Naysayers on Wrong Side of History

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Government is not a four-letter word. Yet, at every turn, we hear a knee-jerk negativism, a shotgun rage charging that the country is going to the dogs.

Yet, if every forward-looking measure, like assuring people of health care, is branded a socialist or, worse, a communist plot, we are simply substituting slogans for thinking.

Note to TN Dems

An open appeal to the Tennessee Democrat Party:

Please stop offering up BlueDog conserva-dems for voters to hold their noses while voting. There is clear and concise evidence that truly progressive democrats do better against the GOP than conserva-dems, in the current primaries (I noted this trend in 2008 at some point in the midst of some post or other.)

It is past the time of continuing to follow the FAILED strategy of offering conservadems to run against the GOP. If you (TN Dems) noticed, you lost the General Assembly following this model, and are positioned to lose the governorship this year. And, seriously consider how well you think you’ll do in US House elections this year. In a word, LOUSY.

Wise up, or continue to lose the support of progressives across this state. It’s your choice.

Thank you.

You Shine Out Like A Shaft Of Gold When All Around Is Dark

The prognosis was good.  They had removed a lot of nymph nodes and found five that were cancerous and the rest were not.  They think they got it all.  There was only one thing left to do:  The Pill.  No, not the birth control pill but the radioactive iodin pill.  One month after surgery, I was to take the radioactive iodin pill.  This pill required a couple of days of total isolation from humans for their safety.  Mrs DBK1 would be out of town on business during the week I took it, so she would be safe and the only one I had to watch out for was the cat.

The thyroid is the only organ in the body that absorbs iodin.  Cancerous thyroid cells had left the area of my thyroid and spread to my lymph nodes and potentially elsewhere.  Prior to taking the pill, I would starve my body of iodin and thyroid hormone for a week, then take the pill.  The iodin-deprived cells would greedily lap up the radioactive iodin and it would kill them.  Natural processes would expel the dangerous cells and radiation and I would be free of cancer.  That’s the theory and apparently it works, as the numerous stories of people surviving thyroid cancer for decades were now attesting.

She’s Alive!

Since we’d let people know about my cancer, I had been hearing from everyone who knew anyone who ever had thyroid cancer and they were all alive and doing well to this day.  My mother, having learned of my cancer after it was allegedly gone, was in a panic because she is always in a panic about something and the fact that it is over doesn’t matter.  I only told her I had done some skydiving three years after I had done my last jump and she was terrified by it.  Apparently living through it wasn’t enough to get her over being afraid.  She remained terrified by my bout of cancer until some neighbor of hers down in Florida told her that his daughter had the same thing and she’s fine.  Me bing fine wasn’t good enough.  There had to be someone else who was fine.

I’m Hot

Mrs DBK1 left town and the day dawned.  I swallowed the pill at a hospital and spent a week in total isolation.  Then I was allowed to eat foods with iodine again.  I’m keeping this short because I haven’t the energy to write a novel about this experience and I feel like I’ve gone on too long already.  Oh, and the title of this posting is from a Monty Python bit.  I’ve used it as a reference to urinary output while being radioactive.  Clever, no?

The Failure of Laxatives

The follow-up test to the pill is some sort of scan a week or so after you take the pill.  The prep for the scan is to fast starting the evening before the test and taking a laxative.  The laxative was foul and made me feel ill for a whole day and my gut was churning and gurgling for hours and hours.  The point of fasting and the laxative was to get everything out of your body, including any remaining radiation.  If the scan doesn’t spot any radiation, then there aren’t any thyroid cells around that absorbed the radiation and remain within you.

In my case they found some hot spots in my intestine, so I had to retake the test.  I refused to use the laxative again, but it turned out that was okay.  They didn’t know if the hot spots were cancer cells or just fecal matter with radiation in it, so if the hot spots moved or were gone the second time, then all was well.  They were all gone the second time I was scanned, so all was well.

And From Here…

I’ll be scanned periodically for the next five years or so and, if no evidence of tumors show up again, I can rest assured that I am cancer free.  That’s it.  I’ve emptied the whole bag.  That’s my cancer story.

