SOML

President Obama is about to deliver his first speech to Congress, an appearance they’re not calling a State of the Union address -- or SOTU, as headline writers sometimes abbreviate it -- but that will feel like one. Last month, here in Washington state, Gov. Christine Gregoire gave the first State of the State (SOTS) of her second term, and a week ago today Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels offered his own State of the City (SOTC) address.

It’s that time of year. So, in the spirit of the season I’m pausing a minute for a personal assessment: the SOML, or State of My Life. Ahem. Lapel pin adjusted. Ready the teleprompters!

Although the SOTUs themselves can drone on, presidential speechwriters often include one line that cuts to the chase. Something like: Tonight, the state of the union is ... sound, challenged, hopeful, whatever the case may be.

Tonight, the state of my life is ... a mix of chaos and stasis. Staos?

In some senses very little has changed, or changes. Approaching two and a half years now since I left work to deal with my health, I remain unemployed, on medical disability, seeing doctors, popping pills, checking months off my chemo calendar. At the same time life feels like it’s changing crazily. The Seattle P-I, where I used to work and Michelle still does, is likely to close in a few weeks. But we have no official word about whether an online version of the paper will survive as rumored or, if so, whether Michelle will grab one of the few musical-chair jobs left to be had.

It’s impossible to say with any certainty what we’ll be doing three months from now or even where we’ll be living. We’re both looking for work here in Seattle, where I have family and prefer to stay, but we agree that this is no time to insist on a specific job in a specific city. As cool as the Excellent Element is, neither of us wants to live in it. So we’re looking elsewhere as well. Turbulence creates downdrafts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if M&M winds up relocating, maybe back to Los Angeles, as early as this summer.

All that’s enough to give a guy a case of the chaotics.

Partly to brace for the financial hit, and in recognition that the various federal bailouts will bail out every sector except that of dopes like us who bought a house we could afford on a loan we were qualified to receive, Michelle and I have reassessed our household budget and made significant cuts in our lifestyle. Again stupidly responsible, no doubt. To be clear, I don’t mean to whine, as we’ve merely ratcheted down to moderately conservative from comfortably affluent. I mean, we are the rock’n’rollers who spent two Pie in the Sky months on the road last year, just a couple of months after spending two weeks in Paris and Rome. We’ve had it pretty good. Ew, did you drop your caviar in my champagne? But we have made adjustments. We’re not taking any trips this year that weren’t already planned, like the April pilgrimage to New Orleans for Freda’s 70th birthday. We’re limiting ourselves to one movie outing a month. We cut back to basic cable. We’ve stopped dining out. We’re making each gin bottle last twice as long (ouch). And I’ve stopped playing poker, on the theory that you should never bet what you can’t afford to lose. That one really hurts.

In support of the new budget plan we’ve combined finances more fully than ever before. That’s a net financial gain for me but a change that makes me cringe. I’ve been financially independent now for more than 30 years and hate to surrender the feeling. Ving Rhames tells Bruce Willis in “Pulp Fiction,” “That’s pride fuckin’ with ya,” and I know that’s true. Still.

I could go on. There are indignities on the job-search front, worries on the family front, frustrations on the medical front.

A friend asked the other day about my health, and I described how at this point the effects of brain cancer feel less physical and more psychological and emotional. I struggle sometimes to think of myself as the same capable, confident person who 17 months ago spazzed out of one familiar life and into this new weird one.

Even so, as I’m sure the president is saying right about now (we’re Tivo’ing the non-SOTU), out of hardship comes opportunity. Hope and recovery are ahead. Trite as these pat lines are, I believe there is truth in them, for the individual as well as the nation.

Personally, I have much to give me strength and hope. Despite some growing pains of adolescence Gina and Franny are awesome, inspiring kids and actually fun to be around. Lovergirl Michelle and I remain totally solid, in spite of the understandable stress we both face.

I don’t know where we’ll be this time next year -- or next month for that matter. But we’ll be here. M&M abides, and the SOML is, staotic though it may be, still pretty good.

OK. Off to watch the speech. Good night, and God bless America! Please comment on Obama’s address here.

Photo credit: Top photo via whitehouse.gov on Creative Commons license.

Humor. It's all relative.

One of the fun aspects of surfing the health-care industry is switching to a new insurer when the old work-based health insurance runs out. That's especially true when the new individual health plan includes a drug "benefit" that uses the word as loosely as my new provider, Group Health Cooperative, does.

I can't say I was surprised at the expense today when, credit card in hand, I ventured out onto the snowy roads to pick up my monthly round of chemotherapy. I had researched all this a month ago before I switched insurers. Even laid it out in a spreadsheet to suss the damage. And reconfirmed it on the phone earlier this week. But still, when they say the words, the copayment of $865 kinda bites. Catches you up short.

At the Group Health pharmacy in Burien it took three stops at three adjacent windows to complete the transaction. At Window 1, I gave the grim old clerk my ID number and she tapped her keyboard. "OK," she said, "I see this is a new order. Did they tell you about the copyament on this?" She had a sick, worried look on her face.

"Yes," I said. "They said it would be 20 bucks."

To me this is hilarious, just to watch the lady's face contort as she prepares to break the news about the actual price.

"Well, no," she said, wincing. "I'm afraid it's a bit more. It's going to be, um, eight hundred sixty-four dollars and ninety cents."

Yeah, I know, I said, I'm just kidding around. Haha. But she wasn't amused. She glared at me and told me to sit down and wait for my name to be called, since the pharmacist would want to discuss my prescription with me.

Ten minutes later someone called me to the next window and the young woman, all business, asked if my doctor had explained to me the procedure for taking the chemo. (It's a ballet of timing, waiting a certain period after eating, popping some nausea drugs at another certain time, downing the chemo and then hoping you can get to sleep before ralphing. So far, most months, I've been pretty lucky on that count.)

Oh sure, I said, I've been taking this for a year and a half (actually longer). No sweat.

The druggist looked annoyed, and groused a bit about preparing all the explanatory material for nothing. To give her something to do, I offered that although I was experienced with the chemo it was my first time paying this much for it, so I could maybe use a little counseling on that score. Always thinking of others, that's me.

"I'm sorry, honey, I wish I could help," she said. She directed me to Window 3, next door, to pay my bill.

When yet another woman appeared to ring me up she did an actual double-take at the invoice printout. "Wow, I can go home early today," she said brightly. "I think I've met my sales quota for the day."

Now this, to me, is not funny. More like rubbing it in. Some people have no sense of humor.

