Happy vacation to me...

Today is the only vacation day I will get this year.

US law being the wonderful thing it is, when I go out for my medical leave, my vacation days get used first. So today is the only real vacation day I will get this year from work; one day, snuck in after Thanksgiving so I could enjoy the wild bacchanalia of a four day weekend. I would like to tell all of you, my faithful readers, that I'm spending it committing sins and debaucheries heretofore unknown. However, I spent the morning at my in-laws, drove back from San Antonio, and now I'm fooling around on the computer while B. and A. go out and go shopping for a Barbara Kingsolver book for her English class. Tomorrow, unless the weather turns out to be just unspeakable, we're going to a Renaissance fair. Wild times.

Headaches and vertigo continue. Tiredness continues. I got a call on Wednesday from the osteoplastics surgeon, telling me they are processing all the insurance pre-approvals and working on scheduling the surgery, and I should have a definite date within two weeks. I'll be glad to just get that done, so I can back- and forward-schedule everything around it. It looks like I might miss the software rollout of our new POS system at work; I'm actually not that worried about that, as my learning style is so different from most peoples' it might be best if I learned it on my own anyway. However, it means the next month I have to shove the database cleanup into high gear and get as much dead weight cleaned out as I can... and that all has to be done by hand. There's no way to automate it; it requires someone with product knowledge (IE, me) to look and go 'Do we still sell this?'.

Emotionally, no real changes. I did find out my younger brother didn't tell one of my younger sisters (the one who Just Doesn't Do Social Media) about the tumor, so I got to drop that on her yesterday during the round of Thanksgiving calls. She seems OK with it, but she's the one who's hardest to read. So who knows? My sister PT is enigmatic as a Sphinx most of the time, so I never can tell what she's thinking...

Decluttering.

In a metaphysical, emotional, spiritual, and physical sense.

I find as I move closer to Der Tag Von Chirurgie that I'm trying to simplify things as much as I can in my life. I have temporarily checked out of the South Central Area Mankind Project Leader container. I have asked for help in the Central Texas community in MKP as well.

And this weekend, we had help from some magnificent friends -- thank you to the entire Weir family -- to clean out our garage. And my friends, it was a MASSIVE purge. I am a packrat, I admit it, and things had gotten out of hand. And Lin and Mike and their two boys came over both Saturday and Sunday and helped us find our garage again. (And our garage was pretty terrible.) A lot of stuff went to charity, more stuff than I was comfortable with went to trash, and I have all my books back where they belong -- in the house.

(I scored two huge bookshelves for thirty-five bucks, too.)

For all that I'm terrified about this tumor thing, and the headaches are getting worse, I'm starting to feel more ME than I've felt in a while. I went to Austin Pagan Pride and talked to more people than I'd talked to in years. I'm even tentatively counseling someone -- might even turn into a student. Maybe it's a Hallmark Channel moment, I don't know. But I've been out of touch with part of me for a while, and it's good to be back. And that's decluttering, too. There was some guilt and shame -- doesn't matter what, those who know me know what it was, those who don't know can ask if they're curious, I might tell you -- about teaching and leading in the Pagan community that I was carrying around. I have been given a very clear indication I can let that go now. I'm not interested in going back to some sort of national leadership again. (Though I never say never; That Way Inviteth Coyote.) But I have a lot of experience, battle scars, and scorched tee-shirts I could share. It's nice to feel decluttered of the guilt and shame I had -- so that I can do that again if I choose.

The sky fell in.

Friendly readers. yesterday shit got real. Or, to quote SF writer William Gibson, the sky fell in.

At about 6:30pm last night, I was crying hysterically in my car in the parking lot of the parking lot of the HEB at the Arboretum. I had stopped in to get a few things on the way home and to see my son (he works there). He wasn't working. I don't know why, but that led to the aforementioned breakdown. Nothing was right, nothing was ever going to BE right, and 25 or so hours later I'm still on unstable emotional ground. I would conjecture that I am not as blase about this whole tumor thing as I have seemed to be, (Greek chorus in the background: "Gee, you THINK?") And, to be honest, this is not the only serious stresser in my life, so...yeah. Things fell apart, the center did NOT hold, and anarchy was loosed upon the world for a time. I still don't know if I'm OK. I'm trying not to pretend I have to be.

Appointment today with the ophthalmological surgeon and his army of subalterns; one nurse and one assistant doctor. My eyes are in great shape except for that tumor thing. I have developed peripheral double vision in the last two weeks, so that's new; the doctor explained it by using the anaology of two tracking cameras that aren't quite synced any more. I did find out today that this will be a craniotomy; they're going in through my noggin, so I'm getting my head shaved. I'm having that done by my barber, the redoubtable Louis. If anyone's making me look like Uncle Fester, he is. (And if you're in Austin and looking for a place to get your hair cut, I can't recommend him enough. Corner of G Just north of Airport on Guadalupe; any of the barbers are brilliant. Tell them Mister Duke sent you.)

Stress management.

I am beginning to feel the first flutters of fear around surgery, and coincidentally (or perhaps not) I am beginning to have to really think about stress management and really work at it.

Work is a mixed bag right now. On the one hand, the ownership is being great; they have supported and approved my request to move to a better lit work area, and it seems to have also led them to look at how they light the entire office; they're considering putting in dimmers on all the office lighting.

On the other hand, I have two co-workers who are, frankly, meddlers. They get involved in other people's work and try to tell them what to do, despite having no management role; they're quite fond of doing it to me because they've been with the company for a very long time and they think they know just how everything should be done. (Sometimes, they're right. Sometimes, they're not.)

