quid est veritas?

A gray dawn breaking

2009-12-28T11:25:00.000-08:00

photos: sunrise in the Straits of Messina, highlighting Mt. Etna - May 2009

There is an undeniable allure to the morning 4-to-8s, inexplicable to the average landlubber. Perhaps the mystique is bred solely of exhaustion; after all, there’s never enough sleep beforehand. You struggle, bleary-eyed, out of the rack, slapping fruitlessly at your alarm blinking coldly: 0230, 0230. You bless all those blue lights in Combat and the red lights in the passageways, because by the time you stumble down to Main Control, you’re not blinking so furiously in that stark whiteness, blowing hot and loud. The forced routine of the round keeps you moving. An apple in one pocket, a granola bar in the other – breakfast an eternity away – and, finally, you emerge wide-eyed into the night air for the last part of the round, topside.

Even pulling down on the bar to close the door behind, I’m staring up, eyes trained. Cloudy or clear? crisp and dry? heavy with fog? – I’m picking out stars, wind on my cheek, listening, smelling, smoke shimmering from the stacks, nav lights glowing; I’m forcing my eyes to adjust, judging visibility and illumination, squinting at the horizon, distant and shady. I head aft. If it’s clear, the multiplicity of stars arrests me; and I stare up, sky dense, layers upon layers, blinking, deep into the inky darkness, picking my way across the panoply: Orion, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, Polaris. North. I judge our heading, overlaying it on the mental picture I started outlining back in Combat.

On my way forward, my feet gauge pitch and roll, adjusting as I lean into the wind, striding up the weather decks, boats tied down, dim green light of batteries charging, crouched and waiting. Usually up on the foc’sle, time allowing, my feet stumbling over ground tackle, I stop and look out, scan the horizon, wait for relative motion. Other vessels, the lights of land, the greens and whites and reds along that thin line between sky and sea, blinking on and off, some steady, some coming, some going. Aspects, sizes, distances, all compared exhaustively against the radar scope burned behind my eyes. Then, finally, up the ladders and a visual scan around the bridge catwalk, eyes pressed to binoculars, double-checking.

Entering the bridge at last, saluting the officer of the deck, it’s all double-checking now, confirming details etched in my mind. Distance and direction to land, safe water, territorial seas, nearest port. Friendly forces. Shipping. Patrol boxes, tracklines, “hot spots”, hazards. I listen and watch, judge the alertness of the bridge team, check my equipment, darken the bridge: it’s never black enough. Review the logs, the charts, the night orders I wrote (it seems an eternity ago) yesterday evening, before escaping to bed, before the phone calls, answered half-asleep. Engines, radios, intelligence, tasking, and then, the passdown, nodding, knowing the words before they’re said, agreeing.

I wait. I’m sure. I offer my relief.

The start of the watch is slow. That’s normal: I have to get my watch section accustomed, night-adapted, set in their routines. A half hour in, around 0400, and always for break-ins – and they’re inevitably there, aren’t they? it’s the best watch for training – the session starts. We review the plan of the day and anticipate responsibilities, plan actions. Rehearse wake-up calls for the captain and XO. Calculate sunrise; shoot morning stars. Review casualty procedures, in detail; run mini-drills. Memorize Rules of the Road. Calculate time-speed-distance overnight, and to our next waypoint. Watch the sun rise; shoot amplitude or azimuth for gyro error. Knock out checklists. Hunt for bad guys. Sign off boat checks. Secure nav lights; re-set the bridge for day. Smell the sweet scent of breakfast, curling up to the bridge, the only time the watch ever seems to drag, those last thirty minutes with your stomach crying out and well-nourished reliefs finally plodding up the ladder, mumbling lazy, satisfied reports and you hearing nothing, begging only for waffles or orange juice or biscuits and gravy.

It’s gone fast, and now you’re saluting the watch away, checking your logs, a final touch of the cap, heading below. Time to start the day. But, maybe if you were lucky, maybe somewhere, maybe in the midst of all that rush, maybe while the break-in ran for a head call or dug for a star chart or calculated a fix, maybe you slipped outside for a minute, draped over the bridge rail, looking up, looking out, lost in the vastness of sea and sky and stars and sun, the as-yet-unseen sun, golden only in its clouded reflection, not even risen yet; maybe you braced against wind and wiped away rain and tasted the salt spray on your lips; maybe you just stood, still, alone and small, a dot in the middle of the vastness. Maybe you remembered why you’ve done more in the past four hours, before reveille, than many on land do all day.

At the end of our long patrol this spring, we took on perhaps a dozen friends and relatives for the last short leg home, up the California coast. Two nights and a day, a short sojourn after our long adventures. Most hid in the wardroom, watching movies; the unluckier ones spread-eagled on bottom racks, sick. The more curious among them toured common spaces or spectated at special evolutions: getting underway, mooring, boats launched and recovered. Relative, yes; but no passenger, this man.

No; he appeared wordless, a shadow on the morning 4-to-8, settling silent in XO’s chair on the port side, steaming coffee mug in hand, unbidden, dark against the darkness of the foggy night, alert, watching. I suspected he’d made a round of the ship beforehand, likely more thorough than mine. He said little. He’d been in the merchant marines for years, captained ships, run a fleet out of Singapore, lately retired, still youthful, unbowed, eyes bright. He sat and kept watch with us, comfortable, listening, smelling, feeling, looking, poised. Through the sunrise; and then, upon relief, slipped away down below; breakfast called.

Yes, that man – he was a sailor. He knew.

To the lonely sea and the sky

2009-07-12T14:00:00.000-07:00

It's hard to adjust to the landlubber's life after being six months away at sea. I keep thinking this is only a port call, with sailing orders set in a day or two. I am strangely silent, uncomfortably formal and polite, withdrawn and taciturn: it's odd having to explain yourself after living half a year with shipmates who knew you more intimately than you yourself, who ate, drank, slept, breathed, watched, and endured the exact same boredom and adventures as you. Words, in the end, weren't even necessary, except to acknowledge orders or repeat back commands; only a simple look across a crowded bridge, and it was done.

There is the ceaseless watchfulness to break myself of. The unending hurry, the restlessness and impatience, the lack of time. It is particularly hard to let back in all the trivialities that so consume our daily lives back on the beach: car batteries and utility bills and noisy neighbors and church politics. All the domestic fluff you leave behind when you cast off lines. It all seems such vanity, such chasing after the wind.

But hardest, for me, is the confinement. For months it was just us, bobbing around in endless vastness of wind and sun and sea and sky. Every morning the sun crept above the horizon in the east; every evening, it slowly sank with ephemeral flash in the far west. Nights, the sky dripped with stars, the Milky Way reaching out with uncharacteristic brilliance and clarity. Below, the sea kept pushing, the dolphins diving under the hull and the flying fish scattering like spindrift before you. Day after day, in monotonous expanse. No buildings to hide the gathering clouds; no city lights to drown out the moon and planets, Jupiter overhead, red Mars consorting with blue Venus in the east, the moon rising cold and white and full.

I came back, and made for the hills, whence came my salvation, of sorts. The mountain paths of the Sierras climbed on and on ahead of me, one trail forking into the next. The untamed river rushed and curled and spread out lazily in the sun, over smooth, round stones. The air was fresh, bright, undimmed by smog. At night, the stars hung low. You could almost believe you had only to wake for the next firewatch, to share your adventures over coffee and hot cocoa, to sink slowly into quiet sleep and sweet dreams and wake before dawn with the birds' eager chirps.

Society, of course, waited at the bottom of the mountain, as it had crouched on the pier, eager, ravenous, ready to devour us with its pettiness. I do not want to speak or explain. Gossip bores me. Why are the windows up? Why are we sitting inside when the sun shines or the night calls? There are fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, fresh milk and cheese. Why are we eating, blindly, from drive-throughs? (Why is the rum always gone?!) What are all these rules, these laws, these restrictions and hierarchies? At sea, there is only the captain, imperious and imperial.

On our last day underway, a retired merchant marine captain, one of our "Tiger Cruise" guests, appeared wordlessly on the bridge while it was still dark to perch in the XO's chair and stand the morning 4-8 watch with us. He said little, just gazed out at the lightening sky and darkening waves and watched and listened and smiled.

I didn't ask why. No need.

Prejudice

2009-06-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

It is such an ugly word. I like to tell myself I'm beyond it, past the myopia; blind and all-seeing. I like to say that because skin color means no more than hair or eye color to me; because gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status or class, appearance, physical abilities or disabilities, job, talents, marital or family status, height, weight, educational accomplishments, religion or lack thereof - because this laundry list of descriptors are no more to me than the variety of fruits in the supermarket; that because of this, I am blissfully non-prejudicial. I buttress this with the fact that despite (or perhaps because of) growing up in a very multi-cultural area, I didn't realize there were race tensions until the Rodney King riots when I was in junior high; reinforce it with the rather surprising fact that I was the only white child marching in a Black History Day parade at school one year, and I barely noticed it; reassure myself by the fact that I don't use skin color to describe strangers or ask about someone's ancestors' accomplishments or care how bourgeois someone's money is.

It is all an uncomfortable illusion. I discovered that, this patrol.

It is not, I suppose, surprising. My father came of age in a city bombed by Germans night and day. Most of the earlier and more extended generations of my mother's family were killed in the Holocaust, or the raids and slaughter that preceeded it, to the point that my grandfather spent much of his adult life hunting for living relatives like needles in so many haystacks, combing phonebooks in cities around the world with sizeable Jewish immigrant populations. He eventually found (among others) a first cousin he thought he'd lost, who, along with his older sister, had hidden as children with a Catholic family in France. The older sister, who kept a graphic diary of their tribulations, eventually "converted" back, but this younger brother embraced Catholicism, eventually rising through the ranks to become - when my grandfather sought audience with him - Archbishop of Paris. There were once rumors he was in the running for Pope. He is gone now, sleeping with the others.

When I was in elementary school, there were still West Germany and East Germany and Berlin. West Germany was très moderne; East Germany produced female Olympic swim champions with hairy chests and deep voices; to Berlin went all the outreach music and drama and sports groups, to spread the good news of Western capitalism and maybe, to taste the dangerous bleakness of the Iron Curtain. Until one year at Thanksgiving, my family sat around in shock and whispered news of the Berlin Wall's incredible crumbling. That year, my mother purchased an enormous new National Geographic Atlas of the World. It showed Germany as a whole country, unified, asterisked - it hadn't happened yet;it was yet in expectation, not without a little fear. Germany had been partitioned for a reason.

But I digress.

For one of the operational periods of this deployment, we worked for a coalition task force commanded by a German admiral. (Later in the patrol, command shifted, as scheduled, to the French.) Our initial interaction withthe Admiral and his flagship was over chat, in an English still oddly accented even on-screen. They weren't the easiest to work with, or for. For our part, we were new to the operational area and to the operating guidelines. The stereotypical gruffness, curtness, rigid and directive control, all bore out in action. The pride, too: despite the "coalition" in our collective title, they repeatedly and intentionally monopolized the action, relegating us to the sidelines and claiming the glory for themselves.

Or maybe that's just how I saw it, through increasingly unsettled, prejudiced eyes. I think it was the day I watched the rotund German admiral proudly strutting across our flight deck to greet our commanding officer that I realized my almost physical revulsion. It struck every time I heard them speak over a voice circuit, read their operational directions, argued with them over tasking; even when I saw their brusque Saxon chat. All sorts of ugly stereotypes filled my mind, despite my best, most conscious efforts to banish them. I was unutterably relieved, finally, to leave them behind, more to abandon my new-discovered jadedness than to actually shift tactical control.

I experienced something similar in Gibraltar. I was with a couple of coworkers, shipmates, friends, and we were trying to find a restaurant on the waterfront for a wardroom function with the other officers. An older German man in a thick, faded navy blue cable-knit sweater intercepted us. "Where are you going? Maybe I can help you get there." We handed him our well-creased map. "Are you in the American Navy?" he asked.

I can't remember all he said. We were careful not to reveal too much of our operational schedule or activities, both still classified. He warned us not to jump off a cliff on the back side of the rock into the waters below, a wild idea carried out (surprisingly, safely) by a daredevil few US Navy sailors some months back. But mainly he was still stuck in the past. He didn't look quite old enough to have seen much, if anything, of WWII, but his entire conversation was couched in it. The post-war occupation. Limitations on shipbuilding and military reconstitution, industry, politics. Pride. A wounded pride glinted sharply from his pale blue eyes. He kept us talking there for a long time. He was suppliant, but proud, undaunted, challenging us in the subtext to both respect his country's accomplishments and yet pity him for our restrictions that kept them from achieving so much more. I felt sick. I kept picturing Nazis and freight-cars bound for concentration camps and piles of emaciated bodies. It wasn't his fault. I smiled and formed a few words, like you do when you're drunk, and was immensely relieved I didn't have to do the bulk of the talking.

Tobruk was the hardest, though. I've mentioned how my father's cousins fought and were captured there. How I read of the desert campaigns and Rommel's brilliancy in Churchill's history. The loss of life, the reversals of fortune, the direction of the whole war turning on "Torch" and Alexander's march to the sea. We toured the French and Allied cemeteries. It was solemn and sobering and humbling. But first, our Libyan hosts took us to the German cemetery. The French and Allied cemeteries were stark, sand-colored, unobtrusive. The Germans' memorial committee had erected an imposing brick monument, a castle with thick walls, two stories, an immense, imposing square on the cliff overlooking the city. We all piled out of the cramped bus into oppressive heat and blinding sun. I almost couldn't enter, where in the darkness, a shrine of sorts paid homage to the thousands of dead Germans who had conquered, then lost, the city, leaving abandoned tanks and miles of bloodshed, taking thousands of prisoners before eventually succumbing, themselves.

Inside, you stepped into the blazing sun in a large inner courtyard. Each side of the inner walls was carved with names, top to bottom, except the wall toward the city, which bore enormous, stylized soldiers and their countrymen, in service and in mourning, in relief against black granite, unwavering and undaunted. Beside them, a list of Libyan battles. I couldn't look. They were young servicemen, like us, sworn to fight and die for their country; but they had empowered Rommel, Hitler, the Nazis, the death machines. I couldn't move past that, not even in a memorial to the dead, sleeping in ignorance. The dead, soldiers, like us.

Climbing thick, winding stone staircases, you emerged again into the sun, on the wide parapet a good fifty feet above the memorial's floor, offering a commanding view of the city. In defeat, victory. It was hard to look. I felt sick. It wasn't the height.

Each time, again and again, I berated myself for my feelings, shrinking in shame. I was supposed to be beyond this, evolved or educated away from such crude, animal reactions. There's no pat answer to this one. Just humility, and a sick realization that I'm no better than those I'd so smugly judged.

Shadows

2009-06-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

Last summer, with endless hours in hospital waiting rooms, UCSF shuttles, and hooked up to IVs (I'd say "hours to kill", but that's a bit morbid, in context), I gingerly began leafing through pages of Winston Churchill's magnificent, exhaustive, 6-volume History of World War II.

Wide-ranging in scope, astonishing in detail, intuitively prophetic in political repercussions, strategically masterful, intimate, unforgivingly and proudly British, and above all, rewardingly well-written, this exhaustive personal account propelled me, week after week, through its 4000+ pages and 10 years of tumultuous world events.

I never got as far as WWII in school history classes. Anyway, it would have been American-biased and blinkered, only from December 7, 1941, onward. Iwo Jima and Normandy and the atom bomb. My historical knowledge was generally confined to old war movies, the Diary of Anne Frank, and familial horror stories of the Holocaust. As a teenager in East London, my dad had lived through the Blitz, but claimed to remember only a few highly selective, polished, gems of sanitized stories from the long onslaught. Churchill's detailed history gave me new inroads, new insights, new questions to ask my father, provocative enough to elicit little vignettes nobody in the family had yet heard. Trips to Lake Geneva as a child, dodging Nazi guards. Blacked-out windows on Tube trains. Air-raid shelters dug in London backyards. Peace in our time.

I'd made it to Volume IV when we set sail back in January. Perhaps it was inevitable, given the strategic reach of the Britannic Empire's naval power, but I slowly realized that our deployment was retracing (though, admittedly, out of order) the great naval battlefields of WWII. We began in Pearl Harbor, where we moored for fuel just across from the USS ARIZONA memorial. We sailed through contested Pacific islands, through the Filipino Straits of Surigao (Battle of Leyte Gulf), stopping in Malaysia and Singapore; where on the US Naval base, there is a memorial to the great British sea battle for the fortress. Sailing across the Indian Ocean, port calls in India and Pakistan unsettlingly revealed how steeped those countries' naval forces were, still, in British colonial tradition.

I asked my father to mail me the last three volumes of the series. It seemed fitting to read them as we sailed these waters, redolent with history. The Free French were being installed in Madagascar as we anchored in the Maldives. The air war raged in Iraq and Persia and critical convoys sailed the Red Sea while we patrolled in the Gulf. I sat at a chokingly formal Indian reception, devoured by mosquitoes, while Churchill and Roosevelt debated Indian independence and Mahatma Gandhi refused to eat. The British swept into Athens to flush out Greek communists while I crawled around abandoned gun mounts on a wind-swept Santorini. We steamed through the Straits of Messina just after the Allies' great amphibious assault, wandered through a Rome unscathed from surrender, stared searchingly at Pius XII in the Basilica, and scrambled to the top of the great Rock of Gibraltar to look out, at last, on unfettered Allied control of the Mediterranean.

In between, we watched episodes of Band of Brothers.

And we stopped in Tobruk. Tobruk has great personal meaning for me. Two of my father's cousins, fighting with a South African brigade, were captured there and spent the remainder of the war as Italian, then German, POWs. I'd tracked down one of them, still alert and in his 90s, in South Africa this past fall, to elicit incredible tales of a displaced farm boy whose sweetheart waited patiently on the Cape Town pier, years notwithstanding, for her hero's return.

We were the first American warship to stop in Libya in over 40 years. The local political delegation apologized that all Tobruk had to offer us was a long tour of battlefields, cemeteries, and memorials, but that was what I sought: that was why I'd come, I guess. (Tobruk wasn't even on our initial schedule; Tripoli was.) I wandered around in the blistering heat and touched the gravestones - English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Czech, Greek, Jewish, South African, Free French, Polish, Indian, African. Not forgotten. On top of one of the gravestones was a red paper poppy, the sort they sell in England for memorial days, with the name of a South African soldier, unknown to me, who'd been taken in Tobruk, survived the war as a POW, and passed away in the fulness of life, surviving nearly into the 21st century. Requiescat in pace.