Gamely, I asked her how my total compared with other pharmacy sales. She did a little whistle through her teeth. Sometimes at the end of the year people on Medicare will exhaust their benefits and have to pay as much as $200 or $250 for their medication, she said.

My chemo, I was given to understand, was a record in her experience.

So, Merry Christmas, Group Health Pharmacy. And bah, humbug, with an extra lump of coal, to your stupid copayments.

Happy surgeversary to me!

At the risk of whining even more about my stupid health, I guess I want to note that today is Surgeversary, the second anniversary of my first brain surgery. Woohoo!

I went back and read last year's post about the day and was struck again by how chill I was on the morning of the surgery -- and struck even more by how cool I was last year when blogging about it. Maybe I'm catching myself at a bad time, but it seems the farther I get from the original grim diagnosis -- and despite my generally improving health -- the less sanguine I am about the whole deal.

Part of it is stress. My health insurance (the federally guaranteed 18-month extension of my old work benefits) is expiring at the end of this month, so I've been shopping around for an individual health insurance plan. Man, what a racket. And confusing, even for people with a full-size brain, I'll bet. Not to mention expensive. There were so many options, each with so many variables, that it was impossible to tell by eyeballing the plans which was the best deal.

Timing the switch is critical. Normally when you buy an individual health plan you have to complete a comprehensive health screening and wait nine months, to make sure you have no pre-existing medical conditions, before receiving coverage. That would screw me, of course, but fortunately there is an exception for people like me who are exhausting their Cobra (extended work) benefits. In that case, there is no pre-condition screening and coverage begins right away. The catch is that there is a one-day window to make the insurance switch. If the Cobra benefits expire on Nov. 30 as mine do, the new plan must start on Dec. 1. Any earlier or later, even by a day, and the nine-month waiting period becomes active again. I get sweaty just thinking about it.

Eventually I decided to approach the problem as if it were a newspaper assignment. I broke out a spreadsheet to analyze the coverage options like a state budget plan, creating Excel formulas to account for various premiums, deductibles, co-pays and benefit maximums, being sure to double-check the insurance company formularies to see if my drugs were covered (yes here, no there), reporting at the source to determine the full cost of all the prescriptions plus the MRI scans and weekly blood draws, and charting it all out for the rest of this year and all of the next.

It's the kind of reporting I always liked. But I have to say it's more fun when the bottom line shows merely the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars about to be wasted and not the tens of thousands about to come directly out of my own pocket.

Complicating the calculation further was that some of my doctors are part of one plan's preferred network of providers but not the other's, and vice versa. More potential charges to account for.

In the end the spreadsheet was a big help. I determined, to my surprise, that a local HMO, Group Health Cooperative, was a better deal for me than the seemingly richer plans offered elsewhere. So I mailed off my application last week, confident that it would be approved in time to take effect on Dec. 1.

A few days later a Group Health packet came in the mail. It wasn't my new coverage packet, as I expected, though, but a notice informing me that without an official letter from my previous insurer certifying that I was exhausting my Cobra benefits I wasn't eligible for the waiting-period exemption.

Damn! I had the official letter but had neglected to include it with my app.

Michelle, equally nervous (or more) about the upcoming deadline, persuaded me to drop off the application at Group Health in person rather than relying on the mail. OK, good thought, so off I drove on Tuesday to Group Health's campus in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.

After paying for parking and being misdirected three times I found the business office, where a woman informed me that she "can't process the application manually" and she instead would have to mail it to the co-op's processing center. Argh! Furthermore, since it was Veteran's Day there was no mail service and my packet wouldn't go out until Wednesday. Double argh!

So now I'm waiting to see what piece of red tape I overlooked or what fine print the insurance company can unearth to justify denying my claim.

I'm sure that if they took my photo and vital signs today as they did on Nov. 13, 2006, I'd look nothing like that cheery dip in the above picture.

The difference between jazz and blues

Noon. That was the time of my scheduled brain scan today, my bimonthly MRI, to be followed by a quick blood draw and my monthly appointment with the neuro-oncologist -- well, actually, his trusty nurse practitioner Jennifer -- at 2.

So dutifully I headed out to the UW Hospital, making sure to get there 20 minutes early and checking in at the Radiation desk. I filled out the standard form -- no, no bullet fragments, pacemaker, tattooed eyeliner or penile implants that might screw up the MRI magnet -- while I scanned the waiting-room denizens: a couple of women with their head buried in books, a man reading the Seattle P-I and commenting to a stranger about a story on the front page, a man instructed to drink two chalky milkshakes as prep for some test, a lady complaining about claustrophobia and popping anti-anxiety pills to steel herself for her scan, a 30-ish guy in a wheelchair, so pale he looked transluscent, breathing through an oxygen tank. And more.

A lot of people, which explained the long wait.

An hour passed before they called my name and I went into the bowels of Radiology, to a smaller waiting area, where I put my stuff in a locker and waited for someone to give me an IV for the mid-MRI contrast dye. This whole IV thing is a fairly recent protocol in Radiology and one I don't appreciate, mainly because the techs there have messed it up more often than not, poking me multiple times, spilling blood and, one time, leaving a needle that another nurse roughly ripped out of my arm later. Better to just administer the contrast dye during the MRI, I've always thought, rather than add the extra IV step.

But today the IV tech never came. Instead another half-hour passed -- we're at 1:15 p.m. now -- before a nice woman fetched me and walked me past the MRI room, through long twisty corridors, outside, and to a second, remote MRI machine. There I waited again until a bad-leg patient was wheeled out of the MRI room and I was ushered in.

What, the tech lady said, no IV? That's OK, she said, we can take care of the dye injection here.

Fine by me. She put me on the table, gave me my earplugs and headphones -- the MRI machine is extremely loud -- and asked if I wanted some music. Sure, I said, got any blues? "Is that like jazz," she asked. Well, I made the mistake once before of asking for jazz and got some Enya elevator music, so I changed direction and asked for classic rock. Ah, Hendrix and BTO!

As the automated table slid me into the big MRI magnet tube, the tech lady shouted a question: "What's the difference between jazz and blues anyway?"

Uh.

"Is one more up-tempo than the other," she asked. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, that's it.

After the scan, 1:50 now, I trundled up to the lab to get the regular blood draw before my 2 o'clock oncology appointment. No luck. They didn't have my paperwork on file. Another 20-minute wait while the clerk paged Jennifer and waited for a fax of my orders.

