What Support Is

More than any other post I've written I thought and stressed about that last one.  I asked C if I was over-sharing (a few times), and she suggested that I might relax about the whole blog thing and to not over-share worrying about it.  That people would be supportive and would be interested in knowing and so on and of course she was right.

In the twelve years or so 'AK' (after kidney? I'm experimenting) I've been overwhelmingly supported in lovely, pragmatic, real and non-pitying ways.  I remember thinking that the initial attention and support (both welcome and uncomfortable) would wane just in time for me to lose direction or fall apart entirely.  Not the case.  I suffered my quarter life crisis like everyone else and adjusted to the new post-undergrad world in quiet, nondescript ways.  Without fail folks have been available to me in just the way I would have wanted and have tried to be available myself.  I did not become 'that guy who had the kidney transplant' except to save distant acquaintances who lacked better conversation topics - and really, health is as good a conversation topic as any, if a little premature for people my age.

But to this day I struggle to talk about this or that issue being hard or troubling.  It has been tricky to self-advocate when my emotional well-being is at stake.  On matters of health I have been a vociferous advocate for myself; I ask questions, make suggestions and have filed complaints.  I consider myself a great patient, I try to have a sense of humor, to be light hearted, to be empathetic to my caregivers - but I am not shy about pointing out when something is wrong.  But so long as everything is going 'right,' I struggle to bring myself to talk about how uncomfortable or painful a procedure was, or how lonely it can be in a hospital.  In fact part of what made me feel like a great patient was that I did not talk about (I have to force myself to not use 'complain') how I have struggled.

Good nurses ask me how I'm doing - they know how I'm doing, they are just giving me an opportunity to share it - and I say I'm doing fine with a smile.  And they smile.  And for a bit there it is fine, just two folks bumping into each other, saying hello.  There is so much reenforcement for putting on a brave face, I was commended over and over for handing everything so well.  Largely I think I did handle it well.  And I believe my positive attitude helped me through the tough spots.  The tough spots I remember are a limited bunch amid a wide range of clinic visits, procedures, and major life adjustments.  I feel like I've navigated this experience well.  Yet the flotsam remains, and no one is a rock.  Or an island or whatever.  Porcupine.  So given this history of supportive friends and family and a good attitude welcomed by my caregivers, why have been I so reluctant to delve into the story in more than cursory ways?

Geez that's a big question.  Maybe it's time for a little tangent.  I mentioned the numbers game yesterday - that the thing to do now was wait for lab results and take it from there.  I had a dream this morning that I got a call from someone named Kevin at the clinic who told me, with evident relief, that my numbers were down to 1.95 and asked jokingly what I was doing with those numbers.  You silly man! What are you doing with your numbers!  Goodbye Kevins!  Then I was in the basement of my childhood home with life-sized pictures of underwear models from department store ads ....

No, I can't do this topic justice.  Not yet at least.  If six fig newtons can't get me there nothing can.  Too many gender rules, too much family history - it would take more therapy than I can afford right now.  Perhaps its enough to say that accepting support is what I am working on right now, and it is no small task - even in relation to the thing I am receiving support for.  I have survived this ordeal so far, and with some grace.  It is complicated and difficult to be vulnerable.  Publishing that last post, and now this one, brings me closer to the heart of this experience as much or more so than waiting for lab numbers.  Which by the way remain forthcoming.  I guess I'm saying that for me the lab numbers are secondary to my sharing the story.  The numbers will be what they will be and my next few weeks or months will play out accordingly - there is little I can do to affect that.  My struggle is to remain small and vulnerable in the face of this.  Like the last fig newton.

Thanks for reading!  

Once upon a time ...

