Category: Personal

Three Trump blogposts in a row and what do I get? Another grapefruit. Let me tell you: the karmic fix is in. You may remember my recent surgical lament. I went to have a benign tumor, allegedly the size of a key lime, removed from my back. Out came a grapefruit and a rougher than expected recovery period. This is the sequel to that story.

I returned to the surgeon’s office for the obligatory post-surgical visit. My doctor has a stellar reputation, one of the best cutters in the Washington, D.C. area. His down side is that he is the spitting image of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. When he studies an image of my anatomy, I imagine him looking for an artery to close in order to mess up bridge traffic. Given some of the things I’ve written about his guy Trump, the thought of him lurching over me with a scalpel is a tad disconcerting. Then again, what are the odds that he is among the five regular visitors to this site?

So Christie’s doppelganger stood behind me, peeling the bandages off my back. I heard a couple of affirming grunts as he surveyed his work product. He backed up for a more global view. “Yes, very good,” he said. “Oh, yes. Perfect.” It was as if he were looking at the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, not a seven-inch incision on my upper back.

He invited my wife, Melissa, to join him at the viewing station. I would have thought the fact that I was still alive a week after surgery would have been sufficient validation for him. But he wanted more. He craved recognition for what he clearly thought was a remarkably compelling incision line, subtle in tone with an unassuming texture. Melissa, an artist in her own right, specializes in the rapid deflation of the male ego. She assumed the position adjacent to the beaming surgeon, who pointed to his handiwork and said, “See how nice this came out?”

Melissa, without skipping a beat, pointed her finger to a prime piece of upper torso real estate six inches from the incision. “What’s this,” she asked, “another tumor?” There was awkward silence behind me now. I felt two hands poking and kneading what felt like an enormous lump, very similar to the extricated grapefruit, except larger. It might be approaching small melon territory. Silence hung heavy for three or four minutes.

Then the surgeon uttered a long sigh, followed by, “Jesus, I’ve never ever seen anything like this.” The art show abruptly ended. He thinks the mass is a seroma, as was the one he removed. A seroma is a benign soft tissue tumor usually caused by trauma. I broke two ribs in June, giving rise to Seroma I. The most common source of trauma leading to these tumors is surgery. It is very possible that the surgical removal of Seroma I created Seroma II. My life seems to be evolving into an continuous surgical loop of Ground Hog’s Day seromas.

I was scheduled to undergo surgery today but was bumped at the last minute by some emergency life-and-death cases. Seroma II is now set to meet the knife on Tuesday of next week, unless the governor can work me in sooner. Meanwhile the mass continues to grow. As it does, it presses something fierce against a nerve, generating more pain than a Trump rally.

So that is my tale of woe for the day. Rest assured I have no intention of turning this into a medical blog. The world is overrun with medical blogs, most of them self-indulgent chronicles of everything you wouldn’t want to know about someone’s condition. For example: Jenni’s Guts, Celiac Chicks, I am Not My Disease, and my personal favorite, At Your Cervix. Yet, I wanted to let you know that I may need to skip a cycle or two of appearances here, depending on the pain level. Then again, I may decide to write through the pain. If my next post sounds like I have plagiarized the Unabomber’s manifesto, you deserve to know why.

If life had gone according to plan, a scintillating piece of ponderous commentary would be appearing in this space. You’d be sipping a warm beverage while taking in my words of wisdom, nodding and smiling between paragraphs. Either that, or I would have hit a raw psychic nerve mid-sentence, sending you to You Tube’s cute kitten channel for immediate relief and redemption. Well, my friends, I am here to tell you that life does not always go according to plan. Just ask Jeb Bush, or if you want a second opinion, Rick Perry, the guy who got tossed from “Dancing With the Stars” faster than he did from his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. Oops.

My diversion was far less profound, but just as frustrating. I was scheduled for minor outpatient surgery at Washington Adventist Hospital yesterday, the second of two procedures in a month aimed at removing a benign mass from my back. A benign mass, I learned from Dr. Google, is a non-cancerous tumor, not a pre-Vatican II Catholic church service conducted by hippie folk singers. There are, I guess, some valid procedural reasons why an allegedly minor operation needed two surgical dates. But the explanation is so dry, and uninteresting that it should never be reported outside of a medical journal, and even then only if it is really hard up for copy.