There are no just wars, only justifications for wars. Still, as we sailed homeward across the convoyless Atlantic, cleared at last of U-boats, headed at the close of Churchill's final book into an uncertain post-war modernity, I was left dangling in the great abyss between past and present, ideal and reality, war and politics, posturing and progress. Somewhere, that indomitable spirit yet lurks; the sleeping giant only dozes; the moralist hasn't forgotten. The Empire - tarnished, dusty, and transferred - still stands, a string of lights flickering around the world's oceans, waiting only for electrification.

Making History

2009-06-02T03:43:00.000-07:00

We recently visited Tobruk, Libya, of WWII historical fame. We made some of our own history there: we were the first US warship to visit the country in over 40 years. Here is a Navy press release about our trip: BOUTWELL visits Tobruk.

Yes We Could

2009-05-24T23:08:00.000-07:00

I’ve chosen to tell this past year’s – diagnosis, treatment, and recovery – in the context of my career, perhaps because that is the most appropriate and least damning story arc. But there are others frames I set aside along the way: say, the 2008 presidential election.

There is no causative factor, of course; only a happenstance correlation. It was back around the time of Key West, back around that heart-stopping lump I felt, that I started to follow the meteoric career of this amazing 2004 DNC speaker, the kid with the funny name from the South Side of Chicago, thrust onto the national stage by none other than John Kerry: Barack Obama. In Alabama, in January, while I was being run through the gauntlet of tests, neon bandages around my elbow from the constant blood-letting, that I walked into a library in West Mobile to see how I, and shockingly, three dozen of the most diverse crowd I'd ever seen gathered in the South, could help elect this man president. While the tests dragged on, and the detailer called to tempt me with the grand surprise, unsustainable, of my dream job, I pounded the streets of middle-class black neighborhoods in Mobile and walked past parades of Mardi Gras revelers, registering voters and talking up the impending primary, which due to its concurrence with Fat Tuesday, was held (in Mobile alone in the state) a week early. Since we were in drydock, I carved out the time to drive 8 or 9 hours round-trip to Birmingham on a Sunday to again see the most incredible cross-section of Southern population, gathered in record-breaking numbers of maybe 12K-15K, to reassure each other that this inspirational man speaking before us was no illusion; the America he touted no idle dream. I walked up naively with handfuls of extra tickets entrusted to me from the Mobile office and was instantly mobbed by hundreds of eager, desperate fellow Americans. Desperate for hope. Desperate for change.

Yes we could.

When I went to Rhode Island for TAO school, that abortive attempt at normalcy my gut told me was doomed to fail, given the biopsy taken on the eve of my departure, the Pennsylvania primary already loomed large, and I made arrangements to drive over and volunteer one weekend. While the eventual diagnosis scotched those lofty goals, my immediate redirection to California enabled me to join a call center and reach out to hundreds of primary voters in Indiana. I registered the leather-clad during Pride Weekend, the arugula-eating in Nob Hill, and the surreally cloistered in far exurbia. In late May, I flew up to Oregon and pounded the streets of Bend, Beaverton, and Portland in anticipation of their primary; Oregon's record-breaking crowd of 75,000 packed into the Waterfront Park rally the day I left. Later that summer, I flew to Arizona and lettered campaign signs with my mother – a devout Hillary Clinton supporter I like to think I helped convert – in a tiny house in the Hispanic ghetto. Did I mention that by this time, I was going through treatment? That I was struggling to focus through the searing pain that was destroying everything within me from blood cells to tastebuds? That I was working 30+ hours a week, gritting out the exhaustion and the dizzying sickness with thoughts of ship commissionings and $1 million security contracts? That I was bandanna-clad, scarf-wrapped guarding my delicate bald scalp and radiated neck from the summer sun? I didn’t, but no matter. It was secondary to me then, too. We needed this moment. We needed this change.

Yes we could.

The primaries wound up. I watched the historic acceptance speech from my apartment in San Francisco, cheering wildly with my roommate, all else forgotten. I followed the general election from the road, sporadically. By now, treatment was over, and I was rushing to catch up. As I drove cross-country to bring my car from Alabama to California at last, I no longer feared to tape my “Obama ‘08” bumper-sticker in my back window while driving through the South. My Obama t-shirts started conversations in small towns and big cities alike, and I couldn't stop handing out leftover pins and paraphernalia. People were emerging, squinting, unsure, out of every forgotten corner of America to wish, to hope, just barely over their fear that a long-held dream might just come true, that we had a future, that we, Americans, could truly have a voice, a long-slumbering power stirring awake.

I watched the final presidential debate, or the majority of it, huddled with a couple dozen flight-mates around a TV in Nagoya during an all-too-brief layover to the other side of the world. South Africa was abuzz with the possibility that a man with an African father might be elected American president. In South Africa, the only reason black men finally won the presidency is that their black majority at last earned suffrage. In America, they amazed, a black man might win because white people voted for him. It was a game-changer.

Yes we could.

Election night itself, I was underway, or getting underway, en route to my new life, the one I'd left behind. We were in the middle of TACT, in San Diego. We'd been anchored for a few hours earlier in the afternoon, and despite my exhaustion of endless operations, night and day, I'd been glued to the wardroom TV the whole time, watching early election returns as the polls closed in the East. Then we set special sea detail, and it was dark; I was on the bridge, and my pocket wouldn't stop buzzing. My roommate was frantically texting me electoral college updates, and when that seemed decisive, I begged her for Senate numbers. Just as we weighed anchor, my mother called. I thought it was an emergency and decamped to the bridge wing. "OBAMA WON!!!! AAAHHHHHH!!!" she screamed. "That's great, Mom," I whispered. "I'm at special sea detail right now."

We left for the OOH before the inauguration; providentially, our departure from Honolulu was delayed a day and some hours; long enough to watch the august event in its entirety, again from the wardroom television via the propagandistic AFN (Armed Forces Network). We left as the world was changing, and all that we heard of home in the interim seemed distant and unreal - a dying economy, a sagging stock market, torture, Guantanamo, Supreme Court, budget fights, bank bailouts.

Even in our port calls, we seemed to cross stars with the new administration. We stopped in Malaysia days before Hillary Clinton flew to Southeast Asia for her first foray as Secretary of State.We sweated through India and Pakistan as Obama shook hands with Musharraf in the White House for the first time. We were moored in Bahrain when the President flew out, unexpectedly, to meet with troops in Iraq and Kuwait and Afghanistan. Leaving Jordan and through the Suez as Obama made his much-heralded Egypt speech to the Muslim world. Sailing through the Med as the First Family traveled Europe and was lambasted by press for hugging the Queen in England and sight-seeing in Paris. As we chased down suspected pirates in the Gulf of Aden for one of our biggest operational accomplishments, Arlen Specter switched parties to set up a sea change in the Senate. Days before we pulled back into Alameda, Norm Coleman finally conceded and Al Franken was sworn in on Paul Wellstone’s Bible. The Senate was at 60. Mission accomplished.

There are new crewmembers now, like our new Weapons Officer who served on the Inaugural Committee and hobnobbed at all the balls, who haven’t the faintest clue the path I hiked last summer. Back home, now, the mass of Americans have sunk, deaf and dumb, into their lives of quiet desperation, worried by recession and distracted by Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett and opinion polls, back into the lethargy, forgetting so easily, relinquishing the terrific power they so recently held.

The moment is past.

Credit by Exam

2009-05-19T20:28:00.000-07:00

The Coast Guard, luckily for me, (and mainly from tight resources) relies heavily on OJT - on-the-job training - to qualify its personnel. That's a good thing, because I've never been one to revel in extended classroom "butt time".

Back in junior high and high school, I schemed every trick imaginable to escape from the stultifying confines of those terrible four walls of lecturehood. Testing out, two classes at once, credit for outside activities, dual-credit classes; and my personal favorite, "excused" absences for the purpose of furthering legitimate extracurricular activities. (I missed more than a few days of high school to perform in paid gigs out-of-state. Those were cool chits to route!) It was all about the electives, then, anyway: how many pointless core requirements could I clear out of my day to make room for the good stuff?

College was, quite, the culmination of these years of curiously channeled creativity. In college, lectures were not compulsory; only results counted. I traded somnolent droning for dark tables of dusty books dug from the Bodleian's stacks, runs around the sports grounds to memorize ancient languages, and the midnight-to-0500 shift at the keyboard, typing away furiously at the essay due at daybreak.

Class time it wasn't. It keeps nagging me, somewhere back of my mind, that perhaps I should go back to school one day - fully funded, no less; career-enhancing, certainly. One day in mandatory training explodes that deceptively tempting thought. Classrooms and I don't cohabitate comfortably.

Here, then, I've been busy knocking out "credits by exam", as it were. I was excused from nearly two full months of mandatory pre-arrival training on the proposition that I would gain all that knowledge by doing, on the job, on this patrol. I am a practical learner; we've been busy; it's been ideal. Plus, instead of parking my butt in a plastic chair to blink my eyes sleepily at an soporific instructor, determined to close the last of the hundred Argusian eyes, I've kept watch in the sunshine and the wind on the bridge wing; I've darted around in the dim blue air-conditioned hum of CIC; I've crept through the ship late at night, in port, between endless days of drills and exercises and assessments, skipping the pub crawl to trace the firemain and diagram damage control systems.

There's still the oral board at the end. Which always, despite my level or source of preparedness, challenges me, if only because I overthink the questions and doubt my communicative abilities. Put me on the bridge in bad weather with a distress call from a small sailboat; put me in CIC as we're corralling a runaway skiff or creeping up, defenses at maximum alert, to a suspect vessel late on a dark night. Put me on the conn as we navigate a tight spot. Let me do, demonstrate, train, coach, take action. I trust the kinetics. The academics I study.

In this I have, at last, succeeded. I have earned my key qualifications, with (hopefully) a couple more to follow shortly, before I leave. This time, my reward was not electives, free time, or near-residence at the music faculty. This time, my reward was 6th Fleet operations - the Mediterranean. Work and play. Anything but the classroom.

Early April's update from the CO

2009-05-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

BOUTWELL Friends and Families,

I can't believe it's been over a month since I've written one of these. There has been a lot going on - I'll tell you about as much as I can. Don't feel like I'm keeping things from you - the things I leave out are not all that exciting, it's just info we'd rather not fall into the wrong hands, and as soon as this email goes to an address that doesn't end in "uscg.mil", there's a risk that that could happen.

Shortly after my last email, we joined ships and aircraft from 10 other countries for an international exercise called AMAN '09, hosted by the Pakistani Navy. AMAN means "Peace" in Urdu, one of the principle languages of Pakistan. The exercise consisted of inport workshops, professional exchanges, underway events like mock boardings, formation steaming and Search & Rescue demonstrations, and cultural events ashore. The shoreside events were all held in Karachi, Pakistan. As you can imagine, security was very tight. No liberty was granted to the crew, except to attend official exercise events, so their ability to 'experience' Pakistan was very limited. The official events were very nice, though, and demonstrated a good deal of the rich culture and historical heritage of Pakistan, as well as some really good food.

The crew also got to visit with the crews of the other ships moored with us in Karachi. Ships from the British Royal Navy and the Australian Navy were most popular, probably because of the (more or less) common language, but we also had guests aboard from the Chinese Navy, and lots of interaction with the Pakistanis. France, Malaysia, Japan, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Nigeria also had forces participating. We interacted with them at the meetings and some of the social events, but they were a little farther away from us so we didn't spend as much time with them. On our pier, there were sports events between and among the different crews, and some vendors were allowed between the 2nd and 3rd entry control points, so the crew could do some shopping.

When we left there, we made another strait transit. Remember those from the Philippines? This one was through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that connects the Arabian Sea to the Arabian Gulf. We drew a little attention from some Iranian naval craft during that transit, but it turned out they just wanted to get a closer look at us. Not really surprising - I guess they don't see many U.S. Coast Guard high endurance cutters in these parts. I think we got a pretty good picture of them taking a picture of us.

We then stopped in Bahrain for a few days of R&R&R. The third R is for repair. Bahrain is home to the headquarters for 5th Fleet, which doubles as the Naval component commander for Central Command, or CENTCOM. As such, it’s a logistics hub for the region and we received many many much needed spare parts we had ordered, as well as literally almost a ton of mail. We then left Bahrain, went back out to the Arabian Sea. This time, when we had just finished going through the Strait of Hormuz in the other direction, we came across a small Iranian boat, disabled and adrift, with 22 people on it. We contacted officials from both Oman (because it was closest) and Iran, and stayed with the boat for several hours waiting for the Iranians to come help them. We also provided some medical and engineering assistance to them, and in the end, they were able to get their engine started again before the Iranians got there.

After that, we've spent most of our time doing counter-drug type operations, very similar to what we would be doing on an Eastern Pacific patrol. One of the most interesting things we've done was an underway refueling evolution from a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force oiler, followed by a photo op with them, another Japanese ship and ships from Germany and Pakistan. We're also getting more and more of our people qualified in various watchstations all the time, and we have a lot more qualified boat crewmembers, boarding team members and flight deck personnel than we did before. We've had some advancements as well.

And, as often happens, we've had some equipment break. I think I've said it before in previous emails - one of the strengths of the WHEC is that we have lots of redundant systems, so that even when some of them break we are still very capable. That often makes the decision on whether to continue to operate, at a reduced level, or take time away from operations to make repairs, a very difficult one. That's true in this case as well, but we found an opportunity to repair some of the more important equipment with minimal impact on our scheduled commitments, so as I write this we are back in Bahrain to take advantage of it.

As I write this, we are almost at the halfway point of this deployment. We're starting to get into a rhythm a little bit, hitting our stride so to speak. Things we're doing that at first were new and difficult are now more routine and easier. People are finding ways to make the time more enjoyable and for want of a better word, 'normal'. We've seen the return of steel beach, and a jam session on the flight deck (made up mostly by TAD folks, for some reason). I'm excited and proud of the things we are doing, but at the same time I'm looking forward to being on the back end of the trip. There's starting to be more and more discussion about what we will be doing during the transit back, and once we get back. We still have a lot to do here, and a long time until we're back, but once we get 'over the hump' we generally pick up speed.

CAPT Kevin J. Cavanaugh
Commanding Officer
USCGC BOUTWELL (WHEC 719)

Under wraps

2009-05-18T00:29:00.001-07:00

We have now spent close to three months "in theater". Almost without fail, and even in the port calls before we formally inchopped, the countries we've visited have been extremely conservative, traditional, male-dominated, majority-Muslim societies.

I expected women to be largely invisible; black-clad shadows floating, out of focus, in the background; absent from politics, the military, business: all the traditional seats of power. In this, despite the brilliant knots of sari-wrapped wives in Cochin, I was not entirely mistaken. Everywhere we've gone, I've been a novelty, particularly where I've involved myself in the VBSS (visit, board, search, and seizure) and maritime law enforcement training, or assisted with ATFP (anti-terrorism/force protection) concerns, or even just in introductions as the Tactical Action Officer - what our British and Australian cousins call the PWO (Principal Warfare Officer).
In India, where I found company with their regional coast guard's sole female officer, an O-4 in charge of logistics (and where I admit I didn't help my case by providing the musical entertainment for our reception onboard), the general rumor was that I was the captain's wife. Why else is she onboard? In Malaysia, the boarding team members were skittish when I went "hands-on" to demonstrate correct techniques for handcuffing and escorts, and peppered me with questions about frisking female subjects while avoiding what they called "human rights concerns". In Jordan, the local security forces made eyes at all the ship's females (the local US Navy intelligence agent, a woman, said, "Do you feel uncomfortable yet? You will..."), and in Oman, I bought an abaya. Just in case.

Surprisingly, the Saudis were quite polite to me, in our limited interaction; in Bahrain and the Maldives, I was largely out of the operational loop. Everywhere, I was questioned not on my profession, but on my personal life: where are your husband and children?! It reminded me, uncomfortably, of my nosy neighbors in the Deep South.

Gender-wise, the most challenging country we visited was Pakistan. In Karachi, for AMAN '09, I'd volunteered to organize the evolution our ship would run as OTC (officer in tactical command), an exercise demonstrating the multi-national naval forces' collective ability to defend against the threat from small boat attacks. The visiting naval officers were largely nonchalant (worried, no doubt, about their own pending exercises), but the locals weren't sure how to take me. My input in the pre-sail conference was largely smiled at politely - and ignored. After I briefed our exercise in front of the collective countries' naval delegations, long and oppressive silence reigned: nobody dared question my plan...why is a woman up there giving direction in the first place?! Underway, when I sought to take OTC control in order to kick off the exercise, the exercise controller fought with me over an open tactical circuit, belittling my requests. And at the hotwash, it wasn't until the male officers in our delegation repeated my suggestions that they were taken for further review and followup. Still, brush-offs aside, the general response following the at-sea portion was that our exercise - which I had greatly re-written from the previous conference's draft, to increase its realism and applicability - was one of the most useful of the dozen or so executed during the overall event.

So operationally, I've stood my ground. I earned public bridge-to-bridge compliments after conning the ship sweaty-palmed, but smoothly through a RAS (refueling-at-sea) evolution in very rough weather. I gained the silent respect of pilots in Jordan and Bahrain, navigating to and away from a pier; particularly with the very tight mooring evolution in Bahrain, between a South Korean destroyer and a damaged Navy sub, where I spun the ship around in her place and parallel-parked her, as though we had the assistance of stern thrusters or a Z-drive.

I am glad to be here, the female face in the wardroom, in the foreground and not disappearing in the distance. A Navy colleague out here told me that when his destroyer came through, they had a junior officer pretend to be their XO at all official functions: they figured their female XO might be accepted by traditional Middle Eastern societies. To me, that undermines what we stand for as Americans. Do we shy away from appointing a female Secretary of State; do we have her underlings impersonate her in male-dominated countries?

In Bahrain, where I visited the Grand Mosque, my fully-cloaked female guides suggested that what the Western world called "oppression" of women was actually freeing and respectful. Women worshipped separately so they wouldn't be bending over for prayers in front of lustful male eyes. They covered up so they wouldn't distract men from holy thoughts. They had the most important role: raising the children, the next generation, the men who would become great leaders of the future and the women who would, in turn, bear more men. The same words of traditional male-dominated cultures for centuries, and all centered around the towering obelisk of male primacy.