For most of the last year I have anticipated sitting down to develop my experiences abroad into something deeper and touching more upon, with the benefit of hindsight, my emotional states at the time.  India in particular unsettled me deeply and I have struggled to find the language to express how it left me when I left it in the spring of 2010.  However, the direction of the next few threads will concern another facet of my life; one somewhat related to my Indian experience.  Almost twelve years ago, in August of 2001, I was diagnosed with kidney failure.  The first two years were a wild ride, comparable in a number of ways with my experience in India - it was a paradox of the intense and the ordinary, being hungry without being sated, and interminable in that instantaneous way - an off year of life.

Then from 2003 on my life returned to its normal trajectory - I started a career teaching, I lived in a few apartments before buying the duplex where I currently live, and as you all know I traveled enviably, extensively.  Thanks to the generosity of my uncle Bruce and many many others, my life was barely compromised by my chronic illness.  Like India, the period of my early twenties feels comfortably distant, dim on my horizon.  

Yet while I can choose to avoid the subcontinent in my future, my transplanted kidney function will most likely slow, and at some point it will need to be removed, setting in motion the same machinations that interrupted my senior year of college.  No one can say when that might happen - there are few people in my situation who might serve as guides, I am otherwise healthy - there was no known cause for my illness, and I am very young relative to most people with kidney failure.  I have labs done every few months to keep an eye on my blood levels.  With a few small adjustments, I have been on the same course for nine years.  Recently, however, my numbers have started to creep, and labs done last week indicate that there might be something wrong.  

There are so many aspects to these stories that I have not told - so many of my thoughts and feelings.  It is difficult to create a linear narrative.  This was my initial hope with this blog- to suss out the untold details and meta-narratives of my world travels; how the music I listened to in different countries remains locked there - lilacs, perfume or that smell in an old brick building - I turned on Beach House to sit down now and my mind keeps playing images from Morocco.  Morocco feels as distant to me as it must to you until this music starts and slam I am on a bus, climbing a hill, lonely and scared, clinging to the English speaking travelers I met.  

I had labs done today to double check the results from last week.  Leaving the clinic I called C and opened a bit in the car.  I flashed back to a number of episodes that continue to resonate in my memory - experiences impossible to relate.  Flashes of being in a dialysis center, of outpatient procedures, of doctors and nurses, 9/11, coffee shops - all neatly associated with this pervasive facet of myself that has been dormant.  I had not yet written about India because I knew it would be right there waiting for me.  I knew that time would not dim what I had experienced there.  Even so, I underestimated how close these 'kidney' experiences were to me.  

I have not talked about almost any of this publicly for reasons that are difficult to explain or understand myself.  I often think that I do not want to complain or sound whiny, but it also feels private to me, like a secret weapon almost.  Certainly some psycho-babble could explain a lot of this.  Even what I wrote so far has felt intimate.  

The labs look at a few indicators of kidney performance, most importantly creatinine.  Creatinine is exclusively cleared by the kidneys and thus is a useful indicator of kidney function, and it was my creatinine levels that have recently caused alarm and raised this blog post.  

A 'normal' creatinine is 1.0 - mine had floated around 1.5 - 1.7 for years.  When I returned from traveling, the number drifted up to around 1.9 - or roughly 50% of healthy kidney function.  In the last few weeks it spiked at 2.1 and then last week at 2.35.  That is a pretty high number, and the clinic responded by scheduling a biopsy for next Tuesday, pending similar labs drawn today.  

So that's where we sit today - wait for the numbers.  It's possible the numbers will adjust and we will be back to normal and wiping the sweat from our brows in relief.  Yet I must confess that this most recent health incident is weighing heavily on me.  The world shifts slightly on its axis with a potential adjustment like this on the horizon and I'm not terribly hopeful about it.  

This afternoon, however, it is summer.  Tony and I posted quite well in another Urban Assault, 5th overall this time.  C and I are planning on burgers, wine and backgammon tonight.  And I'm thinking about buying a new bike!  All very exciting things going on, and now time for an afternoon nap.  

Thanks for reading!  

Urban Assault!