I’m a lucky guy.  What I had was not as life-threatening as other forms of cancer, but it does kill a certain percentage of those who have it.  I was determined to be in Stage 2/3 and that kills something like 15% of those who get it.  That’s one in seven.  Not the best odds in the world but the best I could get.  I am also lucky because I had a very good surgical team.  Having health insurance is also fortunate.  I still can’t believe what some of this stuff cost, but we haven’t been terribly damaged by it because the insurance covered most of it.  I’ll be on thyroid hormone pills he rest of my life, but that’s something I can handle as long as the pills are available.

The luckiest part of all this is having a wife who is so wonderful there oughta be a string quartet following her around playing sweet music everywhere she goes.

As a parting gift, I have advice for anyone who may be reading this:  don’t get cancer.  You won’t like.

I’m Cancerboy

We kept it a secret, or rather, I kept it a secret and told my wife not to tell anyone except her sister.  Her sister is a blabbermouth, but I told Mrs DBK1 that I wanted her to have someone she could talk to, besides me, about any fears or problems she might have and, if she thought her sister could keep her big, fat yap shut, she should talk to her sister if she needed to talk to anyone.  I kept my own thoughts entirely to myself.  I never spoke about the cancer to anyone but Mrs DBK1.

I did this because I didn’t want to be “Cancerboy”.  I didn’t want everyone I knew to think of me entirely in the context of my disease or to be restricted in all my conversations to discussing cancer.  I’d rather talk about poker, which I play a lot.  Hell, I would rather talk about baseball, the discussion of which bores me tears, than talk about cancer.  It didn’t bother me to discuss it or to say the word “cancer”.  I wasn’t concerned at all about making other people uncomfortable.  I just didn’t want to be “cancerboy” and to lose my identity to the disease.  Oh, and I didn’t want my elderly mother and father to know about it because they don’t need any more stress in their lives.

Afterwards, when it was all over, we told everyone.  After all, the operation went well and the follow-up tests went well, so there wasn’t anything to terrorize my 81 year old pathological worrier mom or my ubiquitously befuddled but generally calm 88 year old dad.  Everyone else would discuss it with me for a few days and then get over it because it was an illness and it was gone.

Except it wasn’t.  Mrs DBK1 and I didn’t discuss the follow-up treatment still to come:  the radioactive iodin pill.  We didn’t mention the additional testing to see what happened to the radiation.

Next up:  You Shine Out Like A Shaft Of Gold When All Around Is Dark

Bill Haslam – Candidate for TN Gov – and Charter Schools

Sorry for the interruption folks, as dbk1′s journey has been facsinating, but I’ve gotten worked up about something here in TN politics that I just could not pass up.

A few weeks ago, Bill Haslam, one of the GOP candidates running for governor of TN, had sent out a press release touting the benefits of charter schools. His reiterated support of charter schools may be because of the attacks on his “conservatism,” but, more than likely it isn’t. We all know how the “free marketeers” and the GOP love to dismantle public institutions.

Shortly after that press release, an article in the NYTimes on charter schools caught my eye, did they really do better for the children that attended, etc. (turns out they aren’t better than public school, unless they are funded by the wealthy).

Well, it seem that the whole idea of charter schools isn’t just about dismantling the public schools systems. It goes far deeper than that, beyond the fact that the charter schools with lots of money may be competitive with public schools. There are some pretty strong ties that bind charter schools, everywhere, right back to Wall Street.

Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm.

Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions, which strongly oppose expanding charter schools in their current form…

They have been contributing generously to lawmakers in hopes of creating a friendlier climate for charter schools. More immediately, they have raised a multimillion-dollar war chest to lobby this month for a bill to raise the maximum number of charter schools statewide to 460 from 200.

Okay, you’re saying, that link is limited to NY state. Well, Paul Rosenberg says hold your horses, this isn’t limited to NY state, and started by linking to a column written by Juan Gonzalez, on how investors can double their money in 7 years by investing in charter schools.

Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction.

The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.

How does this work?

Under the New Markets program, a bank or private equity firm that lends money to a nonprofit to build a charter school can receive a 39% federal tax credit over seven years.

The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation.

By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.

