Identity and Time

I’ve noticed that my memory is divided into epochs divided by the significant changes in my life.  I first noticed this in college, when I had much more clear memories of my junior and senior years of school then my freshman and sophomore years. I realized that between my 10^th and 11^th grades I shifted as a person – becoming more confident and self-aware. The ‘me’ who was looking at the world was different, so the memories of the new me were much more ready-to-hand than the memories of the older me. I believe my life shifted again in my mid-twenties as a response to my kidney failure, and again when I fell in love with and made a life with C (where I’m writing from now). If I assume an infant/child stage, I am currently on my 5^th self, living my 5^th life.

Today I made the delightful discovery that I’m not the only person who sees things this way. My new favorite website, www.brainpickings.org, featured an article on a new book by Claudia Hammond called ‘Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception.” The article, by Maria Popova, explains the idea of a ‘reminiscence bump:’

Most fascinating of all, however, is the reason the “reminiscence bump” happens in the first place: Hammond argues that because memory and identity are so closely intertwined, it is in those formative years, when we’re constructing our identity and finding our place in the world, that our memory latches onto particularly vivid details in order to use them later in reinforcing that identity. Interestingly, Hammond points out, people who undergo a major transformation of identity later in life — say, changing careers or coming out — tend to experience a second identity bump, which helps them reconcile and consolidate their new identity.

This certainly feels like how I have experienced time and identity, though elocuted more impressively.

I expect (and hope I think) to have a few more of these epochs in my life. I expect they will coincide with the big moments of parenting, maybe retirement, deaths births etc. In the mean time, my life seems to be primarily punctuated with surgeries and hospital stays. It’s telling that the surgeries unto themselves do not constitute major life events. My surgery next week, for example, will likely, hopefully, not stand as a milestone. I have been eager to have that kidney out, and when I found I had to have it out the date felt far far away (two months, ha). As the time neared my eagerness turned to anticipation and then to some apprehension as it became more real. Suddenly the surgery is next week (suddenly, ha).

I’m not nervous and anything going wrong. I am nervous about what they will find (still hoping, in spite of my better reckoning of hope), and a bit nervous about what it will feel like. I find that what I choose to share with people reveals how I actually feel about it, and I’ve been talking about the pain. The recovery is supposed to be quite painful, and for a while I was curious as to what ‘quite painful’ would be like. I’ve experienced lots of things, though my surgeries were never very painful (I never took pain killers, for example). I know well what it is like to be physically uncomfortable and I expect the pain to be something like that. I can accommodate some pain; discomfort must be endured.

I think I’ll save further reflections on the surgery for another entry. Thanks for reading!

I Finally Felt The Thing Everyone Says And It Didn’t Feel Good

I should start with this – never, that I can remember, have I been bitter, resentful or angry about any of the health crises that I have experienced (I wrote ‘that have happened to me, but that didn’t feel right). I have gone so far as to say that I would rather this or that thing not have happened, kind of in the same way I might say that I’d rather it not be raining. My kidney failure and subsequent adventures have not felt more or less than the trials that everyone experiences at some point in their lives. I believe that we are all tested and prodded by life in uncomfortable and unpredictable ways.

I’m not claiming any kind of hero status (see previous post). There are moments for me that are more difficult than others, and times when I recognize that the specific moments of my life are fairly unique to me, and that I am afforded a certain deference for my body. That being said, I have yet to meet someone with whom I would trade maladies.

In my life I have heard from people, almost from day one of the kidney times, that I’m too young for this to happen to me. That is it unfair that I have to face this, that I don’t deserve this. I understand that saying ‘you’re too young’ is a form of sympathy. It can be a way of people saying I’m sorry that this happened to you. At the same time it feels as though these expressions are appealing to a greater order in the world. In the movie ‘50/50’ (which is fabulous), Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character is diagnosed with cancer. He is shocked, claiming his healthy lifestyle - ‘I don’t smoke, I exercise, I eat well … I recycle …’  It was a pointed joke - as though we can somehow inoculate ourselves against these random and painful crises.  

As you know the past few months have been a difficult time for me, health-wise. This week I’m trying to schedule the surgery to have one of my native kidneys taken out. I’m trying to miss the least amount of class time at school, and to have it as soon as possible. The mass in the kidney is likely renal cell carcinoma, which is a particularly nasty cancer. It is well contained, but still – it feels like I have a time bomb in my back. One doctor is saying to wait three months because of the blood clot, and that the clot is already resolved. I’m trying to have it a bit sooner – two or two and a half months. Scheduling this is a headache. [UPDATE: As of yesterday the surgery is scheduled for January 22^nd! Which is good – get it over with.]

