learning how to walk

I had my first session with the physical therapist today. I'm learning how to walk all over again. Fortunately I don't have to start all the way from scratch, but sheesh, it's only about half way from scratch. My muscles seem to want to do strange things all of their own, and that coordinated body movement we all take for granted when we step or sit down has been hit hard. But it's not gone. There are many things that will have to be retrained: just stepping one foot in front of the other in a coordinated motion is a mighty tricky business. Lifting one leg independently from a prone position takes a lot of serious concentration. But it's doable, and it's so interesting to me to notice for the first time all these tiny coordinated little movements our bodies negotiate when we do even the most mundane of things.

So what I can do now: I can stand, but not on my own; my balance is not good and I go over at the drop of a hat. I've got a walker to help me. I can type, obviously, which is wonderful. But not as well as I did. Some of the coordination was lost there, too. But it's coming back with practice (and I practice a lot!). I can eat with a fork, a little clumsily. I can dress, but I can't do things like tie knots in a scarf anymore. I need that scarf, you know, because I want to hide my surgery. No need to horrify the passers-by. Things that require kind of a coordinated backwards motion are insanely complicated for me. Trying to pull a knit shirt over my head and to get my arms into the sleeves is not, as it turns out, a user-friendly process.

But I still know my times-tables--go figure! And I still remember my important medieval factoids. At least I thought they were important factoids, once upon a time. Now I'm not so sure they are. But it's all there, and finding the way back to them gets easier every day. It's a crazy business, this life stuff, isn't it? But wonderful, and fascinating.

I'm going to have so much stuff I want to write about and share, stuff that I want to know if other people have seen or experienced or thought about ever, too. I want to know everything now. It's so stunning to me now that I've spent so much of my life wrapped up in a myopic, insulated little world, when there's so much more there than I ever had any idea of. Thank you so much for your generosity in reading--it means so much to me, and your kind comments do, too. You have no idea how much you all touch me just by reading.

This life stuff--it's just not what we thought it was. We've gotten much of it so wrong. But we can still get it right.

mornings

Mornings with only half a brain have become an amusing daily event for me--probably not so much for my family. My confusion and disorientation are the worst then, so everything is a little off. Things like trying to put on clothes--trying to remember what I used to wear and what goes where!--are much trickier than they ever used to be. A lot of the coordination comes back with time and with--surprise!--coffee. But when I wake up I frequently don't remember where I am or even--in the first half hour--what has happened to me, and I start careening around the house, knocking things over, crashing repeatedly onto the floor, and generally horrifying my saintly family. They have always been later risers than I, and my new medication regime only makes my sleeping patterns worse. Insofar as my espresso dependence was always my traditional workaround for morning dementia, trying to figure out how to get this stuff to come out right has been a real priority.

Yesterday my fiance and I indulged in a high tech Jura espresso maker that I can manage--that's the thinking, anyway! --on my own. I'm having my first cup now, and it is very nice. Espresso is one of the special things that I really look forward to as part of my day--it's just part of the ritual order and rightness of things. But this has not been easy, either. It's the "simple" and "perfect every time" devices that you really want to throttle manufacturers for.

the other side

I saw so many strange things on the other side--I don't want to forget them. First the was the almost molecular-like sensation of getting scanned by the MRI in that strange preoperative state. An MRI is loud and the effect for me--though apparently no one else! --is this strange settling of the normal images in my brain into geometric patterns. I saw things I have never seen before. I can't explain it--almost like the normal images in my brain were being vibrated into new patterns. Strange and harmomonic and geometrically proportionate. But I'm glad I remember it--I don't expect too many people get to experience that one. It's worth experiencing.

It's like I've seen a pattern and a structure underlying life that I didn't know was there. This is not a moral structure or a religious structure--it's just a structure, and everything accommodates everything else, and there is room for new structures and patterns, too. I saw it--saw the new ones forming and branching off, and sometimes disappearing altogether. I saw it all.

All of this has left me with such a peaceful feeling--that life is just this ongoing movement. And we're all a part of it, and so many of our efforts are spent in things that don't matter too much in the long run. It's a very long run we're talking about--longer than our own single lifetimes--and there are lots of things to see and do and feel--and it all matters.

