NO MORE HOUSTON - I HOPE!

THIS ONE IS A LITTLE LONG - I APOLOGIZE! BUT - IT WILL PROBABLY BE MY LAST ONE - AT LEAST ON THIS ONE SUBJECT.

My immediate question to myself is; "Why I am sitting here doing a Blog Entry when I have been off work for two weeks or more?" "Don't I have more productive things I could be doing?"

More productive - yes, more fun - no! There are a lot more productive things I could be doing if I could only do them, but there aren't too many things I can actually do right now. First, almost any movement I make hurts - not a whole bunch most of the time, but it just flat out hurts to move at all. You know that someone has been tinkering with your body.
Secondly, the good doctor did put the fear of God into me this time about taking care of myself and following the rules - which means not doing much physically for awhile and in some cases forever.

He has restricted me to lifting nothing more than 5 pounds (I was sure he said 8 pounds, but my daughter-in-law and son were right there and they swear he said 5.) Of course, they are not always to be trusted when it comes to a difference in opinion between me and either of them on the subject of what the doctor said. Any way you look at it, 5 pounds is not much weight; maybe a blank sheet of paper, a pen, my name badge (good thing I have a short name), my proxy key and a light lunch. On the other hand - 5 pounds could allow 20 "Quarter Pounder" hamburgers - okay, cut that number in half because we need to allow for the weight of the french fries, lettuce and a pickle slice. Still you would at least have 10 Quarter Pounders - that's something to look forward to each day.

The real reason, and the big reason, I am spending my time doing this blog is I enjoy doing it. For me it is fun, it is therapeutic and it has been a very positive tool for me in coping with this little problem of cancer. I have heard from many others who have felt it has been a positive tool for them or people they have passed it on to, so I do get some sense of satisfaction from the thought that this jumbled mess of words with all sorts of grammatical and punctuation and spelling errors will possibly help put a smile on someone's face. It is also remotely possible that I might even provide some information once in awhile that will be useful.

My last Blog Entry under the banner of "Hurry Up and Wait" was a little pre-mature. The real demonstration of "Hurry Up and Wait" was to take place a few days later - when I actually started to leave for Houston.

I was frustrated about everything that was going to happen that day, April 23rd, before it even happened. I have this personality defect (one of many which I have) which causes me to become anxious and nervous and all worked up over anticipating a problem that hasn't even occured - but could possibly occur. Today when everyone complains about having to be at the airport an hour and a half before flight time - don't worry about me. I have already been there for two or three hours. I worry about; "What if I have a flat tire on the way to the airport, have a wreck, run out of gas, can't find a parking space, get a speeding ticket, etc." I have all of these "What If" conditions tied to every activity I am involved with all day long.

This particular Monday the 23rd I was destined for an overload of frustration. The night before I had been up late packing for this trip. At this point I didn't know how long I would be gone, what I would be able to do, how long I would actually be in the hospital - so what do I take? Just in case, I took enough "stuff" to open a small clothing store, a library, a convenience store and first aid station. I also took a half dozen folders on different projects I was working on, including income tax, just so I would be sure to have something to do. Needless to say, I never touched these folders. So, on this Monday morning - after being up most of the night deciding what to take - I got up at 4:00 am - I am sure I got at least one hour of sleep that night to start loading the car.

This Monday morning it was cold, damp and dark as I started dragging everything out to the car. (I even bought a brand new suitcase for this trip. It is basically a small bedroom on wheels) I drug that oversized suitcase all the way through the house out to the garage and opened the garage door (where my wife's car sits all snug and warm and dry and taking up so much space I can hardly get past it with my suitcase) and opened the big garage door to the driveway to a blast of cold air that made me want to go back and crawl back into bed.

After stumbling over a garden hose someone left in the driveway and tripping over a few cracks in the concrete driveway, I am ready to reach into my pocket, get the keys to the car, unlock the door and load my suitcases.

I stick my hand deep into my pocket and search around until I locate my key ring which contains approximately forty keys. I think I can still remember what maybe five or six of these keys are for. The other thirty-five or so keys - I can't remember for sure. I think there is one key that might have been a key to my first apartment when I was a young bachelor. Gosh - that was a long time ago. There is one that looks like it could have been a key to my office - maybe that was from a time I got promoted and got a bigger office, or moved to a different office building or maybe to a different company - who knows. It could be 20 years and 10 states away from today for all I know. Then I do have this one beautiful key that is blue and orange - my Denver Bronco Key. It is supposed to open the front door to the house but it doesn't. It doesn't do anything but look good - a Bronco tradition. The guy who made that key for my wife hated the Broncos and was an admitted Cowboy fan and probably sabotaged that key so it wouldn't work. I like it - so I keep it
anyway.