No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.

Even if a charter school fails to bring in the number of students it projected, or loses students, investors still win. Shorter version, the GOP and Free Marketeers want you to believe that charter schools are better. What they are not telling you is that charter schools are better for their pocket books.

As Haslam has already stated his holdings in family owned Pilot will NOT be in a blind trust, let’s get down to brass tacks here. Bill, I want to know, just how much you have invested in charter schools.

It’s more than disingenuous to think that you (charter school investors) can get people to support the dismantling of our public education system when charter schools have mixed reviews at best, but to get regular folks to push for something that is no guarantee to be better for their children, but will definitely lines your pockets (and the pockets of your wealthy friends) is sleazy at the very least.

They Can’t Pay Anyone Enough To Empty My Piss Bottle

It was like a light switch.  I was out, and then I wasn’t.  I awoke in the recovery roomw ith far less of that groggy feeling that I had experienced from other surgeries.  In fact, I felt like I’d had a good sleep and, if it wasn’t for the pain meds, I probably would have felt pretty good, or pretty bad, depending on whether my tolerance for pain was high enough to subdue the experience of having my throat cut.

One of the first things I discovered was a plastic bulb on the left side of my chest that contained a certain amount of dark red liquid.  This was the endpoint of a drain that was placed in my incision.  This was one of the first surprised I had coming out of surgery.  Nobody told me about the drain.  For the next 24 hours a nurse would remove the bulb and empty it for me whenever it looked a bit too full.

The second thing I discovered was pain in my penis.  That was something else they didn’t mention to me before the surgery.  I had been catheterized.  As a poker player, I think of it as the surgical equivalent of being “durrred”.  I suppose, if I had thought about it long enough, I would have realized that the dragon would probably need some draining during five hours on the table, but at the time it came as a complete surprise to me.  I would rate the experience as far less romantic than it sounds.

My dominant emotion was a deep and profound relief. I had expected not to wake up again.  Even now, writing about it, I feel a sense of relief returning.  I had another day in which to see my wife, to pet the my cat, to sip a little Jameson.  Okay, so it’s 9:00AM and I am taking a break from work to write this so no Jameson this early in the day, but later…

I was and remain very glad not to have died.

I was anxious to see my wife and she was allowed to see me once the nurses had checked me out and determined that I was doing fine for someone who had just had his throat cut.  I don’t remember much from that first hour or so.  I drifted in and out of sleep.  I wasn’t groggy, but I was sleepy.

Once I was fully awake and in my hospital room, where I would remain for another twenty hours or so, I became aware of some other things.  One was the IV drip.  I had an IV drip, which I didn’t mind so much.  Another was the oxygen tube to my nose.  I found that very annoying and removed it whenever the nurses left the room.  My breathing was fine.  I didn’t need a tube irritating my nose.

The most noticeable post-op inconvenience were the compression wraps on my legs.  These are bags that inflate and deflate, forcing the blood to pump around so that patients who are not especially mobile don’t develop blood clots.  This was another part of the surgical recovery process that nobody had mentioned to me and it was a very annoying one.  Sure, it was fine for a couple of hours, but having those bags squeezing your legs for ten or fifteen hours gets old.

Another post-op surprise had to do with the IV drip.  Naturally I am aware that what goes in must come out, but you’d be amazed at how quickly that constant feed of liquid needs to be expressed.  Until I realized I could take the bags off my legs and move about on my own, as long as I dragged the IV stand with me, I was only able to pee standing up next to the bed with those bags and their tubes constricting my movements, into a measured decanter.  What went into that decanter was recorded by the nurses and nursing assistants whenever they emptied the decanter.  Not only does it have to come out, but they were checking how much came out to make sure the right amount left.

The nurses were there every half hour when I first got into the room, then they cut back to every hour, but they checked my vitals frequently and continued to do so through the night.  I forget the schedule and at which point they stretched it out to every two hours.  They were right there with me, though, and I learned all their names as we went through the 24 hour shift.

