2017

What a year!

It began with a gang buster, a great January and February where I felt quite well and increased my hours at work. Not that I had the energy of an 18 year old, but I did have enough energy to be engaged in work, Church, house, children and family, with some left over at the end of the day. I was riding a wave in the gleaming sun, and it was great.

Then it happened. Something went awry in April, and big time. I was brutally fatigued, such that for a month and a half I barely came out of my bedroom; I also lost a lot of weight, and upon visiting my oncologist, I found out that a tumor marker was going up and something had to be done. For the next two months we embarked on the Great Tumor Adventure, with multiple scans, an endoscope and colonosopy and, almost on a whim, an operation to remove four lymph nodes that had lit up on a PET scan after a biopsy was inconclusive.

It was all negative, and they said: go home, we’ll scan you in three months, so home we went.

We started it all up again in September but only this time on steroids. Not only was the tumor marker up, it was way up. Another crazy, insane walk through the medical world: tests and more tests, and at last we found the culprit: a growth on my left side about an inch by an inch and a half that lit up on a yet another PET scan. The Great Tumor Adventure was over. We had found our man. Off to see the doctors and get their opinions, and then to get second opinions. All agreed the growth was cancerous, and I even did a work-up for radiation: tattoos on both side and stickers down my back, and we scheduled my radiation treatments every day for the next two weeks.

For many reasons, it was virtually impossible to get a biopsy of the thing on my side during this time. My doctor had gone on vacation and forgot to order it, then was doing rounds the following week, and when they did schedule me it was after my radiation treatment began – oops, a little too late – so I said “forget it all” and went to Roswell in Buffalo for the biopsy, which would come back before the radiation started. It came back on a Thursday, and I was supposed to start treatment on Monday.

It was negative.

Everything came to a halt. The train jumped the tracks, all the appointments were canceled and once again I was told to go home; we’ll scan you in six weeks and see if the tumor has grown. During this time, my left side (where the growth was) started to hurt and the pain got worse. It got so bad that I could not sit, and sleeping was very difficult. There could only be one conclusion, I thought: the growth had grown, so wasn’t I surprised when the scan results came back, and the growth had not grown – not at all!

I was surprised. What other way could we understand what was happening to me. It was great that it didn’t grow, but the question is: why was my side hurting?

Another mystery.

Nothing went my way this year, in a manner of speaking, but of course with God it all went my way. He worked in mysterious ways, because I also – along with my side pain – had shingle-like pain across my front but with no rash. Shingles normally comes with a rash. We talk to the doctor and maybe it is shingles with no rash – it can happen but it’s rare. With me, anything is possible. Apparently the thing in my side activated the shingles lying dormant in my body, so it just had to make its appearance in – you guessed it – the year 2017, along with all the other crazy stuff.

Fortunately, the medicine they put me on helped. All is going well now, and we’re living life up once again in three month increments, and did I tell you my doctor thought the biopsy in November was bogus, as do I. (Yes, I had them mail it to me and read every line of it.) What does all this mean? Who knows! That is for a future chapter in the Stahl Medical Saga, to come out in 2018.

I do know for now I’m breathing and it looks like I made it to 2018; what could be better?

Christmas at 57

I have to admit:  Christmas then is different than Christmas now.  Then was when I myself was a kid, and now is now at 57 years of age.  Can you still enjoy Christmas at 57?

That is the question.

The answer:  I think so.

To begin, I have to say that Christmas was always wonderful when I was growing up in the 1960s.  For Christmas we didn’t get computer games or Xbox games or cell phones or the like, and something like a Netflix subscription for the year was never even remotely considered, but I do remember getting a big red fire truck that I could actually fill with water from the kitchen sink and wheel around the house putting out fires.  What could be better?

