Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Mishpucha (mi familia)
Pushing through to the other side
Today’s subtitle comes from Special Inspirational Mentor-type Person Geneen Roth, whom I’d never heard of until this very moment, having recently googled the phrase “the only way out is through.”* And I’d always thought Lewis Carroll said it. (No, but he did say, ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful voice, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ . . . which is better still.)
“Otch**,” my mom is saying right about now. “What the hell is he talking about?”
Well, Mum, it’s about to get even worse. This afternoon, while torturing myself on the elliptical trainer, I thought about how much exercise had in common with writing, and how quantum tunneling provided such an apt metaphor for both. Here’s a short bit from Wiki on quantum tunneling:
Quantum tunneling is the quantum-mechanical effect of transitioning through a classically-forbidden energy state. The classical analogy is for a car on a roller coaster to make it up and over a hill which it does not have enough kinetic energy to surmount.
Think about how hard it is to sit down with that blank page and get moving. Better yet, don’t think about it, just do it. Because I know you do — the writers out there, anyway. Have you ever been able to will the words onto the page? In the moments between blank page and written page, something happens. You tunnel through that energy barrier and find yourself on the other side. Conscious effort has little to do with it.
Same with exercise. Every time I get on that elliptical trainer, I’m convinced I’ll never make it past 20 minutes. By 25 minutes, I’ve hit my second wind; by thirty, I’m thinking, “Ten minutes until cool down. I can take anything for ten minutes.” Finally, I get my five minute cool down; and before I realize what has happened, I’ve sweated off 450 calories.
If I stop to think about writing, the task seems insurmountable. If I stop to wonder if I really, really feel like exercising, the answer is always no. Without fail, I have to do these things automatically, without forethought, so that they’re done before I’ve even had time to bitch.
***
Jake update:
He had his lumbar puncture this morning. Sailed right through it; his biggest gripe was having to wake up at 7AM. (Hey, he’s home-schooled. ‘Nuff said.) Clear fluid, normal pressure. What galls me is that I know they’ve done a Gram stain by now, and (if someone’s bothering to check!) we could have some useful information. Namely, does he have chronic viral meningitis? But, no. I’m only the patient’s father, not his doctor (although I have lanced his ears and pulled red string out of his nose). I’ll have to wait.
Monday morning, I’m calling.
Jake convinced Karen to stay another night in Medford, so I’m ganz allein yet again. He’s doing okay. No spinal headache, but his baseline headache is still there. If we come up with bupkes on the LP, I’m not sure what we’ll do next. Perhaps we’ll go down to the mecca (Stanford).
***
Menu for tomorrow: focaccia, oxtail stew (I make it with navy beans and smoked ham shank), and apple pie for dessert. I’m going to make a fairly standard bottom crust, but for the top I bought some puff pastry. It’s high time I tried to figure out Marguerite Slater’s* apple pie recipe.
D.
*According to Wikiquote, Geneen Roth is also responsible for “Be fully present for five minutes each day.” There’s something pathetic about that, don’t you think?
**My father’s name is Arthur, nickname Archie, further shortened to Arch, transformed further still by my mother’s thick Bostonian accent into Otch.
***Lance Henriksen’s mother, and my surrogate mom during my first year at Berkeley. And if you’re exceptionally nice to me, one day I’ll tell you the story of how Lance reunited his mom and dad after they’d been divorced for umpteen years. You won’t get that story on IMDB.
What’s my motivation?
When I woke up this morning, I’d intended to write another installment of Gastronomy Domine. Hence the altered subtitle above. (Pop quiz: have any of you noticed that I change the subtitle with each new blog entry?) I wanted to do a piece on basturma, the Armenian ur-coldcut that is to pastrami what a Top Dog Polish is to Oscar Meyer. Real scientist George Muscat introduced Karen and me to basturma some time in the late 80s. The three of us went to Tarver’s Deli in Sunnyvale (now closed, I think) and picked up some flat bread, tarama (carp roe), basturma, and a ball of vicious cheese we’ve never found anywhere else. George taught us how to make taramosalata. We spent the afternoon scarfing roe, itsy bitsy flat bread-and-basturma sandwiches, and dime-sized bits of vicious cheese. Then we went into a crowded supermarket and breathed on people.
But, alas, I’ll have to leave that story for another time. For the past two days, I’ve been stressing over Jacob. He had three good days, and then Monday morning the headache came back in force. Most of my anxiety comes from the fact that Jake’s Medford neurologist wouldn’t return my calls. 4PM today, we’re still waiting for the guy to set up a lumbar puncture (something to look forward to! . . . but the point is to get an answer). He finally called Karen about 5PM. Tentative plan: Karen will drive in to Medford with Jake tomorrow, and the procedure is set for Thursday morning. They’ll be doing it with IV sedation, so it should not be terribly traumatic for Jake. I’ll keep you posted.
***
We’ll get back to basturma some other time. It’s worth its very own bit.
D.
Breath-holding; another vertebrate
Karen took Jake to the neurologist’s neurologist yesterday afternoon. On call, hammered by an emergency, and close to two hours late, but he managed to make time for my son and do a complete neuro exam. My hero! It never fails to impress me when I find a good doctor; I’m so used to the opposite.