They are angels.  I think of them with nothing but affection.  Even when they were waking me out of the few fitful minutes of sleep I could snatch with the bags and the peeing and the tubes, they were angels and I was and am grateful to them for their attention and care.  You can’t pay anyone enough to empty my piss bottle and note down how much was in there.  You can’t pay anyone enough to put up with unhappy sick and hurt people.  I was a very good patient, by the way.  Normally, when sick or hurt, I just want to be left alone.  I’m like a cat that way.  Mrs DBK1 knows this and leaves me entirely to my own devices when I am sick.  I’m a bad patient.  This one day, this one time, I was gentle and cooperative with everyone, and told Heather, the nurse’s assistant who woke me to take my vitals, to stop apologizing when she started and that it was all right.  You have time to think when you are in a hospital and it is late at night and sleeping is difficult.  I thought about what a crummy job it must be to deal with scared, suffering patients and how kind one had to be to do it.  They certainly aren’t compensated enough for it.  For once in my life, I was a gentle patient.

Mrs DBK1 had said she’d stay there in the room with me, but I sent her home because I wanted her to rest if she could.  She’d been there with me the whole way and she needed her rest as much as I did.  She’s my rock.  I didn’t want to put any more strain on her than she’d already taken.  When the nurses woke me in the middle of the night, they didn’t have to wake her too.

Now, a word about sleeping in the hospital.  My father, who is the world’s worst patient, has reached the age where his repertoire of jokes has shrunk to a handful that are repeated whenever the appropriate situation arises, so that they are heard endlessly.  When you mention hospitals, he always says something like, “Did I ever tell you” (most of his jokes start off with “Did I ever tell you?”, to which the answer, if he bothered to wait for an answer, would be “Yes”) “that when I was in the hospital they woke my up to give me a sleeping pill?”  He then pauses for the laughs that never come, but that’s another story.

On the white board in my room, someone had written the goals for my stay.  One of them was “rest”.  Rest and sleep are two different animals as defined in hospitals.  Do not expect to sleep when you are in the hospital.  Expect to lie in a bed and, if television bores you and you didn’t bring reading material or something to entertain yourself, expect to be bored.  To quote Billy Pilgrim, “So it goes.”

This is getting very long, so I’ll wrap it up quickly.

The surgeon removed the drain the next morning, which meant another surprise.  The drain entered my throat at the end of the incision on my right side.  When he started to pull the tube out, I felt the tug at the left side of the four inch long incision.  I felt the tube slide the entire length of the incision.  I hadn’t realized it was that long.

Another surprise, which I had discovered earlier, was that the left side of my chest was numb from the center all the way to my left shoulder and from the incision along the base of my neck to about two inches above my nipple.  There was simply no surface nerve sensation.  My Doctor Todd told me that they had to move a lot of stuff around when they were removing my thyroid gland, but that he and Dr Mengele has checked very carefully and that they hadn’t severed any nerves, so he expected the nerves were shocked and would recover over the ensuing months.  I’ve had some sensation return, but not much, so I don’t know if this is permanent or not.  I can live with it.

My stay was 23 hours because, if you stay 24 hours, a different set of rules and definitions kick in for the insurance company.  I was able to leave after 23 hours and felt fine.  There was a lot of swelling at the point of incision, but that would go down over a period of weeks.  Mrs DBK1 was back in the morning and together we returned home where I would spend a week watching the idiot box and petting the cat.

Next up:  I’m Cancer Boy

‘Twas the Night Before Surgery and I’m Gonna Die

I was never afraid of cancer killing me, mainly because cancer doesn’t kill you all at once.  Based on everything I had read and the friends and family I had seen die from cancer, I knew that, if thyroid cancer was going to kill me, it was going to do it over a period of very annoying years.  I would be tested and retested and then treated and re-treated and the cancer would go into remission and then come back and, after years of such irritating interruptions to my life, I would end my days in a hospital bed, surrounded by family and friends, looking and feeling miserable, emaciated, tortured, and finally dead.

I was certain the surgery was going to kill me.

