Beltane and the Recovery Moon
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Category Archives: Shadow Mountain
Atomic Love
Beltane and the Recovery Moon
Next week Monday is my first radiation treatment. On Tuesday the first Lupron injection. The radiation continues every weekday until August 6th, which is both the Hiroshima anniversary and Raeone’s birthday. (Raeone is my ex) Not sure what to make of that. Also, Sunday is Father’s Day. I told Kate I wanted a Geiger counter. Hope she knows that was a joke.
Gonna try to have a little fun with this. Don’t want things grim, mordant. I found a gift shop in Los Alamos and bought a couple of t-shirts. Only found an image I could reproduce for one. I intend to wear both of them, off and on, for my treatments. As soon as they get here.
Been reading a book about Androgen Deprivation Therapy. Helpful. It may not be as bad as it sounds, at least for me. The longest I’ll be on Lupron is two years, probably less. The intense side effects seem to emerge over longer periods of time. Hope so.
In a twist not unlike prostate cancer treatment the day after Father’s Day and ending on the Hiroshima anniversary Kate continues to improve markedly as my journey heads into a difficult period. Her affect is almost bubbly. Sort of. Not sure Norwegians do bubbly, but she’s feeling good.
Her weight is at 99.4! Wow. 76 was the nadir back in February, I think. The j-tube feedings, with some minor exceptions, go well and she’s able to eat more, too. We had shrimp scampi, rice, and Brussels sprouts last night and she ate a full plate.
Our relationship has had the sort of strains that you might infer from a long, long bout of medically related bad news. Eight and a half months now since her bleed and she was not well before then. But open communication kept us out of any deep potholes.
Our partnership, this marriage that got started in the seats of the Ordway Theatre, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concerts, is stronger than ever. I wrote much earlier that adversity unveils gratitude. So many people show so much caring. Well, I would add to that today that adversity deepens love.
New (to us)
Beltane and the Recovery Moon
Air conditioning is important in our house. Kate and I both prefer cool weather to warm, cold weather a lot more than hot weather. Explains our maybe incomprehensible to some commitment to living on top of Shadow Mountain. 8,800 provides natural air conditioning.
When the a/c in the 2011 Rav4 began to sputter three years ago, I began a series of missions to get it fixed. Cost me basically zero. I’d take it in, they’d put die (oops. dye. what’s on my mind?) in it, charge it up and not give me a bill. They never found a leak. This year I decided, time to solve this. But. As I wrote below, we’d end up with a $3,200 or so bill and no assurance that it was fixed.
I’m more tolerant of heat than Kate though not by a lot. It was time to do something. Buying a car (like buying a house) gives me the heeby-jeebies, I don’t like the sense of manipulation. I don’t want to get a bad deal. Yet, we need transportation and shelter.
Kate came out to Colorado, worked with a real estate agent and found our home here on Black Mountain Drive. I would have dithered. I asked Kate to head up the car situation. She did. We have a new car.
Kate, “Medical school trained the dithers out of me.” How? “Code red.” Oh. A philosophy major and a theology degree trained me in the fine art of dithering, the paralysis of analysis. Good thing I’m married to Kate. In so many ways.
Part of the urgency was anticipation of 70 hour long trips to and from Lone Tree for visits to the Cyber Knife. All in late June, July, and early August. Heat. Don’t need exasperation from an a/c-less car to go with radiation and Lupron. Bad combo.
Not an easy decision in a financial sense since it draws down the corpus of our IRA, but the now to be known as the white car was no longer adequate. Also, Kate and I have been musing over these last medical months that we don’t need to have our money last into our 90’s since we probably won’t.
Death and its meanings
Beltane and the Cancer Moon
Under the Cancer Moon I’ve wrestled with the news of cancer returning. Death and its meanings. At the Journal workshop I wrote in one exercise, death has found me. I still feel that way, that this is a mortality signal with little ambiguity.
Even so, I’m feeling upbeat, happy right now. Why? CT scan showed negative for metastases. So did the bone scan. That means the reemergence has happened in the prostate fossa. Localized. An easier place to treat.
Death may in fact have found me, but prostate cancer may not be its agent. The word cure comes back into the vocabulary with these findings. If the radiation is successful, I’ll be a 72 year old guy with no cancer. Wow.