Sunday morning Tony Liuzzi and I met at Peace Coffee in Minneapolis for the annual Urban Assault race. The aggression in the name is misleading - this is mostly about a bunch of bikers getting together for what they call the nation's largest bicycle scavenger hunt.  It is an alley cat race, which means that there isn't a specific route - riders are requested to keep legal but are left to their own devices for navigation.  We were given five locations in advance, a clue to the sixth, and instructions that we would get a clue to the seventh at the sixth stop.  The race had about 350 teams competing, and Tony and I had jokingly given ourselves about a two - two and a half percent chance of winning.  To spur us along, C had raced it last year and placed first in the women's division - I was hoping for top twenty-five percent to be honest; I had a cold and am not in great biking shape.

Having meticulously planned out our route, Tony mentioned the morning of the race that he had heard that lines had slowed racers down in the past and that last year's winners had gone the opposite direction and won.  Our route - the logical route - put us at the 'mystery stop' first, where we would get our final clue.  This gave us the widest latitude location wise - there was little risk of needing to backtrack if we were just starting.  Going the opposite way, we were banking that the stop would be in south MPLS, given the density of stops north of 94.  We hit the trail hard, almost the first ones out of the chute.  We were shortly on the west side of Hiawatha with no one behind us - seemingly everyone else went the other way.  We crossed 55 on the pedestrian bridge at 24th, and saw that several other racers had the same idea we did and had caught the light at 28th where we started.  Slightly discouraged so early in the race, we stuck with our plan - duck off the Hiawatha trail at the Franklin Light Rail station and head to Midwest Mountaineering via Cedar.  This was the first of two decisions that put us in the lead - we were the first to our first task - assembling blocks to form the Clif Bar logo.

From there the course was fairly quiet until we got to Theo Wirth, where we started meeting traffic coming the other way round.  At the Walker, our next stop, we were stopped by lines.  For me this was lucky - I had felt the cold I have been carrying around (thank you high schoolers) the entire race, and the stretch from Theo Wirth to the Walker (a savvy one where we picked up some time) had been tough on me and I was winded.  I sling-shot a pair of shoes into Tony's basket and we were on our way to Loring, where we hoped fervently that we would not be sent back North.

The clue, as we had heard, was a photo of a place.  While Tony checked about the rules (we had to deliver a Jack Link jerky wrapper), I saw the photo - it might have been my own house.  It was the Birchwood; not only my neighborhood cafe, but practically my second home for years now.  Tony and I zipped off to make the checkpoint, along with our final stop; the Cardinal bar on 38th and Hiawatha.

We were pretty optimistic at this point - there were not many people ahead of us that we knew of, though of course we could have missed people going the other way round.  We passed two teams going the other direction on Haiwatha, made the stop and headed back.

In the end we finished very well - 6th place overall!  I've actually checked the Urban Assault website a few times to make sure it is real (it is here if you want to see it).  I'm hoping Tony and I will have some fun photos from some of the stops - we made a good team.

It was hot on race day (9/11) and it was hot yesterday (9/12).  But TODAY.  My GOODness.  It is fall, suddenly and magnificently.  Last night I stood in the street for a time with the wind blow from the west and feeling the weather change.  Finally biking to school does not reduce me to a pile of sweat.  Finally it is just a little bit cold when I wake up in the morning.  I can enter the world, rather than waking up to that atmospheric void where the air feels like an extension of my skin and there is nothing between my soul and the lack of a breeze.  It is a much better feeling to encounter a chill in the air - to bike into warmth, up from the river.  The leave are just starting to think about shifting; last week walking home at night I smelled that first hint of fall in the sweet rotting smell of the leaves on the ground.  That smell holds so much promise for me.  Fall is a portentous time - Halloween, harvest - it feels much more like a beginning than a new year.  Maybe that's because I've been on an academic calendar almost my entire life.  Anyway, it is about to be a very beautiful time in the Twin Cities - I am sad that once again I will see October without C, but she will be back here soon enough.  Thanks for reading!

And The Stages After That ...