In its own way, I realize, it's no different from the "male gaze" dominating Western popular culture as well, despite our "advances" and feminism. Women's magazines abound with photo spreads of scantily clad women; both articles and advertising convince distraught readers that only with the right cosmetics, clothing, jewelry, fancy shoes, and the right attitudes and acts, can they hope to improve themselves enough to attract or keep a man; which is, of course, the ultimate goal of every modern woman's life.

It is then that the billowy black cloak and protecting veil seem, in their way, liberating.

The sound of silence

2009-04-13T04:50:00.000-07:00

Solitude is hard to come by on a ship, even one that’s three hundred and seventy-eight feet long, forty-two feet wide, and several decks high. You sleep in company, eat in company, work in company, relax in company, despair in company, fight in company, revel in company.

The luck of landing a private stateroom is fleeting, for your chances of quiet escape are even rarer: you have a private phone number, and everyone knows where to find you.

And there’s certainly no escaping the commotion of everyday ship’s operations: pipes, alarms, radio traffic, engine roar, needle-gunning, clanking, whirring, banging around, shouting, loud rock music from the space next to yours. The soft hum of mission accomplishment.

The brain accustoms itself to this noise, tunes it down and focuses it out, though at times it’s overwhelming, like trying to drive the ship with a half-dozen different radio circuits blaring and ten or twelve crewmembers shouting across bridge wings, other desperately clamping sound-powered phone headsets to their ears in a futile attempt to pick out your commands, hollered over the commotion.

Sometimes you’re lucky, in port calls, when you can escape the buses and vans with piped-in music, the TVs blaring ubiquitously, the raucousness of the drunk and rowdy, the rock music at the gym, even (to my surprise) piped in underwater, in the pool, in one of my few remaining sanctuaries.

Numbed by the noise, the mind takes its time to unwind, to release its carefully hoarded thoughts. Clarity of focus emerges surprisingly, after sleeping in (for once), with noise-canceling headphones tuning out the ceaseless clatter of worklists and general announcements. Profundity is hard to grasp, larger concepts harder to conceive, even rote memorization hard to digest comfortably. Cognition is coiled expectantly, nervously.

Somewhere I find a quiet corner, secretly, briefly. Carefully classified and covertly occupied, lest the others run to possess it in reverse hide-and-seek. Here the thoughts start to bubble up, slowly at first, then in a torrent, pressed down and overflowing. Perspective emerges. Realization. Understanding.

Then I am piped. “…your presence is requested in the XO's stateroom...”

It shatters. The moment is lost.

Under the weather

2009-04-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

They call it the common cold for a reason. We all get sick. It’s supposed to be normal, and then we all recover. Except when your immune system’s been compromised, you’re never quite so sure. You scrutinize every sneeze, sweat the fevers, choke back the sore throats, stress over the aches and coughs.

And standing up to 15 hours of watch a day, you don’t have a chance to slow down and sleep it off. You dope yourself up with cold medicine, swallow gallons of water and hot chocolate and cough syrup, and hope the watch will be busy, to distract you.

Eventually the cold medicine wears off, or maybe you’re just building up resistance, or maybe the cold is getting worse (you worry). The pseudoephedra starts clouding up your vision like the steroids did; you’re blind when you first wake up, and no amount of blinking and squinting focuses the picture. The fever’s broken, but you can’t stop coughing. You lose your voice at first, then it abruptly returns, but only in lower, raspy registers; and when you try to sing, out come these strange chirps.

You’ve tried not to think about it, but you’re counting the days, and when, after 7 days you’re still sick, you can’t escape the lurking despair anymore: I had an immune system disease, after all.
Your fingers start reaching, feeling, searching for swollen lymph nodes: neck, collarbone, armpits, thighs. It doesn’t matter nothing’s there. You still worry. You still look.

The recirculated cold air blowing down your throat, the short nights of just a few hours’ sleep before waking for another watch, the close-quarters contact with other ill folks, the stress and noise and uncertainty that keep you up even when you’re in the rack; maybe this is why you’re not getting well, but that’s not the thought foremost in your mind, undercutting all your conscious powers.

One day you wake up after a decent amount of sleep and your head is clear, your chest clear, your sinuses clear. Your voice is back and the cough has stopped, but you open your mouth to sing and still it’s the chirps coming out. And your hand instinctively starts feeling again, searching, dreading.

You still wonder. You still worry. You still feel.

AMAN 09

2009-03-10T14:15:00.000-07:00

We recently participated in the multi-national exercise AMAN 09, hosted by Pakistan. "Aman" means "peace" in Urdu.

Here is an official Navy press release.

God's country

2009-03-09T07:43:00.000-07:00

At first, it was fishing boats. Wooden, simple, brightly (we Westerners say "garishly") colored. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, glaring and cluttered in the dirty water, air heavy with trash-burnt haze hanging low.

The slightly sooty white ships (snapped in a sepia-toned world of yesteryear) passing close aboard, sailors at attention formed up on every deck, sweaty, saluting smartly, holding salutes into the distance, long past "carry on". Chinese fishing nets draped delicately, cobwebbed, on the tarnished shoreline.

"We call this 'God's country'," crowed the smartly-togged commander at my elbow, resplendent in faded whites. As we approached the pier, the conning officer's helm and line commands were drowned out, raucously, by a tired band in sagging formation, two sweating petty officers posing at either end of a briskly-lettered sign, red on white: "Indian Coast Guard Welcomes USCGC BOUTWELL to Kochi."

The music at times petered out, but given an important command to the lee helm or bow prop operator, the plaintive strains overswept our hearing again, instantly, stridently. It was hot, and hazy, and the whole pier area, everything in sight, was swept clean of people, just for us, rabble cordoned just out of reach. I squinted even through polarized lenses. Still, all the eggy whitewash in the world couldn't cover the mess of Cochin.

We swayed through the crowded streets in shabby luxury buses, worn with time, seats filled incongruously by officers in trops, gleaming white combo covers on laps, peering out through ragged curtains at the world of dust and dirt and grime and striving poverty just the other side of thin glass, inches away at every intersection, chaos and teeming livelihoods undaunted by a cacophony of car horns, moped horns, shouting, pushing, shouldering.

At night, the air was thicker, ashy with burnt trash, red, thick with fat bugs eager to bite, the back of your throat seared. Lights swam back and forth on the water, dark, oily. We clustered in a "safe" hotel, slouched on soft leather couches, five-star on the water, under the verandah, smoked with incense, icy, expensive cocktails in henna'd hands.

Outside, the sewage ran raw through the streets under concrete-block sidewalks. A large, rusty pipe fitting protruded from a cracked wall; above it, a hand-lettered sign: "Potable Water Connection". Every shopkeeper was a hustler, every meal suspect, every transaction scrutinized. Mopeds swarmed around us, driver smartly attired and helmeted, wife side-saddle behind him, child clinging to gas cap, passengers all bare-headed, husband clutching a couple spare helmets in front of him, heedless of hazards.

We disembarked from the musty bus into an oasis, the training center for our hosts and counterparts, colonially time-warped, deep mahoganies and linen-draped wicker, white lights strung through trees in the humid evening, china cups of milky tea in the hot afternoons. Strictly divided: enlisted in the rear, officers up front, captain on a low, velvety couch inches down from the stage, served silver-trayed delicacies by junior personnel. A nine-gun salute. Flamethrowers. Choreographed acrobatic stick-fighting. A long, static, epic mime-opera in drag. Delicious, spicy curries and breathtaking, colorful silks.

A world grasping and unregulated, scrambling over the ruins of a colonial, civilized, casted past. Marked by our words, our skin, our first-world tastes, we struggled to play both gracious host and humble guest, stumbling through ceremony and ritual unfamiliar to us artless Americans, hardening our hearts against questionable need and inescapable touts and beggars. A free market spurning every attempt at regulation.

And in the evenings, around sunset, before the incinerators sparked up and the bug swarms thickened, strains of music wafting across the water, low, determined, calls to prayer.

Underway on the other side of the world

2009-03-07T11:25:00.000-08:00

Another update from our CO follows...

BOUTWELL Family and friends,

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to say "It's a small world" ever again. It's hard to believe that we are about one quarter through this deployment, and we are just now getting over here to do the job we were sent to do. But, it's true - except for some of the work we did during some of our port calls along the way, everything so far has been preparation for this. The real work begins now.

Let me tell you about what we've done since my last email. We've made two port calls and worked with the Coast Guards of India and the Maldives. Both of them were very excited about our visit. As you can imagine, they don't get a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter stopping by very often. The Indian Coast Guard really rolled out the red carpet for us. First, they greeted us with a military band on the pier. Then, they invited us to a demonstration of some of the cultural aspects unique to that region of India, including a martial arts demonstration and a very interesting, stylized performance that combined music, singing and I guess you could call it acting, but it was really an intricate display of eye, facial muscles, lips and hand movements mostly. It was called Kathakali - you can probably Google it and get a better description than what I gave, if you're interested.

We hosted them on board for a reception the next night, and they had the wardroom back for another reception on the final night. In between parties, we had a friendly game of basketball with them. We jumped off to an early lead, but they pulled ahead in the second half. We managed to tie it at the end of regulation, but they outlasted us in overtime and got the victory. Also, several of our crewmembers participated in a community relations project, repairing and whitewashing a wall at a senior citizens' home. [Let's just say we were scraping off the old paint with coconut husks.]

On the day we left, we conducted an exercise with the Indian Coast Guard. We both did SAR demonstrations - they hoisted a swimmer out of the water to one of their helicopters, we hoisted a dummy from our small boat to our helo using our rescue basket. We did some tactical maneuvering with the ships, a fly-by of all our aviation assets, some great photo ops, and did mutual mock boardings with our LE teams. They put on a demonstration of air-to-surface gunnery that was pretty impressive as well.

Our next stop was in the Maldives, near the capital, Male. The Maldives are a beautiful set of coral atolls, about 4-8 degrees above the equator. Tropical island paradise, with crystal clear water, beautiful beaches, fabulous scuba diving, snorkeling and surfing, and really really expensive. We were anchored within the Male atoll, and most of the islands around us charged the crew a 'landing fee' if they went ashore there, going as high as $60 or $75 per person. Hotels started around $200/night. Still, it was very pretty.

We worked with the Maldive National Defense Force Coast Guard there. We gave them some law enforcement and use of force training, did a mock boarding and a SAR demonstration for them, and flew their Director General around in our helo. It was a nice, productive, low key visit with an opportunity for most of the crew to get a chance to relax and have a little fun.

This brings me back to my opening statement about the real work starting now. [We're part of a Naval expeditionary strike group, or ESG.] We've been spread out during our transit from Hawaii, and we'll be doing different things in different places while over here, but we will remain part of that group until we leave. On Friday, the head of the ESG came by for a visit. During the visit, he asked several of the crew, "What have you done for your country today?". It was an interesting question, and I believe it took a couple people by surprise, until it dawned on them that every bit of work they do on board is for their country. It reminded me of a story I heard, that, in the 60's, if you went to NASA and asked one of the janitors who was sweeping a floor what he was doing, he'd say he was putting a man on the moon. It's an important reminder that everyone's job contributes to mission success, and, in our case, it extends to all of you back home as well. The sacrifices you make on a daily basis enable us to do our job - so, thank you for YOUR service!

I know that this deployment is not like typical Coast Guard deployments. I'm giving you less information than I normally would, but I think it's for a valid reason. It might be frustrating, but there isn't any practical reason you need to know where or when our next port call will be. And, for those of you who do know what the current schedule is, there's no reason to give that information to anyone else. Even if you're sure the person you're telling is trustworthy, public communications aren't secure, and believe me, people ARE listening. [In fact, they've told us that every "ship's cell" phone is being tapped.] There are many reasons why it is in the best interests of the crew to keep that information as tightly held as possible.

The next few weeks are going to be pretty hectic and also pretty exciting. I should be able to write again sometime in the next couple of weeks, before St. Patrick's day, anyways. Until then, keep us in your thoughts and take care of yourselves!

CAPT Kevin J. Cavanaugh
Commanding Officer
USCGC BOUTWELL (WHEC 719)

DoD Bloggers' Roundtable: Coast Guard's Anti-Piracy Efforts

2009-03-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to a transcript from an interesting "bloggers' roundtable" discussion with two Coast Guard O-6's from CGHQ talking about the Coast Guard's role in anti-piracy efforts.

Bloggers' Roundtable

The blessings of liberty

2009-02-23T04:16:00.000-08:00

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin

It is when I am furthest from home that I tend to appreciate America the most.

Not that every place I visit or live doesn't have its unique and intrinsic charms; but never do I regret winning the birth lottery of natural-born American citizenship. Developing countries tend to exude early-American entrepreneurship and eager, heartfelt service, but run terribly arid on all the splendid little conveniences we grow accustomed to enjoying. Other first-world countries drip with those niceties like drinkable water and flushable toilets and driveable roads, but whirr with a cold efficiency, demonstrating little of the creativity or joie de vivre, the multiculturalism, the daring, the refusal to be confined or defined, the irrepressable variety of our melting-pot society. And you cannot seem to escape castes and class systems, more deeply ingrained than even the color line in America, that deep divide that today seems so joyously to be vanishing, ever so slowly, filled in by the endless toil and shoveling of an endless line of heroic laborers.

Here, in Singapore, you emerge into a most modern, economically successful, clean, superbly-equipped, crime-free, and indeed beautiful city, but its residents flit through the well-swept streets like so many timid ghosts, afraid to even breathe the wrong way for fear of a hefty fine and arrest by police unconstrained by laws of civil liberty.

As trammeled and twisted as our Constitution has been over the past two hundred and twenty-some years, it yet remains the unshaken basis of our laws (laws copied and envied the world over, even and perhaps particularly by those who "hate us") and our concept of a society built on the ideal that something as ephemeral and proclaimedly self-evident as the "pursuit of happiness" was worth enshrining, protecting, and defending in our founding documents.

Happiness and liberty cannot be taken too lightly. Freedom may be messy; but it is irreplaceable, bought only by blood and sacrifice. Never discount it, never sell it short, and never give it up. No matter how superficially attractive the alternative may appear.

From the Captain

2009-02-13T08:05:00.000-08:00

BOUTWELL Family and Friends,

Sorry it's been so long since I've been able to get you an update. I'll try to do better in the future, but I have a feeling things are only going to get busier over the next few months. Hopefully, I will still have time to keep you informed every few weeks or so. Besides the pace of operations, there are other things that limit my ability to let you know what's going on, however. While we are working with the Navy, most of our activities and just about all of our capabilities become classified, so I can't tell you where we are going or when, specifically, or write about any equipment casualties we might have.

I can and will tell you about where we have been, and as much about what we have done as I can. And as for equipment status, I can tell you that we have received great support from both the Navy logistics organization and our Coast Guard maintenance commands. Necessary repairs are completed as quickly as possible, much more quickly than I've seen on our usual patrols. Trust me, neither I nor the Navy will allow us to operate in any condition that is unsafe.
We've been gone for just over a month now, and have been mostly transiting during that time. The weather during the trans-Pacific crossing was a little worse than what I have seen in the past, and coupled with the need to get to our port calls in a certain amount of time to meet commitments or maximize time available for inport work, the ride was not the most comfortable I've ever had. For many of our shipmates, this was their introduction to shipboard life, and there were a lot of anti-seasickness patches handed out.

I mentioned needing to be certain places at certain times. The Navy refers to this as PIM, which stands for Plan of Intended Movement, and together with the SOE (Schedule of Events), it kind of rules our lives. People get very excited if we are 'behind PIM', and even a little excited if we get too far ahead of PIM. And, if you want to get something done, you had better make sure it gets entered into the SOE. When I was an XO, I used to jokingly tell people that our meal times weren't in the SOE, so they were optional. This level of control and rigidity is somewhat foreign to us, but when you get the chance to look at things from the perspective of the strike group commander, or higher, it becomes clear how complicated the schedule is and how quickly it turns into chaos if everyone is just acting independently.

Our first stop of the deployment was in Hawaii. Not a bad place to visit, and actually, living there doesn't look too bad either (my emphasis!). We topped off our fuel tanks, picked up some needed repair parts, got some more people qualified at the rifle range, and got the rest of our aviation detachment and some other crewmembers on board. This was a working port visit, so we kept normal tropical work hours during the day, but the crew was able to get out and enjoy the island somewhat.

During our transit after we left Hawaii, we got to experience our first 'strait transit'. A strait transit, something we practiced during our workups with the Navy last fall, is different from open ocean transit and challenging on 3 different levels. First of all, there is the navigational challenge. You're closer to shoal water, there's more traffic, and there's less room to maneuver to avoid it. Second, there's a force protection challenge. You're closer to land, so if someone wanted to do us harm, it would be easier for them. And finally, there's an international law challenge, since during part of the transit we are in the territorial sea of another country. That's okay under international law, but there are certain protocols that have to be followed pretty closely, and they change based on the location and the situation. So, we put together a plan in advance of each transit, make sure everyone who needs to be is briefed properly, put additional people on the bridge and in our Combat Information Center, and make sure we are ready to defend ourselves in the unlikely event we are attacked, but at the same time avoiding the appearance of an aggressive posture. All challenging and interesting stuff.

Next, we had a 3 day stop in Kota Kinabalu, a small city in Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. The main purpose of this stop was to work with the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, a 4 year old organization the Malaysians have put together modeled after the U.S. Coast Guard. We held boarding team and boat crew training with them, conducted some mock boardings, and gave some tours of the ship. We also played a game of soccer against them and worked side by side with them ashore doing some trail and walkway maintenance at a regional wetlands park.

Leaving there, our most recent stop was in Singapore for 2 days. This stop was primarily for crew rest, but Singapore is also a logistics hub so we were able to get some good support, received some more parts and got several crewmembers back on board who had been stateside.
When we left Singapore, we did another strait transit, this time through the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest international straits in the world. The sheer number of large vessels transiting the strait or anchored in Singapore anchorages is absolutely mind-boggling. It was a very long day transiting out, filled with more close encounters with other ships than most cutters experience in a year. To give you an idea, my standing orders to the OOD require that I get called whenever another ship is going to come within 2 miles of us. Usually, I get those calls when the ship is 6 to 10 miles away, sometimes farther. The OOD and I discuss the situation, he or she tells me how they want to deal with it, and we proceed. I will usually go up to the bridge myself if the ship is going to be closer than a mile away. During the Strait of Malacca transit, we were routinely 500 yards or closer to other vessels, often within 500 yards of a vessel on either side of us, making 15 to 20 knots to avoid getting run over. Again, a long day but pretty exciting and professionally rewarding.

