Culinary baptism by fire…

Marshal Dillon kept the peace.

We picked up one more straggler for the trek into the Bridger: Ellen.  Her ticket is already in hand and there’s no disguising how much I look forward to her joining our little band of hikers.   She’ll be a good addition although she’s already reminded me yet again that she doesn’t eat red meat (like we were going to tote steaks around) and she’s about to get a culinary baptism by fire with camp cooking.  She also professes to not like fish, but if she’s hungry enough, she’ll warm up to roasted trout sprinkled with lemon pepper soon enough.  Assuming we catch any.

————–

June 27, 2011

Ellen/Reid: What is worth looking forward to this week is a short Friday.  My boys Tom, Mike and Todd are planning a grudge match at some local course on Friday afternoon.  They all have high pressure 24/7 jobs at the bank and they are really looking forward to getting the three day weekend off with a bang.  Of course, it will be at my expense since those thieves demand strokes.  Not that your inheritance is at risk but I’ll need to keep my hands on my wallet at all times.  It is near criminal.

Got a pretty clean bill of health from my four month checkup on Wednesday.  The doctor is on one hand a no-nonsense guy in that it is all about data/results, but he shows his softer side, too from time to time.  I go back in September and that will be the real litmus test.  He took me off guard by saying that everything has yet to heal fully and by September it should be all buttoned up, so to speak.   His assistant paints something of another picture.  There’s this troublesome diverticulum (kind of a large balloon or bulge) on the bladder which creates what is essentially an unintended reservoir.  That’s why things don’t empty as they should.  The thinking of the assistant is that this creates a long-term set of problems (infections, etc.) if not corrected.  It doesn’t have to be right now but it’s a strong point of consideration.  Not real invasive surgery, but they go in and cut out this protrusion and sew the hole in the bladder shut.  It would put me down for up to two weeks with another 30 with “no lifting or straining.”  Literally, we were talking a January timeframe (so as to miss the least amount of golf and riding) when the doctor came in.  He immediately nixed those plans.  His reasoning is since I feel good and all the numbers point to things being mostly okay, he doesn’t want to operate in the absence of symptoms.  He reserved the right to change his mind when the September results are in.  I’m not opposed to the knife although he cautioned that every surgery has its risks.  So we’ll see.  But I feel good as of this writing.

Felicia came through her melanoma surgery in fine shape.  Basically, they carved out a chunk of her left calf and sewed it up nice and snug.  The assumption is they send the tissue to pathology to check it out, and no word so far on the results.  She was hobbling around like Festus on Gunsmoke and I had to ride her about just taking things easy for a while.  If it were me, I would’ve milked her nursing for everything I could get.  But she’s headstrong and she was doing it her way.  There are no stitches per se.  They glued the wound (can you really glue human skin?) and then did some other kind of non-stitch thingies and kept it together.  It will be interesting to see how it all looks once the bandage is removed and the non-stitch thingies go away.  It’s good they moved up the surgery a week or so because that gives her more time to heal before we head to the Bridger.

Enough health morbidity.  Apparently they no longer manufacture the tent pegs I want.  That, or people simply buy them out.  I’ve been to REI and another couple of stores more than once and everyone is flat out of good tent pegs.  This weekend we resolve to fire up the MSR stove and fumble our way around erecting the Mountain Hardware tent so we’ll know what we’re doing when the time comes.  I’ve put up a tent in heavy, wet snowfall before and it’s no fun and that’s no time to figure out how to erect a tent for the first time.  The menu is beginning to take shape although I am all ears when it comes to innovative breakfasts as long as it does not involve freeze dried food.  No doubt it will be the traditional instant oatmeal and whatever additives come to mind.  I just hope the weather is decent and we can have fires.  People are relatively outraged that there will be no smores or other fresh foods available.  What keeps coming to mind for me is: bears.

Well, off to the races (as in rat races).  Be good, stay cool and have fun.

Invincibility takes a hit…

This has nothing to do with today's post, but I'll keep reminding Ellen and Reid they need to take an interest in the natural world. My new blue bird house - unoccupied as of yet - is one such reminder.

