Again

We met with Dr. Lieberman Tuesday. He's Ken's neurosurgeon. The man who just happened to be available five or six years ago when the wire dripping morphine into Ken's spinal column from an implanted morphine pump was severed as surgeons were trying to remove the pump and its line from his body. The removal was to have taken 30 minutes or less. He was in surgery for four hours because the line snapped and the anesthiologist removing the pump had to call on a neurosurgeon to fish it out of his spine. Lieberman was there. He's been a source of reassurance, skill and brains ever since. This time (there was another surgery in between our first encounter and Tuesday's appointment) he was talking to us about the pros and cons of having an electric stimulator inserted in Ken's spine to ease the pain and reduce the load of pain meds he's on, which are proving more and more inadequate and causing their own problems not to say the long term effect for his kidneys and liver processing these toxins. His assessment: the electric stimulator won't handle Ken's kind of pain. It would be useless. His alternative? Detox, reset his pain receptors and then have another morphine pump inserted. In cases like Ken's patients have required something like 1,000 times less drug potency than when they took pain meds orally. We're waiting word from his pain doc who would manage the withdrawal -- cold turkey. Two weeks. So, we'll see. Meanwhile, Ken is contemplating getting another dog presumably for Winstons amusement. But I think the real reason is to have something to hold on to during the detox.

March loss

In fairness, I must report my losses as well as my wins. I had a big loss yesterday. Missouri fell to UConn. You could tell from the body language, with 1 minute left and six points behind, that Missouri was going down and that they knew it.
Sad. I had them going all the way. I also had Villanova beating Pitt. That proved providential, but I didn't have Villanova winning it all, just making it to the Final Four. This is the madness of March. Mine appears to have ended a round early.

The small things

I wrote in my morning pages today and had this insight: it’s the little things. I went for my mammogram and bone density scan yesterday. Mammo clear but I had more bone loss. It's clearly my fault. The tech could barely hide her disgust when she read the answers to the questionnaire about my bone care habits. They are dismal. I don't take calcium supplements. I do eat cheese, but rarely do I drink milk. I don't take Vitamin D. She even asked incredulously, no multi-vitamin? No. I said. I felt her disgust as I lay on the table and the scanning thing chunked, chunked over me. I don’t take calcium. It’s almost this willful thing. I was writing about that this morning and then scooted right along to the issue of my mother and my mental wrestle with that ever-present guilty, unresolved issue of where she should be. I haven’t talked to her really since Sunday. I just talked w/ her briefly Tuesday. It’s Friday. So, I’m writing and I realize that to build my bones I have to take 3 calcium tablets a day. Stay in the sun 20 minutes. Walk 30 minutes and jump on my pogo stick. That’s really it. Some small things. As for my mother, I probably don’t have to move to North Manchester. Quit my job. Or sell my house here and buy a larger one (although apparently now’s the time to at least buy if you have money) and move her out here and hire caregivers and a therapist for myself. I probably just need to call her every day and send a card once or twice a week. That’s what I need to do. The small steps not the grand gesture. And I thought that’s not my style, small steps. And how much I miss not having the discipline and persistence to do the small steps because accummulated, they do change things. They rebuild bones. They comfort a mother.

More madness

I don't mean to gloat. Really. I just have to do one of those annoying little cheers: Missouri beat Memphis, an upset. I had Missouri. And, even though I'm a Hoosier, I had also picked Connecticut over Purdue. Not an upset, but pulling against my roots. So kind of an upset.
I don't mean to gloat.
And I won't probably be gloating anymore as this unfolds. But for now. For this moment. Just a teeny tiny gloat.

Recommended Reading

My Sunday morning ritual is Frank Rich in the New York Times. It use to be Vows in the Sunday Times' Style section. But now, it's Rich. When he was on vacation after the election, I was bereft. I have never read the Opinion page of any newspaper. (Nor comics for that matter.) But I have found myself a devoted Rich reader and would gladly fork over the $5 for a Sunday Times and consider it money well spent if his was the only piece I read. That I also more often than not enjoy Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman is icing.

March Madness

So far, two days into this grandest of spring rituals, I am 25 out of 32 games on the NCAA bracket. If I was mathematically skilled I could tell you my batting average, but, as established earlier, I am not. So, I'll just say that I think this is one of the best first rounds I've had. But, as they say in sports, the game is yet young and I have many more games to lose.
I've thrown myself into March Madness for 27 years. I haven't once in those 27 years missed filling out a bracket. One year, I won. For the last three years I ran the Republic NCAA pool and named it after my father, The Mike McGaw Memorial NCAA Tournament Pool. My friend's husband did the stats. We thanked him in wine. The first year of that pool I told the winner that I had donated his winnings to my father's Elk's Lodge to restuff the heads that hung in the Isaac Walton lodge hall. For a moment he believed me. This year, someone in sports is managing the event. Lucas called the night before he and Melissa took off for London to check my picks. His friend Brian had made him promise to call him if my picks were wildly different than his, such is my reputation for serious bracket-selection.
For a couple of years, March Madness was one reliable form of distraction while one of us in the McGaw clan was healing. In 1999 it was me from a masectomy and reconstructive surgery. My mom, dad and Ken and I all had brackets and we watched while I sat hunched over a pillow trying not to cough, sneeze or laugh b/c I hurt so much. Another spring, I coaxed my dad into filling out a bracket while we kept track of the games long distance. He in Kokomo fresh from learning he had Stage 4 lung cancer and me fresh from hearing the diagnosis. My mom may have put an entry into tht one too. Always Lucas has entered. And one time we drove into Prescott to Murphy's Bar and Grill knwoing that we could catch some of the games at their grand, old-fashioned bar. It's there that we discovered they had great wings and where over a glass of wine and beer we watched one of the great rituals of spring.
(I had Siena over OSU. That was this year's upset. Although at the last minute I betrayed my state and put Utah over UofA, so disappointed have I been in those boys this year. I missed Wisconsin and Michigan and was wrong about VCU. I still think when I'm 90 I'll play this b/c it's such cheap fun for the price of getting into the nearest pool.

Counting

My husband and our friend, Jon Shorr, conspired to contact some of my favorite authors to request that they write me birthday greetings on the event of my 60th birthday. The one who did, and who is my favorite author notwithstanding her reply to Jon's request, is Mary Doria Russell. She of Thread of Grace and Dreamers of the Day and Children of God. She wrote this witty, warm note noting that I was preceding her by a year into our 7th decade. Seventh decade, I thought. Seventh? She's 70 and she thinks I'm 71? I scrambled feeling a teeny tiny gnawing sense of dread that I'd blithely written six decades in one of my birthday musings. Math has never been a strong suit. A visual learner, I actually made a time line this morning and misnumbered even that before I finally grasped that by the time I was 20 I had lived a decade and on it goes. So Mary Doria Russell, my favorite author and now math instructor, is 59 and I'm 60, preceding her by a year into our 7th decade. Right?
Here's her note: (The subject line read: Happy Birthday you old bat)

Dear Ms. Felt,
Your friend Jon Schorr was rude enough to reveal that you are turning sixty on Monday, and hilarious enough to believe that you would enjoy being reminded of the event by an author whose work you enjoyed.
You are preceding me into our 7th decade by a year. Last week my husband and I replaced our ten-year-old car. Don realized that, barring accident, we'll be driving this new one when we turn 70, which is also the year of our 50th anniversary.
We have been walking around in a slight daze since that moment of existential shock.
Most of the time, I love being who I am now, and wouldn't turn the clock back even ten minutes. On the other hand, we're more attuned than ever to the dismaying aspects of old age. Don's mother is 94, and rather pleasantly demented. Recently, she picked up a piece of breakfast toast, gazed at it for countable seconds, and asked, "Now, what do you suppose this is?"
"Toast, Mom. You eat it," Don said.
And I thought, Shoot me. Please, shoot me.
Best wishes for happy returns that you remain sharp enough to appreciate
-- from a fellow boomer,
Mary Doria Russell