compassed about

This is one of first poems that Steve ever read to me....


A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
    And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
    "Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."                     

So let us melt, and make no noise,                                       5
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
    To tell the laity our love. 

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
    Men reckon what it did, and meant ;                              10
But trepidation of the spheres,
    Though greater far, is innocent. 

Dull sublunary lovers' love
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove                                     15
    The thing which elemented it. 

But we by a love so much refined,
    That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
    Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.                           20

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
    Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
    Like gold to aery thinness beat. 

If they be two, they are two so                                          25
    As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
    To move, but doth, if th' other do. 

And though it in the centre sit,
    Yet, when the other far doth roam,                                30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
    And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
    Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,                                    35
    And makes me end where I begun.

Obituary

Reverend Robert Stephen Malone, Jr., 49, of Birmingham, formerly of Gulf Shores, Alabama, died Monday at dawn.  Steve was born in Norfolk, Virginia, graduated from Foley High School, Auburn University and Reformed Theological Seminary.  He was a realtor with the Mountain Brook office of Realty South. 

Steve is survived by his wife, Melanie, his parents Robert and Cynthia, his Godmother, Martha Blake-Adams and mother-in-law, Marilyn Beard, his children, Madeleine, Margaret, Anna Claire, Mary, Colin, Brennan, Wesley, his siblings, Frank (Jennifer), Marshall (Jeanette), Charles (Anne), many loving aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews.  He is a member of All Saints Episcopal Church of Homewood, Alabama.

Steve was a man of few, but kind and generous words and quiet but true ways.  

A Memorial Service will be held at All Saints Episcopal Church, on Saturday, May 28, 2011 at 4:00 p.m., the vesper hour. 

In lieu of flowers, gifts may be given to Red Mountain Community School, P. O. Box 55973, Birmingham, Alabama, 35255.

from Jayber Crow

“What they  (the young seminarians) 

didn't see

was that it (this world) 

is beautiful 

and some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.”

Last breaths

Into thy hands, O Lord, we commend his spirit.

Steve died at dawn yesterday, May 23, 2011.

Sustaining Breath

Sustaining Breath 

One afternoon, early in the cancer fight, I walked in on Steve napping and listening to his ipod.  I could hear the faint voice of Fernando Ortego through the earphones.  Steve was a little teary, which is unusual for him and I said, 'oh, are you very sad?'  and he answered, 'no just so very full.'

Here are the words to one of his best loved 'fernando' songs;

A PLACE ON THE EARTH

Find me a place on the earth
Where a weary man can rest
And listen for your voice
In the turning seasons 

A quiet place in the world
Where I can bow 
And confess that I fear 
Where you have brought me,
Mysterious God

All of my life
You have been with me
My comfort in loneliness
My hope in the dark
All of my life
Lord, please stay with me
Be my sustaining breath
Guardian of my heart

My days are passing by
Like falling stars
That blaze across the night sky
Then they are gone

But Father, at your side
I will never be afraid
For you have held all my days
In the palm of your hand

All of my life
You have been with me
My comfort in loneliness
My hope in the dark
All of my life
Lord, please stay with me
Be my sustaining breath
Guardian of my heart

A
Be my sustaining breath
Be my sustaining breath
Be my sustaining breath

Highland Avenue

Most of you probably know that Steve is a dog whisperer.  He loves animals and I have never met a dog who did not love Steve.  Yesterday was Do Dah Day on our beloved Highland Avenue - a day set apart to honor canines and their caregivers.  We opened our window to take in the barks and howls.  This reminded me of Steve's musings that he has written but never shared about our neighborhood.....

Highland Avenue 

This Avenue, like a river
Never changing, never the same.
The tide carries its cargo up and down,
Back and forth,
Each in his own vessel.
All manner of people amble along its banks.
Some shrouded in prosperity,
Others washed up on the shore.
I have walked, paced, run along this waterless river
And watched the currents of its tributaries.
Countless hours
Lonely full moon midnights
Dark to New Day sunrises
Companionable Vespers
Scorching heat
Bitter Cold
Soaking Rain
Enlivening breezes
This river is my home. 