There must come a point in everyone’s life when the notion of invincibility takes a hit, when mortality takes on personal meaning.  For me, that point is right now.  Not to be morbid about it, but it does give one pause.

Someone suggested if now was the time to let Ellen and Reid in on the the reality of being a post-middle age dad.  It is a fair assumption that kids tend to see their parents as forever beings.  I did, but as we all know the outcome is not a matter of if, but when.

So today’s letter you will see next week might be something of an intro to a larger conversation between the three of us.  We can’t run from the future but only toward it, and we might as well recognize there are indisputable facts of life in motion for all of us.  I don’t see this, however, as some omnipresent dark cloud over the letters; in fact it will be far from it.  It is just simple recognition that it is just the way things are.

—————–

February 14, 2011

Ellen/Reid: They say every day above ground is a good one and I am now a true believer.  What a hell of a birthday.  One moment I’m working out in the gym and feeling good and three hours later I’m in a hospital gown with a catheter shoved up my you-know-what.

I’m not sore at all but am really just out of gas. Haven’t dipped into the pain meds they gave me. Tried to work at the kitchen table but ran out of steam.  I’ll get back to it in pretty short order.

All things considered, I’m really lucky.  By sheer luck, I was the only patient in the normally packed urologist’s office because he was doing surgery.  So I got instantly into a room, and again by sheer luck, he was just returning to the office.  Once he saw my urine sample, he and his staff pulled out all the stops.  They quickly put in the catheter and in an incredible sign of how urgent this was, he personally drove me the few blocks to the hospital.  He described the possibilities for the source(s) of the bleeding, and the outcomes if it went unchecked, in terms that just stunned me.  I wasn’t so much scared as just wondering ‘what the hell is going on here?’  His staff had already admitted me on an emergency basis and I went straight to the urology floor where they started to irrigate my bladder with what’s called a Murphy drip.  They were trying to flush the blood or clots out, and that was what they did for the next 54 hours or so.  It was sheer torture.  If the path of exit was impeded by clots, which it was frequently, the saline solution would accumulate in my bladder and make my stomach puff up.  The nurses couldn’t respond quick enough to my pleas for relief, so it was up to me to relieve myself as best I could.  You’ll be spared those details but it was awful.  It was really good to have Felicia there because she understood the medical lingo (she’s a nurse) and was able to goad the nurses into action.  She was there almost every minute.  I was really glad to get your persistent text messages.

The surgery depended on the doctor’s schedule.  That was the worst part, waiting for him to go inside to explore the source of the bleeding, given his blunt predictions of the source.  There was one good bit of news in that the CT scan didn’t show any overt tumors or cancers.  In a nutshell, my bladder had worked overtime for some time to unsuccessfully, and fully, drain itself, in part impeded by an uncooperative prostate.  This in turn put pressure on the bladder walls and adjoining kidneys.  But it was the bleeding that had to be stopped and since the bladder was filled with blood it obstructed the view of the source which could have been anything.

The surgery was supposed to be Thursday mid-morning but it didn’t go down until the afternoon.  He went into the bladder, removed the clots, and then he proceeded to “roto root,” or resection, my prostate to create an easier path for the urethra to drain the bladder.  He said he talked to me in recovery but I don’t remember a thing after telling the anesthesiologist “I can feel it working…”  In the space of his 120 second visit Friday morning, he said he reserved the right to go back in to the bladder if things didn’t clear up to the degree he liked.

But I’m home now and still feeling okay.  Felicia played nursemaid the entire weekend.  I’m up and around a little bit, checking in on e-mails at work, trying to be marginally productive.  It’s weird in that I can go from a workout to being told no exertion for six to eight weeks.  No golf (no biggie) and no bike riding (biggie).  But I’m damned lucky in a lot of ways, and like they say about soldiers in the midst of war, even atheists find God in a foxhole.  He and I had our share of short conversations.  No doubt there will be a few more to come.