I have gone through this routine many, many times and keep promising myself that I am going to figure out what all of these keys are for and get rid of those that have no purpose. I am not sure how I will do that - go around to all the apartments I might have lived in as a young bachelor and try the key on the doors, or go back to all of the office building I might have had an office in and check out the keys. But I know for sure - if I get rid of just one key - within a week I will discover what that key was for and I will desperately need that key (probably a key to a fortune) and it will be impossible for me to replace that key. So for now, I will just play it safe.

The problem is that with this system, this time of discovery always happens under the same circumstances. I pull out this handfull of keys when my hands are full, it is dark, it is raining, my cell phone is ringing, etc. So I kind of stumble around in my pocket with my fingers feeling each key to see, if by the feel, I can discover the key I actually need.

This system usually causes the keys to slip through my fingers onto the pavement, sometimes wet pavement, as I bend over to pick up the now slimy or wet keys and start the process all over again. And it always happens that I will eventually find the right key, guide the key to the lock on the door holding it between my thumb and little finger and go to insert it into the lock - when I drop it one more time just for good mesure. Kind of a punctuation mark to the whole process. Of course this creates a mild explosion of profanity, which is either amusing or frightening to someone who might be out walking their dog at three in the morning.

Now you can understand why I am so uptight when I need to meet a schedule of any kind. All of these unforeseen obstacles which attach themselves to me to test my skills and strength of character really do delay me.

Okay, I now have the car open and have wrestled my suitcases inside the car (no wonder I had four hernias that had to be repaired) I am all ready to roll now and - Oh Wait!! - Crap!
I am standing here in the middle of the driveway with the garage door open and the garage door opener in my hand. Now if I hit the little button, the garage door will close and I will still be on the outside with the garage door opener in my hand. The garage door opener needs to be back inside the house on the kitchen table. (Don't ask me why - I don't write the rules - I just obey them.) So I go back into the house and place the garage door opener on the kitchen table and now I am inside the house with the garage door opener but the garage door is shut again. I am getting nowhere fast!

I have six outside doors to my house and because of little challenges at each of these doors, like a heavy swing set in front of one door, a lawn mower in front of another, total darness outside another, etc., none of these doors are potential choices.

But a solution has just exploded in my mind. I will close the garage door with the garage door opener, I will place the garage door opener on the kitchen table - as I have been instructed to do, I will go to the front door - where I know the lock is difficult to work with and the motion detector light is burned out (someone keeps forgetting to replace it) and make my exit.

I drop the set of keys two more times and finally I get the inside house door locked. I insert the key into the outside glass door and it will not turn either left or right. I struggle and twist and curse and finally it turns to the left. Now it won't turn back. It has my key - the door is in the locked position and it won't give my key back. Finally I force it back into the unlocked position - afraid that I am going to snap the key off right in the lock - and I am now able to extract my key, but it is getting late and I need to get to the airport. I unlock the inside door one more time and go in and write a note so that when my wife wakes up she will know the outside glass door is not locked. I write the note and go back out to tape it to the door when it hits me - it might not be a good idea to tape a note to the front door stating that it is not locked. The inside front will lock after all, so I decided to leave the outside door unlocked and will wait until I get to the airport and call Scott ahd have him call his mother and give her the news. I was not about to call her at 4:00 in the morning to tell her that I had gone off and left her asleep with the front door unlocked.

So here it is - it seems that half the morning has been spent - and I am still in my driveway. I still have to get out of my driveway, drive to the airport, drag my baggage inside, check in, go through security, go stand by a post with a number on it and eventually get on the plane. Still plenty of opportunities for something to happen and totally screw up my day.

I haven't even gotten to the part that has me the most upset. The schedule I have received from MD Anderson has me on a non-stop program for today that is so tight that I will - at some point - need to make a decision on whether to spend a few minutes to go to the bathroom or to blow my nose. I will just have to wait and see which becomes urgent first.

By the time I got to the airport, I ws too uptight to even think about eating anything - which under current circumstances would have probably made me sick - so I didn't eat. I got to Houston and had just enough time to get from the airport to the hotel and check in and go across the sky-bridge to the Main building of MD Anderson and check in for blood/specimen collection. Actually I was lucky and made up a little time (good cab driver) and was able to check in for Blood/Specimen an hour early. It was a good thing as there were more than hundred people in line and they were running an hour behind schedule - but at least I didn't lose too much ground. I was scheduled to do check in/prep for CT Scan at 3:40 pm - which gave me approximately an hour to eat for the first time for the day. There was no way I was going to eat before going in for the CT Scan, so I went on up and got ready for this procedure. In the meantime, Scott and Sheri arrived from Albuquerque and were there when I finally got through with the CT Scan around 7:30 PM. It had been a very long day and I still hadn't eaten all day, but after the CT Scan I am never hungry anyway. Scott and Sheri talked me into going down to Rice Village next to Rice University for something to eat and I ate something - can't even remember what it was.