OK. They figured out who I am -- M-A-T-A-S-S-A, 2-18-60, I confirmed -- and they sucked my blood. I walked over to Neurology, 20 minutes late now for an appointment scheduled two hours after the 30-minute MRI for which I was 20 minutes early.

Jennifer said everything looked fine and sent me on my way.

That, I though to myself, is jazz. It's all about improvizing.

Whereas what I have is the I-hate-brain-cancer blues.

Bad Trip*

(* Or, How I Kinda Halfway OD'd on the Wrong Meds)

Last week I was sick. It was a chemo week, so I expected to feel crummy, but this was worse than usual.

On Sunday, the first night of my five-day course, I woke up in the middle of the night barfing. All the next day and really for the rest of the week I felt either drunk or hungover: headachey, listless, loopy, uncoordinated, dizzy, sick to my stomach.

This is the 19th month now of the 24 months of chemo my doctors have scheduled for me so I'm used to some ups and downs. The side effects vary from month to month, but generally I can count on heavy fatigue, a general nauseous feeling and digestive troubles, lasting from a few days to a couple of weeks.

To combat the effects of the chemotherapy drug, Temodar, I take an anti-nausea medication, ondansetron, a couple of small, round, off-white pills, about half an hour before I down the pink and white chemo capsules. All that in addition to the oblong Keppra pills that I take twice a day to stave off seizures. You're supposed to take the Temodar right before going to bed, and my routine is to take the Keppra at noon and midnight, so on chemo weeks the last hour or so before bedtime is a flurry of ringing alarms and pill-popping.

No wonder that there might arise a little confusion, right? That's all I'm saying.

When the mail-order pharmacy sends me my monthly Temodar supply they always ask if I need more of the nausea meds. Over the months I'd managed to squirrel away a few pills here and there, and so for a couple of months in a row I declined the ondansetron refill and saved on the co-pay. In fact I rounded up several unfinished bottles of the nausea meds and put them together on the little desktop where I keep all my drugs so that when it was time I could just grab a container and go.

That was the mistake, I guess.

On Thursday, the last night of my chemo round, I reached for the nausea meds and happened to glance at the label. Wait. This wasn't ondansetron but Lorazepam, a muscle relaxant and anti-anxiety drug -- basically Valium -- that my doctor prescribed, before our big road trip, to take if I had a seizure and couldn't get to a hospital.

Damn! No wonder! Not only was I getting all the weird spacey "benefits" of Valium -- at twice the recommended dosage, since I normally take two nausea pills -- but I wasn't getting any of the anti-nausea medication.

In the above picture, the Lorazepam is the small white pill on the left; the ondansetron is the very similar (right?) off-white pill in the middle. The Keppra's on the right.

Michelle noticed that the prescription label says the original Lorazepam pill count was 15, but there are only six pills left in the bottle, so I must have been taking those suckers all week. What an idiot.

Michelle did me a favor and hid the rest of the Valium. Somebody lock up the Drano.

Brain cancer in the news

Kathi Goertzen, from komonews.com

On the off chance that your giant headache today isn't caused by the economic meltdown or presidential politics -- more about both in a minute -- I want to pause briefly to consider brain cancer in the news.

I always flinch when I see stories on this topic. Too much of it is the maudlin, over-the-top "Gloria"-style coverage I can't stand. But even when it's straight-ahead, brain cancer news feels like it's hitting too close for comfort. A couple of months ago, when conservative pundit Robert Novak announced that he had a brain tumor -- and said it explained why he ran over a pedestrian the week before -- a friend wrote to me, full of outrage on my behalf: Doesn't it piss you off that this idiot gets all this coverage and you get nothing, my friend said.

Well, no, not really, but I do get tired of seeing brain cancer everywhere. Is it just me, or is this disease more in the news than it used to be? And often with a kicker that makes me feel bad, one way or the other.

First there was the University of Washington football player who was diagnosed about the same time I was. That killed his football career, but by the following spring, hey, he had recovered and made the UW baseball team! The M&M Pie in the Sky tour hit the East Coast about the same time Sen. Ted Kennedy was found to have a brain tumor, and that news was inescapable for a few days, along with opinions of his "grim prognosis." At Barnes & Noble one day I noticed that Bobby Murcer, the longtime Yankee player and broadcaster, had written a book and I couldn't help rolling my eyes as I read about his brain cancer being a blessing in disguise, or the best thing that could have happened, or some such nonsense. He died in July.

Anyway, this week, the popular Seattle news anchor Kathi Goertzen, pictured above, underwent her fourth (!) brain surgery in the past decade, partially resecting, again, a tumor that keeps growing back. This P-I report says the surgery lasted eight hours. God. For some reason, though, this ongoing story hasn't make me wince like cancer coverage usually does. Maybe it's that I've met Goertzen several times and like her. It's true what they've been saying in the local reports about her warmth and dedication to her craft. She strikes me as a good and brave person, and I'm wishing her well. That's all.

In economic cancer news, I loved these two news-ish takes on the Wall Street meltdown.

First, with typical editing aplomb Jon Stewart compared President Bush's speech on the economy the other night with his strikingly similar warnings years ago about terrorist attacks.



Then, CNN's Campbell Brown dropped all pretense of objectivity in ripping Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson a new one. Again, the juxtaposition of old and new clips is what makes the case.




Planning to watch the big debate tonight? Now that John McCain has backed back in everyone's back to preparing their debate preview pieces. I've scanned a few of them, and for my money the best guide is this piece by Judd Legum at Huffington Post.

Legum, whose old job was monitoring post-debate punditry for Hillary Clinton's campaign, said the main thing he learned was that pundits are full of it (duh). Turn off the post-game analysis, he advises, and figure it out for yourself. He offers a few useful rules for doing so, with examples from previous debates.

Finally, could any morning news meeting be complete without a little dig at one or the other of my former local employers?

Try this local-front taste test and tell me which lede makes you want to read the story.

Newspaper A:

BLAINE -- The second gubernatorial debate of the Gregoire-Rossi rematch proved to be another bare-knuckles slug fest, this time before a pro-business crowd that gave Republican challenger Dino Rossi a home field advantage.

But while several of Gov. Chris Gregoire's positions received icy receptions -- her support of Washington's estate tax, for example -- she touted her accomplishments with optimism and confidence.

Newspaper B:

BLAINE — Gov. Christine Gregoire and challenger Dino Rossi both pledged Thursday not to raises taxes to make up for the state's projected $3.2 billion budget shortfall.

But even on that point of apparent agreement, the rivals found plenty of room for dispute during a heated hourlong debate sponsored by a business group.

