Month: January 2005

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s surgery, with apprehension of course, but also with hope. This has not been a pleasant month, having blood drawn weekly and suffering from some rather unpleasant side effects of hormone therapy, but I’ve been fighting hard to make sure I’m ready for surgery tomorrow.

Despite the blood contributions and multiple doctor appointments, I have still managed to keep walking three to five miles a day for four to five days a week. My red blood cell count remained high despite warnings that giving blood weekly could lead to anemia. I’ve generally kept my spirits up, despite having to banish Leslie to her daughter’s house for the last five days after she was exposed to, and came down with, the stomach flu. I even managed one of my longer walks today.

On the other hand, I’m not so stupid that I’m not worried about the surgery. Any surgery that requires three to five hours and three to five days in the hospital is nothing to take lightly. Still, I’m younger and stronger than most who have to undergo it, so the odds should be with me.

I’m also apprehensive about the three to four week recovery period when I’ll have tubes sticking out of me. I’m not a good patient. Like Santiago in Old Man and the Sea, I take sickness as a personal failure. Not to mention, the long-term effects of the surgery and whether or not they’ll discover the cancer has spread beyond the prostate.

That said, I realize Skye needs me. Without me not only would he miss his daily walks, but if he keeps charging the fence and tracking mud throughout the house I’m the only thing standing between him and a return to the pound. Most of all, I worry about my beloved Gavin who worries far too much about his Pahtah and the fact that I keep trying to die. I’m not even letting him know I’m going to the hospital. No kid should have to think about death, and I’m determined to stay alive long enough that he will be ready to accept what I already accept, that you only live as long as you live, not a day longer. In the end that’s good enough for me. I’ll be more than happy if I manage to continue to stay alive as long as I’m living.

I’ve asked Leslie to post a comment on the site letting friends know how the surgery went. I’ve made it as simple as possible, but don’t automatically assume that I’ve died if you don’t hear anything until some time next week. Leslie’s NOT an internet person, and I’m sure she’ll have other things on her mind, including how crazed Skye becomes when he’s left home alone all day.

Finally, I’m closing comments later tonight because I don’t want to come home to a shit load of spam Sunday, Monday, or, Tuesday. I’m not sure my heart could take that.

Judging from the last few stories, you might think stubbornness was the cause of most of my problems at the age of five. Not so. Curiosity was really my major weakness and, though it didn’t kill me, it caused me some serious problems.

The first incident took place when I found a book of old matches while walking home with my brother. Since I wasn’t allowed to touch matches at home, I was trying to see what would happen if you struck them on the cover like I’d seen my parents do. It seemed like no matter how hard I tried they just crumbled without lighting. Bill turned around to ask if they would light, and instantly screamed at me to go get Dad. One of the discarded matches had ignited the grass field we were walking across, and flames were heading straight toward the only gasoline storage tank in town. While Bill fought the flames, I rushed to get Dad. Luckily, the two of them were able to extinguish the fire, though Bill was not happy that he had lost his eyebrows in the effort. Dad just plain wasn’t happy. I wasn’t too curious about how he felt and had enough sense to stay out of sight as much as I could until he returned to Seattle a few days later.

The second incident ended up, at least for me, much more disastrously. Most readers probably aren’t old enough to remember that wash machines once had wringers to dry out the clothes rather than spinning them dry. I was watching our apartment manager wash clothes and was intrigued by how the clothes fed into the wringer. So, when she went outside to hang up some of the clothes, I decided (using that word rather loosely, of course) to touch the wringer to see what caused the clothes to go through. I found out, and nearly lost all the flesh on my left hand in the process. When the manager returned, I apparently asked her calmly to stop the machine. She stopped the machine, took one look at my hand, nearly fainted, then ran off to get my mother without ever releasing the wringer.

Needless to say, the hand was mangled beyond recognition. The doctor proposed skin grafts, but my mother couldn’t imagine how I could manage to keep my hand fastened to my stomach for a month while the new skin healed. Though self-conscious of my hand for years, I secretly felt it was kind of neat that my hand perfectly fit the shape of my baseball mitt. I never became the great pianist I could have become, but that might have been good thing considering the neighborhood I grew up in. Two of my fingers are still scarred enough to remind me that if you’re not careful you can pay a price for being too curious.

Though I’ve seldom suffered such consequences again, I have stubbornly stuck with curiosity, one of the great driving forces in my life. It explains why I seldom get bored and why I have piles of books on strange topics waiting to be read. It’s helped me to get through some rough periods in my life. It might even explain why I’ve continued to plug away at this blog for years now.

Another infamous episode that took place when I was five came to be known as the “I can do it myself” incident. My mother, father, older brother, and I had headed into the wilderness on a trout-fishing excursion.

Goldendale was cowboy country, at least to a city boy from Seattle, so I insisted on wearing my new cowboy hat. When we came to a log crossing, brother Bill scampered across the log closely followed by mom. Dad tried to get my to take his hand while crossing the log, but I refused it repeatedly, loudly pronouncing “I’m a big boy. I can do it myself.”

Of course, if I could have there wouldn’t be any story. Needless to say, I ended up floating down a rushing snow-melt stream with only the cowboy cap tied under my chin revealing where I was. It would have helped, of course, if I had known how to swim.

Apparently my father found the whole incident so hilarious that my mother had to threaten to jump in and save me if he didn’t get up off the ground, quit laughing, and pull me out of the water. Eventually, of course, I was, though I still remember sadly watching my cowboy hat float away down the stream.

You might think I would’ve learned to ask for help after that, but you’d be wrong. If that were true, my mother wouldn’t have had to tell the tale repeatedly, and I probably would have forgotten it by now.

What I did learn was to fear slippery, and even not-so-slippery, logs. Despite all my backpacking and hiking, I’ve never feel entirely comfortable crossing rushing streams, particularly while balancing a heavy pack. I’ve been known to trek many a mile around such crossings. Once when there was no other way across, I even sat on the log and leap-frogged my way to the other side.

It’s taken much longer to learn to rely on others, something I’m not sure I’ve accomplished yet, though as a I age I find I’ve had to rely on wife, children, and even grandchildren for emotional support to get me through some episodes.

In a few days I’ll be relying once again on a doctor’s help, and perhaps that’s been the hardest of all to accept.

If I sometimes seems indecisive and prone to questioning my decisions, you can blame it on my mother and on the fifth year of my life, a period where, at least if my mother is to be believed, stupidity and stubbornness converged. My mother loved retelling childhood incidents that revealed just how stubborn I was.
One of the more infamous incidents happened when we ran out of oranges for our usual fresh-squeezed orange juice, my favorite part of breakfast. Since there had been orange juice every other day of my life, I was certain that there must be oranges in the refrigerator waiting to be squeezed.

So I marched to the refrigerator and found some “oranges,” small yellow oranges, as it were, but still oranges. My mother tried to convince me that those yellow oranges weren’t really oranges at all, but I wasn’t about to be deceived that easily. I knew there had to be oranges in the refrigerator. And those were them.

Mother finally squeezed one lemon and tried to make me take a drink of it, but I insisted that I wanted my usual half glass, not a drop less. She told me that if she squeezed it, I would have to drink it all.

“Fine,” I said. “Squeeze’m all.”

Given the glass, I took a swallow, puckered up a bit, insisted it tasted great and finished the whole glass, never pausing to admit I might have been wrong. I’m assuming that inwardly, at least, I was smart enough to realize that I wasn’t drinking orange juice, though I guess that’s not necessarily a given.

I do know that that incident, or at least having it retold periodically throughout my life, has made me question assumptions before rushing to make an important decision.