Steve has written four chapters of something he entitled "Walks On Highland."
Here is Chapter One:

“Writing is a treason of sorts.  Even a cold recitation of facts is never the thing itself.  The events described are somehow diminished in the telling.”  Anthony Bourdain

Where my favorite book lets off, well, that’s where this story begins.  David Copperfield, scratching away late in the night, recording his memories by dim                                                                                                           candlelight, pauses to gaze at the woman who sleeps so peacefully on an arms length away.  He hears her gentle breathing and is moved to hope that after years of sorrow, he may now pass the remainder of his days in her love…the love he finally found.  “The dear presence without which I were nothing bears me company.”

Sigh.

I’m no David Copperfield (I mean Charles Dickens).  He has a quill, I have a Mac.  But I have felt the full force of that final page, both in longing and now in fulfillment.  And I’m sitting across the table from my “her”, at the end of a summer excursion, in a coffee shop in the Berkshires (which has nothing to do with this story except that it happens to be where we are right now).  She is lost in the reverie of books and artists and the end of summer- and I doubt she even sees the way I am looking at her while she makes notes with her pencil (she loves pencils). 

I’m a man- an almost 50 man.  And I can do manly things.  I have tools and like motorcycles, and beer, and black coffee, and cars.  I only make this insecure protest because in a minute or two she will look up from her book, and her gaze will meet mine, and I will melt like wax.

If I wrote a history of Birmingham, it would go something like this:  To help you get your bearings, my neighborhood, Highland Park, sits above the city on the northern side of Red Mountain.  (It’s the north side, but called the Southside, but don’t worry about that.) Highland Avenue is the heartbeat of it all. 

Birmingham is a young city as far as that goes (circa 1870ish).  You can stand atop Red Mountain and picture somebody looking out over the Jones Valley and saying, “Hey, Someone should put a city here.”  There’s more to it I’m sure.  That same someone looked down at their feet and said, “My word!  Here are all the three elements necessary for making steel.”  Next thing you know, you’ve got the “Magic City”. 

Around 1900, a group of people got together and realized that steel mills don’t smell very good.  They began to build a very lovely neighborhood up above the smoke and din of the valley floor.  This is Highland Park.

The barons of steel and industry build homes on the crest of Red Mountain (Redmont), and eventually slid down the backside into what became Mountain Brook.  This is still one of the wealthier communities in the country- a collection of villages named Mountain Brook, Crestline, and English Village, which are separated from the city by the mountain.  The migration of industry leaders and their wallets (1920’s) to Mountain Brook began a full scale southward sprawl that eventually created “Over the Mountain” Birmingham, and which slowly drained “Birmingham, City of….”  This story was played out all over the US, so it’s not unusual really:  A thriving city-center that falters in depressions and recessions, turns icky, and those who can leave.  Those who can’t, stay.

(The Sixties and Seventies were especially bleak, when it literally became city policy that whites would move and blacks would stay.  I’m writing this digression because I think of Highland Park as an almost idyllic place to be, but is has shared it’s city’s history (glories and deprivations), and no one ought to forget that.)

The Avenue, Highland Avenue, flows like a river, meandering around three parks.  Those parks are named for several of the original “someone’s” who conceived of the city and then made a lot of money from it-  Caldwell, Rhodes, and Rushton.  It is anchored on one end by an area called Five Points South.  This is the commercial, club, restaurant, bar, young, hip, crazy urban spot…the only 24/7 part of Birmingham.  The other end is about a mile and a half to the east at the Highland Golf Club, the city’s first public course.  They say (and by “they” I mean I heard this somewhere) that Highland Park (two to three square miles around the Avenue) is the most densely populated part of the State.  Some 5000 people live here.  That’s no New York City, or even Atlanta, but by Alabama standards it’s pretty dang urban.

The streets are lined, for the most part, with the houses that were built in the teens and twenties.  They very in size and style, from stately houses built by the industry barons, to the big houses built by their lieutenants and merchants, to small bungalows built by…people who build bungalows.  Interspersed along the way are a number of classy brick walk-ups.

Still, each decade has left some mark on the original intent of the neighborhood.  Along the way, many of the homes were broken up into boarding houses and apartments and offices.  Oh, and the seventies were not kind.  Old houses came down.  Mod Squad apartments went up.  Families fled, although many of the stalwart neighbors stayed.  During the seventies and eighties you could have probably picked up an old house for a handful of pocket change.  “Hmmm, Starbucks or a 4/3 Tudor?”