Yesterday, carrying these decisions and stress, for the very first time, I entertained the thought that maybe I AM too young for all this to have happened. That I deserve a life without the constant overhanging stress of when I will be in the hospital next, or when I will need to deal with another unforeseen side-effect. Why did this have to happen to me?

These thoughts were immediately followed by the humility they call for – what do I ‘deserve’ from life? What does life owe me? Is there a contract somewhere that promises a smooth ride, with a few bumps when we are seasoned enough to weather them? This is clearly not how life works. Worse – as I thought about the phantom life I could be leading, my feelings were not hopeful or energized. I felt bitter and angry, resentful of the people around me who supposedly lead ‘easier’ lives. That’s not me. I am not those feelings.

I am not owed anything from the world – there’s no contract, no guarantee.  Tragedy does not live elsewhere, where it is distant and tolerated and accepted as a balance for the cosmos. I am not too young for the unique experiences of my life.

I don’t believe that any of us are protected by anything at all – that we are all an accident or circumstance away from crisis, and this is invigorating for me (perhaps because I have been through it). This makes the highs a bit higher and the lows a bit lower. It helps me to pause and enjoy the world around me. I don’t want to live in a world with bumpers. The fragility of life makes it precious. 

Thanks for reading!

A Story of Sickness and Personhood

Hey folks - long time no post! I'm going to post a short series of stories and reflections about my health journey, and I thought I'd start with an essay I wrote from last spring. I was taking a class on teaching writing and learned some things that helped me jump start the telling of my own story. I changed it a bit to tamp down some of the academics. Thanks for reading!

A Story of Sickness and Personhood

I share stories with my students. Often the stories are personal. I share them for a number of reasons; to pass time, to further endear the students to me, to give everyone a break from our academic work, and to assert an argument – generally in favor of living life a bit more recklessly than they are encouraged to live. I also tell stories about myself because by telling the stories I’m able to take hold of a human element within myself that becomes obscured in the slog of high school. I’ve told stories about my travels, about particularly eventful times with my friends, about touching or edifying moments in my romantic relationships. However, what might be my most powerful, most human and edifying story of all rarely makes it into my classroom. In fact, it has barely entered my writing of any kind. Even describing it here requires language I don’t feel is available to me. How do I begin? – the events do not occur to me chronologically, or any-logically. How do I bring to the page something that feels both unitary and dispersed across the last 12 years of my life? How to I translate to language something so inherent to who I am that it feels like family? What am I confronting when I attempt to share this story? Even here I struggle to deploy definite language.

It has been my belief that I have struggled with the story of my body in part because the story is enormous and unwieldy, meaning that it would take more skill than I seemed to possess to fashion and fix it into words. Studying different philosophies of writing instruction (and writing itself by extension), I have come to understand my struggle not as a want of ability, but as a positioning within discourses that discourage or forbid I tell my story as I felt and feel it. I have struggled to find the right language, the right narrative position, and the confidence with which to tell my story. I will attempt to bring these discourses, and my discovery of them, to light here.

While the dominant narratives around chronic illness are changing with help from advocacy groups and policies like the ADA, they remain narratives I want nothing to do with. Disability and illness continue to be tinged with the fear of contagion and subsequent stigmatization, or an association of the sick person with weakness or emasculation. I have struggled to talk about my illness in any part for fear of that part overwhelming any other impression of me – to become a chronically ill person, rather than a person with a chronic illness. The first hurdle I have faced is to locate the language that assembles a narrative with which I am comfortable, one that feels genuine to my experience.

This social struggle of how to choose language appropriate to my experience has lead to many winding and long-winded answers to cursory questions, and ultimately to cursory answers. Much of the language available to me is cliché, culled from soap operas (or worse, parodies of soap operas!), language that was easily recognizable to my listener, but felt disingenuous and clunky on my tongue. There were no words I could call upon to being to cover what it was like for me. I should say that when I attempted to delve into these experiences with my whole heart, into crying, empathic descriptions of procedures, even in more private conversation, my listeners, with a few exceptions, became uncomfortable, and I followed suit.

Over years of telling my story, I was rewarded time and again when I positioned myself as unaffected, above the chaotic and unpredictable events of my life. When I would talk about how I continued to bicycle, or teach, or be cheerfully resilient, people would tell me I was strong, that I was handling all of this so well, or that if they were in my shoes they would be such a mess! People would cringe obligingly when I showed scars, but they (or mostly I) were quick to move past how scary surgery can be. My nurses and health care providers were all so impressed with me – when I was a charming, smiling person they would visit with me, chat with me about their days. While I loved the attention and enjoyed the time, this new relationship made it difficult for me to ask for help, to return to my role as patient. Within these narratives, I struggled to maintain my concept of self (masculine, self-possessed) while having a chronic illness and being a patient (emasculated, weak). Dominant narratives of masculinity and heroics positioned me as invulnerable and disaffected.

