“Surgery and Celebration Week”
This week started with Diana’s dental surgery – tooth extraction and bone graft. She elected not to have general anesthesia, and rather have a “magic pill” at the dentist’s office to calm her down and make her very sleepy. She claimed she wasn’t really getting sleepy – I think the pictures indicate otherwise:
Everything went well according to Dr. Johnson – he reported that he met Diana’s two instructions to him: 1. no pain; 2. do a great job. I was a bit concerned right when we arrived home, as the pain was very high, but things settled down in a few hours. The rinsing, dabbing and pain pills all week are really getting annoying for McD.
I was next up on Thursday, with dupuytrens surgery Act II. I had my pinky nodule removed last year, and now it was time for ring and middle nodules to exit. A lot of work for a couple of little bumps – but they do start to hurt annoyingly after a few months.
I’m usually in a happy and entertaining state when coming out of anesthesia. Not so much this time – too much time waiting without anything to eat or drink, and too much time to review the ridiculous cost of short surgeries. Diana was glad to get me out of there before I really irritated the nurses. Time for some Taco Bell comfort food.
We celebrated Finn’s 29th birthday on Friday – pushing our anniversary celebration to Saturday. The fun started with the “Lightyear” movie at the luxurious iPic theater. This is a prequel to “Toy Story” – showing the story that was behind the Buzz Lightyear “Infiniti and Beyond” toy. The film was action packed and entertaining. Diana commented that it was “one calamity after another.”
After all that excitement, we returned home so that Finn could open presents – he had a great time opening Pokemon figurines from Campbell, custom made San Francisco Giants barstools from us, cards, gift cards, and then a delicious lemon cake and ice cream that Diana arranged for him. So nice to see him so healthy and happy.
The theme for a fifth anniversary is wood. Diana likes to play Connect 4, and so I couldn’t resist this custom wooden version.
I also found an Etsy company that makes wooden boards with song lyrics – had to get our wedding song:
Diana surprised me with a glass koala (D) and penguin (K) that she had made by a guy in New Orleans, who was part of an artist co-op downstairs from our condo. I really love these little guys.
Our anniversary dinner was at Rick’s Chophouse in downtown McKinney. A lovely setting that we’ve enjoyed many times in the past, but this time the service was spotty and slow. We made the best of it and tried not to complain too much. Desserts and my shrimp ‘n grits were both delicious.
Pest control came out to kill off our latest round of hornets, but a few stragglers remained. I tried to take care of them so that D could fully enjoy her sunbathing spot, without unwanted company. They really do look mean.
It was nice to get our surgeries behind us and to celebrate birthday and anniversary.
My book this week was “Between Two Kingdoms” by Suleika Jaouad. I really enjoyed this book, which follows Jaouad’s multiple year battle with leukemia and her path to recovery. I have a bunch of dog-eared pages that I wanted to share, but it’s too hard for me to type with this annoying bandage on my right hand- keeps activating the Ctrl key with all kinds of silly results. So, I’ll just share this online summary that it was easy to copy and paste – the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V responding well.
“In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.
It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.
When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.
How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.”
I thoroughly recommend this book – not exactly an uplifting tale, but such an honest and insightful survival story.
Here’s an interesting Dylan cover that I’ve enjoyed several times this week:
Some lovely, laid back Anders:
And finally a new band that I heard this week and like a lot:
Stay safe, kind and compassionate to everyone!