That was one of the longest Mondays in my life - I think it was about 48 hours long and I was totally wiped out at the end of the day.

Tuesday we had an off day and Scott and Sheri had never been to Galveston Island, so we went down there for the day. It is a neat place with a beach and sand and sea shells and they had a good time collecting sea shells. Then we went to the "Spot" a restaurant and bar right across the street from the Sea Wall. This place never closed during the hurricane and it is right across the street from the ocean. Buildings fifteen, twenty and forty miles and more away from the Sea Wall were destroyed, but the Spot stayed open the entire time. They have a video camera on the patio so we ate out there and Scott and Sheri called their friends back home and had them pull up the web site and waved to them as they ate their lunch.

We went to the Aquarium which has to be one of the very best in the Nation. It is worth going to Galveston just to see this aquarium. You walk in and see an army of penguins - must be at least fifty of them -swimming in this glass pool that is three stories tall, some of them are just walking around, some shooting through the water - boy they can really propell through the water at a high speed and others are just standing around.

You walk down a pathway that is circular and winds up or down and you have tanks of all types of beautiful fish on both sides and then over the top of you swimming back and forth. The have a great collection of sharks swimming around, some great looking sea turtles and even new born sea horses.

We went down town to an area called the Strand. It is an old historic area with old buildings that go back several hundred years. This was the original downtown area of Galveston. This is a well known shopping and tourist area with all kinds of neat shops. When Mary I are were down there the last part of the year the place was bustling with all kinds of activity and lots of tourists. This time only two or three shops were even open. The rest will filled with carpenters building walls, ceilings, floors and getting ready to try to go back into business. The whole area was just gutted during the hurricane. The sidwalk in this area is a good two feet above street level, and with me standing on the sidewalk, the water mark during the hurricane ws a good two to three feet above my head. That means the whole area was under ten to twelve feet of water. Imagine downtown Albuquerque, Denver, Santa Fe, or any other city being under 12 feet of water for as far as you can see.

I didn't get a chance to eat all day Monday until late at night after the CT Scan, so Scott and Sheri made up for it on Tuesday. We started out with a big breakfast buffet at the hotel, two hours later we were having lunch at the "Spot" in Galveston and now one last stop before we leave Galveston. Galveston has a Rain Forest Cafe and Scott and Sheri are fans of this restaurant and make sure to visit this restaurant in each area they travel to if one is there. (They do the same thing with the Hard Rock Cafe) So roughly two hours after our first lunch we stopped at the Rain Forest Cafe and had another lunch. This time I just couldn't force myself to eat. I ordered and took about one bite.

Wednesday we were back to the regular routine. We had an appointment with the Cancer Surgeon at 10:00 AM and they were hopelessly behind schedule. Next we had to go through the patient check in for the surgery and anestehsia assessment. We then dashed over to Mays Clinic for an appointment with the Plastic Surgeon which was scheduled at 2:30PM and we finally got in to see him at 5:00PM.

Scott threw me a curve while we were visiting with Dr. Baumann, the Plastic Surgeon. Scott is normally very sophisticated and intellectual during the conversations with the doctors, and when Dr. Baumann finished going through everything - what was going to happen, why they would do the things they were going to do, the recovery process, etc., he asked if there were any questions. Scott immediately asked; "After the surgery, will my dad be able to play the piano?" Dr. Baumann had this puzzled look on his face and replied; "Of course - he will be able to play the piano - shouldn't be any problem at all." Scott said; "That's great - because he can't play the piano now." Unfortunately, it looks like one of my many undesirable personality characteristics did in fact slip through to my son, Scott. Anyway, when it is all said and done, I guess I will go buy a piano and start taking lessons.

Thursday we just puttered around and went downtown Houston to the Hard Rock Cafe and just killed time. I had talked to Mary several times during the week and she was really sick. It seemed there was no way she was going to be able to even come over, but she did come in Thursday night and after a real tough week at home was set to get up early the next day for the surgery.

I guess things happen for a reason, but all of the frustration I had just trying to end work and get ready to go to Houston, all of the tight schedules we had with appointments for the week and all the other little surprises kept me so distracted that I didn't have much of a chance to think about the surgery - much less worry about it. That was good.

As they did the last time, they scheduled me for surgery at 5:00 am Friday morning. And as happened last time, because it was still dark when we went in for the surgery, I had the feeling that the surgery had started at night. So shortly after 5:00 am Friday morning I have an empty space in my mind of what happened for the next 24 to 48 hours. Scott said he spent the first two nights with me, but I have no recollection of that. This surgery was in the same section of the hospital as my last surgery and other than being on a different floor, everything was pretty much the same.

The first thing I remember was sitting there (I must have been sitting up in bed) staring at a huge clock on the wall. The big hand ws pointed at 12 and the litle hand was pointed at 1. This meant it was one o'clock. (I learned that in 7th grade and still remember it) There was a door to my left and it ws slightly open and I could see some people - like nurses and administrative people moving around out there.