To my eye, the second story, by the Times, gets quicker to the point -- breaking some news with the tax pledge -- and tells what happened instead of characterizing it, as the P-I does with its it cliched "slug fest" take.

My lesson here: Write the news plain, people.

Even blessed with a brain tumor, I can see that much.

Three rules

Thirty years ago, at the end of that interminable summer following high school graduation, it was finally time for me to leave little Roseburg, Ore., and go start my new life at the University of Oregon. I packed up the few things I needed and my parents drove me to my dorm. As we approached Eugene, about an hour from home, my mom cleared her throat and said she had something to tell me.

College is a big change, she said, and you're going to meet a lot of new people and have a lot of exciting adventures. As you should.

"I've only got three rules," she said, "and I want you to promise me you'll follow them. Don't grow a beard. Don't buy a motorcycle. And don't get anybody pregnant."

Well, those didn't seem so imposing. I had no money to buy anything but textbooks, I wasn't even able to grow a beard on my peach-fuzzy face, and lord knows I'd been in no danger of making any babies, even if I wanted to, which I didn't, although I wouldn't have minded being in the vicinity.

OK, then. Good advice, Mom, and no worries.

But, you know, things change with time. A few years later, while still in school, I had wormed myself a part-time reporting job at the Eugene Register-Guard and one spring I did in fact let a scraggly little red-tinged beard grow in. And I had become friends with Mike Stahlberg, who served as my unofficial newsroom mentor and was, as he is now, my poker Sensei.

Stahlberg also owned a beautiful motorcycle -- a 1979 BMW R65 (now a classic, but at the time still a pretty new bike) -- and he let me ride it a few times. Soon he decided to upgrade to a larger BMW, an R100, and offered to sell me his old one. Done. I barely thought about it. I loved the bike, the feeling of power and speed and sensory awakening it offered, and I was thrilled to own it. Mike and I shared many awesome weekend rides through the mountains and the Willamette Valley farmland and I imagined myself to be about a hundred times badder than I ever was.

At the time I was dating a very cool and pretty woman I'd met at the paper, Sheila. Remembering Mom's three college rules I proposed a surprise weekend visit to Roseburg. Mom didn't know about the beard or the bike, so I asked Sheila, who was a much better sport than she had reason to be, to ride down to Mom and Dad's house on the back of the Beemer with a pillow under her shirt.

When we got there, I parked the motorcycle within view of the front door and left it running as we walked up and rang the bell. There we stood with our helmets, my beard and Sheila's "belly" when Mom opened the door. The look on her face is still one of my all-time favorite memories.

All this comes to mind because lately, for reasons I haven't really analyzed, I've found myself thinking again about owning a motorcycle.

I haven't had one for years. I took the BMW to San Francisco when I moved there in 1985 but it was stolen. I bought a crappy Honda off my boss, but it was stolen too. Later, after I moved to Seattle, I bought the same R65 model that Mike had sold me, but it didn't measure up to the original and I never loved it. By the time Gina was born in 1993 I felt through with motorcycles and sold the replacement-replacement Beemer to some guy on the copy desk.

The other day, though, browsing Craigslist classified ads, I spotted a "vintage" R65, which led to a vintage cycle site and finally, this click leading to that, to the Harley-Davidson site. I think I spent an hour reading all about Harleys and contemplating the differences between all the models.

When I mentioned this to Michelle she listed all the good (and true) reaasons I should have my head examined, not least that straddling an 800-pound machine at 60 mph would be a lousy time to have a seizure. She won't even get in the car with me.

Still, the Harley site brought back memories and relit a little pilot light. I noticed that a dealer located south of downtown Seattle offers bikes for rent, so this afternoon, with no agenda or commitment longer than midday tomorrow, I plunked down a few bucks to borrow the above-pictured 2008 "Softail Classic."

I haven't really spent much time on it this afternoon, just a cruise along the Duwamish River and Alki Beach, but I have to say it's an awesome ride. I'm not sure what's driving all this -- Death Wish 2008, maybe, or Rebel Without a Brain, or The Midlife Crisis That Wouldn't Die -- but it felt perfectly natural to be atop a motorcycle again. I like it.

Maybe that's all I needed. When I take the Softail back tomorrow, maybe that'll be that.

In other news, I shaved this morning.

No news, news

One definition of news is that which is unusual or unexpected. By that reckoning yesterday's six-hour doctor trip was pretty newsy.

For the first time in months there were no hassles with the MRI or the blood draw, both of which are regularly screwed up to an almost comical degree. This time, in and out: Some nicely trippy Pink Floyd music nearly masked the loud "Tron"-like droning of the MRI machine; nobody freaked when sticking both my arms with needles (one for the MRI contrast dye, another later for the blood draw); no lost paperwork or spilled blood or bureaucratic snafus. I almost called the newspaper.

Jennifer, who is Dr. Spence's nurse practitioner, looked at my scans and pronounced everything "fine," which prompted our monthly 10-minute, no-resolution discussion about what fine means. Everything's relative when you treat brain tumors for a living. She asked how things have been going and I told her about the day wasted at the best hospital in Maine, and I also mentioned a couple of mild dizzy spells I've had recently.

Those actually have concerned me a little, not because they're debillitating but because I used to get dizzy spells all the time before the giant seizure that started this whole medical adventure. I never thought much of them until I was recovering from brain surgery and then later when I noticed I didn't get them anymore. Maybe, duh, all that stuff was related.

So I mentioned them expecting Jennifer to dismiss them as a typical side effect of this drug or that, or of having a hole in your head. It's fine, I expected her to say. Instead she asked a couple of questions and then, quite confidently, said that those few dizzy seconds are probably little seizures.

She decided to boost my prescription of Keppra, the seizure medication I take twice daily. Her idea was to double my dose, but Michelle, an encyclopedia of drug side effects, mentioned that I've been susceptible to Keppra's associated irritability and moodiness. Yes, Jennifer allowed, that can happen, along with depression, psychosis ... she named some other stuff. Well, she decided, maybe we should ramp up the dosage instead of doubling it, from 500 mg twice a day to 500 and 750, and then 750 twice and then 750 and 1,000, etc.

I don't know if that counts as news but it seemed smarter to one half of M&M, and I'm sure it was a relief to the other.

'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.

Cancer on the road

One of the big question marks on this trip was how I'd be able to continue my monthly chemotherapy while on the road for two or three months.