The summer having passed with considerable incident, only in the past few days finding my toes in the normal puddle, tonight awakened me to a long dormant desire to write, to account in public for the happenstance of my life.  Tonight two entirely incidental decisions aligned something - tapped into something, and my not being a terribly spiritual man, I am at something of a stubborn loss.  Anyway, here they are.

This weekend is my first weekend off of school (as in a break from teaching) since traveling - it is my full return to my life.  This weekend my brother celebrated his union with Lara, his Sufi spouse and mother of his impending daughter.  This weekend landed in my life with emphasis and seemed to converge upon me from several angles, these finding their homes in me tonight.

Tonight I decided, after a lovely brunch with our now merged families, to take a stab at grading papers.  I walked to Tracy's of all places as I knew I would not be distracted by acquaintances or tempted by Birchwood deserts (these being the fruits of my return home).  Rather I ordered a burger and a Surly Cynic - pretty much exactly what I would have used three wishes for when traveling.  I walked to Tracy's and noticed a bookstore (where 'Arise' used to be, off Franklin) and stopped in to pick up the book club book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes."  One of the two people working asked after my reasons for buying that - I mentioned the book club, she sd that her book club "Former Fundamentalists" just read that.  Well that lead to an interesting conversation.  While they did not have the book, they did have volunteer opportunities (they are entirely volunteer run) to work the shop and deliver books by bicycle.  Whell.  That was up my alley so I signed up - I have been for some time hoping to find a position to work part time in addition to teaching - a sort of second career - working in a bookstore would not be a bad place to start.

So that settled, I sat myself down in Tracy's to my Cynic and burger and graded about 80 Sophomore papers.  The burger was good (with tater tots) and the beer was spot on.  As I was wrapping up, I noticed two people across the room get two tequila shots at their table (this generally does not escape notice) - one exclaimed that she had forgotten how much bigger shots were in the states.  "In the states ..."

Bob and I had breakfast at the Highland Grill a week ago - he was in town with Adina and their lovely kids Kian and Iulia.  I chatted with a fella sitting behind me who PAID FOR OUR BREAKFAST because I taught at CDH, where he had attended some years ago.  This favor has sat somewhat elevated in my consciousness since then.  I gathered my things and paid for their drinks along with my own and headed on my way.

On my way home, I decided to walk down 24th rather than 22nd as I usually do.  At 22nd and 30th, I heard zydeco music, unmistakable.  I turned the corner and listened as this group of musicians sang and played in the back porch of the host of this magical looking party.  I watched for a while, a couple approached from the other direction and went in through the gate, a path I was tempted on myself but for my shyness, and I waited for their next song.  I stood for a while listening; they were excellent musicians, and then I went on my way home.  I had however become resolved (and not for the first time) to purchase a Clarinet and teach myself to play it.  An adventure from my living room.  A foray back into music.  And besides, I told Ben Tierney I would pay for his sailboat if I failed to get one.

It has not been a neutral summer, nor a neutral past year, and my feelings and self have not gone unmolested by the trip or my return to Minnesota.  I have wrestled with continuing to write in this blog.  Until tonight I have not felt compelled to do so - and being compelled is a pretty solid reason to get back into it.  I have struggled to explain what it has felt like, being back, or traveling itself, and I wonder if this is the way to process it.  Every time I talk about it I bring myself a little closer to understanding it myself, and even out of the way questions such as 'what was it like' draw me out.  Tonight I found myself with too much thought, memories too emotionally clear to not share them and I moved slowly away from my opportunities to do so; at my parent's house, at the bookstore, and Tracy's, from the party on 24th.  I toyed momentarily with breaking off my shyness and asking for my entry into the party, but I remembered this forum, this venue for my overflown thoughts.  I knew that if I went inside I would spend some of those thoughts and I would not have enough for this entry.  Maybe it is C being once again out of my immediate reach; I am at a loss without her ear sometimes.  I cannot speak to any regularity here, but I have heard often enough kind words about reading my entries to encourage me to overcome my anxiety of hubris and toss a few more entries on the wall.  Let's see if it sticks.  Thanks for reading.  