This will take a while to incorporate.
Imagining Imaging.
Beltane…………………………………………………………..Cancer Moon
Some heaviness in my walk. Taking out the trash for its delayed pickup. Memorial Day. Getting the Denver Post in its orange plastic wrapper. Putting it at Kate’s place.
The sun rise has begun to melt the frosty crown on Black Mountain. All conditions are impermanent, disappearing in the sun, blowing away in a Chinook.
Gabe called last night and wanted to know if I was coming to his continuation. Fifth grade to McCauliffe. I’m not sure, buddy. I have this procedure tomorrow. In his world fifth grade matters as much. I had already taken my thc for bedtime, tired.
It overwhelmed me. His need. Ruth’s. Who wants to go, but had planned to be up here today, to help us, the conflict hidden until it wasn’t. Jon’s navigating their worlds and ours.
My view on the ct today. The cancer is already there. This is just a pair of special binoculars that can peek inside the black box, see where it is. Once this gets read, a treatment plan will fall into place. Unless it’s equivocal, a finding I don’t want. I could know by tomorrow what’s next.
Ikigai
Beltane Cancer Moon
It’s been this kind of May. And it looks as if June will be cooler and wet, too, according to Weather5280. Good news for us, not so much for those lower down when the huge snowpack starts to melt.
Got further along on print Ancientrails. Am now in late 2017, quite a ways in. Then, print spool error. Again. Well. Gotta go back to whatever I did that solved it once. Tried so many things I’m not sure which one worked. Something did. For a while. Soon though. Then, I’ll take everything for three hole punching and decide what kind of binders I’m going to buy. Each folder with month tabs.
Also figured a way to unzip Superior Wolf and focus on Lycaon’s story. Don’t know whether I’ll follow up later on Christopher and Diana. The hunt for immortality is almost a cliche these days. And the central conceit of their story, a hedgefund group that funds Diana’s research, is not fiction anymore. Geez.
That means I’ve got months of work ahead, maybe years. My ikigai. A Japanese word that means reason to live. This article talks about ikigai in more depth as an explanation for Japanese longevity. Squares with my own intuition. Purpose keeps you alive and flourishing.
The Japanese have a lot about life figured out. Ichi-go, ichi-e is another favorite of mine. It comes from the Japanese tea ceremony and means each moment is once in a lifetime. No such thing as an insignificant experience with another person.
Reading a book right now by the wonderful travel writer, Pico Iyer: Autumn Light, Season of Fire and Farewells. It’s a follow-up to his The Lady and the Monk, which I have not read, in which he recounts meeting Hiroko, the Japanese woman who would become his wife. He had moved to Kyoto to immerse himself in Japanese culture, sensing, as I do, that their approach to life is worth learning, perhaps adopting. Twenty-three years later he lives in Japan with Hiroko six months out of the year and six months in the U.S., caring for his mother and working for the New York Times. Recommended.
Each time I dip into some aspect of Japanese culture I find I want to know more. The MIA’s Japanese collection gave me a chance to interact with tea bowls, tatami mats, sumi-e, Buddhist and Shinto sculpture, put me deeper into my own Asian pivot.
Zen itself has not intrigued me, but I did follow Zen back to its roots in Chinese Chan Buddhism, a melding of Taoism and Buddhism. The Taoist aspect of Zen, and Chan. Yes.
Tomorrow. The CT scan. Probably the last of the imaging work. It will either show metastatic disease or a localized recurrence in the prostate fossa. If the former, one kind of treatment. And, prognosis. If the latter, 35 days of radiation and a possible cure. Hopeful, of course, that it will be localized, but aware that it might not be. In either case I’ll know. That’s been the hardest part of this time (well, no, that’s not right. The hardest part has been dealing with insurance and the hospital’s “benefits” office.), knowing the cancer has reasserted itself, but not knowing what that means for my life.
Will be glad to have this work done so I can move onto what’s next.
The Right Thing for Us
Beltane Cancer Moon
Things I think about while falling asleep. Life. A stream rushing down the mountain of time, a branch into a tributary, tributary to river, river to the gulf of eternity, a small part of the sea of infinity.