It's difficult enough at home to make sure the doctor's office communicates with the mail-order pharmacy people and that the drugs then get delivered to my house. During Pie in the Sky, I'd not only have those regular hassles but need to arrange for weekly blood draws, with results faxed back to Seattle, and for my monthly dosage of chemo drugs to be mailed someplace where I'd be able to take delivery.

I spent quite a bit of time talking all this through with my doctors and pharmacist. The oncologist's office gave me weeks' worth of blood-lab slips that could be completed at any lab and faxed back. We'd talk by phone on certain dates and I'd report on my activities and condition; I could even go through the "squeeze my finger, stand on one foot" routine if that would help. Caremark, my doctor suggested, might be able to send me a triple-order of Temodar -- enough to cover all our time on the road -- to avoid the long-distance mail coordination. OK, great.

But then just before we left Seattle Caremark said it couldn't do that after all. The drugs are too expensive -- several thousand bucks per five-day dose -- and what if the drugs got lost or Dr. Spence wanted to change my standard 300 mg/day prescription?

So, fine, I left Seattle with one course of drugs, which I began taking in Los Angeles after dinner at Kaye and Val's. No problemo.

Weeks on the road came and went. I skipped one blood draw, which I'm supposed to get every week, but by our third week out -- two weeks after the chemo -- it was time to look for a lab.

Michelle and I were at a Starbucks in Savannah, Ga., one morning when we saw a bunch of 20-somethings wearing scrubs walk in to get some coffee. Michelle asked them whether there was a blood lab around and they directed us down the street to a little strip mall. I checked in at the front desk and waited with another dozen or so people for my name to be called. Half an hour later the woman called me up to the window.

"Where is this again," she asked. Seattle, I said. Dr. Spence asked that the lab slip be faxed back to his office; the number is right here.

"Well," she said, "we don't have an account with anyone there. The only one we have is an OB/GYN." I assured her my doctor wasn't a gynecologist and she sent me back to sit down. After another 20 minutes, just as I was ready to give up and find a real hospital, they miraculously solved the bookkeeping snafu and called me in for the blood draw. One down.

A week later, in Atlantic City, we resolved to stay away from mom-and-pop blood shops. Instead, we walked down to the big Atlantic City Medical Center, Frank Sinatra Wing -- "Taking You Well Into the Future" -- and looked forward to some professional medical care.


I don't know why it should be so difficult to get a blood draw. Inside the front door a guard directed us to the second floor, where another guard gave me a visitor's pass allowing me to walk 20 feet across a small atrium to a receptionist who walked me around the corner to a larger walk-in reception room. There we waited another 15 or 20 minutes to be called to a desk where a woman loudly asked for and recorded a lot of unnecessary personal information, including my Social Security number and employment status, while a second clerk grumbled aloud about having to wait to take her lunch break. It was 12:15.

Eventually it was my turn and the grumbly clerk walked Michelle and me through a maze of halls to another office with a small waiting room and two staff ladies. "Take a seat," one of them said. "We won't be able to get to you until 1 o'clock."

Really? I said. Another 45 minutes just for a blood draw?

"Blood draw? This is endoscopy," she said. Without even knowing that that meant sticking a long tube down my throat, I knew it sounded like a procedure I didn't want or need. Argh. Finally we dismissed our grumbly, lame-ass tour guide and found the blood lab ourselves, where the phlebotomist poked my arm and sent us on our way. Sheesh.

Even then, I spent a full day playing phone tag with Jennifer, the nurse practitioner in Dr. Spence's office, before an assistant told me Jennifer had sent the prescription into Caremark. And then I spent a good half-hour on the phone with Caremark re-explaining the road trip thing and arranging to have the drugs delivered the following day -- last Friday -- to Ronelle and Aunt Chickie's house in New Jersey.

But when we got to Chck's on Friday night, no drugs. I checked my e-mail to find an urgent message from my sister Michele. She had driven by our house and noticed a package on my porch. The idiots sent the drugs to my home address!

How lucky that Mich happened to drive by. She FedExed the package to New Jersey, nice sister, but it didn't arrive until Monday morning. That meant another day of kicking everyone's butt there in the Wii Championship of the World and eating another meal of ziti and chicken parmigiana. So maybe the late delivery wasn't such a disaster after all, but still.

Fortunately, the drugs themselves have gone down pretty easy. Tonight's dose will be my fifth and final of this course. I've been tired as usual -- I slept in the car yesterday and took a nice nap today at Nauset Beach here on Cape Cod (above) -- but otherwise feel pretty good.

Who knows where we'll be when it's time to run the medical gauntlet again.

Happy hour on the half shell

Our nice, new little neighborhood oyster bar, Ama Ama, is trying a new promotion to turn West Seattle residents into customers: Twice daily, from 4 to 6 p.m. and again from 10 p.m. to midnight, they're offering oysters for 50 cents each. That's more like it!

We wrote about this place once before, lamenting that although we liked the decor and the food the prices were a bit steep to make it a regular grog-walk destination. But last night, when the later happy hour rolled around, we walked up the street to check it out.

Double jackpot. Although the place was almost empty, the host confided that they had under-ordered and only had two dozen oysters left.

"Fine," Michelle said, practically interrupting him. "We'll take 'em."

When we sat down we were informed further that about half our order wouldn't be the normal $2 happy-hour oysters, but the top-of-the-line such-and-such variety that usually go for $4 apiece. Sweet! I can never remember the names of the various varieties, but the Puget Sound is known for producing excellent oysters and these were all local and all very good.

In addition to the fine food, we had a nice quiet conversation -- away from the computers, the TV, the kids and the poker table -- about the emotional swings that come with the cancer (it turns out there are some).

I'm not a big believer in psychotherapy, or at least I've never had much interest in trying it, but Michelle's a terrific listener and thinker, and at happy-hour prices our session was quite a bargain: $21, and that included a great late-night dinner of two dozen oysters, a side order of bread and a couple of good beers.

It could turn into a regular appointment. Now if I can get insurance to cover it ...

In the bonus!

A long time ago, with a girlfriend far, far away, I made the mistake of taking a simple question at face value and answering honestly. "What would be your perfect day," J said.

Fun!

Well, let's see. I guess it would start with the Sunday New York Times and a cappuccino at Trieste (we were living in San Francisco at the time; Caffe Trieste, in North Beach, was and is my favorite coffee joint anywhere). And I'd go to a Giants game, play some poker, see a movie and have some good Chinese food, maybe at Hunan.

"Hmm," she said. "Is that it?"

I racked my brain to see what cool stuff I might have left out or could still fit into one day. Skiing, impractical. Reading all afternoon at the beach would squeeze out either baseball or poker, no good. Bowling, nah.