Those are the highlights of the trip so far, from my perspective. There's also been a lot of drills, training, gunnery exercises, flight ops, underway replenishments, and normal ship's work. Plus a few morale events to round things out. We've been busy, and we are gaining a great deal of experience and expertise that is going to be very useful not only during this deployment, but in future ops as well. Keeping busy also helps keep the crews mind off the down side of the deployment, separation from family and friends back home. It doesn't work, completely, but it helps. With Valentine's Day tomorrow, I know there will be a lot of homesickness aboard. Know that our thoughts are never too far from all of you, no matter how busy we get.

Until next time,
CAPT Kevin J. Cavanaugh
Commanding Officer
USCGC BOUTWELL (WHEC 719)

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2009-02-09T19:09:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are on Facebook, I invite you to follow along with our sanitized adventures by joining the group "Friends of the USCGC BOUTWELL". That's where our trusty PA3 (public affairs specialist) is posting pictures and more from our epic journey.

You can also swap stories, recipes, and sea stories with all the other folks there. Happy surfing.

Time-Speed-Distance

2009-01-25T23:31:00.000-08:00

It's a simple equation. Speed x Time = Distance. In its simplest form, how long it's going to take you to get where you're going. Solve for any variable. Or substitute and solve for two; pick the better solution. Master the basic equation, internalize it, I was told, and someday, you'll be a successful Operations Officer.

It's true. The equation never escapes you. Calculate an intercept. Open CPA (closest point of approach). Develop tracklines and meet up with other ships for replenishment at sea, slowly closing and maintaining stand-off distance while the elements nudge you irregularly. Conduct formation steaming. Launch and recover helicopters during "lily pad" operations (flying a helo back and forth between two ships). Figure fuel burn rates and balance fuel economy with operational need. Plan the day's events. Track targets, calculate maximum effective range, engage the enemy, fight the ship. Time-Speed-Distance.

Eventually you're thinking it without even using the math, internalizing it, knowing it, living it. I race my watchstanders, to their endless frustration and my eternal satisfaction - they work it on paper, on the computer, the calculator, on the maneuvering boards and the radar scope; I think it. The numbers become beings to me, take life, become tangible. This is the math I love, the kinetic, real-life, applicable calculations. Multi-variable equations to model, without theorems or proofs, the seemingly unpredictable movement of a ship buffeted by an array of elements. The books, the theories, the 3-minute and 6-minute and radian rules: they only get you so far. The math of shipdriving is an art as much as a science, and I struggle to explain it, to talk as well as do, to coach; it simply is.

As we steam onward, westward, time melts away under us. Time zones fail to catch us, but the sun and stars and moon are constant in their paths about us, our path about them. Time is measurable, is real; it is at once always the same time, always Zulu, always the time of the sun overhead at local apparent noon; and yet "back home", wherever that is, while we bake at mid-day, it's dark and colder and a whole other day of the week. Time ceases to flow linearly, elastic, inextricable from speed and distance.

You never get a second chance, except going west, on those interminable 6-turned-7-hour midwatches, where the one-o'clock hour is so much sweeter the second time around. And with day following day undistinguished, with sliding six-hour watches that refuse to allow you a set schedule, with operations, planned and unplanned, at all hours of the day and night, there is no day, no date, no distinction; only an unceasing routine and the regular tolling of ship's bells to regulate and to cling to.

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls...

A visit from the Commandant

2009-01-18T21:18:00.000-08:00

Before we got underway for our epic journey, the Commandant came to see us off. He spoke briefly, then took a handful of insightful questions from the crew before touring the ship with the command cadre. Local news media was also on hand to capture our thoughts and reactions before casting off.

Here's the link to Admiral Allen's post.

A public affairs specialist is making the patrol with us; he will be posting pictures and other updates in a variety of places, including Military.com and Facebook. More to follow.

That do business in great waters

2009-01-18T19:20:00.000-08:00

Somewhere betwixt and between the busyness of rushing past the people close to me tantôt vers la droite, tantôt vers la gauche, somewhere I stop, and pause, and I wonder. I wonder.

Perhaps it is an email, or a Christmas card, or an unexpected visit during a fortuitous port call, where I come face-to-face with the vectored, linear time that slips by me so silently as I glide, day after day, through the deep blue. I fool myself that everyone else's lives sit static while I sail past; but I realize, panged, the concurrent motion is deceptive, and it's really I who flail endlessly in Never-Never-Land while everyone about me rushes past: grows up, moves on, marks the standard rituals of life. Marriages, births, deaths, graduations, anniversaries, an endless string of birthday candles flickering off into the horizon. Holidays. Celebrations. Families. Tradition. Generations. Time passing.

I mark time by the ship's bell. Eight bells and the watch relieves. Eight bells and day and date have slipped past; the seas are the same, the sky is the same, the cold-blown watches in red-lit, windowless rooms are the same; different and new and challenging but yet familiar, changing and unchanged, ever and the same.

There is that pang of regret that I have no hometown now, no one place to which I can return, no rootedness. It is both easier and harder that way, a life without an afterlife, present and past but no future. The sea is my home, salt spray and rushing wind and rocking wave. She is loath to release me and jealous for my return. Even in the welcome arms of a port call, the sea is calling, whispering for me to gaze out at that deceptive line between sea and sky, the ever-receding horizon beckoning me onward, tugging at my eyes, straining through binoculars.

I offer my relief. I stand relieved. Another watch, past.

Tales of a Traveller

2009-01-15T09:08:00.000-08:00

All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted- men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A. T. Tappman was the group
chaplain's name.

When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. Most letters he didn't read at all. On those he didn't read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote, "Washington Irving." When that grew monotonous he wrote, "Irving Washington." Censoring the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn't censor letters. He found them too monotonous.

--Joseph Heller, Catch-22

One prolonged blast

2009-01-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

After some last-minute alibis, underway at last. It seemed like forever until we cast off that last line and waved goodbye to the families, co-workers, and other assorted well-wishers clustered, cameras raised, on the pier. I wanted to cheer as the ship's whistle boomed out, but was advised, delicately, against it.

I'm not good at drawn-out farewells and it seemed so odd to have days and days to wrap up my last loose ends at home. The hours seemed endless, even as the remaining tasks and chores kept me out late and up early. One last night on the town, a round at the tiki bar, even a couple beers on the back porch of my apartment - yeah, it all sounded good, but in the end I couldn't quite muster yet more adieux; and anyway, I was busy. Special Sea Detail couldn't come early enough.

Before I left, I guinea pigged for a co-worker's career counseling grad school project, where the subjects (including me) took a series of personality and work interest assessments, culminating, as advertised, in recommended paths for higher education and career fields. I'm always leery of these sorts of inventories, not least because rarely do I come out strongly in favor of one "type" or another; and because often, I'm a radically different person in different situations. For example, in my private life I'm a confirmed introvert, but in most work environments my heart's emblazoned on my sleeve. Which creates strange eddies when the two mix - at a port call, or a promotion ceremony. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to leave it at my abhorrence of categorization and strenuous acts to defy pigeonholing or stereotyping.

Still, I've always been curious what career paths were "meant" for me, because my job history has been so spotty, my career destiny so indirect. Since when does an Oxford graduate scoop ice cream and join the military? So I took the test, and in its haughty wisdom, the test told me my top ten career choices were Computer & IS Manager (blech), Biologist (maybe in biotech or microbiology), Architect, Attorney (red tape!!!), University Professor, Chemist, Physician, Forester (park ranger?), Geologist, and Military Officer (aha...). I admonished the grad student who delivered my results that the test failed to take into account the kinetic nature of my learning and working. Most of these white-collar jobs would drive me absolutely nuts, because I couldn't be up and about, away from a desk and computer, facing down the mercurial elements of nature and people and circumstance, every day newly challenged both physically and mentally, defying what and who I was raised to be...

Where on the list was "ship captain"? I teased the researcher. First mate? Salty sailor of the deeps? I know I belong underway, I thought to the uneven lilting of the seas.

Hey, Mr. Postman

2009-01-08T19:48:00.000-08:00

Here's how to reach me while I'm underway the next several months:

(my name)
USCGC BOUTWELL (WHEC-719)
FPO AP 96661-3902

All parts of this address are important. Without my name, it probably won't get delivered. The basic 5-digit ZIP code will get it to our group, but it is the "plus 4" and the ship name that get it to BOUTWELL. "FPO" stands for Fleet Post Office and "AP" for Armed Forces Pacific.

Packages can't exceed 70 lbs or 130 inches combined length and girth (drat, no new flat-screen). The US Postal Service must be used - i.e., not UPS, FedEx, etc. And, any package over 16 ounces must have a customs form 2976 or 2976-A attached. Under the heading "Description of Contents", write “Certified to be a bona fide gift, personal effects, or items for personal use of military personnel”. Priority Mail is recommended for packages. Alcoholic beverages, hazardous materials, and weapons can't be shipped.

I should still be able to post to and read this blog, although our connectivity will be severely limited underway. Using an internet cafe at port calls like Hawaii is great, but who trusts the internet at port calls after that? I'll be suspending service on my cell phone until I get back, so don't bother calling. I won't be able to access my standard Coast Guard email address, although I'll have a different one aboard ship, and that will probably be the best way to reach me. Just take my normal CG email, and add the number 2 in between the end of my last name and the "@uscg.mil", i.e. (myname)2@uscg.mil. Facebook and web-based email like Hotmail are restricted websites aboard ship, so you won't see me there either. Bottom line: snail mail or CG email. If you're sending email to my CG address, be aware that due to severely restricted connectivity (think 28k modem), any large emails or attachments will get rejected. If you want to send me a document, try cutting and pasting into the text of the email. Pictures take up too much room and won't go through regardless.

So that's all the do's and don'ts. I really hope to hear from you! Profundity, profuseness, and/or creativity are no requirements - just remind me that life exists outside our steel bulkheads. Mail call is the highlight of any patrol.

Wading in

2009-01-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

I was onboard BOUTWELL most of the day. I've been there on and off the past several days, playing reality-TV Tetris as I cram 6 months' worth of stuff into two tiny lockers and a broom-closet of a stateroom. (I'm in 2-man chiefs' berthing, because there's only one female chief, and I'm the only female officer.) I might well be flying straight from BOUTWELL to JARVIS, and it may be months before all my belongings catch up with me out in Hawaii, so I have to take everything I need for the patrol...AND everything I might need for the first several months of my new assignment. With the caveat that somehow I have to squeeze all these things into suitcases to fly out from some foreign port call, just in case.

Since we're doing so many "meet-and-greets" with foreign Coast Guards and other VIPs, we have to pack every uniform item imaginable, which takes up considerable space. On top of all that, I'm bringing skirts AND pants AND pumps AND oxfords AND stockings AND socks. More space.

That aside, today was a day of meetings.

In one of the meetings, an Iraqi professor affiliated with the Navy postgraduate school program presented a seminar on the history, political and religious background, and culture of the various Middle Eastern nations (in particular, Iraq). A similar seminar (which I was not able to attend) was presented last week by an Iranian professor. While the professor had resided in America since his mid-twenties, he had also completed compulsory service in the Iraqi army as a young man, and maintained ties to the region. It is not often that we, as Americans, are afforded a relatively unvarnished view of Middle Eastern life, and I found the professor's viewpoint refreshingly insightful, nuanced, and rational. So much of what we receive through the media is packaged for mass American consumption, much too crude, simplistic, sound-biting, and jingoistic to reflect the true "facts on the ground".

My day was almost over by the time I was able to depart the ship to start my second job - at the ISC. I feel like I'm moonlighting, except I'm only earning one salary.

Plans to give you hope and a future

2009-01-02T20:24:00.000-08:00

It is uncanny how things have fallen so neatly into place this past year. A year ago, I was going through the motions, living on borrowed time, certain against hope that all this rush of good luck was all much, much too good to be true. A last desperate fling at a "wetting down" (promotion party) I refused to postpone, overshadowed by a preliminary diagnosis I whispered to no one but the nagging doubts in my head. Maybe it won't be, maybe it won't...

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

It was, of course, all much too good to be true; and it vanished suddenly, irrevocably, one cold March afternoon in a sequence of phone messages, less than two hours apart, blinking at me in blatant violation of secure-space policy from a silenced phone. Dissolved around me as I sat, sobbing, locked in my car in the parking lot of Navy Surface Warfare Officer School, frustrated, exhausted, spent. What had seemed so limitless now choked in around me. This had been my chance, my golden ticket, my unrealistic and unexpected top pick, my way out, my validation that a born-and-bred intellectual with a degree in medieval English and 15 years of classical violin training could really, against all odds, in defiance of nature, nurture, and family expectations, be at heart a salty sailor, a shipdriver. My payback for sacrificing pride and personal life watch after watch, week after week, patrol after patrol, two boards and thirteen months later, all for a qualification letter and a captain's trust and a hard-earned recommendation. And now, all at once, all gone.

But from the beginning, things fell into place. My command urged me to tell the detailer where I wanted to go for treatment, instead of letting HQ pick. Unbelieving, I picked the Bay Area, and to my shock ended up back on the West Coast, centrally located between family members, and, incredibly, living just an hour's drive from my best friend, whom I'd lived far away from since high school. I went to one of the top civilian hospitals and received top-notch care. The first people to respond to my house-rental ad have been fantastic renters: my house looks better now than it ever did when I lived there. I ended up in a job - intended to be nothing more than a holding pen while I recovered - which was ideally suited to me, where I could draw on my experience, knowledge, and connections and really make a difference at a critical juncture. My command was exceptionally supportive of me. I was able to take large chunks of leave, including an unforgettable trip to South Africa. I landed this irreplaceable deployment opportunity. My latest PET/CT scan came out completely negative. I've seen more of my family in the past several months than in the five years previous. I had few lasting side effects, none seriously disabling. The Coast Guard paid for every penny of my treatment. And, to top it all off, somehow two captains who barely knew me negotiated to get me my top pick this summer, an assignment twin to last year's canceled orders.

Why?

The whole series of uncannily fortunate events has conspired to make me wonder what manifest destiny awaits me. I am certainly no perfect and upright person. There are undoubtedly those far more perfect and upright than me who were touched by far worse. And I wasn't just spared; I was blessed; I've been returned tenfold.

Why?

What burden now must I carry, what torch do I bear, for those who failed to make it this far? What debt must I pay?

Why?

IGTNT

2009-01-02T19:03:00.000-08:00

I Got The News Today. Coined to refer to someone answering the door to a sharply uniformed soldier bearing an ominous telegram, today, to me, it means something else: learning of another person's cancer.

Used to be, I thought cancer was for old people. You know, the disease of an industrialized, modern society that eventually catches you up after you've outlived everything else. Old folks and those kids with leukemia whose pictures graced jars of change at supermarket checkouts. I knew a couple people with cancer, here and there. Tragic cases, people whispered, and turned away.

Then when I was in my early twenties, a friend of mine, married with two young kids and pregnant with a third, was diagnosed. The desperate race against time to save both mother and baby didn't make it. The loss opened a gaping hole.

Since then, my father and mother both survived cancer. My grandmother still struggles. And now I've joined the ranks. Since then, it seems cancer is everywhere, particularly cancer of the young. At first it was strangers, stopping me on the street to share stories of their similarly bald-headed nephew, or cousin, or sister. Beautiful, talented, bright, promising young folk - or young adults with kids of their own - snatched away in the flush of their bloom.

And the stories abound of overwhelming costs, of insurance denials, of fundraisers and bake sales and donation funds, of lost jobs and houses, of inadequate care, of outdated techniques, of delayed service. Of lasting, crippling side effects. Of depression, frustration, abandonment, futility.

That is not my story.

I had tremendous support from friends, family, and my employer. I was paid, and encouraged, to relocate anywhere in the US I wanted to go. I was sent to the top civilian doctors, where I received cutting-edge treatment. I continued to work throughout my treatment, but I didn't have to - I still would have received my full salary. I received sizeable housing, food, and cost-of-living allowances, which made it possible to live comfortably in the heart of San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country. I was allowed as much recovery time as I needed, which I used to visit friends and families on the weekends during chemo. And I didn't pay a penny for my treatment - not for the medications, doctor visits, infusions, transfusions, radiation, scans, blood work, or checkups. Not for anything. No insurance hassles necessary. Most importantly, I had a very treatable form of cancer, caught early.

So it breaks my heart every time I "get the news" and hear of someone else broadsided by cancer in the prime of their life, haggling with insurance, stressed by bills, leaving behind young children and a promising future.

When I was in college, I used to wonder how I'd been so lucky as to win the "birth lottery", finding myself in a middle-class American family, instead of a slum in India, a war zone in Africa, a frozen apartment block in Russia, or maybe abandoned in a dumpster in China, just for being a girl. It's part of why I joined the Coast Guard, to repay my gratitude to a country which had unconsciously invested me with so much.

These days, I find myself wondering how I've been so lucky as to win the "cancer lottery", if I can describe it in such crude terms. I've done nothing more meritorious than the little girl with leukemia, or the young man with pancreatic cancer. How do I lay my worth against the parent who passes on after a short but valiant struggle, leaving behind three young children?

Is there a message? Is there a reason? For what greater purpose have I been saved? What debt do I owe to those who didn't make it? What burden do I bear?

The ghost of Christmas yet to come

2008-12-30T08:30:00.000-08:00

Ghost of the Future! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?

Duty on Christmas is reliably mellow. You make a few rounds, munch candy canes with fellow watchstanders, energize the Christmas lights, dial up the holiday tunes, and settle down for a long winter's night of catching up on your undone work while nobody’s around to bother you. While you eat leftover Christmas cookies dropped off by sympathetic shipmates, who are now at home, bundled up by the tree.

There's usually a nice Christmas dinner spread put on by the cooks (or in this case, the contracted galley staff). There's no competition for the weights or cardio room, it's easy to find a parking spot, and often the CO calls or stops by to dole out some non-alcoholic holiday cheer. At OCS, my first Coast Guard Christmas on duty, I think they sent us the Chief of Staff and his pleasantly cordial family to raise our spirits as we sat around drinking forbidden soda, eating forbidden sweets, and watching forbidden football (when we weren't sneaking off to find forbidden pay phones). I swear, that'll be me some day: all the other flags are home popping Christmas crackers and re-gifting fruitcakes, and I'll be the schmuck out awkwardly celebrating Christmas with the troops. Every year. I'll volunteer.

Christmas is quiet. Excepting the odd officer or chief who calls to share holiday greetings, nobody calls. Nobody emails. Nobody arrives. Even the message traffic slows to a crawl.