Project print ancientrails update. Got into May of 2015. Then, printer spooling error. Spent an hour on it yesterday, got tired. Learned long ago to quit at a point when I’m doing the same thing over and over. Come back the next day with fresh eyes. Later this morning I’ll be back at it.
Looked out the bedroom window this morning. Frost. Rained over night and the temperature is just below freezing. A nubbly ice covered the deck and the stall mats, but the driveway was only wet. Saw a mule deer crossing Eduardo and Holly’s yard.
The sun is now well up at 5:30. The victory of the light will peak in three weeks. I look forward to the Summer Solstice as the moment when night begins to claw its way back into prominence.
Jon and Ruth left Gabe here yesterday while they went skiing. A-Basin. It still has peak snow cover, may be open until July 4th. Unusual. When they got back, Ruth and I made spaghetti and meatballs. She’s turning into a sweet, loving person. A real pleasure to see.
While walking back to the house after getting the paper this morning, I thought about her and Gabe. We moved here to have these kind of interactions with them, casual and frequent. It was the right thing for us to do.
When I was in school in Alexandria, Memorial Day marked the end of the school year. Summer begins! Days of freedom wandering alleys collecting pop bottles for small change. Going to the field with Rick Meyers and the Kildow boys to play army. Playing blackjack every weekday afternoon in the paper boys shack of the Times-Tribune. The occasional pickup softball game. Riding bikes around town. Outside until well after dark. No thoughts of pedophiles, school shooters, terrorists. No climate change worries. No computers. No cell phones.
Here in Colorado school typically ends in June though Ruth, because of McCauliffe’s schedule, got out a couple of weeks ago. This is Gabe’s last week. They will both start school again in the second week of August, both at McCauliffe for this one year, Ruth in the 8th grade and Gabe in the 6th.
Ruth, as do most of her friends, has a season pass to Elitch Gardens, an amusement park that serves as summer day care for many Denver teens. They have rides named Brain Drain, Mind Erase. You can see the attraction after school’s over.
2,000,000 Words
Beltane Cancer Moon
A long quest for me has ended. I’ve been searching for a way to print out Ancientrails for a couple of years. Not an insignificant undertaking at well over 2,000,000 words. Found a plug-in for WordPress, the software I use (thanks, Bill) called Print My Blog. Prior to Print My Blog the only way I had discovered to print posts was a repetitive process of copying each blog post and then pasting it into a Word document. With over 10,000 total posts that was enough to make the process difficult and time consuming.
Print My Blog has its problems. It only allows starting at the beginning of your blog and printing sequentially from that point. If you have a printer or software issue, as I did twice a couple of days ago, Print My Blog resets to the beginning. Sigh. I was at February 22nd, 2013 on Saturday when I got a printer error. That was about half of the total pages I needed to print. That was the good news. The bad news was that if I wanted to finish I’d have to start all over again, at the beginning. And hope nothing would interfere.
Then it hit me. I can run Print My Blog, get its formatting of all of ancientrails and its content, do a select all, and copy the entire blog into Word. Which I did yesterday. Easy peasy. Printing is much easier in Word with multiple ways to divide a document. I may finish printing it out today. Then, I’m going to get thirteen notebooks, 2007-2019 and have those pages three hole punched at Staples. There will be a written copy of my work on ancientrails except 2005-2007. They exist somewhere in the cyberether, but I can’t find them anymore.
Why are you doing this, Charlie? Kate asked. I have three reasons. I have a cloud backup of Ancientrails using Updraftplus and I’m grateful for that. If my web host crashes or I get attacked by a hacker, I can restore everything. But, when I die, it’s probable that no one will pay my web host and/or no one will be able to use the backup because they don’t know it exists. I’ll leave instructions, but after my death protecting my blog won’t be a top priority. A printed copy solves that problem. If, that is, anyone wants to keep it.
Second reason. My cousin Diane thought some folks might like to read what I’ve written here. At 2,000,000 plus words no one, not even me, has that much interest. A volume devoted to Ancientrails will require editing. A lot of editing. WordPress is good software for writing and posting on the web, that’s what it’s for, but not so good if you want to go back and read, then edit, multiple entries. Pretty clumsy. Reading ink on paper and marking it up? Easier. This is a long term project, but one made simpler by the hoary art of printing.