Yeah, I said, that sounds like a pretty good day.

My mistake, it turned out, was that my perfect day didn't include any plans built around J or, for that matter, even mention the possibility of her tagging along. One of many lessons that I like to think of now as Boyfriend School.

---

Years before that, in college, my friend Gohman and I used to waste a lot of time at the tavern playing video games and pinball. If you scored enough points to win an extra round, Gohm would happily announce: "In the bonus!" You had beat the game, tricked the actuaries. You had permission -- almost an obligation -- to play with abandon, to explore the game for hidden points, go for the trick shot. In the bonus was free life.

---

Today is my birthday. The past few days, leading up to it, Michelle has kept asking how old I am, thinking maybe she'd freak me out. (I am getting up there.) Then last night, at our little birthday party with the girls, she pulled out my Dad's famous (in our family) question whenever anyone had a birthday: How does it feel to be .... 11, 23, 35, 60, whatever the magic number was. To which, whatever the answer and whatever the number, he'd follow up with, "What a great age!"

So, how does it feel to be 48? Considering that at 46 I had two brain surgeries and was diagnosed with a fatal disease and, for a while there, wasn't sure I would make it to 47, 48 seems pretty good. I feel like I'm in the bonus.

It's nice of them to make a national holiday on my birthday. Michelle's off today for President's Day and she asked me the other day what would be the perfect way to spend the day.

Adjusting for geography and the fact that it isn't baseball season, my list hasn't changed much. Only now there's a preface.

"Since you have the day off," I said, "I think it would be cool if we ..."

We're going out for our cappuccino now. Poker session and Chinese food at the casino to come later.

(Michelle took the above picture of me at Trieste during our visit last summer.)

Surgeversary II

Amid all the fun of recovering from last night's drunken poker session and preparing for tomorrow's awesome flight to Europe, I need to take just one minute to mark Surgeversary II -- the first anniversary of my second brain surgery, which was a year ago today.

I've written here before about the first surgery, in November, boasting about how I was Mr. Cool even in the prep room before going under. The second time, not so much.

The docs had determined I needed a second surgery because, two months after the needle biopsy and the seizures that prompted it, they still hadn't been able to determine what was causing the problems ... even whether the masses showing up in MRI scans were in fact tumors. So the plan was to operate in the same area -- cutting along the existing scar on my scalp, in fact -- only this time instead of pushing a needle through a small "burr hole," they would saw through and lift out a triangle of cranium, do another biopsy and, assuming it appeared cancerous, remove as much of the tumor as possible.

As chill and optimistic as I try to be, this didn't sound good to me. I don't know whether it was the reading I had been doing about brain operations, or the not-so-fun experience of recovering from the first one, or just dumb superstition, but I had a bad feeling about the upcoming surgery. That's not like me. Michelle even said just the other day it was the only time she's ever seen me seem superstitious. But I really didn't like my chances all that much.

When we got to Swedish Hospital at the ungodly hour of 4:30 or 5 a.m., whatever it was, we were placed in a small, curtained surgery-prep waiting area, along with a bunch of other people including, I remember, a guy who had been in some kind of horrific logging accident.

While we were waiting, an ancient nun (this was a Catholic hospital) came in and asked if she could pray with me. She was dressed in white, with a deep-wrinkled face and knobby little hands; she looked like she might have been Mother Teresa's mom. I remembered her name for a long time but can't recall it now ... something that fit her looks, like Sister Carlotta. I know a lot of people would take comfort from this. It had the opposite effect on me. I'm already freaked out enough, I thought, without Mother Teresa giving me my last rites.

The good thing about the surgery was that my doctor, Marc Mayberg, inspired much more confidence than the University of Washington dude who did the first one. They determined that the mass was in fact cancerous -- oligodendroglioma -- and removed a large chunk, about the size of a Ping Pong ball, I think, from my right frontal lobe. (I can now testify, firsthand, that the old joke is true: I would rather have a bottle in front of me.) A second, larger tumor in my left temporal lobe -- about the size of a lemon -- was deemed to be inoperable, and that's what we're treating now with chemotherapy.

So, a year ago today at about this time I was out of surgery and in intensive care. The recovery was hard. Although I was pretty out of it, I remember one horrible, painful night in the hospital when I threw up on Michelle (sorry, baby) and really wasn't sure I was going to make it. (The above photo was taken at home, a few days later.)

All of which gruesome details serve, for me, to inspire appreciation for the long way that I've come in the last year and, as I've said before, the incredible love and support of so many people, notably the readers of this dumb blog.

It's hard to believe that exactly a year after my low point of fear and pain I'm packing my bag, along with the amazing partner of a lifetime, for a high point of joy and pleasure.

We'll be thinking of you all in Rome and Paris.

Happy Birthday Michy!

Tomorrow, the 12th, is Michele's birthday ... man, 44 -- that's pretty old for a baby sister. Then again, it's not as old as I thought she was last year.

As we recalled this afternoon when she fit me into her schedule for lunch, I was in the hospital on Mich's birthday last year. In fact I went in a year ago today, following another seizure, and was still there the next morning when Mich came to visit. I was a bit out of it, but I remembered what day it was and wished her a happy birthday. That made her happy, I think, but then, confused, I said something about her turning 45. Ouch!

I had a moment of confusion today too, but at least it didn't include making my sister out to be two years older than she is.

I suggested we go for a sushi lunch. Unfortunately, my first choice, the wonderful Mashiko in West Seattle, is open only for dinner, so I recommended a place Michelle and I used to visit from work sometimes: Sam's Sushi, in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood.

I picked Mich up at the Times and drove us to Fremont; it wasn't until we got there that I realized Sam's isn't in Fremont, but Ballard! Sheesh, I'm absolutely losing it. No biggie, except it's a slightly longer drive and I think I returned her to work a few minutes late for an afternoon budget meeting. Sorry, dude.

In between we had a fab lunch, chatting about movies and music and work and family, as we always do, and enjoying Sam's very good sushi. For dessert, in lieu of birthday cake, we walked across the street to Starbucks and split a birthday old-fashioned donut with our coffee. Yum.

I love sushi. Everything I needed to know about it I learned from Mom, whose motto when we were kids was, "You'll never know whether you like something unless you try it." Interestingly, that's also all I needed to know about Brussels sprouts, and also corned beef and cabbage.

Anyway, lunch was great. Mich seems really good, and I feel really lucky to have such a cool sister. I think we'd be great friends even if we weren't related.

