'Any unexpected weight loss?'

Michelle actually laughed out loud when the admitting clerk asked me that question today at the Maine Medical Center. No, I said over the cackling, if anything I've got the opposite problem.

We weren't there for my weight -- loss or gain -- but because at the Brunswick, Maine, Starbucks Michelle noticed some swelling over my right eye and got worried. It's true, I had noticed the same swelling, and also had experienced some dizziness and nausea Saturday night beyond what I would normally expect at this stage of my chemo round. So, over my objections that it wasn't worth a hospital visit, we turned around, blew off the search for Maine's perfect lobster roll, and headed to Portland's big freeway-side hospital.

Because it was Sunday our only option was going to the Emergency Ward, which seemed extra goofy. After being screened and admitted, I was put on a stretcher in a hallway marked "triage," which I found doubly embarrassing as a parade of Mainians with actual emergencies -- a baseball player who missed a pop fly and took it in the eye, an older woman who apparently had heat stroke on the tennis court, some bleeding kids -- cooled their heels.

At one point some EMTs brought in a guy on an ambulance gurney who didn't look good -- a drugged, vacant look and a fresh wrap of some kind on his arm -- and there wasn't a stretcher available. I offered to give mine up, but they wouldn't hear of it. The poor guy had to wait, and the EMTs with him, while I was there with, essentially, a hangnail.

When I was rolled into Emergency Room 5, Dr. Good (no joke) came in to see me and we explained the symptoms, such as they were. She made a concerned face and went to fetch a consulting doc, who chatted us up about primo lobster rolls and hiking in the Northwest ("I always say Washington is like Maine on steroids").

A nurse came in to draw some blood, but she couldn't seem to do it right, and she lectured me about traveling without my complete medical records and about the need to avoid salt and wine. Yeah, thanks, I said, I'll try to remember to talk to my real doctor about that when I get home. I think my sarcasm was lost on her.

The eyelid swelling could be this, it could be that, my new medical team said. Maybe we should do a CAT scan. Ok, we waited some more, and then they wheeled me in to radiology. After the machine did its thing the tech lady said, "Looks like you've had some brain work done." Yes. I explained about the surgeries and, blah blah blah, the tumors.

"Oooh, benign, I hope," she said. No, I told her. Malignant. I let that hang in the air for a minute. Not a glioma, I hope, she said.

Anyway, six hours after we arrived, it turned out my brain isn't leaking into my eyeball or vice versa. I maybe, possibly, have cellulitis, which isn't something to be removed from your fat legs but a skin infection. They prescribed some antibiotics, which I may or may not take. I'm going to call my real doctor first.

Meantime, no lobster rolls today. We said poopy to Maine and skedaddled out of there, landing tonight at a Best Western near Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau never visited Maine Medical Center, as far as I know. But he did write this: "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Tomorrow, for something totally different, we're planning on driving to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame.