Unearthing a life.....

My day started at five thirty AM with a shower and a shave and then downstairs to find Allie already at the TV watching cartoons, but he had not followed the correct sequence on the remote and was stuck with one channel only. So I demonstrated the correct sequence so that he could more successfully ace grandpa out in the future. His other grandmother, who brings him in the mornings, has gone to San Diego for a couple of weeks, so Allie is a rare overnight guest on Sunday and Tuesday night for the next two weeks. For breakfast he ordered a butter and peanut butter sandwich on not toasted bread. I also gave him a glass of milk. "I did not ask for milk," he says. "It's for dry mouth emergencies," I reply. I few minutes later I look over and the glass is empty.

At 7:30, NoApologies parents arrive to provide conveyance and misc. child care. Bookworm has her own therapy appointment at the same time as mine, so Mary Ellen will haul me off to the chemo clinic and Bob will look after Aleister and walk him up to the school bus stop at 8:36 to catch the bus at 8:45-8:50. I'm glad that Dr. Bob got to experience a small, but precious, part of my daily weekday life and that he enjoyed it as much as I do. Mostly it's just ten minutes of four small boys playing senseless, ruleless games and an occasional older girl. But a nice part of the day.

So Mary Ellen got me over to the clinic and deposited me at the front door with words of love and good luck. And in I went. Bravely. But probably no more bravely than the couple dozen others who marched in there this morning - and afternoon. Sat down next to a fellow who'd been called in a few minutes before me ... getting a 'spot' near the restroom. Just in case. Who knows what could happen. And I'm sitting there waiting some chance to be able to brag that I'm slated to be there for seven hours, when his nurse comes up to him with his first bag of 'stuff' and says, "Well, Mr. So-and-so, you're going to be with us for eight or nine hours today." And he grumbles, "I know. This is my tenth session!" There went all my bragging rights down the ye oulde drain.

I may be 'cool' on the outside, but on the inside I was being just one more jerk who was entering a roomful of veterans and hoping to impress them with my own chemo battle (which hadn't even been joined yet). I felt lucky that the nurse's remark saved me from likely embarrassing myself. I took slight stock of myself. And straightened up my act. Zipped my lip.

With a pillow in my lap and my arm on the pillow and the neddle in my vein, I was introduced to a big bag of saline, then a small bag of anti-nasea medication, then a small bag of saline, then a medium bag of Alimta, another small bag of saline, then a big bag of Cisplatin, and lastly a final big bag of saline. 8:20 till 3:20 .... seven hours on the old nose.

In my victory photo at the top (taken by Bookworm), I am holding up a special stone that Darlene J. loaned to me. She got it in China (if I'm remembering correctly) and held it through two separate chemo battles against cancer and was an is a survivor. I took it with me today and held it through the Alimta and Cisplatin doses. Bookworm showed up around ten with my lunch (a tuna salad sandwich and three figs) and the New York Times. I had the nine-hour man on my right, a little oriental woman on my left and Bookworm in front of me. She, being more gregarious than I, asked everyone's names and introduced us to each other and engaged all three of us with leading questions. For a moment there I thought she might have created a monster when the woman to my left (who reminded me a lot of my Hispanic once sister-in-law Rosie) began talking like one of those people who never stop once they get going. But she did stop. Anyway it was very comforting to have Bookworm scouched up in front of me for an hour or so. When she finally had to leave to get Allie from the bus, she asked everyone if she could get them anything ... and asked if anyone wanted the New York Times. A woman across the way claimed the paper and I watched it circulate to other during the afternoon. As Bookworm left the nine-hour man said to her, "Better be careful or they'll hire you on here."

It was an eye-opening experience. On the way home Bookworm and I were discussing how we'd alway imagined that chemo-therapy went on privately in secluded little spaces, a lonely process. NOT AT ALL! It takes place in big, well lit rooms with mucho open space and twenty or more patients and mates and caretakers ... and a passle of very pleasant nurses. In a way it's more like a group battle than an individual battle. I felt fine afterwards and am still feel fine this evening. But now I weary and must go drink a bottle of water.

Our new backyard deck is prepared for company. One might say the sun was out, but the temperature probably never hit 60 degrees and there was a small, disturbing breeze flitting about.

The following is a quote from NoApology's April 12th blog posting titled 'Rivers and Rocks'.

"Early this morning, as we waited to board our flight back home we met a woman from Australia. She had spent time in Santa Fe not exploring the wilderness, but taking classes in what she vaguely described as "energy work." In her late sixties, perhaps even early seventies, she talked with great animation about energy's memory, how we carry with us all of time. "Your vibration or your aura, as it were," she explained with her hands flowing through curves of air, "is specific to a place and time. Actually, it's specific to the place and time of your mother at least two months before you born. When you arrive back to this place, you are perfectly aligned with the energy of the earth, the vibration of the place. You are, in every sense of the word, home."

I am not a desert dweller. While the high desert is one of my favorite locations to vacation, I could not live with the dust and sand, the wind and the thunder clouds, the cacti or the snakes. While I was born in Iowa, I have lived most of my 48 years here in the Pacific Northwest. As we flew over the mountains today and ascended over Puget Sound, I was reminded of a drive my brother and I made from a small airport in Iowa northwest to the birthplace of my mother years ago. As much as the Pacific Northwest feels like home, I remember carving our way through the cornfields of Iowa and knowing I'd been there before, not just as a small child, but always. As if the corn and the sky and the dairy cows and the puffy clouds were as much a part of me as the rain and evergreens and salt water of Seattle."
.........NoApologies


When I first read this, the concept of 'home' as the place my mother was two or so months before my birth sounded downright silly. When I got to the part where NoApologies wrote of her Iowa cornfield experience, I thought how similar to my own experiences when traveling back to my birthplace in Eastern Washington.

I was born a resident of Othello, WA, in 1934. My father was born three miles northwest of Othello. My grandfather was born forty miles east of Othello. And while I was actually born in the Deaconess Hospital in Spokane, Othello would have to qualify as my hometown. I moved to Puget Sound in 1952 and for the next 48 years made many trips back to central Washington to visit my parents and siblings. I always experienced these trips as follows:
From Bremerton, over Snoqualmie Pass, and down to the area of Cle Elum, I always felt antsy and/or stressed out .... to the point of developing chest pains. Near Cle Elum you pass a collapsing house and outbuildings (on the right) in a field dotted with a few evergreens. At this point I would feel a wave of relief ... "I'm going home" .... and any physical discomfort would melt away. Ellensburg brought even stronger feelings of ease. Ellensburg is where my folks did their monthly grocery shopping and where I had my tonsils out. Then over the sage covered mountains to Vantage on the Columbia River ... and crossing the bridge at Vantage was the final step. When I hit dirt on the east side of the river there was a total feeling of "I am home."

So the pregnant mother concept struck me as far too specific. Until I began to wonder Where do I feel most purely home? Definitely not in Othello or Royal City or even Smyrna. The place I feel most perfectly centered at 'home' is the spot pictured above. After I die, I would like to have my ashes put to the wind from this spot .... on the bluff looking east down on Morgan Lake and the stretch of shoreline that once held my great uncle Simon's homestead cabin -- where my Dad was born in 1909.

And here is how the silly pregnant mother concept holds true for me. During her pregnancy with me, my mother drove all the primitive roads in this immediate area, 'running' Dad's trap lines. Several times a week. This picture is Ground Zero of my whole body reaction to the word 'home'.

As to the "energy of the earth, the vibration of the place", I'm not so sure .... seems like New Age claptrap to me. BUT! I could be wrong. I have been wrong before. Is there some unique vibration or harmonic or frequency that emanates from the earth from discrete spot to discrete spot and leaves its 'fingerprint' on a developing embryo. Would this fall into the same catagory of inner radar that guides birds on their migrations or salmon on their run to spawn? Whatever is going on here, it is something that creates a strong feeling of being naturally linked to a specific place. NoApologie to the Iowa cornfields and FossilGuy to the Washington scablands. And these feelings are individual specific and not interchangeable.

Now the pregnant mother idea does not seem so silly.

One of my authorial icons has passed away ... Kurt Vonnegut at the age of eighty-four. In the '50's and early '60's, I was an avid sci-fi fan. In those days it was mainly the written word as opposed to TV or movies. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle was one of my first hardbound sci-fi books purchased. I still remember when Bookworm and I read his Slaughterhouse-Five in '69 or '70.

In the latter '70's, we became friends with his nephew Kit Vonnegut and Kit's wife Bernice. Kit and Bernice worked backstage on the first show that Bookworm directed at the Bremerton Community Theatre ... My Sister Eileen. If memory doesn't fail me (and it well may), daughter Erin also worked on that play and, I think, lived briefly with the Vonneguts before she removed to the Bellingham area.

In the Eastern Washington society that I grew up in, one did not have even once removed relationships with authors. Authors were some elevated and definitely invisible class of people who did not frequent the sagebrush steppes of the Columbia Basin. So it has been one of the surprises of my life to have brushed ever so slightly against against an author or two or three. Some of it Bookworm's doing and some of it not.

There was Frank Herbert, author of Dune, who we had come to the Unitarian Fellowship and address us. After the 'services' he and his kids stayed around and played volleyball with us. One of the kids grew up to author additional books of the Dune Series .... after Frank had unexpectedly passed away.

There were authors at Olympic College events, authors at Centrum, and poets at the dinner table. Not long after Bookworm and I became Margaret Atwood fans, Bookworm studied under her for a week at a Centrum Writer's Conference. Then Bookworm evolved into a yearly featured writing teacher at Centrum .... and Rattlesnake Hills and Jackson Hole and Quartz Mountain. And she began publishing short stories.

All very unexpected and wonderful. Made me feel like I'd moved up a rung or two in the American caste system. Nowadays Bookworm teaches journal writing from time to time here in our home. Where authors-in-the-making .... such as NoApologies and BrownShoes .... sometimes come to practice their craft.

Last and least there are the writing feats of FossilGuy:
In the mid-'60's there were eight-four weekly columns in the Royal City Capsule under the heading Sagebrush Sam Sez.
In 1966 and 1967, I did a number of columns, political cartoons, and a comic strip for The Central Kitsap Reporter (under the editorship of Carol Page).
I wrote a lot of rhyming poetry during those years. When Bookworm came along in 1967 and read it, it made her eyes cross and her throat choke off. Thus ended my rhyming poetry years.
I did later do some fine translations of Federico Garcia Lorca poems (to be found early on in the archives of this blog) .... and several of them were published in a short-lived literary magazine named Quicksilver.
My greatest publishing moment was not even literature. It was my extremely stodgy scientific 'paper' describing a new species of extinct American antelope that I helped dig up in Easyern Washington .... published in 1995 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

And now I write this blog. Speaking for myself, it would have been very crippling to spirit and life to have had to go through it without writing, without reading the writing of others, without marrying a writer, and without all those writers that I brushed ever so slightly against.

God bless the Word that does!

Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut for your part in all these memories.

Fox Island is in Puget Sound down in the area of Gig Harbor and Tacoma. We spent Easter Sunday there with the family of Bookworm's Uncle Lawrence and his children and his grandchildren and his great grandchildren. Allie was some disappointed that he was the only boy there .... two boys of his age were absent due to flu. But he had a great time despite that and conked out asleep on the backseat on our way home to Bremerton.

This whirley-gig quest to nail down my mesothelioma problem has been a big distraction from the flow of normal life around me, around my family, and around my friends. And my recent inability to really focus on these surrounding events has contributed to a feeling of being disconnected, of flapping in the wind. I'm understanding that a great deal of my identity comes to me through the external things I center my attention on. Being caught up in a self-centered event is very limiting .... and not very enjoyable.

I have noticed that life has gone on for others around me. Things I have let slip by without sufficient comment/response:
Bookworm's own health problems and on-going struggle with rampaging muscle spasms.
NoApology's and Ann's prospective new dog.
Dr. Bob's eye-lid lift.
Katie W's strange encounter with unemployment.
Erin's horror at watching Jessica make unplanned trips from horseback to ground.

I hope to be more attentive in the future. I think I have set my own shovel aside for the time being.

Bookworm, Allie and I spent Easter Sunday with Bookworm's Uncle Lawrence's family (at her cousin Sis's home on the shores of Fox Island). I took my usual crowd pleasing 'jalapeno pie'. Allie had a fine old time hunting easter eggs and squirting everyone with silly string (apparently a Greaves family tradition).

My next post will be a sampling of the photos I took at the Easter celebration.

FINALLY! --- today Bookworm and I kept our date with mesothelioma destiny .... to wit, we had our first meeting with an oncologist. The two month trek from internist to medical imaging to pulmonologist to thoracic surgeon to x-ray to oncologist has ground to an end. Partial full stop.

I suppose - with mesothelioma - it's good news when you find you still have the capacity to write about it. Bookworm and I were both at low ebb going into the doctor's office. We were expecting the news (info) to be Bad - Bad .... though we weren't quite communicating that harsh outlook to each other.

As it turned out the news was Bad - Hopeful. 'Bad' as in no cure. But we already knew that. 'Hopeful' as in there is a form of chemotherapy used to combat the aggressiveness of mesothelioma. 'Hopeful' in that my otherwise good health should ease me through the chemo (four to six treatments twenty-one days apart). 'Hopeful' in that he didn't feel there was a pressing need to start chemo until we see some further evidence that the cancer is behaving aggressively. AND, this kind of chemo does not make your hair fall out. Out damned vanity!

The Doc ventured that in all likelihood we would be able to put together several quality years for further aging. So maybe my string has not quite yet run out. I am feeling much encouraged this afternoon.

Photo by FossilGuy: Allie shoots Grandpa with 'canned string'. Easter 2007

I see Bookworm has been writing about fatigue. We've had guests for a week ... daughter Kelly for five days and daughter Erin and granddaughter Jessica for two days. While we have very much enjoyed these visits -- in this stressful time, having anyone about creates a state of alertness that is, in itself, tiring. In the past, I've always been able to forge right through this, but during this past week, I found myself saying "I'm just going to topple over on the couch here and rest my eyes a few minutes." And I'd wake up an hour or two later.

Michal D. fixed our leaky kitchen sink drain. Bill T. and his son Max are working on the new deck off our family room. Peggy D. came by with a pot of Mexican soup and helped Kay choose colors for our repainting of the downstairs rooms. Kelly bought me a new countertop stove for my birthday ... to be delivered and installed this coming Tuesday. Erin and Jessica turned to in the front yard and did some much needed plant/tree maintenance. And this coming Monday I'll finally see an actually oncologist .... and get some real info on what I'm facing here.

Life just rolls on, whether you're up to it or not.

It's 12:30 ... lunch is munched ... Kelly left a few minutes ago to return to SeaTac and California. Erin and Jessica are heading this way by car ... taking a 'backwoods' route through Shelton and Belfair ... planning to stay till Sunday morning. Workmen are in the backyard setting foundation blocks for a 14' by 20' deck we're having built. The sun is shining. It's almost possible to believe that Spring is here. Looking forward to seeing Jessica ... she was last here four months ago for Thanksgiving.

I (especially) am sorry to have to report that the cancer found in my biopsy of two weeks ago is mesothelioma, the asbestos related cancer type. The sugeon suggested that it might be more advanced than I would have thought. I suppose that is a roundabout way of saying 'It's got a good grip on you, fellow.' There is no cure, but there may be treatments that can slow down its advance. He said treatment would not make me better (i.e., as regards the shortness of breath that has slowed me in my tracks).

Next step is to see an oncologist and find out what the treatment options might be. That is scheduled for the 9th. In the meantime, I remain the same old Jim you've always known .... just moving around a lot less and a lot slower.

Daughter Kelly is here for a few days and yesterday she rose above the Curse of Otis and borrowed a neighbor's lawnmower and laboriously chewed up the hay field that was thriving in my yard.

This week the plane did not break down on the runway and Kelly did make it to our door. She and Bookworm have trundled off to the Unitarian Fellowship, then to turn in her rental car, then to go out to Sears and look for a new stove for my kitchen.

This morning she decided to upstage Otis by mowing my lawn. The first furrow in her brow occured when I turned the lawnmower on its side and began securing a partially loose mound of duct-tape to the mower housing with a roll of glass tape ... sort of like trying to hold a baling wire repair in place by the addition of Elmer's Glue. She yanked on the pull cord until she practically toppled over from exhaustion, but finally it started up and for the first time this year, gave out its full-throated Honda roar.

One fairly short pass through the tall, damp grass and the blade got jammed and killed the engine. So she emptied the catch basket and then gave the pull cord a jerk and WAHLAH!, the pull cord mechanism was locked up tighter'n a drum. Fah-rozen in place! Lawnmorium extincticus! The Curse of Otis had reached forth and strangled the useful life out of my equipment.

In all fairness to the fine old Honda lawnmower, it took good care of our lawn for the past eighteen years. I am not a proper hand at maintenance. I never did keep the underside of the mower housing clean, so after a dozen years, little holes began to rust through the metal. (Bring on the duct-tape!) AND, of course, that little hummer of an engine has never had an oil change OR any oil added. I did put a new blade on it once (by myself) .... because the old one was beginning to show considerable edge distortion from where I occasionally / regularly mowed a rock and/or rocks.

Now I really need to get on the stick about hiring Otis, or an Otis-clone, to get over here and get a lawn mowing contract under way. We are rapidly becoming an embarrassment to our neighborhood.