When it dawned on a significant percentage of the national consciousness that suburbs were really boring and sucked the soul out of you while you slept, neighborhoods like Highland Park got a boost.  The city enlisted a noted architect to redesign the landscape along the Avenue.  She did it with an eye toward honoring the style of the place- red brick planters and crepe myrtles along the median, and wide sidewalks on both sides that make Highland a happy place to walk, run and live.

I’m just finishing a grilled cheese sandwich at my favorite downtown coffee haunt, Urban Standard.  “A grilled cheese”, you say? “Yes!”, I say.  It ain’t no ordinary sandwich- three kinds of cheese, a lot of butter, and you get to dip it in a raspberry reduction (whatever that means) sauce.  Mercy!

I’m thinking about food because I just met Dan from New York who moved here to be a food editor for a now defunct magazine. He is freelancing and is probably hungry, so I gave him a half of a sandwich.  (I didn’t give him half of the reduction sauce.  That’s mine.) He likes Birmingham and lives close to my street so he can walk to the Continental Bakery.  When a New Yorker gives the thumbs up to your neighborhood, it gives you a little lift in the self-esteem.

My father was a Navy man, and growing up it seems that I changed schools and houses as often as I changed my shirt.  So it has struck me that now, after five decades, I feel at home, as if I belong to this place and that it belongs to me. 

When I first moved here and told people I was going to live and work on the Southside (downtown), I constantly heard my soon to be neighbors referred to as “those people.”  I took offense as if someone was insulting my mother.  “Love your neighbor,” Jesus said.  I’m not trying to improve on that.  I just wonder if he didn’t mean “love your neighborhood”- the people, the place, the buildings, the dirt, the trees- all of it and everyone.  Sink roots, share its fate and let your story melt into its history.

current

Our priests originally suggested this blog because they knew that as Steve and I entered into the 'valley of the shadow of death' we would have meaningful stories or medical updates that would quickly grow stale to us if we had to repeat them over and over.  Writing about our days here and offering the tellings to our loved ones preserves in a small way the life that we keep finding.


We have not wanted to post much in the past week or so because our cancer fight has taken a turn from fighting to surrendering and much of what goes on seems too raw or even too sacred to bring to print.  I am a journalar at heart but I have not made an entry for days.


However, this morning we had a moment that brought such sweet relief that I asked Steve if I could retell it for our blog,  and he said, 'sure.'


Breathing continues to be the issue.  Whether it is the actual fluid build up, or the anxiety over the fluid build up, few hours go by without us seeking some kind of remedy.  Steve has had peaceful nights in the
last three days but last night was not one of them.  I could tell he was restless and we were awake alot, adjusting meds and oxygen intake.  We were awake at dawn, so i suggested we read the Office of the Dawn from the Book of Hours.  In the past we have joked about Phyliss Tickle's ( the author of our particular book of Divine Office) hymn selections.  It is sometimes surprising to  find an 'Onward Christian Soldiers' or 'In My Heart there Rings a Melody' following an otherwise more compelling reading or prayer.  


However, today's hymn portion was a serendipitous gift.

Breathe on me, breath of God,
Fill me with life anew,
That I may love what Thou dost love,
And do what Thou wouldst do.

Breathe on me, breath of God,
Until my heart is pure,
Until with Thee I will one will,
To do and to endure.

Breathe on me, breath of God,
Blend all my soul with Thine,
Until this earthly part of me
Glows with Thy fire divine.

Breathe on me, breath of God,
So shall I never die,
But live with Thee the perfect life
Of Thine eternity.

I read it Steve and he said, 'that is amazing.'

I titled this entry 'current' because I find that my mind, body and soul cannot live on old comforts.  As meaningful as they were 'then' they seem to have little power to sustain me in the 'now'.  However a simple hymn, that at some other time i might have found trivial, becomes sustenance to me, to us in the 'now'  of our current need.

Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to it's sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Catching our breath

We are at home and finding our way.  Our hospice nurse is wise and gentle and brings great relief and peace to the whole family.  She and Steve have a good rapport - she has been a  nurse for 30+ years and possesses that rare, kind quality that turns nursing into an art as well as a science.  She makes three house calls a week, but hospice means we are free to call and have someone come whenever we feel like it is necessary.  We are grateful.


Steve's main presenting problem since our homecoming last Friday has been shortness of breath with an ensuing anxiety.


Frank left yesterday morning to return to Gulf Shores after being here a couple of days....I asked him to write a detailed description of Steve's Tuesday Excursion to St. Vincents....  