The Final Stages

Poland and a few final days in Stockholm wrapped up my seven month excursion abroad.  It was a gentle conclusion to what has been at times a tumultuous journey.  As promised, here are Torun and Gdansk, our last stops on our Spring Break '11 tour.  I'll throw in a few stories and images from Stockholm for good measure.

Torun was another lovely Polish town - like Krakow it's entire old city area is a UNESCO heritage site, and deservedly so.  C and I spent most of our time wandering around - we did visit the Copernicus museum (which was essentially his family home with some copies of artifacts in it) and sampled some Polish honey beer and wine at a farmer's market.  But mostly we enjoyed the slow pace of the town.  Here are some photos:

The waterfront - not quite as nice as Krakow

The streets of Torun

A bloomin tree!

A dog cooling it on a door mantle

Gdansk was an even more abbreviated stay than Torun - just an afternoon, but we still managed to enjoy the city a great deal AND almost miss our flight out (even having arrived C early - which is earlier than Kevin early).  Gdansk was just as picturesque (seemed like all of Poland was picturesque) as Torun and Krakow.  It also had a waterfront and many beautiful churches.  We stopped into one massive church on Saturday evening after dinner and stumbled upon the Easter Vigil mass!  We walked in early and were able to watch the candle lighting ceremony (I could make out the 'Alpha and Omega' but not much else - though I did recognize the tune of the song they sang as they processed up) which was lovely.  The church was magnificent - I did not get any photos of the inside, but you could look at any of the other images I have posted and you would get the idea.  This one had been hit by the reformation and was a little white-washed, but still arresting and beautiful.  Here are a few images of Gdansk:

Train station - picturesque no?

A very neat building next to a stream

Iconic Gdansk waterfront

A street in the old town

Our trip out of Gdansk, as I mentioned, was not devoid of some unintended action sequences.  We flew Wizz-Air, as I think I mentioned, who required us to drop our one bag and make our way to the gate fussing and worrying over the dimensions of our carry-ons (C's being on the oversize, I encouraged her to avoid the check-in lady - the source of our later woes).  We got to our gate area (we were told gate 6 or 7) and cooled our heels a moment or twenty, and watched the stewards approach the gate area and the people get restless - we decided to jump the line and both were among the first through the gate (seat yourself on the low-cost carriers).  This was fortunate, because as I was told 'wrong flight,' C was told that she needed to have her boarding pass checked against her passport by a check-in official - on the other side of security.  Our real line was forming at this point, I hop into it, suggest that C might not actually need to go all the way back (she finds that she does) and hold our position.  We have a 1/2 till the flight goes, plenty of time.  To be on the safe side I brainstorm and begin rehearsing various stalling methods to have them hold the gate for her.  She was back in 10 minutes - record time, having negotiated with the info people (the check-in counter being closed).  And we boarded and sighed our way back to Stockholm.  To the best of my knowledge, this passport check system involved the check-in person seeing her passport, stamping it, and sending her through the gate.  Of course, the check-in people are the same people at the gate, the same people on the flight.  Ordinary airline workers - not security, not officials.  WTF say I.

Anyway - we enjoyed a few days in Stockholm in lovely weather.  We saw the 17th century ship Vasa on a cloudy day, had coffee, relaxed.  Here are some final Stockholm photos:

Tulips!  

Nelson and Mel preparing us an Easter dinner!  Note the tequila sunrises (picturesque no?)

C in a diving bell (in the running for my favorite image of the trip)

The Vasa

more info here

Mel, me, Nelson and Kyle saying ttfn

C arranged a goodbye evening in a Stockholm blues bar

The next day I got my things packed up and headed home.  I've been in town for a few days, working on getting my bearings (and my luggage).  I am sorting out stories and emotions and will continue to post reflections here.  Thanks for reading!