What you don’t expect is to hear from the detailer.

Christmas Eve morning, sure, you're supposed to be at work unless you're taking leave. So maybe the detailer was trying to wrap things up before he headed out for the holidays. But Christmas is a holiday, and this year Dec. 26th was a federal holiday too, and then it's the weekend. I figured the detailer'd maybe get back to me sometime next week, by which time I'd hopefully be safely aboard BOUTWELL somewhere in the Pacific, making it that much harder for him to extract me and stick me elsewhere.

I woke up relatively early Christmas morning, not for Santa or stockings but to arm up and make a security round. I checked message traffic, eyeballed the logs for any overnight issues, and as an afterthought, glanced at my email. Maybe somebody'd wished me a Merry Christmas.

There was only one email, a quick message sent from the detailer's Treo. Does he sit texting while his kids rip open presents? I wondered. Just what I needed on Christmas - another "great idea" to yank me off the deployment. I wasn't sure I wanted to open it.

The two COs have been negotiating, he began, and they've worked out a plan that'll get you off the BOUTWELL a little early so you can still get to JARVIS. This is sort of a "have your cake and eat it too" scenario. If you still want to go to JARVIS, let me know and we'll work out the details later.

Did I ever! Aloha Hawaii! Now that was a Christmas present. I didn't stop to wonder how the detailer knew I'd be at work on Christmas Eve AND Christmas Day. Except that I always seem to be.

Again the ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea – on, on – until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch: dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.

The ghost of Christmas present

2008-12-30T07:54:00.000-08:00

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds – born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the water – rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in itself.

This was my fifth out of six Coast Guard Christmases I've spent on duty. (I was scheduled for duty my second year in, too, but squeaked out of it after I covered for someone who skipped out on watch a couple weeks earlier.)

I don’t mind holiday duty. I volunteer for it. Let someone else rack up family time. The essence of American Christmas – Santa, presents, reindeer, lights, cheesy pop music, succulent ham, and unbridled consumption – fails to impress me. And, my family doesn’t have any great Christmas traditions (half my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, to begin with), at least not any I’d want to replicate with warm nostalgia. (Dragging out the withered Christmas tree in April to the tree graveyard out back? Being tasked to wrap your own presents? Christmas music blaring at 5 am when you were up performing for three Christmas Eve services, the last stretching past midnight? Ripping open a gaily wrapped package of...Sears underwear?)

I’ll go for a quiet candlelight carol service and charitable gifts in honor of friends and relatives; I enjoy writing Christmas cards. But that’s about it. My one Christmas off, I spent the 24th and 25th cooking meals in a soup kitchen. So give me duty, really...I don’t mind.

This year, it was unexpected. Whether due to my supervisory responsibilities, my changing duty status, my rank, or the transitory nature of my non-billet, I’d escaped the duty rotation and thus dodged the specter of holiday duty. Until a week ago, when one of my petty officers fractured his shoulder in a particularly spirited Morale game of Ultimate Frisbee, and there I was a couple days later, shooting lead downrange to re-qualify and stand his duty.

My roommate, meanwhile, was heading home to Turkey for three weeks. She had me wake her up at oh-dark-thirty to say goodbye – by the time she returned, I’d be sailing in the Pacific somewhere. “I’ll see you in the summer,” she blinked drowsily.

Christmas Eve flew past faster than the NORAD-tracked reindeer. Morning staff meeting, a long passdown as my supervisor disappeared for 15 days of leave, and then a busy procession of cars to check through the front gate, everyone rushing to squeeze in last-minute Christmas shopping at the exchange. I’d saved up a fair amount of paperwork to slog through, too, so it wasn’t until late afternoon when I noticed the light blinking on my work voicemail. Blink. Blink. Blink. Who would call me on Christmas Eve at work? Who knew I was here? It was, to my astonishment, the detailer. Uh oh. Wasn't my future set? “Call me. I have an idea I’d like to run by you.”

Of course, by then, it was evening on the East Coast; and assuming he was busy envisioning the dancing of sugar plums with his family, I left him a quick message and then put it out of my mind, searching out my watchstanders to go spread Christmas cheer. No more ideas! I thought. I thought I was all set to deploy. Don’t change that now. Don't ruin my Christmas.

A dream deferred

2008-12-23T19:29:00.000-08:00

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Don't get me wrong. Despite the expostulations of my well-meaning roommate, there was no bad choice, no rock, no hard place, no Scylla, no Charybdis. Only two amazingly good strokes of luck, sandwiching a providential determination of good health.

Still, it was bittersweetly that I released one dream in order to embrace another. The cheap plastic lei I'd draped on my CYPRESS stateroom door when I'd first received those improbable "OPS on RUSH" orders last year still beckoned, hopeful, dusty but unforgotten, on a closet door in my San Francisco apartment. The dream still flickered in the dusty depths of my mind, only set aside by chemo and radiation and temporary distractions, never abandoned, never boxed up, never tossed out.

Lightning never strikes twice. One or the other. Half-hearted ideas I tossed up to the detailer sank like rocks. The ship wasn't willing to waive the schools I'd miss, didn't want to wait, needed me now or never. So, no. My roommate reassured me, "Hawaii isn't going anywhere," and my great white visions slowly faded to black, to thoughts of perhaps a buoy tender out there, something else, the dream still not released, just set aside, just deferred, in stasis, waiting.

As thrilled as I was about the deployment, I still had to keep explaining to everyone why I'd chosen the improbable over the unlikely. An exhausting day aboard BOUTWELL, driving the ship from drydock back to homeport, unpredictably stirred up the spirits again - ear to the wind, the news was that BOUTWELL's CO had been advocating for me with JARVIS's CO. Why two captains, one who never met me and the other who'd seen me in action for all of two weeks and a day, would negotiate over me like choice chattel, was beyond me.

So I started to pack my seabag, and to plan for my return this summer, and to wrap up things in the office; but I couldn't help but cast a few last longing glances at that cheap plastic lei, considering packing it away. On second thought, I left it hanging where it was, garish plastic flowers against a drab white closet, reminding me, a dream deferred.

The ghost of Christmas past

2008-12-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

He then made bold to inquire what business brought him there.

"Your welfare!" said the Ghost.

He could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been much more conducive to that end.

It was a year ago, just before Christmas. This time, last year, I was partying in Key West, fresh off an astonishingly successful and exciting TAD trip on board THETIS, leading a dozen merchant vessels in an depressingly fruitless man overboard search, weaving at high speed through a fleet of fishing vessels to chase down go-fasts, carefully choreographing intelligence and helicopter flights and small boats and international agreement and ship navigation to catch drug runners, threading back and forth through rough seas in pitch blackness to pick out and retrieve jettisoned, camouflaged drug bales, deftly bobbing the ship just in sync with the surging sea to squeak just inside the pitch/roll limits for helo ops, frolicking during sun-baked port call days in Grand Cayman, and above all, reveling in the respect and confidence, invaluable shiphandling opportunities, and the deep, newfound confirmation that I really was, and would be, and wanted to be, a cutterman.

So here I was in Key West, squeezing out a few more days of paradise while my permanently assigned ship, the CYPRESS, was underway working buoys. The sun-drenched time passed quickly, filled with delicious food, apple pie-baking, Christmas church services, jogs around the island, a small-boat trip out to a lazy inlet, and daily JO get-togethers. Even a day trip I arranged to JIATF-South was more adventure and reconnecting with an old friend than work.

It seemed anything was possible. I'd met my goal, earning a 270' OOD qualification in just 10 days of watch. What took me 13 months and two boards to achieve on CYPRESS, I'd somehow knocked out in just a week and a half, the best birthday present of all, as the timing had it. The ship's CO had passed along a glowing recommendation. And at last, I had a whole group of JOs to hang with, and we were having a blast. I'd fallen in love with white hull life. But I was living on borrowed time.

One afternoon, as I was putting on a necklace, preparing to go out with my newfound friends, I felt a funny lump tucked under my collarbone. Tiny. Barely noticeable. Didn't belong there. I put it out of my mind until late that night, curled up on the couch, trying to focus on a few paragraphs from Jeremiah, everyone else asleep, the house heavy with humid, warm December air. I kept fingering that little lump in the hollow of my neck, my heart sinking. I knew. Somehow I knew.

I didn't tell anyone, not then and not for a couple of weeks, not until the holidays were over and I was back at work, at last. We were getting ready to go into drydock. I was nervous with expectation over my impending orders, wondering anxiously if all the ammunition I'd gathered during the 270' patrol would be enough to influence the detailer into taking a tremendous chance and granting me a white hull OPS billet somewhere. Frustrated, because for three glorious weeks I had tasted freedom, challenge, and respect, underway; and now here I was, nobody again, loving my job but bristling against a structure that kept me a big fish in a small pond, heavy on responsibilities but completely stripped of any authority to accomplish anything, feeling unrespected and harassed for all I did. Disappointed we'd be going into local drydock instead of undertaking a much more interesting voyage around the Keys and up the East Coast to the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore.

It was time. I went to see the ship's HS1. "Doc, I've got this weird lump in my neck. It's probably nothing, but I'd like to get it looked at." He asked me a ton of questions, carefully massaged my neck, and flipped through several diagnostic books. He wrote everything down and sent me away, and later that afternoon he brought me back. "I'm going to send you over to the clinic for some bloodwork," he said. "It looks like you have a swollen lymph node. There are a lot of things that can cause that." I don't remember the laundry list of possible, probable causes he rattled off, but at the end, as almost an afterthought, he pulled out one of those thick diagnostic books and slowly turned the pages until he found what he wanted. "Now, this is highly unlikely, but you should know that there's also a very remote possibility that you have either Hodgkins or non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But I wouldn't be worried about it right now."

I wasn't worried. But I knew.

Right vs. Right

2008-12-13T11:46:00.000-08:00

Our class schedule at OCS (Officer Candidate School) incorporated an inordinate amount of time studying ethics. We defined ethical dilemmas, classified the different flavors of ethical dilemmas, analyzed ethical dilemmas with a variety of specific methods, and eventually, learned the processes for resolving ethical dilemmas. We then spent countless class hours debating actual ethical dilemmas from "Ethics for the Junior Officer".

While certainly a welcome break from (and infinitely more engaging than) the multitude of other topics of our tutelage during training, I found this obsession with ethics befuddling. Mainly, I worried that the sample scenarios we debated seemed so cut-and-dried to me, even the ones which were clearly dilemmas: "right vs. right" and not a deftly disguised "right vs. wrong". Sure, there were gray areas, patches of shoal water, endless reflections of "ifs" - but my decisions were swift, my supporting arguments clear-cut and without regret.

At first, I chalked it up to a perhaps overly developed sense of right and wrong, until I discovered that classmates with unbending views on any topic found it nigh impossible to choose between competing virtues. Experience, loyalty, integrity, wisdom, and compassion did much to weed out non-dilemmas, but only muddied the waters for the true tough choices.

Now, more jaded after five years in, I venture to guess that my classmates' indecision (prophetically foreshadowing, for me, astonishing moments I later encountered of senior officers' indecision or complete refusal to decide) stemmed not from intellectual or moral uncertainty, but from a fear of being judged wrong in the final analysis, the "command review", or most strikingly, on the OER. In the heat of battle, often any decision is better than no decision, particularly in a dilemma. I like to think I'm immune to brown-nosing and wardroom politics, but most of the toughest dilemmas I've faced thus far have been decisions between what is best, or right, and what the command directs. I've learned diplomacy.

These past few weeks, I've faced a different sort of dilemma entirely, completely unexpected on my part. Early rotation to (and thus guaranteed placement in) my most-desired job, or a crazy, high-intensity deployment. Sounds like a no-brainer, and I could tell most of the people I asked for advice saw it as a short-term vs. long-term dilemma, with the long-term career benefits easily weighing out the short-term adventure. (I daresay they also saw it as individual vs. community - pleasing the detailer and the Hawaii ship's command, or indulging in a personal, irreplaceable adventure.)

But it wasn't that simple. While my decision was swift, I didn't trust myself at first, and it was only as the intervening days played out that my reasoning became clear-cut. After the medical argument - that my doctor needed to see me once more in six months' time to complete my care - it turned out that my next strongest point was actually a rebuttal to concerns of the Hawaii ship's XO - that I didn't have enough "white hull" experience. As I explained to the XO in my carefully worded "Dear John" letter yesterday, this deployment provides me the opportunity to gain much of the white hull experience I lack, and makes me a much stronger candidate to walk into a 270'/378' OPS job this summer.

I followed my heart on this one, and it was only after much consideration that my head came around to see the wisdom of the snap judgment. It turns out, in hindsight, that there really was no second choice for me, though I'm still astonished at the detailer's willingness to accomodate my desires, even at the expense of his.

I won't let them down.

Plans to prosper you and not to harm you

2008-12-12T18:06:00.001-08:00

It's our unit Christmas party tonight, so I'll post later, but I wanted to pass that I talked to the detailer today, and after congratulating me on my healthy scan, he said, "So, I am ready to support whatever decision you make."

I'm deploying on the OOH.

And now, I'm out celebrating!!!

Good news!

2008-12-11T14:05:00.001-08:00

The scan was negative! More later.

Wanted

2008-12-11T11:26:00.000-08:00

I just found out late yesterday that BOUTWELL and MLCPAC selected me to fill the TAO billet. I'm on my way to see the doctor now, to find out the results of my scan and make sure it's OK to deploy.

How I'll handle JARVIS and the detailer has yet to be determined...

I'm barely containing my excitement! I couldn't sleep at all last night. I kept waking up every 15 minutes - is it 6am yet and time to start the day?

I know the plans I have for you

2008-12-05T23:21:00.000-08:00

While I await the results of this week's PET/CT scan and doctor consult, I find myself subject once again to the shifting vicissitudes of assignment season...

I'd worried about next summer, about getting back into the mix, trying to get back underway again, wondering if the same miraculous alignment-of-the-stars that brought me my unlikely number one pick last year would somehow weigh ever so gently on the new detailer this year. Just keep me off the beach. This year counts as a staff job, right?

The summertime conversations with the detailer went well, but when the "shopping list" appeared in August, I found, uneasily, only three 378' OPS jobs open.

Since I knew my doctors wanted to check up on me a few more times, and since the detailer kept saying I was transferring next summer...and since I was fit for full duty, and had a replacement to take over my job, and a very supportive command...and most of all, since I was eager to reclaim my life, I started planning underway trips, even before I'd finished radiation.

My goal was to log a couple weeks aboard a 378' in the fall, in time to influence the detailer's decision in my favor - much like that fortuitous trip aboard THETIS last fall. Additional underway hours beckoned in the spring, six months of "open slate" outside of eight weeks for pipeline training. I called the ship schedulers (ah, the convenience of working on an island with well over a dozen different commands - easier to cut red tape) and found out who was going where, when. One trip in particular intrigued me.

I was already discussing possibilities with my command and playing with patrol dates when a request came out for a JG or LT to fill a TAO billet for that out-of-hemisphere (OOH) deployment. Bingo. An actual billet I could fill, instead of just shipriding for my own professional development. Negotiations ensued, and resulted in my getting underway with the ship for a couple weeks in November, just a day after I returned from South Africa, as a sort of trial balloon. Would they like me? Would I learn things quickly enough? Would I really want to deploy with them?

The singular answer to all those questions was a resounding "yes!", but the ship couldn't give me a straight "up or down" answer until they got the results of the solicitation. After all...I didn't yet have all the qualifications they wanted - underway 378' OOD letter, TAO qualification, the requisite experience. I could make the entire deployment, though, so the command was willing to qualify me en route. I allowed myself to get excited.

I should know by now that hope is dangerous. It wasn't long after I returned from San Diego, high with anticipation, that the detailer called. I'd known he wanted to get me off my medical support billet, but I'd assumed, naively, that it was for administrative reasons.

I had been counting on having the spring to recover my physical strength and mental sanity and get "back in the groove", log a final checkup with my doctors in the summer, and only then PCS to a new assignment, but the detailer was mulling other plans for me. Now that I was fit for full duty, I became a viable pawn on his chessboard. So, the offer: rotate six months early to backfill for two officers on a 378' who were leaving early. I'd fill the empty Weapons Officer billet until the summer, when I'd fleet up into the OPS position. And the kicker: the ship in question...was my top pick.

So why wasn't I more excited? Even the detailer was confused. How to explain? The dynamic nature of the 6-month OOH deployment, all that underway time, so much to learn, unique foreign port calls, daily challenges of a sort perhaps never to be repeated...in a word, Excitement!...what if I never have this chance again? I could argue that sending me on the OOH might more sense for the ship, or for my career, or even medically, but the truth is it will be an adventure, and how can I pass that up to sit in drydock?

The XO of the"top pick" ship started calling me, and it was mildly awkward. I didn't want to commit, but I also didn't want to turn him down outright - what if I was sent there? I found out there were no other volunteers for the deployment, but with two sister ships on the East Coast standing by, there were certainly a few qualified folks sitting there, potentially under-utilized and available for deployment. I counter-offered to the temporary assignment folks that perhaps they could cross-deck a couple people from the East Coast ships to Hawaii for the spring - they'd already be qualified and knowledgeable - and send me on deployment as a very willing volunteer and someone the ship already knew.

I asked for advice from friends, family, colleagues, supervisors, and mentors. The only consensus was that there was no bad choice. I kept encountering folks from the OOH ship on the Island; they greeted me enthusiastically, assuming I was sailing with them. To my great dismay, I had to be noncommittal in my replies. Their command cadre couldn't give a straight answer, because they were all overseas preparing for the deployment. My emotions were all over the map. The scheming side of my brain kicked into full gear, only barely restrained by the calm, carpe diem, "yes, sir" side that told me to quit looking a gift horse in the mouth. Was I wasting political capital and valuable time trying to fight this one?

It all rests, ultimately of course, on my PET/CT scan and doctor's visit this week, the first since I finished radiation back in September. I was supposed to check in with the doctor before I went to South Africa, but they botched the sequence of appointments and I was out of the country before they had time for me. The doctor, no doubt, will be taken aback that he might lose me permanently from follow-up care so soon. Forty percent of Hodgkins patients who relapse will do so in the first 12-18 months following the start of treatment (it drops off precipitously after that). So it is no stretch to state that checking in one last time after the OOH would ease his mind and be the most sensible, medical. Perhaps even if I go to Hawaii, I could check in with these same doctors during the drydock period, just for continuity of care.