In addition to finding words that feel right, I have struggled to position myself in relation to a story so integral to me. This initially took the form of ‘not knowing where to start,’ but has evolved into ‘not knowing what to say.’ I find myself wondering how much or what parts of my story a person would need to hear to make sense of the story of my kidney failure (even the words ‘kidney failure’ feel totalizing, and are problematic for me).

Tracing the discourses in which I am positioned, I have found that I am quick to name the concrete facts of my experiences and omit what those experiences were like for me. My stories are bursts of ‘when they removed my tunneled hemodialysis catheter, which had been in place for twice as long as initially planned, the tech put a knee on my shoulder to gain leverage while he tried to pull the catheter from the scar tissue that had secured it to my jugular vein. On the fourth try, the last one before surgery he said, I felt the tug like gravity from my stomach to the top of my head before it broke free from my vein and pulled out of my shoulder. The process, which lasted no more than five minutes, has been one of my most persistent memories.’ This, and others like it, is a series of what happened, rather than what it was like, and at best tells an incomplete version of what happened, missing entirely what it meant. Where am I in this story? I have no authoritative presence here.

The final struggle I face when attempting to position myself in relation to the story of my body over the past 12 years (at least the last one I will deal with here), is how to write about a story that is ongoing, and will continue to be ongoing for me. Stories have for me (including the stories I share with my students) followed a conventional narrative arc, delivering a relatable message from a contained set of events with a beginning, middle and end. There have been segments of my story that played well. I can share the arc of an incident, or a rough period that seems to resolve in the end, but the reality is that there is no ‘end’ to this story, no cure, until MY story is over and buried. Though even THAT is a misnomer, to consider my story complete and fixed at any point. We are continually becoming, evolving. My narrative may then shed the burden of authority over who I am or what my life means. It shifts from an authoritative statement to a representation, a world played out over time, but a world fixed and placed some distance from whoever or whatever me and my sickness are.

In addition to my struggle to appropriate the right language and my struggle to find the best position from which to tell my story, I have struggled with how my story will be received by those who hear or read it. This is not a unique anxiety, as any personal story can seem bound to the person telling it. When I become vulnerable in front of my students, or in an essay, or pretty much anytime, I retreat into my turtle shell. I shy from challenging all of the narratives I’ve mentioned here, in addition to the dread I feel of boring my audience. The more I assume narrative authority over my experience, the further I withdraw from the safety of the conventions that dominate my genre. What has been helpful is the potential of writing as some classmates experienced it. Their responses, indicating that they gained control over the narratives dominating their genres, were exciting and empowering. The story as fired pottery, strong enough to withstand embellishment, and my recognition that my anxieties about my stories are shared by others.

The second tool I have to address my anxiety of reception is the concept of autoethnography, where a person considers themselves as a place to be studied. With this study of the self I treat my story as a place. From this place I am able to employ my telling of my story as a disruption to the narratives that would impede or limit me. The chronically ill young person need not be limited to tragedy or hero. Perhaps obviously, my position as multi-faceted human being with a chronic illness challenges that totalizing narrative. By telling my story as autoethnography, I also gain a new sense of what it means to be me, a critical sense of the discourses that shape the lives of those with chronic illness. By recognizing and distancing myself from the dominant narratives of chronic illness, I can both tell my story less encumbered by those narratives, and I can begin to create a more empowered sense of what it means to be me.

Here’s a story I’ve not yet shared with my students. About once a month I make a trip to my kidney clinic. I go to get my blood levels checked, and sometimes to get a shot that helps me make red blood cells. I enjoy the trips – the nurse I see is practically an old friend of mine. We joke with each other and talk about our lives. She knows what I mean when I tell her things. Last week, when I visited the clinic, a middle-aged woman was having her blood drawn the same time I was, and the four of us – two nurses and two patients – all bantered away in this small room. The woman talked slowly and laughed easily, and for a moment I wondered about her mental state. When she laughed she would leap out of her chair cackling, and slap her knee or bang on the wall. Her nurse was clearly having a hard time getting her to sit still and have her blood drawn. When she finally had the needle ready, the woman waved her off, her breath caught and she started crying. She hated needles, hated having her blood drawn, hated it. Her nurse asked questions about her life, her kids, helped her calm down. Meanwhile, I bared my arm and calmly watched my nurse slide the needle in and draw two vials of blood. ‘See!’ she said, ‘See how good he is?’ She was half kidding. No way, I thought. I told the woman seated next to me that I understood not wanting blood drawn, not wanting the needle stick. That as much as I love these nurses, they do not understand. That sometimes the greatest struggle of organ failure is not surgery, strict diets or a future riddled with complications, but braving the same small needle stick month after month after month after month. I know this. This has become a home for me.