Most of the time, I can ignore them. I am, however, running out of emotional energy to do so, and tonight when one of them told me I should take on a large project because she thought it needed done, I asked her to talk to my supervisor. I was neither polite nor impolite; just neutral. She didn't like that much. But I don't have the energy right now to fix more things that weren't done or to defend myself against more groundless criticism from people who should be doing their own jobs. I am making it to work every day and doing my thing; I need people who aren't even in my department to back off.

So that's today's bitch session, faithful readers. Thursday I see the osteoplastics surgeon; a report shall be forthcoming after that.

Entirely too much mortality.

At my age, I have lost a few friends, but not very many. It seems, in the last week or so, that the average is trying to catch up with me.

Last night, a friend and former covener of mine, Julian, lost her battle with cancer. She was very young -- three years younger than I was -- and left behind a teenage son. It was not an easy death, or a short one; she was in a great deal of pain at times, and while we were no longer close, I know from mutual friends it was a hard time for her. She was a quiet, complex, and gifted individual who I wish I had known better.

On November 5, another friend and former online gaming compatriot, Kennet, lost his life-long battle with several severe illnesses. Kennet, while having some physical limitations, had a keen mind and a huge heart, and left behind a clan of people who loved and mourned him and a smaller family of two plus commensals who have a huge absence in their lives now.

As I said to my eldest daughter, "I have had enough of dying people and people dying."

It's not that this makes me fear my own death. I still think that the upcoming surgery will come off without a hitch and I'll be back to harass the universe in my own inimitable fashion after a short recovery. It's that once again, I have been reminded of the space that we create in other people's lives; the fingerprints that we -- that I -- leave and have left in others lives. And I've also come to realize I've left less of those over the last few years than perhaps I could have; I've pulled within myself, done less teaching and leading than I could have.

I'm going to Austin PPD tomorrow. Maybe that will change. But on a night when there are one hundred and more dead in Paris because of madmen who don't understand that all of this is connected, I want to remember that to acknowledge that connection, even as I fear headaches and vertigo and surgery, is the essence of life and living.

Paper thin.

I spent a lot of time listening to John Hiatt's "Paper Thin" today. It seemed apropos.

I'm tired. Real life continues its inexorable pace, regardless of the guava's presence, and I have to keep up with it. I'm short on sleep today, and I can tell; my head hurts, and I just feel worn around the edges.

On the other hand, it was a great weekend. I took my daughter to a live show she REALLY wanted to see ("This Is Night Vale" Live) and she had a glorious time; I had fun as well. Then Sunday I spent with a friend, in his back yard, drinking too many beers and shooting the shit. Just an ordinary day that I desperately needed; it restored some semblance of normalcy that I really enjoyed, at least for a little while.

A lot of people have asked how they can help. While I expect nothing from anyone save their good wishes, if you wish to do something more concrete, B. and I worked out a list of things we will need over the next few months (or need sooner than that) and I've posted it in a Page (called, amazingly enough, "How you can help"; it's off to the right) on this website. If you feel moved to do so, take a look at it. Some of it does require some context; my surgery is tentatively in January, as y'all know. I will be in recovery through February.

We get a German exchange student in March.

There are a WHOLE lot of things I was supposed to help do to get ready for said exchange student (a young lady named Kat, from somewhere in the Schwarzwald; just what we need, another Kat) that I will be unable to do. So that's adding yet another level of panic to what is already a seven-layer cake of running in circles and hyperventilating. Thus, the rather This-Old-House-ish tone to some of the things we're asking for help with...

Blessings, my friends.

In which the clouds part a little.

Today was my consultation with Neurosurgeon #2, which was somewhere between a second opinion and a specialist for the specialist. Today's doctor specializes in both this type of tumor and surgeries that involve the skull and bone work -- given that both of these things apply to me, NS#1 handed me off to him for a longer consultation.

Despite having ominous forebodings all morning, I allowed myself some hope when he walked in and looked like a younger version of the man who led my New Warrior Training Adventure 12 years ago.

The summary is this: we got a lot of potentially good news. Here's the list --

1) He doesn't think I'll lose function on the eye. He has rarely if ever seen that occur in this type of tumor with this placement. It's possible, but he considers it very unlikely.
2) My recovery time could be shorter than we were originally told, which is good because I do not have any short-term disability and we're going to be down a paycheck while I'm out. We thought six weeks originally; he's saying it could be three to four weeks instead.
3) He does not think the image on the MRI that runs along the right side of my head is a 'tail' off the tumor. He thinks it's a blood vessel. Again, we can't be completely sure due to the limitations of MRI technology, but...

He also told us -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- he wants us to think of this as less brain surgery and more skull and eye surgery. If things go the way he thinks they will go, we'll never enter the brain. We'll skip along its surface, yes, but never actually visit Grey Matter Village. He does not think the tumor is in the brain at all, but is restricted to the dura and ocular cavity. I also finally understood what NS#1 meant when he said the tumor was 'in the bone of my eye socket'; the bone itself is not tumorous, but the tumor has punched through the bone and is growing into the eye socket. That's why my eye is popping out; it's being pushed out of its socket from behind.

(My inner 11-year-old boy thought this was awesomely gross and incredibly cool.)

The surgery is still scheduled for January, tentatively. Next step is a consult with the osteoplastic surgeon on November 19th. After that, there will probably be a CT scan, possibly a consult with an ophthalmological surgeon, and then going back to NS#1 and NS#2 for some nuts and bolts planning.

More details, friends and loved ones, as they become available.