Whole lot of nothin'

I worked out. Like a crazy person. Then I ate cheese and had a beer.

Oh well.

I don't suppose I can create a whole blog post around my fattitude, my apathy, and my fatigue, so I leave you with this one question:

What is the one thing you want to do more than any other? And why aren't you doing it?


See you tomorrow.

Brainal Choice

Recent events have knocked me way out of sync. I am confused (and my left side hurts a whole bunch, in case you missed that), and I need unemotional people to tell me whether I am confused in an appropriate way or in a wrong and bad way.

Brainal Weather Concern

Since I got back from my brother's place on Sunday, I have felt far more calm about my dad's situation. I am aware that he is probably going to die pretty soon. I know it because the scientists tell us so. However, once a person has the pattern of the person you love most in the world NOT dying each and every time the scientists tell him he is going to die, a person stops ringing the alarm bell every time a scientist predicts the demise of the most beloved person in the whole world. One starts to have thoughts like, "Every time I skip the gym and eat cupcakes and cry, I am letting the terrorists win," and "Oh... what-e-ver. He never died all those other times, so he must be immortal."

I know the deal, but for some reason, what feels right is to give the cancer the finger and get on with my life - even though I know that the cancer, like the terrorists, can blow it all up any old time - and that I can do nothing about it.

So you tell me. Am I:

a) a bad person

b) defeating the terrorists

?


Mountain Climbing Ambition Issue

No matter what I do, the trip to Africa is going to be messed up. If my dad dies, it will be messed up because I will be so brainally twisted that I won't train. If he doesn't die, he will likely be very sick right about the time when I am supposed to leave for the trip. That means I will be in Africa for three weeks - with no immediate means of returning if something should go wrong. At the same time, I have read the trip insurance fine print, and it turns out that since I knew good and well my dad had leukemia when I booked the trip, I won't be entitled to a refund if I need to cancel or return early. So my plan is to behave as if the trip is on and then decide the day before we leave whether it would be appropriate for me to go.

Am I:

a) a bad person

b) defeating the terrorists

c) really stupid



Thank you in advance for your opinion.

Long Day

How is that possible?

I didn't do anything today, after all.

It was long because for the last four days, I have had sharp pains in my left side, which I know to be caused by a series of inflamed muscles. How do I know this? I know this because it has happened before. The last time it happened, I was 25. I had just lost my job, and my mother was in hospice care. And I got these strange knots under my rib cage that were sore and swollen and screamed at me every time I moved. So it is no mystery why I have them now.

I talked to my dad today. He was sitting on the deck, drinking coffee, watching the clouds go by. He spent the morning completing the electrical work on the lower deck, and he planned to complete some cosmetic work on the wall in the afternoon. He sounded fine.

Anyway, I am going to go to bed early and have a delicious time feeling sorry for myself. If it still hurts this bad on Monday, yes, I will go to a doctor.

Back

If my laptop worked, I would have posted from the road. It didn't, so I didn't.

My dad is the same.



* This is not my dad. I took this picture from a moving bus in Times Square. For those of you who don't live around here, it's the Naked Cowboy. I thought I would just toss this picture in for interest since I have nothing meaningful to say.

I am tired and sick.

More tomorrow.

Scene

When I got there on Friday night, I walked across the street and had a brief moment when I was convinced that God doesn't completely hate me and everyone in my family. It didn't last very long. (I'll tell you about it tomorrow).

I then stepped into the liquor store and bought a bottle of champagne that I could not afford. Also a few bumpers of Saison Dupont and a biggish Chimay Reserve. As I was paying, my brother drove up in front of the liquor store, wordlessly took my bags, and went back to buy about three times as much as beer as I had bought. When he got back in the car, we looked at each other for the briefest moment before saying nothing and driving back to the house.

My brother Buzz and his wife Leta have worked in television for most of their careers. As a result, they share a habit of closing awkward and painful moments by making a gesture very like the fading of a screen to black - and say: "and... scene."

Then we are free to break character, go for more drinks, re-stabilize our MELPs, whatever needs to be done to maintain the composure and dignity of a family sitting out behind a house situated in a golf course, getting drunk, talking about the death of its leader. That's what we did all weekend (except for when the baby could hear. Then we talked about whatever. And no, we have no problem drinking around the toddler).