Besides gifts there was the food.  There were lots of foods could only be harvested around December, because that’s only when we ever saw them.  Could anyone ever image eating fruitcake in the summer?  Of course not:  I’m sure it didn’t exist then.  The same with eggnog.  The cows, I am sure, only produced that sort of milk at the start of winter, and then after that switched back to regular, boring white milk production.  The same with chestnuts and lots of nuts in particular.  It’s just how it was.

Me at Christmas

Then there was the entire Christmas pageantry.  What would Christmas be without Christmas music, and I never knew what a chestnut was until I was a teen but year after year heard the song, Chestnuts Roasting over an Open Fire.  Who, I ask you, ever roasted these things in the middle of winter?  We never went Christmas caroling – something I am indubitably happy about, because I can’t sing a single note.  We watched all the Christmas specials on TV, the Grinch who Stole Christmas being the best.  One of my kids asked if all shows and movies were in black and white when we were kids.  The answer is no.  We also did not live in a cave or beat our prey to death with a club.  Anyone without an iPad in their childhood has to be by definition Co-Magdnon.

Of course on Christmas we would get together with family, with aunts and uncles who seemed old and tired and gave the impression they had lived far too many years, and these people too must have been warehoused someplace but came out only at Christmas, because that’s virtually the only time I saw them.   They would sit around cracking nuts together and digging out the contents with a special nut picker, and then after Christmas would leave to be warehoused until the next year.  I’m sure it was that way.

We kids, though, were always letting our imagination run wild with our exotic new Cat In the Hat like toy rather than being dull and making conversation with adults while cracking nuts.   No, we were in an exciting new world with our new Raz-A-Ma taz very politically incorrect and violence promoting male gender specific gun, but it was great fun to pretend to secretly shoot these old warehoused relatives from a distance who were cracking nuts.  It was a great world for a boy with an imagination, and the gun only helped.

Of course, in all this wonderment, we as kids never saw what went on behind the scenes.  Reality for us was such that all this great stuff was just there; we woke on Christmas day at 6 am and found the presents, tightly packed below the Christmas tree, and just assumed it was put there by a fat old man who somehow had made it down the natural gas chimney; we never asked further.  All those great Christmas cookies, shaped like Christmas trees and reindeer with the colorful and super sweet glaze brushed across them – we just ate them and assumed just to us they had come to us – Presto!  Someone had to make them someplace, and perhaps all the busyness in the kitchen was my dear mother making such things, and for us.  Who knew?

Who knew, who really knew all that went on to making Christmas a great time for us kids?   We didn’t know, but I bet our parents knew.  I can only say that now because –  guess what:  I know.

I have my own kids and now Christmas was on me!  Christmas didn’t only mean eating cookies, shooting toy guns and a fat man fitting himself down the chimney:  it meant driving to store after store looking for that one special doll for a daughter or gun for the son.  It meant wrapping and trying to find tape to wrap and someone took the scissors again and the boys are fighting with the Christmas wrap tubes, and the toddler just pulled the Christmas tree over on himself.  We get our picture taken as a family, and someone is always screaming and besides:  we do have a budget, and how much does all this cost?

Somehow the joy of Christmas drained out of me and drudgery set it; the more the children the more the chore it was.  It was another thing added onto a list of a lot of other things that never seemingly got done anyway.  The list was always long and scratching off another item always infrequent, and then another gift from God was coming out the shoot, and somehow we did it.

There is a scene in the Grinch that Stole Christmas where his teeny tiny heart gets bigger – three times as big if you want to be mathematically correct.  How did it happen to such a mean old Grinch?  How could it?  He had stolen all the toys and was listening for sighs when – instead – he heard the Whos below singing Christmas songs, as if none of it mattered, and it didn’t.  They celebrated Christmas anyway, as Christmas was in their hearts and they were together; that was enough.

So the Grinch got light, and so can we.  So did I, my heart growing bigger by three times – or more.  There is a time to get rid of all our logical, in-order thoughts that make the world (and Christmas) dark.  I am thankful for those Whos.  They knew what it was all about.

So can we!

Merry Christmas!