomes a fucking nightmare. Here's an example: My stupid home health provider, who vends my enterals (food) to me will not take orders over email and I cannot speak, and I will not make Charles take a phone call when I can be dealt with easily. They claim email is insecure but you know what? The Secret Service will let the President have email but they will not let him have a commercial smart phone because-duh-they are incredibly easily hacked and data is incredibly easy to sweep from them. Yet because I cannot speak, I cannot work with them because I cannot work with them from an easily hackable fucking cell phone.

In fact, any health care provider will discuss your intimate details readily on the world's most monitored, hacked, swept, data-losing, platform, but will refuse to do so by email. Too insecure. I mean you have to laugh or you'd just buy a gun.

So, I see Dayton, and instantly, I feel better. I saw him Friday (yesterday as I'm writing this) and I still feel better about life. I feel better about the surgery upcoming, I feel more informed and more capable to deal with recovery, I know better what to expect. I like that he doesn't pretend to know everything, and that we can have a fun but informative conservation about the most important topic in my life--me.

I read garden porn and I know that all I want is to kill weeds and plant beauty and enjoy the benefits of both. I want to watch Rally schnoodle his way through the shade garden which he loves as much as the birds and insects have proven to love it too. Even with my interferences it's mostly just naturalized space, the wild violets prove to be powerful, but too pretty to just uproot every year.

At some point I'll be out with my Gator mini-chain saw hacking down those stupid shade bushes that are pissing me off, the stupid mulberrys that grow everywhere because birds shit everywhere, and my weed whacker, my wheelbarrow (a new one coming!) and my spade (a new one of those, too), and I'll be in hog heaven...I love it. I feel warm, I like to feel the dirt, I like to imagine where I'll plant what. I'll be thinking how much I like blue skies and how much I wish I'd know that about myself way earlier. It would have spared me much grief.

But that's life, isn't it? It takes a log to pluck the toothpick from one's eye.

Party and Bullshit: My Date with Dayton

Today the sky is very crystalline blue, as Winter skies can be without clouds and with lots of cheerful sun. It's 16 degrees on its way to a high of 19, there is no wind--in short, this is perfect weather, this is what I love and used to live for, this is the weather that framed my park and woods walks with Hector and Hildy who both, like me, loved winter.

I find it incredibly beautiful--I like the color palette of bark, I like the stripped bare trees when their lattice can be seen. I enjoy the snap in the air, I love the brilliance of white snow against the foot of a dark grey elm, a beigey oak, the black and lichen of a maple. Today is such a day. This is why I love the Midwest.

Friday are chemo days and every third chemo Friday, I also see Dr. Dayton. These visits are usually just me recounting what has happened or not happened since our last visit. They are forums where I toss questions out and propose scenarios. We talk about sex, we talk about bowel movements, we discuss the New York Times (today's article on fighting cancer through the targeting and suppression of mutations was a lively topic), and we spend a few seconds congratulating ourselves on how well we've done working together against bad odds.

We've been focused upon the upcoming surgery, of course, and the results of my recent MRI are very encouraging, very winter blue sky. Aside from the mass we hope to excise and two small satellite masses attached, we are looking at a Mark who may just keep ticking, fighting those micro cancers that roost and grow, like Rilke, dann und wann ein weisse Elephant....(just don't ask me if that adjectival ending is correct--my German is way too far in the past. Donna, I'm thinking it should be eine weisse....)

March 3rd will mark the 2nd anniverary of my 18 hour initial surgery in 2013--a day that will live in, what, infamy? No, like the unexpected beauty of a copse of trees on a golf course in winter, it's a day whose effects still resonate. I am grateful that I could be saved, overall, the surgeons did a good job. It's not their fault that my tongue was thoroughly colonized by cancer and had to go, not their fault that in a mouthful of cancer they couldn't scoop every last cell, and some of those minions escaped and went on a permanent joy ride through my lymph system.

Like watching snow fall, I'm never properly awed by the fact that cancer invaded my lungs and got its ass kicked before it dug in, until I breathe, until it falls, until the grey light behind the white flakes is resonant with the sun it's obscuring. Like everyone, I complain I don't receive miracles while they quietly go about their business around me.

I like Dr. Dayton so much because I believe he tells me the truth, or at least the truth as he sees it. It's a lesson all doctors should learn. I have cancer, I didn't catch retardation, so talk to me rationally, like an adult, tell me what's really going on. Today we added a new nurse to the infusion center rotation--Cally--who is being trained upon the art of dealing with me.

Honestly, I'm a bit livelier than the average person who shares Friday morning chemo with me. And that's because I'm happy to be there:  I've received such benefit from chemo, suffered comparatively little in the way of side effects, and (in a recent conversation with Dr. D) have found that if cancer comes roaring back, their are still things we haven't tried that we will try. So I have relief, and confidence, and I can sit back and enjoy the fact that 7,000 dollars worth of treatment is dripping into me.

There will be more snow on Sunday here, but finally, a bit of warmer temperatures. Without the wind, the teens are delightful weather, but these days, hard on me--that sort of air and a trach tube for breathing don't go together well. Just getting the mail out of the box yesterday was a trial, but there was wind, pushing knives of dry down my tube and shocking me into believing I couldn't breathe. Uh, no, Mark does not play that, not no more.

Ultimately what I like most about my intermittent dates with Dr. Dayton is the fact that I feel better, and more optimistic, after each one. And, to no one's surprise, I'm the one who does most of the talking--or typing, in my case--so I suppose I'm getting a talk therapy benefit along with a health overview. But the optimism I feel is buttressed by the results, the concrete, real achievements of our team this year.

I came back to Indiana last January looking like a sad ass frozen red bud hoping not to die. These days, I'm at least a Tulip Poplar, looking forward to my next bloom.