The Borderland Between Sick and Well

In a scene of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway mentions how ill George, another character, looks.  Fitzgerald then gives him one of the many profound lines of the novel: "It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."

I have struggled with this distinction.  Foucault and queer theory have struggled with any distinction.  I am not what I experience, nor a tidy sum of my actions or beliefs.  Sometimes I am sick, sometimes I am well.  Much more frequently I am both.

The more clear distinctions happen rarely - though they have both happened recently.

I was in the hospital a few weeks ago with a UTI.  This simple little SOB landed me in Abbott for three days.  Some people, god knows why, talk their way into a hospital.  I generally resist going in and spend most of my time in trying to get out.  I've thought about being that guy who sneaks out, but I respect most of my doctors and nurses.  Besides, this time, I was sick.  Like, sick sick.

This has happened to me a few times; I go from feeling fine - you and me fine - to asking for a ride to the ER because I can't hold anything down and I've got a climbing fever of 103 or 104.  This typically takes six to eight hours.  I undergo a profound transformation from the time I walk in the door, clothed in my clothes, my wrists free from hospital plastic wrist bands, looking and feeling like a healthy person.  This is when I feel awful, but am still my own person - sick but not hospital sick.  Not naked in the gown.  I might lean on a wall for support but I am leaning with my shirt sleeves, with my phone in my pocket, with my shoes on.

An hour later I am in the gown, toting an IV pole.  And I am seen anew.  The hospital is the place where I am home.  Think about that.  Where are you 'home?'  When I walk through a hospital for some other reason I am a visitor - passing through this land of the sick, this quarantine of disease and infirmity.  I think of the hospital as hallways doorways and elevators.  Transience.  A place to pass through.  When I am 'sick,' the hospital is a room, a bed from which I move reluctantly and with caution.  It is the space between my bed and the bathroom.  Asking for another blanket.  Asking for a glass of water.  Asking for a drug to make me feel less nauseous.  Being asked to take four deep breaths.  Listening to the ragged breath of the guy sharing my room.  I'm pretty sure he never left.  In the hospital I am attended to.  I can ask for things.  I give up something to gain access to this treatment.  Perhaps this is what Fitzgerald was talking about when describing George Wilson, desperate with jealousy - a person loses a piece of themselves to sickness or death when the hospital is the place from where they exist.

I imagine a struggle for nurses as well, working with dozens of partial people every day, humans at a valley of dignity.  On the one hand there is so much suffering in the humanity of these people, of me in a bed, dirty, unshowered, weak and emasculated - how could a nurse remain open to such suffering while administering care within the confines of a hospital.  There are only so many kinds of nurses, and at the heart of it just two - those who see patients as humans and those who cannot.  I do not fault those who cannot - I cannot.  What an awful place to be; sick.

Being well is much more familiar to us - to you, really.  Biking to work on a crisp morning, passing cars at a stop light, dodging potholes, having cold thighs taut with blood.  Powering up a hill with some leg left at the top.  This is being well.  It is miraculous, and the gift of being so often sick is to have ready access to that miracle.  Feeling the cold wind on my face is sometimes everything.  The unmitigated world is a miracle, but the condition of this experience is wellness.

Most of the time I live between sick and well.  I'm like a spy, surveilling the country of the well, passing as not-sick.  I don't make a habit of talking about why I missed school, or how I spent my weekend trying to catch up on sleep and work.  But I do those things - miss school and sleep a lot.  I struggle to carry my share along with my guilt for not always carrying it.  I navigate the collateral damage my health inflicts on the people who love me.

I standardize my answers; I rarely know how to talk about myself, or about my weekend.  I lie outright sometimes, which comforts me as much as it does them.  I sometimes enjoy the secret, that I am secretly sick and most people would never know.  Other times I feel alienated and alone in the middle of a crowd - that people do not know my reality.

Of course these experiences are not uniquely mine, but I may experience them more profoundly than most.  We all attend to the various unfolding crises of our lives.  And many of us exist in the space between things.

Nick Carraway eventually abandoned the jaded East to return to the cultural subtitles of the Middle West.  The hard, defined living with the likes of Jordan and Tom and Daisy didn't suit his temperament and he went home.  Plurality affords him a more flexible interpretation of who he is, and that seems to suit him.  Thanks for reading!

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!