Back from the world of sleep

And what a strange world it is. Every day I can feel more of my body coming back--I'm still typing slowly, and it is odd not to feel your fingertips. It's odd not to feel your fingers. But my brain remembers that I have them, and so somehow when I engage the old patterns the words come out, almost like they used to. I guess this will either lift of its own as my mass shrinks down, or I'll just get used to it and adjust. I'm already adjusting--it's like all things; a bit different, but you get used to it.

Things are much more normal today than they were even just yesterday, and worlds away from a few days ago. Today I was able to wake up and remember where I was, and I even had a bit of an interior landscape about where I'm staying and what the layout of the rooms was. The night before that was all gone--very distressing in way that you can't just chalk up to disorientation...although I think disorientation was probably part of it. I get tired at night and things stop working so well--pretty much stop working at all, really--and I have to just accept that and trust that it's all going to be okay and that people are taking care of me. And then in the morning I wake up again and slowly some of it comes back.

Coffee helps. Why doesn't this surprise me? In fact, I attribute much of my recovery to getting my espresso maker here so I can have my morning coffee the way I like it. Silly, isn't it? But so important. Espresso and brain function go hand-in-hand.

So apparently I have an enormous gash in my skull where they went in for the biopsy--I think I must have known I had one, but I have no memory of any of this, so the gaping head wound was news to me until my daughter told me yesterday. She asked me if I could cover it up, because, as she said, "It's kind of gross."

"You're kidding!" I told her. There's a gash in my skull? Why didn't anyone tell me? You'd think someone would have mentioned it by now. Or that maybe I would have noticed it on my own.

But maybe not. I certainly managed not to have noticed a few crucial things along the way--that's for sure.

But it will all come back, and I can't wait to do all the things I want to do. I'm starting them already. There's so much to do--I don't know what I was ever waiting for.

every day is Christmas

Well, this has been quite a ride. I'm home from the hospital now, after four days in getting my brain biopsied and mapped. I never, ever would have thought this would happen to me--that I'd be getting brain surgery and chemo and the whole shebang. But it did happen, and it's okay. It's just another little thing that happens in life. It's all different and it's all interesting.

And for my friends who are looking for specifics, know that I'm on an aggressive treatment plan, and things look pretty promising, which is all any of us ever need to know. And I have a really good feeling about things. The very day I walked into the hospital I thought, it's going to be okay. It's not what I thought I saw coming down the path, but it's okay.

So I want to thank everyone for being there--online, visibly, or invisibly. These communities matter so much. I knew that before, but I really know it now. It doesn't matter if you see people or not, as long as they're there.

But I want to say more than that. I'm realizing how much we all touch each other in these tiny, unfathomable ways. I've been touched by people I barely know or have never met at all, in some phenomenal, fundamental ways, either by reading their work or by being told about their experiences by someone else altogether. It all matters, in ways I registered before but didn't fully appreciate. Now I know, and knowing that little thing is an amazing gift.

I'll be writing more on this--I've been thinking about it a lot, actually. For now, I'm relearning how to walk--though not quite from scratch! And I'm getting used to the strange sensations I'm now getting from what I like to call my necrotic arm. All very weird--but again, not bad, just different from what it used to be.

See you soon...

Sometimes things don't always work out the way you expect, but they keep on working out anyway, sometimes in their own way. And you learn new things along the way. I've learned lots of things this weekend, one of which is how lucky I am. Maybe not lucky in everything, but in some things I've been extraordinarily lucky. I think you can't ask for anything better than to have people around you who care about you. I have people I know will do anything for me. I want them all to know how grateful I am.

And there a lot of people that I haven't gotten to know so well, but you all have had an impact on me, sometimes in ways you don't even know. And I want you to know that I'm grateful to you, too. I just want to let you know how much you all mean to me.

I'll be gone for a little while, but I'll see you soon, and I'll try to keep writing.

taking the leap

Well, my baser instincts have gotten the better of me. Over the weekend I finally bought that PS3 I've been thinking about not buying. It just kind of happened, in that way that things frequently just kind of happen to me: I convinced myself--against my better judgment!--that I needed to make a trip to Costco, because I needed--well, exactly nothing. And once there, I wandered past the games area, where of course I knew there would be a PS3 sitting. I told myself I was just looking at it, just to see, you know, if it was there. And the next thing I knew, the PS3 was in my cart and I was hurrying toward the exit with the kind of haste that characterizes people who know they are doing a Bad Thing and who want to get it over with before they can persuade themselves to stop.