Here's a sample of Sam's fine fare:

Blurry vision?

The next time my trusty nurse practitioner Jennifer asks at our monthly appointment whether I'm having blurry vision maybe I should say yes. At least that's the excuse I'm trying to allow myself for a huge blunder in my afternoon poker session at the Muck. I misread the board -- a rookie mistake that I haven't made in a very long time -- and it cost me a lot of chips.

I was playing with the hole cards K-Q, a pretty good starting hand that, at this loose table, stood to drag a good pot if it hit. The flop brought scary but potentially lucrative cards -- 10, 9, 3, but with two clubs. That meant I had an inside straight draw but was vulnerable if someone else were drawing to a flush.

Six people were in the pot and somehow it checked around without a bet on the flop. This was doubly good, I thought -- a free card for me, and diminishing pot odds for the flush-drawers if I wanted to bet or raise to go for a steal on the next street.

Beautifully, the turn brought the jack of diamonds, completing my straight and missing the flush-drawers. A tough, aggressive player in Seat 7, two seats to my right, bet out in early position, which again was perfect for me. Now I was able to raise, forcing the players behind me to fold or call $16 for one chance at catching their flush card in what was now a $48 pot. That would be an error if they did so, and if they were calling with one pair they were probably drawing dead, unable to catch a card that would win them the pot.

Predictably, and happily, everyone laid down until it got back to the original bettor, who just called. Any non-club on the river, I figured, and I was good. The final card was a red queen, which I took as probably good news with an asterisk. It wasn't a club -- nice! -- but now the board included 9-10-J-Q. If Seat 7 had any king I'd split the pot with him instead of hogging it, and on the off chance that he had ace-king I'd be toast. Otherwise, though, I was golden.

Again he bet! What? A-K, really?

That holding didn't make sense to me, though, given the way he'd played the hand. I thought it was much more likely he had K-J, which would have explained the turn bet and call and would have made him think he'd pulled ahead with a straight on the end. My thinking at this point was that unless he has the unlikely A-K, I had no worse than a tie for the pot. So I raised, only to be reraised (!) for my last eight chips.

My opponent turned over A-Q for top pair with top kicker, but nothing close to my straight.

"That's a good hand," Dave the dealer said.

Me, snarkily: "Not good enough," and I flipped over my king-queen and started reaching for the chips.

Nope, Dave said. Nut flush.

I looked again. Yike! The flop -- the original three common cards -- included three clubs, not two, and Seat 7's hand was the ace and queen of clubs. He'd flopped it -- the nuts, the best possible hand -- and then played me for a chump, extracting the maximum possible from my dwindling stack.

Argh, how could I have overlooked that? It happens, but it hasn't happened to me in a long time.

Embarrassed, I bought another rack of chips, refocused, and resolved to study the board -- twice -- before raising again.

Luckily, the patience and resolve paid off, or I just caught a little lucky streak, and by the time I got up to leave a couple hours later I had recovered the hundred bucks I lost and added another $130 to boot. Nice comeback to cash out a winner, but I know that my bankroll's about $40 lighter than it should have been if I were paying attention.

Tomorrow, I'm planning on playing again with my friend David. Since there won't be time to get fitted for glasses between now and then, I'm going to have to sit up close and squint.

Promises, unrealized

Last week, in my blog tease after a couple of postless weeks, I said I felt refreshed and ready to return in the new year to the M&M fold. It hasn't exactly turned out that way.

Not only haven't I been blogging but, I'll confess, I haven't really been feeling refreshed either. After my monthly oncology appointment yesterday I drove to University Village to meet Michelle for lunch and ran into a guy from work. He asked me how I was doing. I gave him my pat answer, usually true, about how I always know it's time for another round of chemo because I notice I'm feeling so good. But when Mich e-mailed me this morning asking how I'm doing I gave her the more honest answer: up and down -- not so great, really -- especially emotionally.

Part of that is cyclical; although I usually feel good physically at this point in my monthly treatment, I always get crabby and anxious about the start of a new chemo round. But I feel more down and irritable lately than usual. I hear myself snapping at the girls or Michelle, which embarrasses me and bums me out, to say nothing of the effect on them. Also I can't seem to get up for anything. I sit around, accomplishing nothing.

This surprises me. It shouldn't maybe, being that I'm sick and everything, but so far throughout this ordeal I've mostly managed to be Mr. Cool. I like that; I don't want or expect to morph into Mr. Malaise. Even as the new year approached, without resolving to run more, as Michelle did, or freeze the butter like Kaye, I felt optimistic about the future. The past year, I figured, was all about physically recovering from surgery and dealing with chemo, which I've mostly done pretty well; now I could focus on relighting my creative pilot.

Weirdly, though, as the holidays passed and Michelle went back to work and the girls returned to school, I've felt less energetic or optimistic than I can remember.

At the doctor's appointment yesterday, Jennifer ticked through her checklist of symptoms, part of our monthly ritual, halfway paying attention as I answered: seizures, no; nausea, some; blurry vision, no; depression, yeah ... kinda.

Michelle asks me about depression once in a while too, and I'm never quite sure how to answer. It sounds like a question about direct cancer-related depression, and I never sit around thinking: man, I have cancer, what a drag. But I also know that these symptoms and feelings I'm describing add up to something that sounds a lot like depression. And I do in fact have cancer, and so maybe, yeah, all this stuff is related.

I hesitate to write about this here. It feels maudlin and like a total buzzkill on the awesome M&M vibe. But, you know, I've written about other aspects of the illness experience, like fond memories of surgery or the funny and inappropriate feelings of superiority while observing the health profession's idiocy, or even the thrill of a good blood draw. And I gather from comments and conversations that one of the things people like about this stupid blog is its occasional, unexpected moments of honesty amid all the goofy banter.

So there you have it. Plus it's another excuse for my failure to post lately. Sorry to be such a drag. I'll snap out of it one of these days; maybe a good movie or afternoon poker session would help.

He's just old and red and sweaty

It's a chilly but very pretty day today, and it's my last afternoon before a week of chemo, so I decided to try to stretch out my normal mile-long run and go a bit longer. But I ran out of gas and had to walk the last few blocks back to the house.

So I'm staggering along the sidewalk, trying to catch my breath, when a little girl, about 3 or 4, emerges from behind a gate followed by her mother. The girl looks at me then turns around and says something I can't hear to her mom. I see the woman look at me and then back down at the daughter and, over the Talking Heads blaring in my earbuds, I hear her say, "No honey, he's not weird."

I was out of earshot before she finished the explanation.