I had read, many times over the years, not as a study but in passing during the course of a life as a “big reader”, that anaesthesiologists kill more people than surgeons.  I’ve had a few surgeries before and I hate anaesthesia deeply and bitterly because it always makes me feel horrible.  I don’t even like novacaine.  I have, when I could convince the dentist, had teeth drilled and filled without benefit of anaesthetics.  I have a high tolerance for physical pain, so I could get away with that sort of thing and, when a dentist bumped a nerve, I just took it and held still.  I can keep my mouth open wide when a dentist hits a nerve, but I can’t keep it shut when some Texan at the card table starts telling everyone what a good president George Bush was.  Liek I said, I have a high tolerance for “physical pain”.

Anyway, getting back to my certainty that I was going to die during surgery, irrational fear is irrational, so I can’t explain it.  I kept my fear to myself.  The night before surgery, Mrs DBK1 went to bed at her normal time, unaware of my mental state.  I couldn’t let myself go to bed because I didn’t want to waste too much of what was left of my life sleeping.  I stayed up and wasted it poking around the Internet, reading blogs, playing poker, and weeping.  After about an hour of that, I wrote a farewell letter to my wife and family, which included a few bequests, considered telling a few people off their trolleys as a final gesture, thought better off of it because even my asshole lawyer brother doesn’t need to have his final memory of me being how little I think of him, and, around 4AM, crawled into bed to enjoy, for one last time, the warmth and comfort that comes from sharing a bed with someone you deeply and truly love.  The letter was left on the desk, tucked between some other items, and labeled “Do Not Open Unless Something Goes Terribly Wrong With My Surgery”.

This was not the first time I felt as if I were facing death.  I’ve taken ten skydives, one bungee jump, backpacked in grizzly bear country sans weapon, and driven a car in Ireland.  Driving in Ireland was actually the last of these acts of courage and none of its predecessors prepared me for the terror of the Irish roads.  I drove the Ring of Kerry going from South to North, and anyone who knows about that particular stretch of road can affirm the test of nerve that goes with such a passage.  The skydives were the experiences that seemed the most closely related to surgery in that you could feel the presence and perhaps eminence of death, but I never felt frightened.  Maybe it was my youth, but I was always only exhilarated by them.  But then, I had sought them out, and I never sought out surgery.  Skydiving was, to me at the time, a way to test my mettle and see if I had the guts to climb out of a plane at 10,000 feet, trusting my survival to a few square yards of nylon, some dacron string, and the skill of the parachute packer.  When I completed my first jump, a static line jump at Skydive Long Island out by the Moriches, I felt like the most alive person on earth.  I remember driving home afterwards and thinking, “Christie Brinkley lives with Billy Joel out here somewhere.  I think I’ll stop by their house and take her away from him.”  I was that full of myself.  The adrenaline rushes came on me periodically for days after that.  I could sit at my desk and feel, out of nowhere, a wave of adrenaline wash over me.  It felt literally like a wave washing over me.

But I told you already that I survived the surgery, so that’s it for today day.

Next up:  They Can’t Pay Anyone Enough To Empty My Piss Bottle

Five Hours Under the Knife or “Have You Eaten Lunch?”

I’ve skipped a lot of incidental events that aren’t incidental when you are going through them because this is a series of blog posts and not novel.  “What incidentals?” you ask.  Scheduling surgeries and doctor visits, pre-op tests to see what my odds of surviving the surgery are (I’m exceptionally healthy for a 52 year old man with cancer–bloodwork very good, hemoglobin excellent,  coeur-de-lion) and the like, all of which have their own time demands and all of which add to the stress.  “Which day is good for you?”  “Do I have a meeting that day?”  “Damn, I’m out of sick time and can’t get short-term disability until I’ve been out for six consecutive work days, so now I have to use vacation time.”

Stuff like that.

Part of scheduling was working around the surgeon’s schedule.  He was to be in Nicaragua with Doctors Without Borders for a couple of weeks, so he couldn’t cut my throat for me until early March.  He wasn’t in any hurry, though I was anxious to get my throat cut as soon as possible.

I’ve decided to refer to my surgeon as “Dr Todd”, as in “Sweeney”.

Surgery day.  Early afternoon.  Mrs DBK1 and I get to the hospital as instructed.  Pre-admission stuff and all that.  Yawn.