But it is a dangerous card to play: I don't want to remove myself from being FFFD - concurrent with being available for worldwide assignment - and it is tricky to argue that I am safe to deploy short-term, but not to end up in Hawaii, with its excellent military medical facilities, for two and a half years.

I can't plan for packing, moving, renting out my apartment, finding a new place, visiting friends and family for the holidays (either the last chance before the OOH or the last chance for a couple years), or even buying tickets for holiday events, not knowing when I might ship out. Even as my friends, family, and colleagues become more invested in the career plans, ultimately, the decision is not mine to make. So I fill my time with relief processes and laps in the pool and studying systems and defenses of 378s. I try to trust that there is a master plan and prevent getting too excited, just in case the scan finds something. You can never be too certain.

Lean on me

2008-12-03T18:36:00.000-08:00

I really haven't sought out any cancer support groups or networks over the past several months. Perhaps it's just that I prefer to identify as a well person than a sick one. I was happy to raise money for cancer groups pre-diagnosis, but now I just want to fly under the radar and be done with it all.

A very nice, if over-eager, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society lady approached me in the hospital one day, and not to discount the terrific work this group does, but I really had no need for it and tried valiantly to slink away. In particular, she kept pushing me to take the group's money, and I couldn't convey strongly enough to her that I had no need for the cash. My medical costs were fully funded, I was still drawing a full salary and housing allowance, and I couldn't bear the thought that somebody's well-meaning donations were going to a place of little need. I give to groups like this; I shouldn't take.

Out of curiosity the other night, though, I stumbled across a social-networking site for Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphoma survivors. I'd scanned a few cancer blogs early on, before treatment began, because I was uncomfortably unaware of what lay ahead and wanted to steel myself. That was months ago, though. This group had a few interesting sub-section topics: Long-Term Survivors, Lingering Side Effects, and Remission or Relapse? grabbed my attention. I read how several people had lived with (or without) the disease for 5, 10, 20 years, usually after being diagnosed and treated as a teenager.

The Side Effects section was more sobering - survivors described infertility, memory loss, hypothyroidism, weight issues, heart and lung problems, secondary cancers, fibromyalgia - the litany seemed endless. Several posted that they dealt bravely with this horrible quality of life from all the side effects because they were just grateful they weren't dead from the cancer. I felt more than a little guilty, because my lasting side effects (as yet) are so limited and unobtrusive. In fact, in many ways, I feel much, much healthier than I have for a couple of years. I suppose a good chemo prophylaxis does that.

Even reading the Side Effects section, I began to wonder if the sort of people who joined these groups - and, even more so, the sort who would post their personal experiences to an anonymous "support group" of "survivors" - were self-selecting for the worse. I certainly hoped this was the case, once I dove into the ominously named Remission or Relapse?

A precious few proudly stood behind a decade or two of remission; some even declared confidently that their cancer was "completely gone" and they were "cured". But they were in the quiet minority. Many wrote of deflating experiences of finding new lumps, positive PET/CT scans, and repeat chemo, usually accompanied by stem-cell transfers and other more aggressive treatments. There was the unsubstantiated claim that over 80% of relapses occur within 12 months after the first round of treatment, which now I'm intrigued to research.

And then, most uncomforting of all, there was post after post describing the overwhelming anxiety building in advance of PET/CT scans. Scans are a fact of life, a frequent fact, for lymphoma survivors. Every few months (eventually, annually and then maybe once every couple years) for the rest of your life, you take the radioactive glucose and the vein-burning dye so the doctors can scour for any sign of relapse. So be it.

Not for these folks. Most of their posts ran something like this: "About a week before my scan, I start feeling lumps and bumps everywhere. My blood pressure skyrockets and I can't eat anything, I'm so nervous. After the scan is over and I get the results, everything goes back to normal...until the next time.

I just can't get worked up like that. My job, the assignment tug-of-war, now that I'm stressed about. But a scan? Either I'm sick or I'm not - there's nothing I can do about it. And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest?

Appearances

2008-12-02T20:04:00.000-08:00

I have hair again. Well, mostly. There are still a couple balder patches at the nape of my neck, from the radiation; but other than that, my hair's grown back. It came in fine and downy and thinly at first, like baby hair, eventually thickening back to normal both in quantity and quality. I've already cut it a couple times, and it was strange to see the cut hair, one end of it was wispy, never sliced.

I'm keeping the hair short for a while, at least. I've wanted hair this short for a long time and couldn't have it: my supervisor during OCS famously turned down my request to shave my head of its pesky, time-consuming, freeze-to-my-head-in-the-New-England-winter-hair because, and I quote, he "wanted his female officer candidates to look like young ladies". After I cut my hair as short as I could get away with, fellow OCs wondered what my boyfriend would say or worried how I'd be perceived at my first unit; and more than a couple started wondering aloud if I was actually a butch lesbian. (Don't ask; don't tell...)

When I cut my hair this summer - first right before I started chemo, and then again (a completely bald shave) three weeks later, when the hair fell out in clumps and patches - I didn't ask permission. I figured I had an iron-clad excuse. And now that it's short, it's hard for anyone to argue that I'm being "radical" in my hairstyle or making a "statement" by it...after all, they've known me with that hair, or lack thereof, for quite some time now.

One of the great things of a short haircut, and there are many, is that you can get your hair cut quickly and cheaply on the "guys' side". Or you can buy a "home cut" kit, like I did a few weeks ago, and go at it yourself. Hair washes, dries, and styles much easier as well, a feature particularly practical during my recent stint underway.

So the downside? Well, I don't know if it's strictly that, but I've been called "sir" ever since the hair made its disappearance. I always figured it was an easy mistake and ignored it most of the time, just returning the greeting and moving on. We have so many people on our base, I figured if they didn't already know me, what was the point of correcting a stranger? I fell victim to the same trap of ignore-and-condone on the ship, though, and one of the other officers was quick to jump all over the unwitting offender. It reminded me of training, except without the pushups to emphasize the point. "That's ma'am. Good morning ma'am. Does she look like a sir to you??" followed with a glare at me, How could you excuse such behavior?

I've had one stranger tell me I was "brave" for having my hair guy-short, and a couple others ask if I'd had cancer. But the real eye-openers have come when I've worn wigs, which I've only done a couple of times. Once was in Texas, during my road trip, when I sported an obviously fake, shoulder-length, bleach-blond wig as part of my "costume" and a statement on the nature of the state I was visiting. Nobody said anything or even looked at me funny, which I found more than mildly amusing.

The first time was just before that, before I left on my road trip, when I met up with my former SF roommate and some of her friends (all of whom I hadn't seen in maybe a month) at a bar. Again it was like donning a costume for one of the many plays or musicals I've been in over the years. This time, my wig was short, brown, heavily styled, and expensive (=relativey realistic). I paired this sassy number with an equally bright, classy outfit and headed out on the town. Not a single person in the group recognized me, not even the roommate I'd seen daily for three months straight. "Wow, you look so good! So much...better...I mean..." was frequent.

This awkward moment was later duplicated, on Halloween. For Halloween, my one-day "mid-patrol break" in between South Africa and 378' life, I reprised a 70s outfit I'd worn to a summer theme wedding, except this time, I had the accompanying Farrah Fawcett wig that hadn't arrived in time for the summer event. Longer than shoulder-length, strawberry blond, big fat curly bangs and side-bangs and soft and long in the back...I thought it topped off my costume perfectly.

It was the first time anyone at work had seen me with any length of hair, and again, few people recognized me, even after the obligatory double-take, which I guess was only to be expected: after all, I run around all day in ODUs, safety boots, and a high-and-tight, and here I was in a long, flowing white dress topped by cheesy makeup and a fluffy wig. (The wig didn't quite have the desired 70s effect, due largely to the appearance on the political scene of one Sarah Palin, whom I, with glasses and wig, apparently resembled, at least to drunk partygoers steeped in pre-election frenzy.) The wig, or maybe its Sarah Palin connotation, worked its magic all night though - guys couldn't stop trying to introduce themselves. I knew they wouldn't have given me a first glance (let alone a second thought) if I'd been wigless, sporting my normal cut.

Top comment definitely goes to an older civilian man who works in my building. He stopped by my office the morning of Halloween, saw a girl with long, strawberry-blonde hair and a white dress sitting on the couch, smiled, and stepped in ready to flirt. (Believe me, I saw the eyes widen in happy surprise and the attitude change - the straighter posture, the slight tip to the head - gradually wash over him.) When he realized whom he was talking to, he stopped suddenly. "Wow," he finally got out. "You look really great! It's the hair, the dress...wow...you know what they say, 'clothes make the woman'. I mean...you just look really different today, so attractive!"

Just one of the crew

2008-11-30T19:39:00.000-08:00

Back a month or so ago, I was able to get underway for a couple of weeks on a 378', a trip I'd started laying groundwork for back in September.

This relatively short excursion was preparatory to my desire to deploy with the ship in the spring for five months: an opportunity to get some experience onboard, meet the crew, familiarize myself with the ship, and start working on my qualifications both on the bridge and in combat.

The command cadre knew of my background: an inescapable explanation for why I was available, what my background was, and just how I'd managed to take only 1/3 of an important "pipeline training" school. It was accepted as part of my package, and otherwise ignored.

The crew, on the other hand, knew nothing other than that I was a restless seafarer uneasily anchored to a land desk, desperate for that one prolonged blast. I crossed the brow, then, with no baggage but a hastily packed seabag.

The two weeks were relentless. I flew out to meet the ship less than two days after I'd returned from South Africa. We had barely reached the sea buoy when a fireball blew out of the stacks; and that was only the first main space fire: at midnight that night, we had another; and the next evening, the threat of a third (though it turned out to be only billowing smoke). Drill followed drill, non-stop, from daybreak to taps, preceeded and followed by training team briefs and debriefs. Almost every morning and evening, we were either pulling into or out of San Diego, anchoring for brief moments (for "score"), or exchanging crew members and shipriders via small boat. At last, the TACT drills took a brief hiatus, so we could squeeze in a 48-hour battle exercises with a Navy strike group. I volunteered for the morning 4 - 8 break-in watch: sure, it meant days lasting from 0230 to 2200, but it was the only chance I could carve out to stand a watch uninterrupted by drills.

Nor were my watches uneventful. I conned away from one pier and took the deck inport homeport, maneuvered the ship to protect a "high value asset" during a Navy exercise, coached for recovery of a deflated gunnery target, and tracked down and assisted a sinking sailboat before dark one windy morning. We even beat the helo to the scene. Down in combat, I observed a multiplicity of drills before filling in, somewhat uncertainly at first, as the Watch Supervisor. Eventually I took a turn as TAO (tactical action officer) to practice identifying and defending the ship against inbound missiles. I loved every minute of it.

The best part, though, other than finally casting away the lines (OK, shouting rudder commands from the bridge wing and "wardroom movie night" featuring Sink the Bismarck! were also pretty cool), was that I was simply one of the crew: a landlubber with a bit of sea time trying to make the cut for a high-stakes deployment. It was not that I neither asked for nor received any special favors; it was that they weren't even under consideration. Held to the same standards, and subject to the same expectations, as any of my shipmates, I at last felt free from the stigma of sickness. (Even seasickness: 378s ride well, and the weather was mostly calm.)

I was just one of the crew.

Because against all odds, we're still here

2008-11-26T21:24:00.000-08:00

"No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy." --Abraham Lincoln, 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation

It was a game I couldn't lose - taking multiple turns around the table to give thanks, I wasn't about to run short of ideas. The little things, like being able to taste food again; the job- and career-oriented - a supervisor who encouraged me to go where I wanted for treatment, other supervisors who supported me taking leave to go to South Africa and to get underway with a ship, the opportunity to "write my own ticket" this year, a whole network of colleagues who supported me at every turn; the friend-related: living in the same city as my best friend for the first time since high school, seeing more of my family in five months than in the previous five years, friends who knew and judged me for who I was, not what I suffered from; the move: two amazing roommates, a great apartment, unbelievably amazing renters, a safe home for my car over the summer; the symptoms: no lasting heart or lung damage, no lasting damage to my fingers (the symptom I most dreaded), no more drugs; the side benefits of taking a few months off: a two-week cross-country road trip, shelves of books read, a symphony and several other pieces composed, a newfound love for the local library; finances: a completely paid-for course of treatment (with some of the best civilian providers available) - I didn't pay a penny for anything, not for transportation, not for medication, not for anything, for treatment that's cost at least $100K and counting; opportunities: long deployments or top assignment picks; and most of all, that I'm still here. It wasn't that long ago that someone in my position a year ago wouldn't have made it this long, let alone be driving ships and hiking mountains and cooking Thanksgiving dinners.

Not to discount the hard work and distinguished support of so many, but this is the work of no mortal hand.

"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him."

Confounding expectations

2008-11-21T23:57:00.000-08:00

If you know me much, you probably know that I’m not good at fitting into stereotypical boxes or under conventional labels. Having grown up attending a small school in a very insular community, where pre-kindergarten follies are doomed to dog you through high school, I’ve made it a mission of mine to confound expectations, to leave people guessing.

I certainly don’t match the picture of conventional young-womanhood. Ok, so I’ve followed the 18th-century playbook in a few ways: I can cook, clean, and sew; play a civilized musical instrument and sing light songs; speak a smattering of foreign languages (including the de rigueur French); sprinkle my polite conversation with literary and Biblical allusions; entertain small children; throw fancy parties; and sure, I’ve been known to paint a watercolor or two, or needlepoint by the fire.

But that’s about where it ends. I also fix my own car, curse like a sailor, would much rather spend a day at the range than the mall, and have been known to out-drink more than one male companion. I take about 5 minutes to get ready (10 if I have to polish my boots), detest women’s magazines, watch SportsCenter, not soap operas, and detest chick flicks (sappy love stories are only marginally permissible if bloody battles outweigh romantic longings by at least a 3:1 ratio). So I’m not about to be on the cover of Vogue any time soon.

The South African relatives I met, most of whom are solidly in the sit-and-genteely-drink-tea generation, weren’t quite sure what to make of me, this fearless Coast Guard chick traipsing about a country halfway around the world, alone but for a 12-page list of relatives’ names, cold-calling folks in the phone book, making up her itinerary as she went. One elderly relative in particular was most politely appalled. She did her best to shield her pointed questions, but the barbs became unmistakable.

“So, tell me about your family,” meaning not my parents and siblings, but a sidelong shot at my apparent lack of husband and children. Why hadn’t I “settled down”? Where were my traveling companions? The military…sailing around in foreign seas…driving ships: “Isn’t that a man’s job?”

Finally, she wound up to her final zinger, delivered with withering disdain: “Your hair…do they make you keep it that short for the military?”

“Oh, no,” I replied cheerfully. (How could I say the military wouldn’t let me cut it this short - I'd tried, and failed!) “I went through chemo and radiation this summer, and it’s just now starting to grow back.” “Excuse me?” “I went through chemo and radiation a few months ago and lost all my hair – it’s just now growing back. It’s coming in nicely, don’t you think?”

It silenced her for the duration.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free

2008-11-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

I've done a fair amount of traveling outside the country, and while I'm a confirmed quest-a-holic who could easily spend 9 out of every 10 days on the road; without fail, I always ended each trip deeply longing to return to the good ol' U. S. of A.

It wasn't just the conveniences of living in the richest (and most expensive) country in the world. The privileges - and responsibilities - of being the world's only remaining superpower. The conveniences and commodities and the enormous well-stocked grocery stores. The big cars and the cheap gas. Those are all double-edged swords.

No, it was the pervasive, if dying, truth that even in the darkest days of discrimination, slavery, war, depression, and fear, that no matter who you were born, with hard work, prudence, good stewardship, determination, and the indomitable American spirit, you could grow up to Be Someone. Or in the worst of circumstances, at least your kids would have it better than you. Even in other First-World European countries, I found this to be devastatingly untrue, which made me always long for home, America, where the homeless and tempest-tossed could make good someday.

This changed with my trip to South Africa. I have never seen a country so resilient and determined. I thought the brutal, dirty stain of apartheid would have irretrievably polluted the national spirit, but I found nothing of the sort. Instead, I saw an entire country of first-generation American immigrants. Working in mediocre jobs, living in shacks, eating minimally, surviving with the least of frills, sacrificing everything to send their children to the best private schools possible, hiring tutors, ensuring their kids studied every spare moment, irrepressible in their determination, convinced beyond doubt that they might die penniless and broken, but their children, dammit their children would be successful, success was within their kids' reach as it was never open to them. A whole country full of welcoming, friendly, helpful people, who, far from being taken aback from calls from foreign strangers claiming kinship and wanting to meet, scolded me for not staying longer and eating more of the extensive spreads they laid out for me.

South Africa has a tarnished reputation for widespread and violent crime, but I've felt more afraid in the streets of Chicago and New York. In fact, all the locals went out of their way to warn me away from the bad streets and sketchy characters. It was a country under construction on all three coasts and everywhere in between, frantically trying to rebuild and expand infrastructure in advance of World Cup 2010. A country of hope, of promise, of unfailing hospitality.

I was sorry to go, but even more so as I found myself confronted by materialistic, selfish, cold American society. On the plane into Washington DC, an elderly woman (seated with her husband, on a flight of mostly older couples who had been flying for the past 17+ hours) spent the final 20 minutes prior to landing carefully applying eye makeup and anxiously checking her reflection in a compact mirror. Even at the remotest bush airport in South Africa, the planes flew on time, the stewardesses were young, polite, and attractive, and traveling was a refined experience that left you refreshed at arrival. In DC, our plane was delayed due to striking pilots and a half-full flight, the stewardesses were middle-aged and rude, and the airport filled with angry, frustrated, snappy passengers. The stores teemed with expensive, processed, packaged, useless goods and to get a basic snack cost upwards of $8. The bathrooms were dirty and the people handling our luggage, careless. The line for American citizens at Customs was twice as long and moved half as slowly as that for all the foreign nationals. The CBP agents eyed all of us Americans suspiciously. What was this country to which I returned?

Ubi sunt indeed. I daresay the golden door yet exists, beckoning like a beacon in the night; but the lamp lifted beside it, is it still lit?

Fear itself

2008-11-14T22:02:00.000-08:00

I used to think that after staring down the barrel of a loaded gun held by a crazy person wanting to kill you, there's not much left to fear. But the truth was, the whole surreal episode made me cling a little more desperately to life, to realize what I'd nearly given up, to weigh more dearly what still hung in the balance.