'A diver, huh?'

That quote, from one stop in my three-part hospital visit today, reminded me of my famous first attempt at skydiving. When we landed that day, my instructor and tandem jumper unhooked our parachutes and safety straps then looked at me and said, "Screamer, huh?" It wasn't until that point that I realized I'd been screaming for our entire 12,000-foot fall.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Today is my monthly oncologist appointment and bimonthly MRI scan, and also time to stop at the hospital lab for my weekly blood draw. It's a time of month that always makes me cranky, mainly because it means I'm about to start another round of chemo. On top of that, today's appointments were annoyingly split between early this morning and this afternoon, meaning two trips back and forth between West Seattle and the University of Washington across town. I had decided to avoid that by hanging out for several hours at the University Village shopping center, but after a stop at the Starbucks and quick tours through the bookstore and Apple store I got bored and tired and came back home instead.

Anyway, when I showed up for my MRI this morning the tech lady whose job was to hook up an IV for the contrast dye greeted me with a cheery, "Did you bring your veins with you today?"

I hoped so, remembering my last visit here when the rookie tech stabbed my arm five times and spilled blood all over the chair and my arm before getting a vein. This time, no problem, and the MRI was its loud but normal no-sweat self; half an hour later I was out of there.

So I stopped by the lab to get the blood draw. What would make sense, it seems to me, would be if they could use the same IV to draw the blood that they had just used for the contrast, but no, it was sort-of explained to me, that was against procedures. So the lab lady tapped my right arm and whipped out her needle.

Poke. Nothing. Poke. Nothing.

That's when she said, "Oh, you've got a diver, huh?"

Turns out that's her term, or maybe it's blood-industry jargon, for a vein that seems to dive below the surface out of the way of the incoming needle. So I guess I didn't bring my veins with me today after all, at least not all of them.

No problem, my new friend reassured me, we'll just find another spot. She went on to tell some horror tales of patients, mostly heroin abusers who had ruined all their veins and had to be poked behind the knee or between the toes. One guy, she heard, had so abused his veins but was so desperate for a fix that he was found in a bathroom with a needle stuck in his eyeball.

I could feel little beads of sweat starting to form on my forehead about that time, but she found a non-diver in my right hand and that was that.

Now I'm heading back for a consultation with Dr. Spence or his able nurse practitioner, Jennifer. Update to come.

On the skydiving, by the way: I didn't want my legacy to be "screamer," so I went again a couple of months later. No screaming. Just pure, silent, terror.

Evening update: This afternoon's appointment was no biggie. Dr. Spence seemed pleased by the new scan; no new growth equals good news, he said. We did our little routine -- squeeze my finger, look at my nose -- and then he locked and loaded for another round, still at the reduced dosage that I've been on for the past two cycles. That'll start on Monday.

Surgeversary

I don't mean to turn this blog into a rolling review of a year in the life of Brain Boy. But like Spazziversary a couple of weeks ago, today feels like a day worth noting.

A year ago this morning I was in surgery -- the first of two, it turned out -- to try to figure out what was going on. It was less than two weeks after the seizures that sent me to the hospital, and MRIs and other tests were inconclusive. The best way to know what this mass was in my head and how to treat it, my doctor said, was to do a needle biopsy.

Well, that seemed simple enough; it barely sounded like brain surgery.

All they'd do, Dr. Silbergeld explained, is peel back a piece of scalp above the hairline on my right temple, drill a dime-sized hole, and use a needle to extract a small sample of the mass (possibly but not necessarily a tumor), which could then be examined in a lab. They'd plug the hole with a piece of titanium, sew me up and in a few days we'd know what was what. Nothing to it.

When I look at the above photo, which Michelle took with her phone in the surgery prep room and which we later dubbed "Mr. Cool," I think, what an idiot.

In the picture I look totally calm, and I was. Almost happy, which I don't think I was. The biggest, most immediate drags were having to get up early enough to be at the hospital's neurosurgery wing by 5 a.m., and not being able to drink any coffee.

I remember them taking my pulse and it was something incredible, like 58, an athlete's pulse, betraying no nerves whatsoever. And I remember joking with the nurse who was prepping me. He was shaving a target for the surgeon and for some reason talking about the little battery-powered razor he was using.

"I like it," he said. "It has a disposable head."

"Just like the patients," I said. Ho ho.

Michelle, who is used to my stupid jokes, groaned, but the guy got all nervous. Uh, no, um, our patients are blah blah blah, and I would never blub blub blub ....

I ended up having to reassure him. Sheesh.

Why was I so calm? Either I was buying all that nothing-to-it nonsense, which doesn't sound like me, or I just didn't know enough to be scared or mad, both of which I had come around to by the second surgery, in January.

I think what got me through that morning and a lot of the year since was a brilliant short-sightedness. Somehow I managed (and some of the time still do) not to think about the big picture, but to concentrate on the moment just ahead.

OK, now we're going to have you lie still on this table for an MRI. ... OK, now it's time to swallow a pill. ... OK, now I'm going to shave your head with my disposable razor ...

Nature's gift of self-preservation, I suppose. It's also like being on a newspaper deadline. Don't freak out. Just do this one little thing.

In the end, for those who weren't following along at the time, the surgery was a bust. Successful, I guess, in that my brain didn't leak out of the hole and I woke up later, but unsuccessful in that the biopsy was inconclusive, even after an extra week of testing in the lab.

I recovered from the surgery well enough to go home after only one day in the hospital, but I think it was slow going after that. A lot of it I don't remember very well.

A year later, I'm not sure I'm still Mr. Cool. I feel lucky to be here, and to be free so far of the seizures that put me in the hospital in the first place. But I've also grown tired of the whole deal, of the monthly chemotherapy (month eight concluded last night), even of trying to put a good face on things or make a joke or reassure the next guy that I'm all right.

As I admit sometimes to Michelle and to Mich, both of whom have been incredible this past year, I'm sick of stuff.

The charm of brain cancer has begun to wear off.

Spazziversary weekend

Good idea, Ronelle.

As my cool cousin suggested, this weird anniversary is a good excuse to get out and celebrate somehow. Also Michelle has a brand new car itching to hit the road. So she's taking today off and we're going to drive down to the Oregon Coast for a long weekend.

Kind of a last-minute plan, but it seems just right. Beautiful weather too. We'll walk on the beach, have some luscious clam chowder at Mo's and probably play some cards at a favorite room, the nearby Spirit Mountain Casino.

Photos and a full report to come when we return.

Happy weekend, everyone.