"I don't know the medical reasons for the shortness of breath, but his lungs are getting a workout.  He has a catheter in his right lung which allows it to be drained at home when he feels that too much fluid has accumulated where it does not belong.  It is a painful procedure, but seems to be a relief.  The lung struggles to reinflate and I imagine after draining it loses some strength.

The left lung is another story.  It began accumulating fluid later in the game and this was discovered via scan when he was in the hospital.  It has now been drained, I think, 3 times, via a medical procedure done behind closed doors at the hospital (which is the segue to this story).

On Tuesday morning, Steve knew it was time to drain the left lung so Melanie arranged the appointment with several calls and some vip treatment from good friend and doctor, Shane Wear.

So this is what it takes...the ambulance arrives about 1pm.  Steve moves from his chair to the wheel chair.  This move was exhausting.   An oxygen discussion ensues with the paramedics who note that his oxygen machine only goes to 5 (whatever that means).  They mention that they have a portable that goes to 15 and bring it up with a mask to replace the nose thing.  After putting this on Steve and cranking the air up, relief!  Within 3 minutes he is ready for the trip (carried down the stairs while sitting in the wheel chair, then put on a stretcher for the ambulance ride).

Steve had about 1.5 liters drained from the left lung, and got to rest at St. Vincents on an infusion of good oxygen.  When the ambulance arrived to take him home a few hours later, he was taken off the higher oxygen setting and loaded back up, carried back up the stairs, and put in the bed.

He seemed much more relaxed, and a new oxygen machine that can crank it up to 10 was delivered by hospice care.  That was it for the day.

I went to see him Wednesday morning and he was sleeping soundly.  Melanie said that he had "the best night ever!"  Relative to a week of gasping for air, I imagine it probably felt like that, and hopefully it will last.

Maybe the lungs needed the draining to get back working better, but it was very apparent that the hits of more oxygen brought him comfort.

Hopefully today he can speak more.  Steve has always been a listener, but it will be nice to hear his infrequent ramblings again."

silence

Steve and I are participating in this online retreat about benedictine ideas.  Yesterday our assignment was about the value of silence and we had some fill in the blank type phrases.  I asked Steve to tell me his answers out loud and I copied them to post them here.

We receive many moving letters about how Steve's few but kind, generous words and quiet but true ways have formed and shaped their lives.  I love gathering the children on the 'family bed' to hear some of them or parts of them.    I think these kinds of letters, his journal entries and written conversations like this one will be nourishment for us for all of our days.

Here's the conversation:


The assignment did the bold line and Steve's answers are on every other line.

Silence is . . .

well, it's sacred space, letting an idea go to its end.  that make sense?

Silence brings . . .

I don't know about that.  I'll have to think about it.


Silence enables . . .

all the other voices to recede into the background.

Silence keeps me . . .

unhurried.

Silence helps me . . . 

come to whatever i want to say.

Silence hurts me . . . 

when i use it as a self defence

In silence, I listen . . . 




In silence, I hear . . .

Instead of answering these last two Steve made up a poem,
" In silence I listen, in silence I hear,
   without it I panic and give in to fear."

sorrow and love

This week has felt chock full of both of these things.

We are finally home from the hospital after an 8 day stay.  Although there was initial talk about trying some procedures to help Steve benefit from his food, the drs. finally concluded that his breathing and lung issues made any type of surgery too precarious.  We have come home and do not anticipate anymore chemo or procedures unless Steve gets stronger in a miraculous way.

Steve's parents and our children are all around this weekend so we will send more details along the way next week - we continue to take one day at a time and are so grateful for the constant care and provisions of our friends.

Daily Bread

Because the meds make it hard for Steve to do any attentive reading, I have been reading aloud to him.  This is one of the surprising gifts of this cancer desert because there are few things I enjoy more than reading aloud.  My early work was as a storyteller and librarian and although I wasn't very good at enforcing fines it never felt like work to read to children.

As a young mother I remember some parenting guru advising my friends and me to put 10 books on the mantel each morning and then read to our children throughout the day from this pile.  Then, at the end of what was usually an exhausting day, we could rest in peace knowing that the minds and spirits of our children had been nourished.

I am finding snippets of  that same kind of peace on the days that Steve and I have time to read aloud together.  Reading in this unhurried, contemplative way each day is a vanguard practice for us.  It keeps us in the receiving posture by putting ourselves in the 'way of the gift'  (a phrase from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson).