The thing about a PS3 is that it is only the first of what will inevitably prove to be many purchases I don't need to make. Because right now all I've got is the console, and of course what good is the console without the games to play on it? I need some games. And the games will be so beautiful that I'll decide I need to upgrade my TV system to further appreciate them, and probably I'll need a 3-D sound system, too. This will make my living room look ugly, so I'll probably need to buy new furniture to house the sound system in, and of course one always needs a comfortable gaming stool or chair that blends decorously with the other furniture items.

And so it will proceed. I wonder how much all this will cost me?

the smell

There is a smell in my refrigerator, and I cannot locate the source. I've removed all the milk products, suspecting an aging batch; I've thrown out all the cheeses and all the half-used canned items that I stuck in there some months ago, thinking at the time that I didn't want to throw out perfectly good food that might prove useful one day. The food never did get used. But it is all gone now, and still there is that smell.

At the moment the smell has become something of a metaphor for the unclean debris that piles up in one's life from time to time. I'm feeling the weight of that debris heavily right now, when I've just picked up two sets of midterms, a batch of seminar papers, and electronically solicited some forty weekly assignments that have yet to be graded. That's a lot of debris I'm hauling around. Though as far as I know it doesn't stink--yet.

Maybe I should thank the smell, since it prevents me from opening my refrigerator too often. Opening a refrigerator, we all know, is just another advanced procrastination technique. We look in there hoping for something tasty to distract us from whatever humdrum task it is that needs to be done. There seldom is anything all that tasty in there. I make sure of that, by leaving my leftovers for weeks at a time, until they become stinky.

If I am able to get my refrigerator clean--and that is a big if, since I've now filled several grocery bags full of food to be discarded and yet still the smell remains--I vow to make sure the detritus does not pile up again. I like being able to look in my refrigerator. I like smelling things that I actually might want to eat one day. It's such an unpleasant part of life, having a stinky fridge.

Tomorrow I will clean it systematically, going through item by item, and wiping it down, shelf by shelf. And then I will keep it clean.

But first, tonight, I have to grade some papers.

This Is No Country For Old Men

I've been thinking a lot recently about this strange transformation that occurs as people reach retirement. I've been thinking about this for a long time, really--ever since I noticed that outgoing faculty members in whatever department I happened to be housed in at the time frequently went outright crazy before they went out the door. We used to think it was the asbestos in Adams Humanities. Now I just think it's the encroaching horror of endless free time.

More about my outgoing colleagues later, maybe. For now, I'm remember the various oddities of retired people as I was growing up. In my teen years we lived in little suburb in Dana Point, full of identical stucco houses overlooking the valley of San Juan Capistrano. Ordinarily, suburbs make you think about normal people doing normal things--people have jobs, they go to work every day, they mow their lawns, they shop at Ralph’s and Albertsons, and they make dinners out of little plastic bags that they microwave for ten minutes until the stuff gets soft enough to chew. So it was always kind of strange when you saw one of your neighbors doing something other than minding his own business. And because we lived so close together in the suburbs, and because we could see practically into one another’s bathroom windows, it was almost impossible to get away with doing something that wasn’t what other people expected you to be doing.

Two doors down from us lived this retired couple. We could see straight through the post fence, past or an immediate neighbor, into their yard. The older gentleman liked to sit on his lounge chair in the California sun, shooting pigeons. He had bought a BB gun especially for this task, and we could all see it as we sat in our own backyards. He did not seem to mind being observed at all. He would leap to his feet, grab his gun, kneel down, and take aim at these hapless pigeons that liked to sit on those post-fences and poop all over them. Nor did he always aim straight backward off the embankment of his yard, where there was at least no immediate danger of hitting the neighbor’s dog or even the neighbor himself. He was just as apt to take aim through the fence toward our own backyard and toward us kids. We were nosily and probably obnoxiously watching him in open horror, so we probably deserved this.

But anyway, here is the thing about retired people. Little things really bug them. Little things like squirrels and garden moles and pigeons.

So, being retired, they buy air guns and shoot them.

What's up with this?