He thinks Jake may have chronic viral meningitis (which is what my internist — another good doctor — thought, too). He wanted to do a lumbar puncture, but he was running too late. He had Karen call me to ask whether I would trust any of the Crescent City doctors to do an LP on my son. (No.) Currently, the plan is for Karen to take Jake back to Medford on Monday, to some hotshot pediatrician who does lumbar punctures on kids all the time.
You might ask what good this will do. Well, there is something to be said about knowing. Beyond that, there’s no treatment for chronic viral meningitis. Just have to wait it out.
On the up side, his headache has been better for over 24 hours now. This is significant. In the last 10 weeks, he’s had only one or two other breaks from the headache, and those lasted only a few hours. With any luck, this whole thing might pass, and Jake won’t even need an LP.
***
We home-school Jacob, which is a damned good thing, since with this illness he hasn’t accomplished more than two full days’ worth of work in the last 50 school days. A few weeks ago, to con him into doing a bit more work, we promised him another kitty. That will make three cats — four, if you count Tolerance, who ran off some time ago. Tolerance was Jake’s favorite, so this new kitty is sort of a replacement cat.
We bought a calico from the Humane Society. I’ll post a photo ASAP. Jake named her Emerald, which is a fine name, except it reminds me of Emeril, and no one liked the idea of naming her Emerald LeCatsy.
***
Decent writing day: just under 1300 words. It’s another battle sequence, which never fails to amaze me because I don’t know squat about the military. At my father’s suggestion, I read Audie Murphy’s book — well, I read about half of it. Got bored. My next big idea was to buy the PC game Call of Duty. I might not be a veteran (thinks I) but if I finish Call of Duty, I’ll have some sense of what war is like, right? But I only finished a third of it. Got bored.
I can only pray that my readers will be forgiving. I’m no Joe Haldeman, that’s for sure. I’m looking forward to getting John Scalzi’s book from Amazon (Old Man’s War)to see how he handles his battle sequences.
Only one battle sequence left in the novel, and this last one will be a corker. It’s unconventional enough that I should be able to get by on imagination alone.
D.
Thanksgiving
As some of you know, I’m relatively unburdened by the religious memes that oblige me to be either (A) thankful for the blessings God has given me, or (B) guilty as hell if I’m not feeling particularly (A). Relatively unburdened. Which is to say, I’m a God-fearing heathen. Which is to say, I don’t think I’ve figured this one out, and I doubt I ever will.
The point is, my son Jacob is still sick, despite our attempts to turn his stomach into a medicine cabinet. His headaches are getting worse, as is his nausea, and his neurologist wants to send him to a neurologist. How f-d up is that?
Today, Jake passed his eye exam with flying colors. (Perhaps that is proof of God’s existence. Jake’s mother and I would lose to Mr. Magoo in a game of darts.) That was my last hope that this would turn out to be something innocent. And yet . . . and yet my sublimely pessimistic medical imagination has run dry on what this COULD be. The CT and MRI effectively ruled out brain tumor or meningitis. The normal CBC (blood count) and sed rate ruled out leukemia. And now I’m racking my brains for all the hideous things I learned about in med school and subsequently forgot.
He sees the neurologist’s neurologist this Friday. I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I keep thinking about how religious folks deal with these stressful things. With faith, right? Faith that things will turn out all right. Faith that God has a plan. Faith that, even when things turn out for the worst, God still has a plan, and that we’re too dense to know His mind.
Ever hear the saying, “God never gives you more to deal with than you can handle”? Bullshit. Karen and I are handling this just fine, thank you very much, but I know there are things under the sun which would exceed our capacity. I know it. I’ve seen it happen to other people. It’s my business.
What a downer I am tonight. Maybe I should hop over to iTunes and see if I can find Felix Unger’s, “Happy and Peppy and Bursting with Love.”
D.
The Littlest Nailhead
I popped over to John Scalzi’s blog this morning to see what he’s been up to. Answer: he’s been busy. Stay away from a guy’s blog for four days and you end up with miles of column inches in your mental to-be-read basket. Anyway, I particularly enjoyed the photo of his daughter wearing a Gothed-out Powder Puff Girls T shirt. The caption is priceless, as is the take no prisoners expression on his daughter’s face. John also posted a link to a comic called Kindergoth, which reminded me: I still have ten bucks over at PayPal (for selling my story Saul the Deserted to Neverary) burning a hole in my electronic pocket. Time to spend it on something morally uplifting, like Kindergoth.
Jake used to be a kindergoth. At four, Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile was his favorite CD. Soon after, he became enamored with the rest of Reznor’s oeuvre, including Closer. Um . . . especially Closer. Karen and I used to joke about Jake singing this to his k-garten teacher, but the truth is, he’s always had more common sense than that.
After Nine Inch Nails, he branched out into The Cure and Tears for Fears (bunch of poseurs compared to Trent Reznor, but they fake it well). Lately he’s been into Pink Floyd, which, all things considered, is a good deal more upbeat. The Wall is a church picnic compared to The Fragile.