It promises that at some point some word or phrase will strike us particularly and as a matter of course feed our hope.  The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called these particularizing phrases 'biddings.'  Julian of Norwich, the mystic who wrote our 'All shall be well' prayer called them 'showings.'  I usually know when I am having one because I feel something akin to a blush or a shiver or a quickening. 

This past week has held some of our most discouraging moments so far. Steve and I have had the big conversations about the bigger things facing us with this cancer.  But how to deal with the roller coaster like events of each day is the kicker for me.  Steve says that when he feels disoriented, if I start reading to him, in a matter of minutes he will remember who he is and what he loves.  It all comes back to him.

What is that, I wonder?  It is mysterious, but surely it is tied to the truth that we are spirits more than bodies and fed by ideas as significantly as daily bread.  When i grab a pile of books to take to the hospital with us or feel for one under the bed to read from with the nightlight wedge, it seems so random and unguided.  But this week, reading  George Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind and Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone, Andrew Nugent's The Slow Release Miracle/ A Spirituality for a Lifetime and Maria Lichtman's Poetry as Prayer: The Life of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Steve and I have been fattened with ideas and somehow readied for another day.

Burley on Preachers

I don't mean for this little passage to be morbid at all, in fact I was struck by it long before I knew I was sick. It strikes me more as being about preachers (of which I was one) and people, and real community. I think our Priests at All Saints would understand what Burley is getting at, and they have demonstrated real love to us over and over, making our church a city of refuge for our family.

This comes from a 'A Place on Earth'. I remembered this section from the first time I read it, and read it aloud to Melanie a month or so ago. It's when Burley sees the preacher going up to Mat's house when they find out that Virgil is missing. And Burley recalls the preacher's visit when Tom died.

"Wednesday afternon, after the news had pretty well got around, I seen Brother Piston going in up there at Mat's. And I says to Jayber, "I know the speech he's going to make." And so would all of us. He come and said all that to me after we knew Tom was dead. And none of it quite fit. You could say that he didn't have too good of an idea who he was talking to. (As Jayber says, when we seen Brother Piston go in up at Mat's, the worst thing about preachers is they think they've got to say something whether anything can be said or not.) While he was having his say I sat there and thought my thoughts. Here in a way he'd come to say the last words over Tom. And what claim did he have to do it? He never done a day's work with us in his life, nor could have. He never did stand up in his ache and sweat and go down the row with us. He never tasted any of our sweat in the water jug. And I was thinking: Preacher, who are you to speak of Tom to me, who knew him, and knew the very smell of him?

And there he sat in your granddaddy's chair, with his consolations and his old speech. Just putting our names in the blanks. And I thought: Preacher, he's dead, he's not here, and you'll never know what it is that's gone.

The difference between people is what has got to be taken notice of. There's the preacher who has what I reckon you would call a knack for the Hereafter. He's not much mixed with this world. As far as he's concerned there is no difference, or not much, between Tom Coulter and Virgil Feltner. Their names fit into the riddle he thinks he knows the answer to. I wouldn't try to say he ain't right. I do say that some people's knack is for the Here. Anyhow, that's the talent I'm stuck with. For us it's important to keep in mind who Tom was. And for Mat and them I judge it's important to know who is meant when they speak of Virgil. We don't forget them after somebody who never knew them has said, "Dead in the service of his country" and "Rest in peace." That's not the way these accounts are kept. We don't rest in peace. The life of a good man who has died belongs to the people who cared about him, and ought to, and maybe itself is a as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And surely talk of a reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who need each other here as much as we do.

I ain't saying I don't believe there's a Heaven. I surely do hope there is. That surely would pay off a lot of mortgages. But I do say it ain't easy to believe. And even while I hope for it, I've got to admit I'd rather go to Port William."

update from Uncle Frank

Melanie, Steve and Uncle Frank's notes from the week:

This week has held some pretty rough moments. Over last weekend we noticed that Steve's vomiting had a different personality - more projectile. On Wednesday, Steve had a an Upper GI as well as a stomach Xray to see what was going on. We discovered that Steve's tumor is now pressing in on his duodenum and so he is getting very little nourishment from the small amount food he has been able to keep down. So, instead of Chemo, an admission to the hospital instead. Steve was admitted to the Oncology/Bone Marrow Transplant floor b/c there was no room on the Oncology Floor. (The rooms were pretty nice, and all the pudding you could eat.)