Or not.

Depending on how you look at it.

On Friday at about noon, my dad was told for the second time to go home and polish up for an early death. He didn't ask questions because he already knows: six to eight weeks at best. Four weeks is more likely. Less than four would be common and less than two, improbable, but still possible. He felt quite good, so on the way home, he stopped at the local nursery to buy petunias to plant that afternoon. On the way back from the nursery, he called each of his kids and then his four brothers to give them the news, just like he did nine months ago when his doctors told him exactly the same thing, which is: recurrent Acute Myelogenous Leukemia is not treatable. You'll live longer if you just go home and dance around the house in your underpants. (I am not sure they said that part about the underpants, but it was definitely in the subtext. Party while you can. You don't have long).

Many of you already know that the doctors were wrong. He felt bad for a few weeks, and then slowly trended better. By the end of the eighth week, he was doing yard work and building a retaining wall out of Tennessee flag stone for a lower deck down by the water. By the end of week twelve, he had gone camping with his friends, raked and burned the leaves that were still green when he was told he about it to kick it, and made plans for a Christmas. He finished the wall - and built the deck. He never went back to the doctor to find out why he wasn't dead. He never even considered being re-evaluated for further treatment. "I am done with doctors," was all he would say. No one blamed him.

None of us blame him now, either, for saying he still doesn't completely buy that he is dying. He had is bad artificial knee drained last week and got a whalloping bunch of anti-biotics and now he is home feeling just about the same as he ever did. When I told him I would be within a six hour drive on Wednesday, he said, "Don't bother. We have plenty of time."

Or not.

Depending on how you look at it.

My dad got a lottery ticket of a break the last time he was told he was going to die. He should have, by every statistical and anecdotal measure, died. The fact that he didn't makes him one of the one hundred and twelve people since 1879 to have untreated AML and and not die of it. No one bought tickets for these odds, I admit. But who would?

We didn't have the courage to hope it would happen the first time. Can we do that this time? No. And yet we are not left with any choice. We have before us a man with no time left who insists he is not in any hurry to die and feels pretty good. He knows he is not likely to stay feeling good, but at the same time, he just had such a wholly unsatisfactory experience with medical people that he is unimpressed with their predictions of his demise. After all, they were wrong the last time. In fact, they have been wrong every time they predicted that dad would crash. (Three times, total).

So what do we do?

We wait. And wait. And if we are lucky we wait some more.

Sin of the Week, 5/25/08

My major and minor crimes are boring. But here's one (or two) since the title of the post suggests crimes: Last night after spinning around in bed endlessly pretending to be asleep, I wished for my dad to die so that I could move on with my life. Then I sat up in bed and said out loud, to no one, "You could not be more evil. You are beyond hope of salvation."

Then I did restless leg yoga in bed for a few more hours and finally fell asleep near dawn, about a half an hour before the toddler of the house drove a race car over my left boob, calling it a "mountain."

Here are a few pictures of where I sometimes go on the weekends. It is my brother's house.






Tomorrow, I will describe* the weekend.

*My dad is fine right now. Depending on which end of the statistics you believe, this means that he just lived the last 5.84% of his life in relative peace and comfort - or the last 17.52%.

MELP

MELP, or Minimum Expected Level of Performance, is a value based on the number of classes I am teaching, the variety of life-stress I am anticipating, and the number of dollars not in my bank account times my waist measurement (in inches) divided by my hip measurement (in iches), rounded off to the nearest hundredth and scrawled on the back of an envelope and placed under a cookie bag on my desk. I permit myself to have a moderate level of healthy self-esteem if I maintain MELP.

Let me start over.

There are four levels of MELP.

Level One: whatever, whenever, just don't show up for work visibly drunk. (A little bit drunk is fine).

Level Two: whatever, most of the time, just don't show up for work visibly hung over.

Level Three: make it to the gym once a week, no visible holes or stains, grade the papers instead of throwing them directly in the trash.

Level Four: be attractive, polite, virtuous, strong, and competent in every measurable way.

Fall semester was a Level One in every way. It is positively bizarre that I did not get fired and I might have suffered a psychotic break and did so publicly right here on this blog.