Speaking of churches: thanks to this month’s Harper’s for teaching me the word megachurch. The latest issue features a full scale salvo against the Evangelical movement’s political machine, including a new article by Jeff Sharlet, whose article “Jesus Plus Nothing” provided inspiration for my novel’s Kinist Church.
That’s it for now, folks. Someone with a stuffy nose is bound to show up at my door any minute now.
D.
So, you’re saying this is NOT my fault?
I blitzed a lot of my old friends with emails today, alerting them to the presence of this place. Start posting comments, folks. Many of you guys know each other.
Jake had his neurology appointment today with Dr. Ali in Ashland. (This is the boonies. We have to drive three hours to find a pediatric neurologist. In exchange for this isolation, we get a beautiful coastline, drop dead gorgeous countryside, a real estate market that is booming like you would not believe, and . . . drumroll . . . no HMOs.) Dr. Ali called me after seeing Jake and told me he has ‘chronic tension-type headache’.
I confess ignorance on this one. For me, headaches are divided into categories: sinus headache, nasal headache (yes, there is such a thing), cluster, migraine, atypical migraine, MPD (myofascial pain disorder, a close relative of TMJ), and oh-my-God let’s get your head scanned YESTERDAY — rule out tumor, in other words. I’d heard of tension headache, naturally, but I didn’t know you could have a tension headache that lasts, in Jake’s case, six weeks.
Good doctor that I am, I consulted a reliable resource to learn more about chronic tension-type headache: the web. Here’s a link to a MAGNUM article on chronic tension-type headache. MAGNUM = Migraine Awareness Group: A National Understanding for Migraineurs. They got their information from a neurology textbook, so it must be true. Honestly, though, Dr. Ali explained everything very well to me, but I needed to see it elsewhere, in writing, simply to feel reassured that it wasn’t my fault.
What’s in a name? Turns out ‘tension headache’ is a misnomer. It has nothing to do with tension. The fact that I’m making this fifty pound nine-year-old read from an 11th grade literature textbook, that I’m expecting him to kick ass in algebra and learn physics, French, and typing besides, might be making him miserable, but isn’t the cause of his headache. (We’re home-schooling.) To quote from that MAGNUM site, “Tension-type headache is multifactorial and poorly understood.”
On the other hand, tension-type headache “may be triggered by physical or psychological stress, lack of sleep, anxiety, and depression.”
Oops.
Bottom line, the kid is all right. Focus on the positive.
By the way, Karen tells me Jake entertained Dr. Ali with his comic stylings, cribbed largely from the collected works of Monty Python and Steve Oederkerk’s Kung Pow: Enter the Fist., wherein the bad guy announces, From now on, you will refer to me as Betty . . . (one of Jake’s favorite lines). Trust me, this gets old after a while.
D.
I should be tickled silly
Last night I had one of those moments. I realized that in a few hours’ time, our lives could change forever. Why? Because this morning, my son had an MRI of the brain.
He’s had a constant headache for the past five weeks. His mother and his pediatrician both seemed ready to write this off as a particularly nasty viral crud, but I’ve seen too many kids with brain tumors. It didn’t help that the mom of one of those patients came by to thank me last week. (Sure, it’s nice when people do that, but it stirred the pot.) Nor did it help when I told myself that those other kids were a lot sicker than Jake. They had much worse neurologic symptoms (says I), they LOOKED sick, and so forth. That little creep in the back of my head (trust me, you want your doctor to own a creep like this) merely said, “It could STILL BE SOMETHING HORRIBLE. You can’t drop it just yet.”
And so we got the head CT last week. Normal. Does that let Jake off the hook? No! Some of the nasties will only show up on MRI. So why do I bother with the head CT? Go figure.
Last night, I thought about Life after Diagnosis: the mental distortion that comes from hanging on to hope, when the odds are so slim; the painful trifecta of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy (what’s worse: living through that, or watching your child live through it?) The loss of function. The dissolution of personality.
We doctors are a fucked up lot.
By this morning, I’d gone past that stage. As Jake’s appointment neared, I found it more and more difficult to dwell on ‘what if’. Now I was in Writer Mode, already assuming the MRI would be fine, mentally composing my daily blog entry. Realizing: asshole, this isn’t about you. But writing, like medicine, is a fundamentally egocentric activity. (More on that some other time.)
Well, Jake’s fine, naturally. Otherwise, we’d be flying or driving to Portland right now. Next up is the neurology appointment on Monday in Ashland.
Jake went through the MRI like a champ, by the way. He barely flinched when the tech injected the contrast, and weathered the nauseating flushing reaction that came with it. He saw the films afterwards and commented on what a nice looking brain he had. I looked through the films, too, with quite a different frame of mind (that fuzziness — is that just volume averaging? And what’s that dark spot — flow void, or something else?) Obvious enough that there weren’t any big gumbas, to use the technical term, but was there something subtle present that only the radiologist would see? Nope. The radiologist gave us a clean bill of health, too.
So. I should be relieved, tickled pink, delighted. I am relieved, but I still feel tight.
Really go figure.
D.
