Dexamethasone

You'd think that when you go into the hospital and they think you've had a stroke, they'd give you more than an aspirin.  Or later, a couple of Tylenol.  Hey guys, I've got a big headache!  I need to develop my complaining techniques.

Finally a doctor in the field showed up and she said "you've only had that? Sure, we've got something better."

Indeed it was.  Called dexamethasone.  It didn't work right away, and I had to develop another nmemonic (my brother, whose name is like "dex", snorting meth in a school zone), but it turns out to be remarkable stuff.  While I was at the hospital, by injection, and since by pill.  A declining amount over a week.

No more headache.  After a few days, no scary word loss.  (OK, c'mon.  I'm 63!  I'm still going to forget where I left the keys once in a while.)  In fact I feel really good.  I think just as clear-speaking, if not more, and a lot of thinking about life and liberty.  And it clears up my nasty psoriasis.  I'm looking fine.

It's a steroid!  Finally I get to be like a pro athlete.

So........... how about I stay with this stuff for the next, oh, 15 years or so?

When you read about it in places like Wikipedia it sounds strongish but not brutish.   But when you ask the doc about the idea of longer prescriptions they look at you like you are nuts. Lots of bad physical things and it could make you crazy.  Bad idea.  Bad results.  OK OK.

I don't want to destroy my body.  But the other thing - the mind?  Is this some kind of Awakenings? Once I stop taking this stuff, will I go to dumber and dumber?

We may find out soon enough, because today is the last day of the prescription and there ain't no refill. But they say no.

And I don't think so.  I think the drug is great and I'm sure it brought things around.  But I think that as to the mental consequences - I really have been re-examining life, and facing choices - I think it's about having had a second chance to seriously greet the Reaper once again and say nope, still not now, still not yet.

OK Mr. Death, here's your green-eyed boy, and he ain't on your plate yet

I had hoped to get back into Strays more frequently.  But something came up.  Over the past days I've been told I had a stroke, brain cancer, and maybe something else they really don't know about, and maybe it was stroke, or a TIA, or a not too important thing.

I guess the history matters.  About 10 days ago I woke up around 4 am.  Not odd.  Usual reason. But when climbing back into the sack, I stayed awake and found I couldn't remember some names.  And I had a headache, not a huge sharp one, more of a big one on the left side.  OK.

Up later, off to the regular breakfast at the diner.  And I found my story-telling ability just sucked.  Hard to remember names and places.  One of my friends said later that I was having a hard time "reaching for words", which is about exactly right.  Plus the headache, still.

So I got back to the house, nervous, and called my doctor.  He barely let me finish the first sentence before telling me to go the emergency room.  So I did, and into another trip through the American medical system.

I'm not going to dump on the fact that these places now look like some combo of a hotel and a fortress and a corporate headquarters.    I guess I just wish that all the hospitals in the world looked like this; so do we all, and maybe someday they will.  Our American versions reflect that they involve landslides, avalanches of money.

They figured, of course, that I'd had a stroke.  A lot of testing and holding out your arms and asking who the president is.  All my physical stuff seemed fine, but I was still having some word gaps.  And for a guy as proud, absurdly proud, of his ability to speak and write as I am, that was not good.

So then begins the series of being inserted on contoured platforms into very large machines.

As it happened, one of them said I had a thing in my brain.  So after day one - maybe not a stroke. Maybe brain cancer.   This is really not sounding good.

In fairness these guys were dealing with a guy who looked like he had a problem.  The two or three regular members of the Strays audience will remember that I had head and neck cancer a few years ago, a lot of surgery and radiology and lots and lots of words here about the whole trip.  But as to a stroke... there the issues are, they say (1) my smoking (again!  these docs just do not like the fact that I smoked 30 years ago, and started when I was 15.  OK!  Bad!); and (2) my parents.  I love my parents and their stroke stories are sad but kind of beautiful,  but not mine, so not here.  But they had strokes.  My dad's was at 63, it killed him, and I'm 63, so hmm....

Oh, the word "stroke."  Incredibly it was one that I had a real problem with.  I had to come up with a physical image  - a batter's swing, a strike - to remember it.  Worked fine.  But I also looked up the word and holy smoke what a widely used and differentially meaning word.

