Happy? 50th!

It is a happy birthday. My last conflicted birthday was five years ago, when I was fretting about getting old, wondering about a cramp in my belly, and pondering how to keep an ice-cream pie frozen long enough for a party on a boat on the river. I insisted to Sally and the girls that we could not celebrate ashore because the river had some symbolic significance regarding the passage of time or whatever.  They kindly tolerated that and told me to see the doctor about that cramp.

A few weeks later I was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, and at the time, my odds of celebrating my 50th were no better than the odds of ice cream surviving a sunny afternoon on the Potomac. Every birthday since has been cause for somewhat surprised celebration. And now here I am, at 50, happy to be so.

But it’s complicated. For one: the passage of time or whatever. I remember way back, a summer afternoon playing with the cousins at Granny’s.  I was maybe five years old, resisting Mom’s pleas that I go down for a nap. She said it would be for only an hour, but to me that hour seemed an eternal and unbearable stretch of time. As did, later, the days leading up to Christmas, the months before summer vacation, the years of adolescence. Senior year would never come.

But then it does, and time continues to accelerate -- college, work, family -- until someone tells you that you don't have much of it left. They give you an actuarial calculation, a percentage chance, a range of uncertainty that all means, in the end, a circumscribed future and a distinctly different way of thinking about how soon tomorrow will come (if it does).

Since then I've been run through five clinical trials, five inpatient surgeries, dozens more surgical procedures, and a warehouse full of drugs.  They gave me happy pills for the surgical pain and pumped gallons of poison through my veins to keep the cancer from spreading, and then when it did, they zapped me with radiation and wheeled in more chemo.  It all worked for a while at least, and I’m grateful for the exertions of the good people who made that happen.  But I feel much more than five years older, and not just because I’m physically diminished. Time has slowed down greatly.

Between the time in hospital beds and chemotherapy lounge chairs, I've also traveled around the world with my daughters, hiked in the Scottish highlands, kayaked in California, snorkeled down to a shipwreck in the Caribbean, climbed up Buddhist temples in Thailand and Moorish castles in Spain, watched a thousand innings of baseball, drank a hundred bottles of wine (or maybe a few more, but who’s counting), worked, played, ate, drank, made merry, and piloted that boat down the Potomac and through a Naval firing range that was, according to the insistent man on the radio, in hot status that afternoon. (Long story that.) I feel like I have done more than five years of living.

This blog will be about that living: baseball, ice cream, and other good things; medical adventures and other bad things; and life in general, which is kind of day to day, no matter how many days you have ahead. I’m writing this for family and friends, who now hear either too much or too little about all this, all kind of randomly. Anyone else is most welcome to check in as long as their interest holds, and on that I make no promises. My compelling anecdotes about what’s for supper may not be compelling for long, and I know that my insights on the hit-and-run will rarely be of interest even to those (or especially to those) in the stands next to me. Regardless I expect that writing this will feel a bit therapeutic. Purging usually does.

If I now ask the docs about my odds of celebrating my 55th, I’ll get an actuarial calculation, a percentage chance, a range of uncertainty, but really not all that much uncertainty. Sooner or later, usually sooner, ice cream melts in the sun. So I think it wise to make some estate plans and think about the best ways to spend next week and next month, while boldly renewing the season tickets -- because, who knows, maybe things will turn around. Meanwhile it’s spring. It was a long, dark winter without baseball, the Nats are now 7-1, and the Royals 7-2. We’re following the Nats up to Philly today, we have seats behind their dugout, and today -- and every day -- is another chance to win.

Ice-cream pie on the 38th, home on leave from Tikrit. Meg is unsure whether I have properly placed the bow.

And a few years later, a sunny afternoon on the Potomac.