I remember yelling for someone to come in and saw a couple of people glance up and then go back to whatever they were doing. I started to become angry - and this not me or my personality. I started yelling loudly and started ordering someone to get in there. I guess I made sufficient fuss as pretty soon this tough unsmiling nurse came in and asked what my problem was.

I told her; " I was supposed to have surgery here. I had surgery here once before and it was a beautiful building and everything was very nice and now you have me down here in the basement in the supply room - what is going on?" "My family is supposed to be in to see me at one o"clock and they won't even be able to find me down here in the basement." She replied; "It is one o'clock in the morning. Your family has been here all night. You have already had your surgery - and you are not in the basement - now go to sleep." (I later found out that I was on something like the 14th floor and it was almost identical to the floor I had my last surgery on. Different circumstances - different perception.)

The next thing I remember was that my whole stomach area really hurt. My cancer doctor had cut me open and gone in to check on the previous operation and move a few pieces around a bit - and best of all find there was no sign of cancer. The Plastic Surgeon went in and cut away the excess flesh and remains of not one hernia but four hernias and tucked everything in neatly and sewed a patch over the entire stomach area. The four hernias are pretty much guaranteed to be from doing things I shouldn't have done - lifting heavy tailgates, third row seats and other acts of lifting. I have an elastic belt that goes over the entire stomach area that I have to wear 24 hours a day for the next six weeks and after that I can take it off only while sleeping.

I was then introduced to five drainage ports which were implanted into five holes in the bottom of my stomach area with clear plastic tubes which dangle down to about my ankles. Attached to each of the tubes are containers called grenades. They are also clear plastic and actually are about the size of a real grenade and they look like a grenade. This is the most awkward and inconvenient things I have ever had to deal with. First - it hurts like Hell every time you take a step or move as this grenade is sewed into the hole in the belly and it has weight and each and any movement causes it to swing back and forth and pull and tug at the sitiches and the hole. It is very awkward to just move or even get dressed. But they help the situation some by a holster that goes around your neck and the grenades now dangle about chest high instead of all the way down your leg. Still hurts, but not as bad. These grenades have to be cleaned and monitored each morning and each night as you measure the amount of fluid in each container until hopefully there is none.

After a few days, I had it down so I could wear this gear up around my shoulders and let them hang down over my chest and you couldn't tell I had anything hanging there. That is mostly because I am so skinny now I could have a watermelon in there and no one would notice.

I had to start walking as this is a requirement with all surgery. I started right away and pushed myself each day to do as much as I possibly could. They brought me a walker and I used it for a couple of days and then parked and made it on my own two legs from then on.

They discharged me from the hospital on the 23rd and Scott and Sheri came on back to Albuquerque the next day. Mary and I went back to The Rotary House, where she had been staying since she came down. We stayed there for the next 7 days until we had our final appointments with both surgeons on the 30th. We were in a very nice hotel which is connected to all the hospital facilities by sky-bridges, so there were plenty of different places to eat and plenty to see. It was a good place to kind of wind down.

On the 30th we had our final two appointments with the doctors, the Cancer doctor at 11:30 and the Plastic Surgeon at 1:00 PM. I had called and warned them that we had to catch a plane later in the day so we couldn't have any massive delays. They told me to come early for the first one and they would work me in. I got there at 10:30 am - an hour early and they were already two hours behind schedule. I did get in finally about noon, I did get in for just a shake of hands and a "Good-Bye", but that was all that was really necessary with the Cancer people. We got in right on schedule with the Plastic Surgeon and they examined everything and removed 3 of the 5 grenades and showed my wife how to remove the other two when we got home. (We removed the last one tonight, and in addition to being three to four feet long on the outside, there was around one foot of tube inside me.) After they removed the 3 in Houston, it was hardly noticeable that I had anything under my shirt. I wondered what would happen if the security guard asked; "What do you have under your shirt?" "Oh nothing - just a couple of grenades."

The last few nights in Houston they had flash flood warnings and tornadeo warnings in the area we were in and even told people to stay off I-45, the interstate to the airport. It is always bumper to bumper in good weather, so in bad weather it is not a place to be. So, while it is completely out of character for me - I made sure we were at the airport around three hours before flight time - just in case. Scott and Sheri met us at the airport in Albuquerque just to lift my suitcases and followed us home to get them in the house. They are really such a blessing - and now because of Scott ,I may become a famous piano player too.

I am pretty well wiped out - just a short trip out to CarMax for a few minutes really did me in for the next day. It is going to take awhile - but I will be back on my feet again. At least I know now that I am not Super Man and am going to have to change my ways a little.

God Bless and thanks for your support and prayers over the past couple of years.

AL