EXTREME IRONING
I spent most of yesterday in the hospital. I met with Dr Ready in Dana Farber Cancer Institute in the morning where he showed me the results of the CT Scan on the office monitor. It was fascinating. So much so that I seemed to be distracted from identifying with the leg on the screen. (Was this an episode of "House"?) I was able to clearly see the cancer tumor as well as where it had compromised the perimeter of my femur. There is no question that I need to have a titanium rod surgically installed into the core of the bone in order to reinforce my leg and avoid accidental fractures. Yeah.
This will be accomplished in a 1 1/2 hour operation next Wednesday afternoon. I expect to remain in the hospital for two-three days and then spend two weeks on crutches. After that, Dr Ready informed me, I should hopefully return to normal functioning. "Could we discuss 'hopefully'?" I asked the good doctor hopefully. He then reminded me that there are no guarantees. Damn! But of course the adult of me knows there aren't. For one thing, there are the creepy little cancer cells to deal with. The operation is fairly mechanical. Radiation is far more magical. I will require two weeks of outpatient spot radiation of my leg following the operation. As yet I don't know whether that will be done here or back in Florida. I prefer to go home but will gladly defer to the wisdom of my oncologist, Robert Schlossman and his Fellow, Elizabeth Trice. I find enormous comfort in knowing that these two brilliant doctors have my back!
Speaking of brilliant doctors, I request that before you go to sleep tonight you thank the Universe for all those nerdy little geeks in high school biology who have or will grow up to be fascinated by the study of blood and other such cancers. When I was first diagnosed I googled multiple myeloma and read about a quarter of what I found. I had two very profound reactions. The first was acute depression. The second was the astounding realization that although with some twenty years of formal education and possessing a fairly competent grasp of the English language, I understood virtually nothing of what I was reading. It was at that point that my heart filled with enormous gratitude that there were men and women who not only understood this complex data but delighted in the inquiry of it all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
All of this aside, there are two things of real importance that I learned yesterday. First, I am shrinking, for godsakes! The nurse measured me at 5'7 1/2". Appalled, I demanded a re-measure! This time I stood consciously erect. "Okay, 5'8","she announced. I have been 5'9 1/2" for over half a century before the myeloma got me and now: Look! Another existential choice: death by cancer or hanging out with Snow White!
The second important thing I learned when the Pre-Op nurse left the office and I distractedly observed the photo on her wall calendar. Disbelieving my eyes I went right up to it and saw that it indeed was a photo of a man in a suit ironing his suit jacket on a mountain peak in Austria. There was no logo or other identifying information to explain this inexplicable image. Curious, I began leafing through the images for the other months of the year. They all consisted of men ironing clothes in the most bizarre outdoor locations: amidst the crashing surf of Big Sur, atop various mountains, and the annual winner who ironed on a board attached to his waist as he hung from a zipline strung between two cliffs! Now I had to remove the calendar from the wall; and having done so, discovered on the back that someone in England invented the "sport" of Extreme Ironing in 1997! UmmHmm! That's right: Extreme Ironing.
Who knew?! I love discovering this kind of shit. It's one of the reasons why I love living so much, shrinking or not.
I spent most of yesterday in the hospital. I met with Dr Ready in Dana Farber Cancer Institute in the morning where he showed me the results of the CT Scan on the office monitor. It was fascinating. So much so that I seemed to be distracted from identifying with the leg on the screen. (Was this an episode of "House"?) I was able to clearly see the cancer tumor as well as where it had compromised the perimeter of my femur. There is no question that I need to have a titanium rod surgically installed into the core of the bone in order to reinforce my leg and avoid accidental fractures. Yeah.
This will be accomplished in a 1 1/2 hour operation next Wednesday afternoon. I expect to remain in the hospital for two-three days and then spend two weeks on crutches. After that, Dr Ready informed me, I should hopefully return to normal functioning. "Could we discuss 'hopefully'?" I asked the good doctor hopefully. He then reminded me that there are no guarantees. Damn! But of course the adult of me knows there aren't. For one thing, there are the creepy little cancer cells to deal with. The operation is fairly mechanical. Radiation is far more magical. I will require two weeks of outpatient spot radiation of my leg following the operation. As yet I don't know whether that will be done here or back in Florida. I prefer to go home but will gladly defer to the wisdom of my oncologist, Robert Schlossman and his Fellow, Elizabeth Trice. I find enormous comfort in knowing that these two brilliant doctors have my back!
Speaking of brilliant doctors, I request that before you go to sleep tonight you thank the Universe for all those nerdy little geeks in high school biology who have or will grow up to be fascinated by the study of blood and other such cancers. When I was first diagnosed I googled multiple myeloma and read about a quarter of what I found. I had two very profound reactions. The first was acute depression. The second was the astounding realization that although with some twenty years of formal education and possessing a fairly competent grasp of the English language, I understood virtually nothing of what I was reading. It was at that point that my heart filled with enormous gratitude that there were men and women who not only understood this complex data but delighted in the inquiry of it all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
All of this aside, there are two things of real importance that I learned yesterday. First, I am shrinking, for godsakes! The nurse measured me at 5'7 1/2". Appalled, I demanded a re-measure! This time I stood consciously erect. "Okay, 5'8","she announced. I have been 5'9 1/2" for over half a century before the myeloma got me and now: Look! Another existential choice: death by cancer or hanging out with Snow White!
The second important thing I learned when the Pre-Op nurse left the office and I distractedly observed the photo on her wall calendar. Disbelieving my eyes I went right up to it and saw that it indeed was a photo of a man in a suit ironing his suit jacket on a mountain peak in Austria. There was no logo or other identifying information to explain this inexplicable image. Curious, I began leafing through the images for the other months of the year. They all consisted of men ironing clothes in the most bizarre outdoor locations: amidst the crashing surf of Big Sur, atop various mountains, and the annual winner who ironed on a board attached to his waist as he hung from a zipline strung between two cliffs! Now I had to remove the calendar from the wall; and having done so, discovered on the back that someone in England invented the "sport" of Extreme Ironing in 1997! UmmHmm! That's right: Extreme Ironing.
Who knew?! I love discovering this kind of shit. It's one of the reasons why I love living so much, shrinking or not.
1 comment:
Re: your Friday blog entry and not understanding what you read in scientific papers... Despite that this story involves a funeral, it was hilarious at the time.
Years ago, my friend, Jennifer, a poet, told me she had once tried reading a paper by her partner, Cecile, a microbiologist. Jennifer said the only words she understood were the conjunctions.
A few years ago, Jennifer's partner died, very prematurely. I was at the funeral, in Baltimore, where one of Cecile's mentors, a Nobel laureate, gave a eulogy. He described some very complicated experiment Cecile had designed as a graduate student -- it was full of jargon and arcane names of very obscure molecular constructs and it went on and on and on and on. I was having Jennifer's experience: the only intelligible words were the conjunctions. The church was filled and at a certain point in the middle of this talk, people (the non-scientists) started turning to one another and giggling. The situation was so preposterous that it was hilarious. Just as quiet giggling started to spread, the speaker read his last unintelligible sentence with what sounded to us like a complete non sequitur, "...and that's when I fell in love with Cecile!"
Jennifer herself got up to speak next and, sharing the story of her reading a paper of Cecile's and only understanding the conjunctions, she said, "I feel like I just watched a Japanese movie with German subtitles."
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