I have been functioning somewhere between Level Two and Level Three all semester and I have even, on a few occasions, performed for an entire day or 1.5 days at a shiny, happy, church-going Level Four.

(woohoo).

Today I am formally and officially going to do an unthinkable and unwise thing: I am not only going to GO to a Level Four, but also make it policy and tell the whole world, right here on this blog.

Oh and my dad 's surgery was canceled and he is on his way home because really there is no point in trying to fix the leg of a man who has leukemia.

Have a blessed day. I am going climbing.

You guys are somenawseome

Big thank you to everyone who said a Hail Mary, or a novena, or even gave Jesus a brief wave this week. Ditto if you raised a glass of a substance known to impair judgment and said "here's to that guy with the big scary medical problem who is the dad of that girl in the computer whose blog I read sometimes."

Here is the news:

As of yesterday (my yesterday, which was Tuesday) my dad was running a fever and things looked un-good. His blood work looked a little bit funny and there was at least one surgeon running around in the hall with a two handled saw, ready to cut my dad's leg off. But then the doctors decided to do a leukemia scan (my dad agreed to this but told them he did not wish to know the results) and wait for the cultures to come back on the infection to decide anything.

Then it was Wednesday morning. My dad's fever went away and he felt better. The doctor's did not yet have lab results of any variety, but they decided that since dad was so hot to get out of the hospital, he could go home with a pic line and do six weeks of IV antibiotics from home (yes, you can do this if you are a veteran of medical everything). This plan was all chosen and the forms were signed.

I, in a very stupid but also very peaceful and zen moment, put my cell phone in my bag and went to the gym and did not look at it for 6 hours. Why I felt like I could do this is one of the great mysteries of my personality.

While I was tearing my hands up rock climbing, my actual real live dad called to tell me that he had reached a decision, based on his talks with his doctors, to just have the knee replacement surgery all over again - in like two days. So it went from "go home and juice up on anti-biotics" to "let's just get the offending parts out of your body right now" in the space of a few hours.

Now, since I did not get to the phone until right about now, which is to say after midnight, I don't know what to make of this.

Interpretation One: Dad's cultures came back from the lab and the stuff in his fake knee is so offensive that his doctors said "either lose the leg or lose the offensive fake knee parts" and that they said this based on the assumption that my dad does not currently have leukemia, ie, the leukemia lab work is not back yet.

Interpretation Two: Dad's cultures came back from the lab and the stuff in his fake knee is so offensive that his doctors said "either lose the leg or lose the offensive fake knee parts" and they said this based on decent looking leukemia scan results - ie, they felt like there a point to trying to save my dad's leg because so far it looks like he is not dying.

Interpretation Three: Is there a possible interpretation where the leukemia scan came back looking bad and the doctors decided to go forward with a messy and painful knee replacement surgery? I mean, what kind of treatment plan is it to give a guy who has less than two months left to live a new knee? What medical person would go forward with a major surgery intended to improve quality of life - for a guy who was known to be circling the drain?

Am I reaching here?

Whatever. I am going to bed.

But before I do, let me just say again that you, internet people, are some kind of awesome. Really. I ran my usual caper: giving God a sarcastic bag of nothing - but you all prayed and had cocktails for my dad and the news, though not a sun-drenched meadow of frolicking puppies, does not suck that much.

Right?

Right.

I love you.

Goodnight.

PAVTAC - St. Francis is definitely a member

I woke up after 4 or 5 hours of fitful sleep to the sound I hate most in the world: the sound of my Cat-head doing his morning sun-salutation. When the room brightens, he splays himself out in the sun and meows, full volume, until I get out of bed and go to the computer. (He prefers for me to type at the computer instead of sleeping). When he is convinced that I am not going to go back to sleep, he stations himself in the floor of the shower and spends his day alternately sleeping (little fucker) or batting my rosary beads around among discarded shampoo bottles and soap dregs of the shower. I used to think he did this because he is religious. I now know he does it because it is part to make sure the rift between me and Jesus is never fully bridged because my rosary beads are fully coated in soapy residue and this situation is an excellent excuse (for me) for continuing to give God (and Jesus) the stony silent treatment.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my inexcusable, whining, self-pitying post this morning. There are no words for you lovely and perfect you all are. Oh and I still know nothing about what is going on with my dad but I will post when I do.