The hospital did not have quite the accommodating nature of the outpatient clinic.  Instead of pajama bottoms, I had two gowns, one to go over my front and one to go over my back.  For once I did not kick up a fuss about this and submitted myself to instructions.  I had not eaten since the previous evening, so maybe it was low blood sugar.

Prior to surgery, the nurse who would be assisting the surgery and the assistant anaesthetist both came to meet me, with the assistant anaesthetist sticking around all the way into the operating room.  The anaesthetist came in and spoke with me.  She was an especially humorless and dessicated woman who reminded me of my endocrinologist.  I wondered if they were oven- or air-dried, though not out loud.

Dr Todd, I was told, would drop by later, but he was eating lunch.  Dr Todd was assisted by Dr Mengele.  I requested that Dr Mengele see me too.  Dr Mengele proved to be the only doctor in the group with a sense of humor.  I asked him right away if he’d had lunch and he said “yes” and why did I want to know?  I explained that the operation would be five hours long and I didn’t want him to have a low blood sugar problem when they were working on me.  He laughed and told me that his own family was never as concerned about his health as his patients.  I asked him if he was in the habit of cutting his family’s throats and he admitted that he didn’t.  I also asked him what they did with the thyroid once it was removed.  I was curious if they were collectible or if I could get mine back.  If I have an air filter replaced at the car dealership, they’ll give me the old one if I request it, after all.  Might be nice to have the old thyroid around.  Good conversation starter and all.  “See that thyroid over there in that jar?  Used to be here,” I would say, pointing at a spot a centimeter below my Adam’s apple.

Dr Mengele averred that it was a good question and one he had asked, but he’d never gotten a good answer.  I figured that, if he never got a good answer, my chances were pretty slim, so we let it go.  I also suggested that he get himself once of those cushioned pads that chefs and bartenders use to ease the strain on their legs from standing for long hours in once place and he laughed again and told me he’d just ordered one.  It was a very pleasant talk we had and it was reassuring that he had been the number one thyroid guy at the hospital for eight years until Dr Todd took over the role as main man for thyroid surgery.

Time passed quickly and pleasantly and then I went into the operating room.  Once again I was permitted to stroll in under my own power.  I laid down.  Extra pillows, as I instructed, were placed under my knees to ease any back strain.  And I went out.

I’ve had surgery before and it was always a pain, the going out part.  I don’t know what they use these days, but it is far superior to what they used to use to knock you out.  This time I went out so fast I don’t remember any part of anything until I woke up over five hours later in the recovery room.  I also became ungroggy faster than I had in the past.  It was like a light switch.  I went out and then I came on.  Five or so hours of my life had passed with no recollection of any of it or even the vague sense that I had been alive.

Next up: ‘Twas the Night Before Surgery and I’m Gonna Die

Finally the Mayans Joke

After the biopsy and CT scan, I met with my endocrinologist.

And now a few words about the Park Nicolett Clinic and health care in Minnesota.  I like the Park Nicolett Clinic very much and health care in Minnesota is WAY better than in New Jersey.  PNC is modern and record are computerized, so when I go from doctor to doctor, they all have immediate access to my records and I don’t have to request that one doctor mail the information to another.  They check my meds every single time I go in and have me confirm them.  Everyone at PNC works efficiently and is courteous and easy to deal with.  For a grouch like me, they can be too pleasant, but that’s my problem.

Back to the endocrinologist.

Dr No creaked into the room slowly, as befits a man of his dignity and 190 years.  I had already received the news that my lymph node was cancerous by telephone.  I won’t go into that conversation in detail because I’m already writing an epic here and it really isn’t that big a story.  Okay, one detail.  My surgeon told me that the pathology report said it was thyroid cancer, but, he told me, “if you’re going to have cancer, that’s the best one to have.”  Seriously, he said that.  I guess I surprised him because I’m not from Minnesota and I can be very direct.  My response to that was, “Just one suggestion:  don’t tell someone they have the ‘best cancer to have’ because that really doesn’t cheer me up very much.  I have cancer.  I’m not happy.”