Sure, there wasn't much they could do to scare me into shape at OCS (Officer Candidate School) after that - yell all they wanted, I knew they couldn't (and had no desire to) kill me. But my career-planning, my life-living, became ever-so-much-more determined, steely-eyed not to forfeit what I'd almost never seen, iron-gripped on a future I swore I'd never again let out of my grasp.

It worked, brilliantly for my career, though to the inevitable detriment of most everything else. Four years of determination and sacrifice finally, astonishingly, paid off in an incredible career opportunity, my top pick, a real leap of faith from the detailers (what with my paper-thin resume), an open door into a limitless future. All blown to bits in just weeks with a cancer diagnosis that dominoed into cancelled orders within the hour. My XO at the time was quite taken aback that I cared more about losing my dream job than I did about dying.

But dying is final. What can be frightening about a fixed endpoint? Jobs are fluid, so many variables: they scare me in a way that facing death never could. Showing up in a new position, with new responsibilities and expectations, new boss, new crew, new unit...always worried that somehow I'll fail, I'll come up short, I'll let someone down. I don't like the learning process. I want to be expert upon arrival. I'm untrusting of my skills, talent, guts, intuition, and experience. Worried about first impressions. But I've been lucky; or perhaps my caution has simply served me well, because no job has ever been as bad as the worry preceding it. I study hard, I watch others, I listen, I step lightly at first, I trust and empower, I speak with confidence, I admit mistakes, I force patience upon myself, I'm eager to learn, and somehow...somehow it all comes out okay.

But Death is different: either you are or you aren't; there's no middle ground. And I guess I've always felt there's so little you can do to control Death (the wages of sin, after all, and have we not all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?), although I suppose that's not really true at all. I feel in some karmic way, I was supposed to be gone by now. Cancer should have done me in. It was my time, was it not? Somehow I cheated Death, for the time being at least, and though he'll come for me eventually, maybe I've carved out a few decades of "bonus round", of "overtime". It's finite. We like to think, us corruptible humans, that we live forever, but there's a horizon in my future and it's not limitless.

And in its strange way, these extra innings have made me even more fearless, if that's possible. Fearless in a different way, I suppose - prudent enough to plan for tomorrow, but improvident enough to enjoy today, to carpe diem, to go for broke. Unwilling to wait for company; unafraid to strike out alone. Hungry to seize at every opportunity, not just for career, but for family, for friends, for myself - to strike all that stuff off my list of things to do before I die. Fearless, because the fear comes from the waiting, the worrying, the unknown. Strike out and seize the moment and clammy fear will evaporate in the sweat of action.

For tomorrow we may die.

A long and winding road

2008-11-10T11:12:00.000-08:00

Flight time from San Francisco to South Africa is about 30 hours. I went by way of Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Singapore; and immediately upon arrival in Johannesburg, hopped on a train down to the coast, to Port Elizabeth. I left San Francisco on Wednesday morning and arrived halfway around the world at my final destination on Saturday at noon, local time. It was a long journey.

My grandfather on my dad's side was one of 11 siblings, and the only one to leave South Africa. Since, of course, many of the younger generations have left, for Australia and New Zealand, for Dubai and Saudi Arabia, for England, for Canada, for the United States; but for the most part, there is a whole branch of the family still resident in South Africa. My father's parents died long before I was born, so I had little connection to, or knowledge of, this part of my heritage.

It is a rite of passage for us melting-pot Americans to go off in search of our roots. More than an excuse to travel, more than a unique opportunity for an inside look at a foreign culture, I hoped to find, in that stereotypical questing way, some reflection of myself among these distant cousins. After all, I don't look much like either of my parents. I'm the starched-collar goy among my mom's family, and too liberal and open-minded for my dad's conservative Christian relatives. Everyone on all sides collectively gasped when I abandoned a safe and lucrative intellectual life to (consecutively) scoop ice cream, live on a farm, work in a small-town dental office, and eventually join the military. Pacifists on one side and anarchists on the other, nobody quite knew what to make of me swearing to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Why wasn't I teaching, going to grad school, studying law or medicine, pursuing a musical career, living in the city, dating a suit, settled down and busy raising rugrats?

I hoped rather fleetingly that perhaps I'd find some actual relations, some resemblances, on this trip. And I was not disappointed, though the source took me by surprise. The second- and third- and once-removed cousins I discovered across the country were all incredibly warm, welcoming, and refreshingly full of stories of my grandfather and grandmother; but the best story I heard was that of my great-great-great grandfather, one of the 1820 British settlers sent to South Africa to establish a human barrier between the British and the native black population (rather peeved about their land being stolen away).

Thomas, my great³ grandfather, was what you might call a rogue. Growing up, he lived with a wealthy merchant family in London, but for unknown reasons, out of the blue he enlisted in England's Merchant Navy. After a few Napoleonic sea battles, he was captured by the French, perhaps even fought back against the English on a captured English ship, languished several years in a French prison, got in with the Freemasons, then successfully leveraged his Masonic connections to escape France - one of just a handful of English POWs who did so. Returning to England, my illustrious ancestor found he wasn't too popular, so after futzing around a bit (and fathering an illegitimate child), he signed up for the dubious 1820 excursion with his wife and three young children. Against all odds, he scratched out a decent farmer's life amid the chaos and privations of white South Africa, frequently haggling with the government for damage and loss reimbursement from the "frontier wars" against the various black tribes. In his later years, though, he spent most of his days chasing after a married-but-separated woman (helping raise her kids) and getting "stupid drunk", perhaps as a way to cope with having to be taken in and supported by his least favorite son, who despised him. Restless, even in his retirement he tutored children, mended shoes, and kept a daily diary, peppered with odd recipes and remedies and regular weather observations ("It was windy." "It was windy." "Today it was windy.") For decades, landlocked far inland, this illustrious forebear kept among his small library a number of books on navigation and seamanship, deeply prized and sorely missed when they burned along with his farm during one of the frontier wars.

Some of my ancestor's colorful nature must have trickled down the bloodline, I suspect.

FFFD

2008-10-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

Fit For Full Duty. Available for Worldwide Assignment.

Such were the words on my latest chit from medical. I’m cleared.

That’s cleared, not cured. But I’ll take it. After all, curing isn’t in my future: remission, if I’m lucky.

I’ve been busy checking items off my list for getting underway. Rules of the Road re-test...aced it. Official passport application, done. Upgrade to my clearance package, submitted. I'm scheduled to get underway for a couple weeks in early November with a 378' and possibly do some buoy tender time over the holidays...then gearing up for spring 378' time as well.

My doctors at UCSF are happy with my progress also. When the Coast Guard doc asked how I was feeling, any long-term side effects, he asked me what the most activity was that I'd done recently. "Well, I hiked El Capitan in a day," I replied. "Ah," he said. "You're all better then."

Today I fly to South Africa by way of Singapore. I am tremendously excited to go, and to hopefully track down a whole branch of my father's family. I may be off the grid for a couple weeks...so don't worry if I'm not posting frequently.

Thanks to everyone for your support!

On composing

2008-10-06T18:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard music in my head as far back as I can remember. I can remember all the car rides as a kid, lights streaming by dark nights on endless California freeways, staring out the window at the reflected lights off the dash, hearing whole symphonies, movement by movement, plenty of time to work out all the development sections.

If you sit and listen and concentrate, you realize, gradually, the hums of all the electronics, all the machines, the refrigerator, the computer, the fans, the cars outside, the planes overhead, and the more you listen, the more you hear, the louder it gets, until even when you focus, it is difficult to dial it down. That’s how it is for me with the music in my head.

In the presence of live music, recorded music, I hear a rainbow of harmonies, cross-rhythms, counterpoint. It’s hard for me to sing melody in a group with all the thirds and fifths and sixths echoing in my head. In orchestras, I’m happiest in the center, second violin, fourth chair or so, where I sit amid woodwinds and brass and percussion and lower voices and place my harmonies amidst it all.

With great care and practice, I learned to translate the music in my head out my fingers, improvising on violin. It took years until I was comfortable. The music kept playing in my head, but my fingers only cooperated with painstaking practice. And it has been like that learning to write the music, also.

My father, at my request, tried long and hard to imprint music theory on my untaught mind. I resisted both consciously and unwillingly. I wanted to try new things, to break the rules; the music in my head didn’t fit the patterns I was learning. The formality of the notes on the page, carefully placed in their time-honored patterns, mocked me. I was intractable.

Somewhere, somehow, it must have sunk in, somewhat at least. And yet this writing process these last few weeks has been an exercise in mental exhaustion. I force myself to translate shapes and colors and things from my head into dots and lines on their several staves, to filter out voicings, to hear both the long phrase and to work out the single measure’s rhythm, to impose formal structures on the sweeps and swirls; to make the head-music reproducible by others than me.

And I research like I’m writing a novel: how to write for harp, for banjo; not only how to notate, but how to play the instruments – what sounds good and what does not; the playable and the simply awkward.

I fit it in here and there – on the train, during a quick lunch break, on the bus, at home before my roommate arrives each night. If I work too long all at once though, my head literally starts to ache from all the concerted effort. But if I try to take a break, the unwritten music pounds incessantly in my head in an unceasing loop, until I cave, until I write it down, until it’s in a final, revised & edited form; only then does the music in my head quiet down to manageable levels.

The only way

2008-09-27T08:49:00.001-07:00

I love being back home. Bills to pay, floors to scrub, trash to take out, disposals to fix, clothes to wash, bags to unpack, cars to repair, letters to open, email to answer.

And work, of course; couldn't forget that. Meetings, paperwork, bureaucracy, red tape, egos. All in a day's sweat. Negotiations: it seems I spend my entire day negotiating middle ground between parties who speak slanted at each other, never revealing their true intent or subjective prejudices.

I'll be honest: I'm working my own angles, too. The guise of "recovery" has opened many rare doors thus far this year, in a line of work where stopping to breathe is a joke at best, and at worst, anathema. But this angling is a delicate dance on the sharp lip of a double-edged sword. Am I well enough to work? Then I'm well enough to reassign. Am I fully healed? Then no need to spend so much time with family. Feeling good? Then stand duty and quit taking leave. Think you can handle the rigors of underway life? Then surely you should work longer days, take on more responsibilities, and focus more on the job you've got rather than jobs you like, jobs you want, jobs you might someday get.

I've been angling for underway time on the locally homeported cutters (one of which, after all, I might well find myself assigned to next summer). Manpower, particularly at-least-slightly-experienced-manpower, is always at a premium in the perpetually-strapped Coast Guard; so as long as their berthing arrangements allow, cutters are usually glad to fatten their watch rotations. Of course it's mainly to benefit me, to gain experience and earn a qualification letter, but if I can pitch the time as useful to the ship - so much the better.

And such an opportunity has opened up, with one of our cutters headed for an out-of-hemisphere deployment all spring. They asked for help standing watches, and I was quick to pull the volunteer trigger. But this requires some, well, negotiations. Clearance level, weapons quals, passport, country clearances, arrival and departure coordination with port calls; these all will follow in due time. The sticking (or perhaps just sticky) point is school attendance. I need a certain school to stand the watches; but typically the Coast Guard won't pay for you to attend these six weeks of school until you have permanent orders to a job that needs it. I'd almost certainly be attending the school this spring, once I've received orders for next year, but here I'm asking to attend early, so I can sail for more of the ship's deployment. The detailer's not going to sign off blindly. So negotiations proceed.

Meanwhile, the music of the road hums demandingly in my head, and I'm pressing out time everywhere to capture it on paper (or on disk, as it were): lunch breaks, commuter trains, late nights, public plazas, sequestered with laptop and noise-canceling headphones. A dual-track race to the finish.

Farther up and further in

2008-09-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

Ah, a road trip. Good for the soul - or at least, good for my soul.

It certainly wasn't the 3500+ miles of driving, the lasting effect of which lingers in a sore left shoulder and screaming right hamstring.

Maybe, then, it was the variety of lodging - everything from guesting in my own house to sleeping in a concrete wigwam and bedding down in a haunted balcony room of a ghost-town Nevada hotel.

Maybe, instead, it was fleeing a hurricane inland, or being feted by complete-stranger evacuees afterward, attending mariachi mass, or sipping a prickly-pear margarita 75 stories up above a steamy San Antonio.

Maybe it was floating past the Paseo del Rio late into the night, or sailing on Lake Tahoe, or wafting a thousand feet above Albuquerque in a hot air balloon.

Maybe it was haggling for Native American jewelry in the depths of Canyon de Chelly, picking up a bottle of local wine in Colorado, sifting through hills of Navajo rugs in Chinle, or receiving the completely unexpected, yet surprisingly appropriate gift of two WWII-era Filipino island paintings.

Maybe it was meeting my renters, or long-lost, never-seen friends (at last), reconnecting with good friends and former shipmates, or maybe it was the host of new, welcoming folks I met along the road, from an ex-pat Londoner forced out of New Orleans by this summer's storms, to a live-to-ski rock climber, rambling for a month in the California Sierras.

I like to think I'm not materialistic, but I was so excited to see my car again that maybe it was the getting back of my slightly worse-for-wear, Gustav-battered Beetle, or after five months apart, laying hands at long last on my long-missed and carefully-kept "real" violin.

I was down to a meal or two each long-driven day, but maybe it was the food: the burritos and brick-oven pizza on the Gulf, the fry bread in Four Corners, the homemade granola in Cortez, the tea bar at the Whole Foods headquarters in Austin.

Maybe it was the massage in a tiny town in Artesia, New Mexico, the live music at a dive bar in Austin, the grandiosity of Temple Square or the surprising diminution of the Alamo. Maybe, after all that, it was the UFO museum in Roswell.

Or maybe...maybe it was the Willa Cather desert southwest, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, the grandeur of Canyon de Chelly and Moab, the sparkling valley at Yosemite.

It certainly felt good to taste what I ate, to push without tiring, to hike some 20 miles up and back rocky switchbacks without my heart & lungs wilting within me, clutching at my chest. And there's the inevitable allure of abandoning all responsibilities but the air in your tires and the fuel in your tank.

Whatever it was...the music started to flow. This only happened to me once before, after rafting the length of the Grand Canyon's Colorado, when in the weeks that followed poured out dozens of songs, lyrics, chords, fully formed on the page. This time it's a piano rag, and a symphony in four movements, and more yet to come. I can't explain it.

But I know this much: I'm back. And it feels good.

Something soft and wild and free

2008-09-17T22:18:00.001-07:00

Is it not ironic that the two places I feel most at home are so widely divergent? - on a ship, underway; and here, roaming in the expansive desert Southwest.

This is Willa Cather country, at last: Willa Cather, probably the least-studied famous American author, and, far and away, my favorite. I wrote my college thesis on her, much to the shock of my English-equals-born-in-England professors.

Willa Cather wrote of many things, but she hit her stride with North American pioneers, and in the desert Southwest. Both underlay "Death Comes for the Archbishop", my favorite work of hers.

Most evident in this book is Cather's belief that a person's identity rises from and is forged by the land itself. Her writing is as expansive and many-hued as the high desert setting.

Colors are so washed out, so muted elsewhere, compared to this desert brightness. The violets of far-off mountains and late-afternoon skies; the reds and pinks of the rock, rising in towers and dropping away in canyons; the shrubs and cacti and cottonwood in deep olives and bright apple-greens; the wildflowers in bright yellows and reds and purples; the brilliant turquoise sky peppered with towering white clouds; the sun blazing sunsets into oranges, pinks, bronzes...there is a sharpness as well, each color contrasting brightly with the next, each angling for a bigger piece of the reflected sun.

You can smell the rain coming, the shift in the air from a dry hotness to a whispered breeze to a frantic downpour, kicking up the dust and drowning the web of arroyos cutting across the mesas. And then it's over before you've hardly gotten wet, the hot sun quickly baking the damp away, the rain forgotten but for the flooded washes and ill-drained roads.

I want to leave my car behind, ride a horse off into the sunset, explore the endless sandstone canyons and scrubby mesas, sleep in a simple hut or abandoned cave, build a fire, listen to the echoes of long-ago ancestors whispering endless truths.

It is the land. It calls.

For tomorrow we die

2008-09-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

San Antonio and Austin were both choked with Ike evacuees on "forced vacations", as I heard often. And nobody's more ready for a good time than someone whose house is flattened. No, really.

This wasn't the two months' exhaustion of blank-eyed relief workers, washed out by weeks of devastation at every turn. Nor the emptiness of an evacuated city, still blinking neon lights forlornly at those who dared to return to a broken town.

These were the people who had the finances and the flexibility to choose their cities of refuge. And their pace was frenzied.

Most of the scheduled tourists were gone: the big UT - UA (University of Texas/University of Arkansas) football game was cancelled, along with several professional sports games. I found a luxury hotel at rock-bottom prices because all the high-end visitors pulled out at the last minute. But that didn't mean there was a shortage of middle-class folks ready to spend anything to forget their problems back home.

Sixth Street in Austin collected all the college-age (and the wannabe past-their-primers) out for a good time. The Paseo del Rio in San Antonio was likewise overflowing with revelers. Any question yelled by bartenders or river guides about evacuees was answered with a deafening roar. The evacuees kept the rounds coming as we blinked, bleary-eyed, at weathermen blown off the screen on enormous plasma TVs.

I didn't even have to pull the "I'm a Coast Guard hero" line to get free drinks. The evacuees were all too willing to treat everyone in sight. Nor were they in any hurry to get home - schools and businesses were closed and power outages (read: no air conditioning) were widespread. And for all the drinking, the two church services I attended this weekend (including an amazing mariachi mass in San Antonio) were overflowing, with prayers for hurricane victims frequent.

PS. For a state that repeatedly reminds you of how large everything is ("Texas-sized Ike")...the Alamo really is quite small.

One trick ahead of disaster

2008-09-14T06:35:00.000-07:00

I've driven across Louisiana and parts of Texas before too. Also in very different circumstances.

Three years ago, after the female counterparts of Gustav and Ike hit Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi; after the evacuation crew, the rescue crew, and the cleanup crew had all moved through, we came: the salvage crew.

That was my inaugural journey to the South. Well, I'd lived in southeastern Virginia, which yes, Mabel, is most definitely the South, just not the Deep South.

I'd driven the Natchez Trace Parkway from Nashville to Alexandria (LA), and eventually set off on a three-week, 2000-mile odyssey across four states to locate and return all manner of large equipment bought, borrowed, or rented for hurricane support.