May intensify this affect/effect

Whatever.

I am still waiting for news about my dad. I can't eat. I can't sleep.

The only thing I can do is climb - but not very well.

Please pray for us. Things do not look good.

PAVTAC, save me

Anyone who has ever picked up my cat has experienced the same series of events, depending on the number of mili-seconds the victim was in close contact with Cat-head.

Event the first: the pick up

Picking up Cat-head is achieved in the usual manner. The victim picks up the cat. What's different about Cat-head is that he will go into what appears to be a blissful stupor at first contact. This is a ruse. What he is doing is marshaling his energies for a strike - with all his fangs - at the victim's jugular vein.

Event the second: the warning

During the two mili-second warning event, Cat-head will flatten his ears and make a sound kind of like what you would expect from a cornered, rabid coyote. It is not a nice sound. If the victim is in a position to make eye contact with Cat-head, eye contact is made. Thus ends event the second.

Event the third: the strike

If the victim does not immediately and unceremoniously drop Cat-head (he actually prefers a lack of ceremony, truly), Cat-head will bite the victim on any area of exposed flesh he can find. He prefers faces, arms and hands, but I suspect he chooses these locations for a strike because he knows that his biting will hurt you less if it is first intercepted by a turtleneck of a pair of blue jeans. For extra drama, his pupils will contract while he bites the victim, causing the victim to be convinced, if only for a brief second, that Cat-head is possessed by the Devil. Sometimes this belief persists well past the strike event. Other times it dissipates, and still others the belief remains operative forever.


Cat-head bit my dad one time, say, back in 1999 or thereabouts. It went down exactly as you see above. The only difference was that my dad was (is) allergic to Cat-head's venom or whatever, so my dad had to go to the hospital and get on lots of crazy ass drugs so his arm wouldn't be eaten alive by flesh eating something or other. My dad is, obviously (obviously!) one of the people who remains steadfast in his belief that my cat is Evil. I can't even pretend I disagree.

You would think that after that first biting incident, anyone and everyone I warned (and I did, believe me) would have the sense not to pick up my cat.

Tune in tomorrow to hear about how my Cat-head ruined by best friend's bachelorette party, wedding, AND honeymoon, all in one go.

Love, Nina

Circle the wagons

We need to have a talk.

My dad is once again in medical danger, and once again it is the kind of thing that we can't do much about but watch and wait.

Here's how you get into my dad's kind of trouble:

1) have bad knee
2) get knee replacement
3) get leukemia
4) get chemo
5) get staff infection
6) have staff infection "bond" to the titanium in the knee
7) lose short-lived chemo produced leukemia remission
8) get sent home to die
9) refuse to die and just keep being not dead for eight months
10) have all your teeth removed because the chemo destroyed them

and now we go to ...

11) find out the permanently infected knee is threatening to become systemic and that the leg may have to be amputated to save his life -- even though he no longer has leukemia. Is that irony? Or is it sarcasm... I get so confused.

Anyway, since you all know I am permanently off intercessory prayer, can you get on this for me?

I am going to go abuse alcohol now. Thanks.

PAVTAC week

Today I formally rededicate my blog, for five days, to the formal explaining of why the fictional organization PAVTAC (People Against Violence Toward Annoying Cats) is a necessary delusion around my house. If PAVTAC didn't stop me, I would throw my cat out the window.

Today's Cat-head story:

When I was 22 years old, I graduated from college and got a job. It wasn't a great one, but not long thereafter, I got a promotion (a promotion!) that required me to move from Charlotte, NC, to Raleigh, NC. Now, I hated Charlotte, North Carolina for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was that at the time, I was a terrible snob* and there just weren't enough educated people (read: yankees) there for my liking. So the promotion was a great opportunity for me. I could move to a place with three universities within thirty miles of each other and live among other people who talked fast and understood that not talking in line at the grocery store is not rudeness, but a sign of respect for other peoples' time and precious energy. Yay!