Anyway, Dr No and I discussed the diagnosis and the cure and the results of not having a thyroid gland and how they would monitor my thyroid hormone levels and so on.  It’s a bunch of technical medical stuff that isn’t very interesting.  He also showed me the results of my CT scan, in which they found another lump that was suspicious.  He called the results up on a laptop computer and it was kind of interesting to see the image as he scrolled through it.  It was my body, from head to groin, in cross-section.  He pointed out the suspicious lymph node and other objects.  Then he got to my spleen.

“There’s a spot on your spleen, but we think it’s an artifact,” he told me.

“An artifact?”

“Yes.”

“Doctor, I’m a technical writer so I am used to much more precision in language.  The term ‘artifact’ is a little ambiguous for me.  What does that mean?  Did the Mayans once live in my spleen?”

I was rewarded with one of the few laughs I have ever received from a doctor, and I tend to be pretty jokey with doctors when they’re not actually telling me I have cancer.

His explanation of “artifact”, by the way, was very vague.  I later found out that they thought it was just something in the CT scan, like a blip, and not a real object of any kind.  He could have just said that, but I guess having to actually laugh confused him.  It was, by the way, a dry sort of laugh, like the sound of dessicated leaves underfoot.

Next up:  Five Hours Under the Knife or “Have You Eaten Lunch?”

Cut Me Mick Redux

In January the big day arrived:  lymphectomy time at the outpatient surgery building in St Louis Park.

It was a dark and stormy night…no, that’s not what I meant.  It was a sunny, cold morning.  It was Minnesota so what else could you expect.  I assume the temperature was below zero.  If it’s Minnesota and it’s January, that’s a pretty safe bet.

Mrs DBK1 accompanied me to the surgery center and would stay and drive me home.  Here we pause to thank whatever good thing I did that allowed me to end up married to Mrs DBK1, the finest human being I have ever known.  If anyone ever questions the value of love, and I don’t see why anyone should, I can only point to Mrs DBK1 and that is the whole of my argument.  Case closed.  She is my rock and the tree upon which the fruit of my life doth hang (any Wodehouse fans out there?  Bueller?)

As mentioned in a previous installment, I was supplied with a pair of pajama bottoms to wear into surgery.  I was then sent to sit in a waiting room for about fifteen minutes until they were ready for me.  I was asked my name, date of birth, and address half a dozen times during those fifteen minutes, which tried my normally miniscule patience considerably.  I was also subjected to a loudly cheerful nurse.  I am not the most peppy person in the morning on my best days and I am never happy to meet a peppy person at any time of the day on most days, but this was the limit.  I believe I could be quoted as saying, at some point, “Could you kindly pipe the fuck down?”

This is not a typical remark for a Minnesotan.  Minnesotan’s are famous for being “Minnesota Nice”.  Look it up.  They really use that expression, which I learned when I moved here about two years ago.  It refers to passive aggressive behavior and avoiding anything that might hint of confrontation.  I was born in New Jersey and lived there fo fifty years until we moved here, so I already have a collection of stories about the distress exhibited by native Minnesotans at the slightest hint of conflict.  Even the mildest of disagreements causes a native Minnesotan to assume a dyspeptic and embarrassed look.

My peppy nurse immediately assumed a dyspeptic and embarrassed look and, thankfully, closed her yap for a few minutes.

And here came the first surprise of my surgical experience.  I was not wheeled into the surgery.  Instead, I was permitted to walk in on my own two feet and lie down on the table.  Pillows were placed for my convenience (I requested and received extra pillows under my knees so that my back wouldn’t be strained).  My arms were tied down to keep me from moving around during surgery, and a pillow was placed under my neck so that I could hold my had in position for the surgery.  I was given a local anaesthetic to deaden the area where the doctor would be cutting.  After that, I proceeded to hold my head entirely motionless for forty-five minutes.  I called on my Tae Kwon Do training to relax my muscles completely while the surgeon cut away at me.  It was one of the strangest sensations of my life.  The most I could feel at any point was a tugging at my neck, but there was never even a hint of pain.

At the end of the surgery, after the incision was closed and dressed, I sat up and the doctor congratulated me and told me I had done really well.  I laughed.  “Yes, I did well.  I laid there.”

Next up:  Finally the Mayans Joke