Steve's brother Frank had already been planning on coming so that he could keep an eye on Steve while Melanie tended to Brennan's Twelfth Birthday Celebrations. On Friday the Docs made an attempt to put a stent (endoscopically) through the duadunum, but found that it was too tough to get through the tissue.

We've been at UAB for the weekend, watching the Kentucky Derby and awaiting a game plan for Steve's nutritional needs. Frank kept notes as he was sending emails home to family so we have copied them here to give you a new perspective.....




...............................


Couldn't get the procedure to work today, would cause more problems than good, so we are waiting for the surgical team to come see us to see when they will schedule the bypass/detour surgery. Could be today so no food now while we wait. He is sleeping and pretty out of it at the moment. May schedule tomorrow but doubtful on Saturday. I will let you know.

Regarding today's procedure, the location of the blockage would have caused complications with a stint inserted. He is fine drinking water and last night enjoyed chicken noodle soup. He said that he keeps forgetting how good chicken broth is and wanted to remember to ask for it more often.

Melanie left to get Brennan from school and prepare the party. This am Brennan and I hung a Dora the explorer pinata in the front yard tree. They will enjoy hitting it (don't tell nora). Melanie will come back this evening for a visit. I will stay in the room tonight and she will handle the sleepover.



........................................................................


We met with the surgical team. No surgery tonight. They are consulting further. We are about to move rooms out of ICU to the 9th floor.

Steve is in and out of sleep...when he wakes, we have good conversation.

Not sure if he will be discharged tomorrow or stay in all weekend to find more info on Monday. Probably won't get any news tonight. The surgery guys were not offering much info.

Steve ate half bowl of chicken noodle and almost whole bowl of veggie soup, some coke so hunger is better. First food since yesterday 6pm.
Dr. Curry paid a nice visit and called the Head surgeon to see what's up. Head surgeon is coming in the morning to discuss surgery options. It is a relief knowing that Steve won't have to wait the weekend and start everyone over on Monday.

You could tell Steve was very relieved to know there is planning going on (even though you have to make noise to make sure you weren't forgotten).

.......................................................................

We had a fairly peaceful night other than the required interruptions for vitals and meds. At 6am a resident surgeon came in with 2 others and woke us up to talk about surgery stuff...same stuff he was saying at 5pm yesterday. Not much help ...kind of a wiener. Then his boss, Dr. Heslin came in and he was great and made a game plan.

1. Today, drain lung to help breathing (been increasingly short of breath, been there before).
2. Full ct scan TODAY, and results today
3. Study scan to determine next move

Plan a...if the scan says it may work, do a direct feeding into the intestines by some sort of iv which can offer 24/7 nourishment with any liquid (boost, ensure, or anythin.g better like that).

Plan b...a relief valve tubing that can drain the stomach when nausea ensues and nourish with whatever he can intake by mouth with drip iv supplement

The plan is to get breathing better and nourishment better to get back on the chemo wagon. May do the tube valve in stomach anyway because it may help with chemo nausea...a simple drain of the stomach, easy touch button drainage...kind of cool idea.

They are still studying the new CT scan and we'll have a sure plan tomorrow or Monday. So, for now...wait.

Monday, Monday

"He has brought us in safety to this new day...." How many times have I written, prayed, or posted that prayer over the last number of years? And yet sometimes it remains the most elusive thought. I suppose that when you are forced to slow down, you have to then face all that internal noise that was hidden before. I have been discovering for some time what a "hand wringer" I really am.

But that little prayer from the BCP has helped me so many times to remember who I am and where I come from. It also helps me see how much I have been given. This is the hardest work- remembering and then living in the peace of that; being able to be present to today and not just my worries.

Cancer wise, the main job is eating. I'm still having A LOT of nausea, but need to be putting some meat back on my bones. Also, just maintaining some good regimens with my medications, supplements, walking around the house, etc. My favorite place is bed, but I can't be staying there. We are scheduled for more chemo on Wednesday.

We were awakened yesterday at 5:00 am to the roar of several motorcycles outside the house. My friends are heading on a ride to Key West, and since I couldn't go, they decided to buzz the house so we could wave them off. Take it easy, boys!

Thank you for all those rich birthday wishes this weekend. I loved them.