And another thing, similar, about this ability to remember words.  We aren't remembering most words, we are just using them.  I didn't have to remember "using them, " or in any event it doesn't seem like remembering.  I'm thinking and out it comes in words, boom, right away.  But then you get to this stuff - placenames, people's names, things in punchlines.  That's what was hit.

Back to the hospital.  Going well into a second day, and I was still pretty concerned.  I mean, a brain surgeon came around to talk to me about brain surgery.  This is not a confidence-building event.  I asked if there were different looks to the different stuff in the brain, so he'd know what to take out. Answer is not really.  All brain tissue is brain tissue.  You mostly do it by looking at what the images tell you, the location, and by research as to what stuff does when it's there.  Oh, and maybe if it's near a fold.

And in my case, not likely to be an operation that would make sense.  They are not sure that what's there is what's wrong, whatever is wrong.  So it's tough to decide to what to excise.  Plus the image shows it in there pretty deep, pretty near language central.  A place I care about a lot.

The next day I got out.  The cancer guy was busy, and my regular doc, a righteous guy, said go home. On Monday I went in and the cancer guy's judgment was, probably a "vascular event".  I love that. Sort of sounds like what teen-aged boys used to hope for.  But just to know, say the docs, how about a PET scan?  (Your what? tenth? in the past five years.)  Sure, why not.

Now, PET results are in:  no cancer, but man really you really did break your clavicle last month.

Next:  dexamethasone!

Verb sap

OK, I guess the verb "to motor" kind of dates me.  But it has good roots.

If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

 - Bobby Troup

Motoring

This is the time of year I motor to the East.  Usually with a dog, and a lot of books on tape.  20 hours, more or less, Missouri to Rhode Island, through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut.  Sometimes New Jersey if I take the southern route and sometimes Massachusetts if the northern.  Every summer, every one for years.

These are highways that I have driven dozens of times, starting in my Mom's Impala in the '60's, through my bachelor cars, the Mustang and the Thunderbird, through a raft of family wagons, minivans, SUV's.  Occasionally passengers, friends, hitchikers, girlfriends, spouses, children - and usually a dog or two.  This time, for the third time, Isabel.  She's a fan.  Her and me, we talk some, listen to stuff, and try at least once or twice to find a place where she can get serious about sniffing up the local fauna and flora.

The idea is to bring a car to where the family stays, then fly back home to the practice, then fly back for ten days or so, sometimes more, then drive back.  It's too focussed and compact to be an odyssey, but there is some of the road's mixture of romance and boredom and looking around, back, forward, inward, out to the horizon, up to the hills, and at the end of the trip out, the sea.

More jazz

But this time all in one tracking shot, a long breathless phrase, trying to capture the end of the day, a hot day, when you hate coming inside to the artificial but hate going outside to the steam and the heat, only just keeping the pace, three men at lunch all agreeing that we live our lives only keeping the pace, not really turning out the fine and magic results we dream about, back to work, back home, looking ahead to bed and dreams, more dreams.

Be bop

But if this is about writing, does it have to make sense?  The poet's dilemma.  We think it is the sound of the words - the sound in your head, the sound in your ears - and the way they fit against each other, or don't.  Not meaning.  The meaning comes from the sound and the fit, not the other way round.  With ancient Chinese writing there was no punctuation, just blocks filled with characters, line after line, beautifully drawn.  The idea was art and transcendence, not a point of view or a plot.  But the other idea is to forestall the weakhearted, the ones who look at a fat gray block of words and think I do not have to climb up and into that.  Just bop bop bop, letting it wash, letting the words pour over.  Not thinking.  Breathlessness.  Courage.  An incendiary clause, a devastating proposition.  Go away.  Come here.  Touch foreheads.  Blink.  Blink.

Weeks clipping by

Yet another Friday.  It's a good day, offering a reprieve from whatever oppressed the week, a close of a paragraph in the chapter in the book.  But as so many of us have found, they just rocket by.  Not that they come quickly - few things come more slowly than Friday - but when they're here it seems so soon, the time is so compressed.  Maybe because Friday is a day with hope, and those hopes are what are flying past.