Here’s the deal, along with a full waiver of my HIPAA rights. Initially the tumor was, in the highly technical jargon used by physicians with five years of graduate school and a two-year residency, the “size of an orange”. Then came the first surgery. When the bandages finally came off, my appendage had been reduced to, again in the medical vernacular, the “size of a key lime”. Yesterday’s surgical adventure was to have been a brief cut-and-stitch aimed at the final excision of the devolving fruit. Instead, it was a day-long adventure.

I arrived, as instructed, two hours ahead of my 9:30 a.m. operating table time. I was prepped and ready to get this done by 8 a.m. Because nobody in the nation’s capital has been able to come up with a way for people to move from one point to another in an expeditious and orderly fashion, my surgeon was held prisoner in I-270 traffic until 11 a.m. I gave thanks for needing only a simple key lime removal instead of a life-saving quadruple heart bypass.

“This won’t take long,” he said, as the anesthesiologist sedated me. I awoke hours later in the recovery room. The surgeon was standing by my bed, sputtering words you never want to hear in these circumstances, “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said. “It was the size of a grapefruit.” He positioned his hands, as if holding a county fair blue ribbon grapefruit, his face flashing the smile of a prideful fisherman boasting of a trophy catch. I told him I was glad he was having such a good day and then fell back to sleep.

All of this, dear readers, is my feeble way of explaining why you are not looking at an insightful commentary on a burning public policy issue. It takes a lot of slicing and dicing to extract a grapefruit. Given the state of our current world, pain is not a useful ointment for the dissection of complicated issues. Try to think fondly of me whenever you have your next fruit salad. I’ll be back soon.

And so it came to pass, in the twelfth month of retirement: I started a damn blog!  It was either that or take up Jewel Dash, and all of those sparkling colors give me a headache.

Well, it was a little more than that. It all started with Facebook, the gateway drug for verbal sharing addicts.  After a lengthy hiatus, I returned to the site in June.  Like the prodigal son, I tried to make it right.  Okay, the truth is that I broke a couple of ribs and could barely move without screaming.  I needed something to take my mind off the pain.  Percocet worked, but Facebook had fewer side effects.

For the first couple of weeks, I quietly lurked about, trying to absorb the culture of social media.  I checked out the baby and cat pictures, the political diatribes, the casserole recipes and the weather reports from various vacation spots.  I knew, at some point, that I needed to yield to that little box at the top of the page, the one that kept asking the same question:  “What’s on your mind?”  That was a challenge for me.  It wasn’t that I had nothing to say; the problem was figuring out how to say it to a diverse audience.

At last count, I had 252 Facebook friends from a variety of demographic sources:  relatives, neighbors, former classmates, people I worked with.  Their ages span at least four generations.  In that mix are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians and Socialists.  There are those who think Donald Trump is an idiot and those who see him as a gift from God.  Some of these friends have been personally and viscerally pained by police shootings of young black men this summer. Others are proud family members of police officers, concerned about the tarnishing of those they love with a brush they don’t deserve.

How, I wondered, do I say what’s on my mind without hurting people I care about, without adding more divisive noise to a world that seems to be drowning in it?  So I decided to violate Facebook protocol and write in paragraphs instead of sentences.  I knew I shouldn’t take up a lot of space on a site designed more for rapid scrolling than ponderous reading. Still, I needed more than a bumper sticker if I was going to explain my thoughts in a way that would not scorch any earth with those who held a contrary view.

I’ve been a FB pontificator now for almost three months, waxing away on issues of the day, everything from Trump to lesbian farmers, from the death of a governor I once covered to the transformative powers of a summer rainbow.  The ribs healed several weeks ago but I continued to write.  As I did, I received a number of kind comments suggesting that I start a blog.  I suspect this was a gentle way of saying I was writing way too long for FB, and I was.

So here I am, on the verge of turning 67, struggling my way through yet another technological adventure.  In my quick research, I was stunned to learn that almost everyone already has a blog. At least it seems that way.  There are blogs about yeast infections, overactive bladders, anger management and adult men who are way too involved with My Little Pony.  Those bloggers – and you – have my solemn word that I will never touch those subjects in this space.

Instead, I will do what I had been doing on Facebook. I will give you a few paragraphs of prose every now and then, crafted, if I’m lucky, with a tablespoon or two of insight, along with an occasional dash of irony and wit.   If you are looking for a shrill voice to slap down those with contrary opinions, this isn’t the place.  You may, instead, want to check out one of the anger management blogs. Or, better yet, the My Little Pony sites.