My boss, however, knew only that my parents lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, and that by promoting me and moving me far far away from them, he was dealing me and my family a tough hand. (He had no idea how I felt about the redneckery of Charlotte). So in order to make this up to me, he went out to Big Al's (Crazy) Pet-o-rama and purchased a pure bred smoke persian cat, whose credentials read only that he had been sired by a cat named Dude and whelped by a cat named Maven. The papers said nothing else except for "This cat is Persian. Take him home. Please."

So my boss gave me the cat, and I was excited. Here was a dog that I would never have to walk! Here was a dog that could not bark! Here was a dog that would never smell like a dog!

I named him Itty Witty and then I got him food and a litter box. And we moved to Raleigh, NC, a place half run over with people from New Jersey. A bunch of my friends from college were in graduate school at UNC, so I had a handful of fast talking yankee friends to drink big blue cups of beer with, and all was well.

Except not so.

Itty Witty, now named Cat-head, was a pain in the ass. He would not be picked up, held, petted; indeed, he would not behave in any even slightly social way. In addition, he could not or would not eat anything that I fed him except canned tuna. Even this appeared to make him queasy. So I put him in my backpack (he bit me several times) and brought him to the vet. I left him there for the day, thinking when I returned, I would pay $50 or something and he would have a diagnosis: allergies, right?

When I returned for him at 4:30pm, the receptionist immediately paged the vet. All she said was "She's here." Hmmm, thought I. This must be had.

A few minutes later, the vet emerged wearing leather armor all the way up to his shoulders. He was also wearing a mask. He handed me my backpack, pulled down his mask, and said, "We need to have a talk."

What he told me is that my cat's personality was so foul, so violent, so anti-social, that if he had been born human, we might have been a candidate for one of those crenelated face masks a la Hannibal Lecter.

Yeah.

Then the vet recommended that the cat be de-clawed on all four feet AND that I consider having his teeth filed if he was ever going to be a threat to other people. Then he handed me a prescription for cat valium and a bag of food that cost more than a my fantasy running shoes. And I also got bill for $400. (It cost so much because he had to be tested for fifty or more maladies that might explain his poor behavior. None did. Plus he had injured four people - until the vet sedated him, which was $85 all by itself).

The new food cleared up Cat-head's food issues, but it didn't make him any happier. He uniformly hated me and everyone who ever entered my domicile. And yes, I later had reason to regret not having his teeth filed. I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

*I now know better. I no longer dislike redneckery. Quite the opposite.

Sin of the Week, 5/18/08

I can't think of anything spectacular except for the that I skipped church because I got too busy with getting ready for the new semester to start. Oh, and I might also have been slightly heavy handed with the martini shaker, and I might have hated my cat a whole bunch, and I might have very briefly considered breaking into the Optician's Clinic and stealing contact lenses because my eyes have clearly (clearly!) not changed in the past year and I am out of contacts and tired of wearing my glasses and I don't want to pay $200 for an eye exam just to confirm that fact. Wait, that was more of a fantasy than a real intention, so it might be a simple case of repressed hostility directed at innocent eye-care practitioners. Hm.

See you tomorrow. (But only with my glasses on).

Middle

One of the main problems with doing so much work is that I have fantasies about freezing the clock - you know - making the world stop so I can run around and catch up. Then when the laundry is folded and put away and the dishes are done and my toenails are painted, I could unfreeze the clock and rejoin the rest of you, who never have these kinds of time management problems.

And this fantasy got me to thinking about time, about how well we use it and how much of it we (I) waste. I have wasted most of the past week recovering from my classes. And feeling guilty that I didn't do a better job at them, in general. And even with more time on my hands, I have been wanting desperately to freeze the clock again, just so I can breathe, sit still, do nothing.

Then I got to thinking some more. In some places, the time goes from one zone to the next - places where you could wake up at 8am and still get to work by 8am because you drive across the time zone line. Or the other way, where you could leave work at 5pm and be home by 4:30. That might be the ideal place for me to run my show. Indiana, right?

If you lived in one of these towns, would you want to live on the later side of line, so you could sleep in? Or would you want to live on the earlier side, so you could get home earlier? Would you still read my blog if you lost an hour because.... never mind. Just keep showing up and I promise that some day soon, I will have something interesting to say.

Happy Saturday.