Third reason. I want to see it printed out. Very satisfying to see all that work in one physical location. The cyber copy of it all is invisible, most of it. Hard to reify. This will make it real in a Velveteen Rabbit way.
Anyhow I’m pretty far along with this now. Word pushes pages out of my laserjet printer even as I write this. The written word has occupied me for the last thirty years. Still does. This is one not so small part of that focus.
A Cloud of Unknowing
Another big medical week. But they all seem to be right now. Minor: had my teeth cleaned yesterday. “Your teeth are so clean.” Hygienist. So one part of my body’s in good shape.
Kate and I visit Ed Smith today. He’s the surgeon who will, we’ve been hoping for several months now, implant the j-tube. The pulmonologist has cleared her, the last remaining hurdle. I’m expecting (hoping?) that we will schedule a date.
On Thursday I have the standard of care imaging studies for prostate cancer reemergence, a ct and an mri. The axumin scan is a pet-scan. In a followup visit to Dr. Gilroy, the radiation oncologist, we’ll see what these tests have to say and revisit the axumin scan if it seems like it would increase the accuracy and efficacy of treatment.
Each step on this journey makes things a bit more real. A bit more sphincter tightening. Right now, I have no idea where I am, except that I’m in a place I’d rather not be. No diagnosis except a rising PSA. No treatment plan. Just the knowledge that somewhere in my body are cells working against my survival.
It’s a strange place to be, ethereal, filled with fantasy. They’ll find distant metastases and I’m doomed. They’ll find a small, localized tumor, zap it with a Buck Roger’s ray gun. I return to a new life free of cancer. The disease is slow, but not fully treatable. I’ll have to live for years with an invader slowly gaining more and more territory. A losing game of go.
I’m sleeping well, not overly distracted or anxious. Yet this is a moment of existential angst, the sort of moment that defines existential angst. Dante helps me see it more clearly. Here are the famous first lines from Canto One, modified just a bit.
Two thirds through the journey of my life I find myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway has been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What is this forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more...
“But, since it came to good, I will recount all that happened there.” This is v. 4 of the Canto and my hope. We’ll see.
The Doris Day Lifeway
Beltane Cancer Moon
Saw Avengers: Endgame on Tuesday. This was to distract me from being pissed at Centura Health, United Health Care and whoever else dragged their feet, waiting until the day before and the day of to interfere with my planned axumin scan. It worked. I know who dies in endgame, but I won’t tell. It’s a long movie and I’m not a super fan, so I know I missed a lot of the inside jokes and things being tidied up from the multiple movies that preceded it. I did, however, come out calm. The universe had been returned to mostly normal, seder had been restored. The underlying reason we like superheroes, mysteries, thrillers.
By that evening I was sufficiently chill to sleep through the night, something I almost never do. I spoke my mind to the health “benefits” folks at Centura Health, distracted myself, got some perspective, and slept just fine. Not deep breaths or wonky meditation, but workable.
Yesterday I focused on an organ, the eye. Played space invaders for the nice man, or, as they insist on calling it, a visual field test. My field of vision is holding steady, no glaucoma encroachment. Pressures are good, the hole in my cornea is, as my ophthalmologist says, is patent. That means it’s still draining the fluid for me. Part of me, an important part, is functional and remaining so. With help from latanoprost and good surveillance.
On Friday I see the Anova Cancer Care folks. This will be a somewhat changed consult since I didn’t do the axumin scan. I plan to ask them what sort of imaging work will make their work optimal. If they believe in the axumin scan enough, I may agree to pay for it. $4,000 versus life? Not a tough call.
After lungs on Monday morning, a crowning achievement on Monday afternoon, the scan hooha on Tuesday, the glaucoma checkup yesterday, and the oncologist visit tomorrow afternoon, we’ll have finished off another very medical week. Something fun is in order for the weekend.
Simcha. I’m coming to believe that joy and gratitude may be sufficient to get us all the way through life. I don’t mean silly puffy gladness, or just saying thank you reflexively, but heart and mind illuminating joy and deeply felt gratitude.
What gives you joy? Be grateful for it. I’m gonna call this the Doris Day lifeway, worthy of emulation.