The endless devastation and despair are burned in my mind. But there were other novelties. Like arriving in Sabine Pass on a stiflingly hot November morning to get dive-bombed by what looked like small birds, but turned out to be enormous mosquitoes leaving three-inch welts. Or pulling into Alexandria (an empty shell of a town) for the first time in a torrential tropical rainstorm, staying in a smelly hotel with cockroaches aplenty, billed as "Alexandria's best lodging". Or driving for miles and miles and miles along I-10 (Hwy 90 was closed for much of its length) and seeing not a single billboard or road sign; they were all blown down. Or the hour-long drive of devastation out to Venice, just days after the road was finally dry and open, three months after the storms; dead horses and 18-wheelers suspended eerily from trees.

In a former life, I pre-positioned all manner of hurricane support and response forces prior to the storms. Out of harm's way but close enough to respond quickly, adjusting their placement as the storm's track changed. Ready to swoop in once the storm passed and I gave the word.

This time I was also dodging a storm, but now I was the mouse on the run. I cancelled my side-trips to Beaumont and Houston and stayed well inland from Shreveport to Austin, one step ahead of Ike. I watched the winds shift and the clouds circle overhead on a preternaturally calm and sunny day, and listened all 400 miles to nonstop local coverage of the storm, simulcast on satellite radio. I watched as gas prices rose over 30 cents per gallon in a single day; in fact, many stations were adjusting their advertised prices as I drove by. I passed any number of evacuees, many towing travel trailers, as they fled town going the opposite direction, but they were mainly radiating like spokes of a wheel from Gulf towns, while I cut cross-country.

I also passed relief & recovery traffic - a stake-bed filled with fuel drums and the rectangular fuel containers I remembered so well from Katrina - a large semi-truck loaded with a large cooler, an enormous generator, a backhoe, orange plastic-lattice fencing, and any number of hand tools. And every so often, I'd pass a convoy of utility vehicles; destined, I am sure, to wait out the storm and then move in quickly.

I felt like a pawn (or, perhaps more accurately, a bishop) on a board I'd once controlled.

If there are lovebugs, it must be September

2008-09-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten that you mark the seasons in Alabama by the type and quantity of flying insect.

Forget stopping for fuel (my car goes some 600 miles between fill-ups), bathrooms, food, drinks, or stretching of legs (I can wait 'til I get there)...on the first leg of this trip, Mobile to Shreveport, what kept me pulling over was a pressing need to clean the windshield of bugs, just so I could see out. Bugs hit faster than raindrops could fall.

My route took me out Hwy 98 through rural northern Mississippi. I've made a road trip out that way once before, Mobile to Cleveland, MS, and back, to rescue a wayward crewmember. It was an eye-opening journey. In addition to some rather odd sights en route our destination (an amusement park in the swamps, a man seated calmly in the driver's seat of his car while flames leapt from his open hood), taking an extremely circuitous route, eating at a hole-in-the-wall, completely deserted restaurant, and staying at a hotel in a construction zone, the arrival and return trip were even more entertaining. A whole town of trailer-park dwellers who did their best to exceed stereotypes; unapologetic racists who pimped out their pickup trucks to race down the main drag every Friday night; a "gourmet" country buffet restaurant in a warehouse featuring table after table of fried who-knows-what's-under-the-breading; and a hundred miles of highway past an endless string of catfish farms out both sides. And Doc & I meanwhile busy trying to talk our unrepentant shipmate out of her endless wild ideas for escaping the Coast Guard.

This trip was nowhere near as dramatic. The weather was sunny, the traffic light, and the folks in a population-300 gas station quick with helpful directions despite my Oregon plates and "Obama '08" bumper sticker. Hell, I was worried people'd run me off the road with a car like that. Plenty of "Heritage not Hate" signs but I think I only counted two or three Confederate flags (there's a higher concentration in rural Oregon).

Oh yeah, and there is really a place called Dixie. It's in Mississippi.

Don't know when I'll be back again

2008-09-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

So after a red-eye from San Francisco to Charlotte next to an extremely fidgety man (I slept anyway, as best one can in an Arctically cold airplane with rationed blankets), and a three-hour layover in Charlotte at the USO (God bless the USO! although their breakfast, big leather recliner, and soft blanket were so comfortable, I sank into a deep sleep and almost missed my onward flight!), the fields and trees and little houses of southern Alabama slowly started to crystallize out of the buggy, humid, puffy-white-clouds-in-a-blue-sky day as we neared the Mobile airport.

And I was excited. That I wasn't prepared for. Excited to squint out the window to pick out the freeways and lay of the land and look for recognizable landmarks. Excited to be back. To see friends. To see my car, and my house. Excited for Alabama??

It was a fun day, jam-packed as I'm sure these all will be. I spent quite a while at the ship, runnign about and talking to everyone about their adventures, well at least, all the folks I knew who are still on the ship. I picked up my car, which thankfully bore only a few scratches and bruises from the Gulf's slew of summer storms. Met my amazing renters who offered me the guest room at my house for the night. The house looks fantastic - the renters have really taken care of it, and they're such friendly and fun people as well. We stayed up way too late talking.

Somewhere in the middle of that I carved out an hour or so to handle paperwork for work...yes, in my overworked eagerness, I sat on an OCS (Officer Candidate School) board the last few hours Tuesday before I left work, so there was paperwork to complete and exchange.

And now I am off, north and west. I'll be doing a bit of storm-dodging...the outer rain bands of Ike started walloping us last night. The past day's been much more enjoyable than I'd imagined a day in Alabama could be - largely due to the people, of course, not any innate wonder of the state. But return is uncertain.

And now...to the road!

(Oh and by the way, I'm done)

2008-09-10T06:29:00.000-07:00

Departures are always hectic, crammed with the undone. Today, Tuesday, was no different. Particularly with the unplanned-for wrench-in-the-schedule of radiation yesterday morning. I had hoped (and planned) to put in two full days of work this week; compressing my work hours was not entirely successful.

Also in this last, frantic few days, I wanted to spend time with my best friend before I left town; and another very close friend - whom I hadn't seen for two or three years - happened to be in the Bay Area, with Monday the only day our logistics meshed to meet.

Somewhere amidst all that, I had also to do laundry, iron, pack, clean the apartment, return library books, extract cash, contact a good dozen people I'm hoping to connect with on my road trip, confirming details and solidifying dates...oh, and sleep. Adrenaline only lasts so long.

And somewhere in the middle of all this I finished radiation. Finished treatment. Concluded the battle. I'm all better now, right? It is a strangely muted denouement. I got to take my netted radiation mask home, and hug the lab tech goodbye, and stop trekking weekly to the clinic for the ritual drawing of blood. But it is more an absence of activity than a presence of relief or celebration. No peace treaties on the Missouri. (I'd planned to celebrate with my roommate and others this past weekend, but the festivities were necessarily shelved when my radiation treatments weren't over Friday, after all.)

Now, in the middle of the night, still unwinding from a brim-filled, pressed, down, and overflowing day, I rocket off to the airport to catch a red-eye back south, and east. Has it really been five months since I left?

Checking it twice

2008-09-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

The AY09 LT shopping list is on the streets.

(To translate: the list of available jobs for lieutenants up for transfer this coming summer has now been published.)

It's a bit sparse. Last year's list was replete with OPS jobs, particularly 378' OPS jobs (the job I want most; the job I so surprisingly received orders for but had to give up once diagnosed). It really does reasonably follow, then, since they're all two-year billets, that this year's list would be rather truncated.

This coming year, there are are only two 378' OPS jobs open- one ship in Hawaii and one right across the pier here in the Bay Area. Those will of course go #1 and #2 on my list; the question is what comes next.

There are several choices. There are a few 270' OPS jobs, a number of 225' XO jobs, and Weapons Officer for one of the new 418's. There's even XO on a Great Lakes icebreaking tug. Many of these jobs are in locations I'd like, or at least places I'd be interested in checking off my "lived there, done that" list. Each holds its particular appeal, both personally and professionally.

So I know what's on my list - this time I'm not going to list any land jobs, not even as "backups" - but not yet in what order I'll request them. What's best for my career long-term (wide variety of afloat experiences - variety of location, mission, platform/ship type, responsibilities, etc.) and short-term (setting me up for command afloat)?

There's also the detailer (=assignment officer) game to play. Not listing enough jobs gives detailers carte blanche to assign you at will to any available job where they need your skills and experience. Listing a great many jobs definitely increases the chances that you'll be assigned to a "chosen job" over another open position - but on the flip side, listing too many jobs can convey waffly career intentions. As the detailers say, "Put it in your comments!" - but how decisive can I sound without being pushy or demanding? And you never quite know how detailers will react - does already possessing a ship's qualification mean you're more likely to get assigned to that type of ship (to put your expertise to use), or conversely, that you'd be better served on a different platform (to broaden your experience)?

I definitely have some thinking and listening to do. What this list does emphasize is that earning a 378' qualification this fall, after the "e-resumes" (=list of desired jobs) are submitted but before assignments are made, is key. Hence my TAD (temporary duty) afloat plans for the next 8 months...which are, at present, percolating promisingly in the "command discussion" phase.

One more morning

2008-09-06T00:47:00.000-07:00

There was a piece of unwelcome news this morning. Well, relatively unwelcome - no cause for panic.

I had confirmed with the techs several times that today would be my last day of radiation. In fact, they started to jump the gun a couple times this week, thinking that Thursday was my last day.

Well, this morning I found out that I have to come back Monday to finish my course of treatment. It really will be cutting it close - I fly out Tuesday night to Alabama.

I was visibly disappointed when the tech told me, and after asking why, she simply couldn't understand why I was frustrated I couldn't put in a full day of work Monday like I'd planned. While it's nice to avoid endless meetings, boring conferences, and piles of deskwork, I still bristle at putting in half-days, particularly when there's plenty of work to be done. Much happens before 0900 and I feel like I'm coming in at lunch time, though I've really only missed a couple of hours.

"We can write you a note," said the tech. "You don't have to be going to work."

Sigh.

A breath of fresh air

2008-09-04T21:41:00.000-07:00

This one goes out to the guy a few days back who was flirting with me, ever so gently.

Thanks that the first words out of your mouth didn't reference (or try to skirt around) my illness.

Thanks for the honest surprise when I, bare-headed with downy Chia-pet-hair, told you I'd had cancer. (Thinking the haircut was concomitant with my "sporty look" and G.I. Jane lifestyle gains you bonus points - in fact, truly believing I was some sort of athlete, after a summer of hardly working out due to treatments and side effects, gains you super-bonus-points.)

Thanks for being interested but not prurient; respectful but not embarrassed. You shook my hand without wringing it, looked me in the eye without staring, and never found yourself saying, "I'm so glad you're...still with us..." and lapsing off into uncomfortable silences.

Thanks for using the word "strong" to talk about my body, not my constitution, attitude, or person. Thanks that the "cancer reference story" you used to qualify your concern and interest didn't end in "it was a hard battle for him, but eventually he died".

Thanks for assuming I'd be going to work throughout, and not putting my personal and career goals on hold, or replacing them with a simple wish for survival.

Thanks for neither ignoring nor indulging news of my illness: you simply acknowledged it and moved on. Thanks for conducting several different interesting conversations, none of which centered around cancer - or even mentioned it much.

I don't know your last name, we live in different cities, and I'm sure I'll never see you again, but thanks. You made me feel like a real, ordinary person - attractive besides - and it was refreshing.

Cyclone

2008-08-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

It feels unbelievably odd to watch with such detachment (physical and psychological) as Gustav bears down on the Gulf Coast. I'm not even at work - I'm visiting my dad in Southern California, going for long hikes, catching up with friends, playing piano & violin (fiddling while Rome burns?), taking naps in the middle of the afternoon just because...

I can't say I'm not following the storm's progress without some interest: with friends from Pensacola to Houston, and a house sitting snugly (on high ground and safely inland) in Mobile, I can scarce ignore it entirely. But this year I have no responsibilities: I'm not policing up loose gear and boarding up windows at home, not being recalled to the ship, not getting underway for storm moorings or hurricane avoidance...or as in my first assignment, not positioning logistical response teams like pieces on a gigantic chess board, safely out of the storm's predicted (and ever-changing) path, folks for damage assessment, repair and rebuilding, evacuation, food, water, fuel, claims, legal assistance, counseling, financial support, spare boat and aircraft parts, transportation, temporary lodging, command posts, generators and other disaster supplies, staging areas...even folks to handle the endless flow of personnel into and out of the affected areas, people carefully siphoned from units across the country. Not attending meetings. Not giving briefings or typing situation reports. Not butting heads with those well senior to me. Not waking from nightmares of the drowned and drowning, worrying for the hundredth time if I'd done enough to prepare or respond. Not surviving on a few hours of broken sleep, nourished only on a large daily Nalgene bottle of orange juice.

(Yeah, someday - when my career's no longer in the balance - I'll probably write a book about all I saw and heard and meddled in...)

My successor at that first assignment called me a couple days ago, sweating bullets over the storm. She's been lucky so far - the past two years were mercifully free of Ivans and Katrinas and Charleys. She wanted to pull me out to Virginia to help her, which normally I would have jumped at, but I'm not exactly free to cut my moorings right now. "You think they have a radiation table there?" I asked her. I tried to reassure her. She'll be fine. She's got a top-notch civilian working for her who was my right-hand man in Katrina. We put a lot of good policies in place after the storm. And this year, thank goodness, the residents and governments are taking the threat seriously and evacuating ahead of time.

So here I sit with this strange detachment, checking the NHC page now and then with mild curiosity, wondering idly if I'll need to alter my road trip to avoid washed-out causeways or if I'll have trouble picking up my car or if a tree might fall on my house. But this year, for once, there's nothing I can do about any of it.

Great simplifications

2008-08-29T18:51:00.000-07:00

This summer I have savored a delicious taste, my first since I've been in the Coast Guard, of autonomy. It's been nice. While on paper I reported to three bosses, in practice, I ran my own little sideshow.

Power...when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing....It is always a misfortune when number two or three has to initiate a dominant plan or policy. He has to consider not only the merits of the policy, but the mind of his chief; not only what to advise, but what it is proper in his station to advise; not only what to do, but how to get it agreed, and how to get it done.

Mercifully, I have eluded this burdensome yoke for the past few months.

Together with my rag-tag band of hardworking folks who didn't exist (people on medical hold, like me; people awaiting discharge; people sent back from the ships because they couldn't get underway; people awaiting assignment), we quadrupled the size of our "official" division, rescued our million-dollar security guard contract from the jaws of high-level defeat, negotiated an expensive and extensive equipment upgrade package gratis from HQ, re-wrote two landmark manuals for our unit, laid plans to remodel our offices, implemented solid disaster-preparedness steps, handled port services for two out-of-the-ordinary ships mooring in downtown SF, implemented a solid tracking procedure for over 200 people's security clearances, and - in addition to our "ordinary" workload of evaluations, awards, instructions, training, weapons qualification, key control, bomb threat response, traffic court, port services, and daily security - handled the outsized and highly visible security needs of a week's worth of high-level ceremonies, during which we hosted 2/3 of the Coast Guard's flag corps, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and around 2000 guests to celebrate the commissioning of the Coast Guard's newest class of cutter.

Whew.

So now, on the back end of this frantic slew of events and demands, while our haggard division is relievedly taking as much leave as duty allows, after we've written up the "lessons learned" and "hotwashed" and battened down to knock out our remaining responsibilities...ah yes, now arrives my new boss. Or replacement, call it what you will.

I'm not angry or bitter - after all, his job exists and mine doesn't. And it provides perfect exit music as I head out for underway time on our local ships or other TAD opportunities this year. I'm confident I've squared away the division for a presentable handover, unlike the scattershot I inherited. And my new boss is a great guy (ironically, a watchstander I supervised in my first Coast Guard assignment). Still...the added imposition of bureaucracy, well, complicates matters. I've gotten used to handling thorny situations myself, dealing directly with key people, whether our own command cadre, at other units, or at HQ. Having to play politics and then sit impotent feels like a regression. It leaves me doing little more than - shudder - writing manuals all day. And it makes me utterly redundant (see above: a good thing) - my chiefs report to me, and I turn around and play Telephone with my boss. The ultimate in middle management.

At the top there are great simplifications. An accepted leader has only to be sure of what it is best to do, or at least to have made up his mind about it.

From whose bourn no traveler returns

2008-08-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

Terminals. The word is so misleading. "Exchange" is so much more appropriate. Like a stock exchange or a mercantile exchange; except instead of securities or hogs, it's people coming and going, trading one city for another, constant motion, endless options.

I love to travel. And I love airports. Not, of course, for the endless sits in plastic molded chairs, or the hurried strip-search at the security checkpoint, or the overpriced pseudo-regional fast food smelling up the waiting areas, overcrowded with screaming toddlers and rumpled businessmen, folded over their laptops, too cheap to fly first class but angling endlessly for upgrades. I love to walk along and glance over at all the other destinations, all the places I'm not going, as I wander to my gate, envisioning myself in Paris, Ft. Lauderdale, or Butte, blaming the inscrutability of descriptionless numbers for assigning me to flight 1202 to Portland instead of 1203 to New York; gate A37 to Oregon instead of C37 to Toronto. Airports hum with possibilities.

It's not so easy to board the wrong aircraft (though I've done it), to "accidentally" arrive in unintended places, but cars are another matter entirely. The "next big city" destinations on freeway signs always tempt me terribly. Why exit here, at mile marker 28? Why not keep going into the Gorge, to the Dalles, to Idaho? It's not that far, right? If I just keep driving...Sunsets are especially alluring. Why not stay behind the wheel until sunrise, wherever the road takes me, wherever I end up? What if I'm not there on Monday morning? What if I just don't come home? What undiscovered country awaits me?

Perhaps the threat of truancy is so tempting because I'm so damn reliable. I certainly wasn't itching to come back to radiation today, though. Halfway done with the zappings, I escaped to Portland this weekend for a friend's wedding and to spend time with my mom. Beautiful weather, tasty (mostly vegan) food, refreshing walks outdoors, a massage, church, roller skating, and a very entertaining wedding...not to mention, somehow, a lot of relaxation...and despite its various protests, my body was very happy to avoid the zapper for a couple days. But radiation beckoned, this afternoon, inexorably.

What if I just stay here?...if I take a different flight?...if I stay at work too late?...if I miss my bus, or my train, or my shuttle?...if I just don't show up?

I've never been all that good at breaking the rules.

An Epic Journey

2008-08-18T22:28:00.000-07:00

The Epic Journey approacheth.

Shortly after I finish radiation, I fly to Alabama to see some friends, pick up my car, and begin the long trek back West.

In my race to get out here for treatment in April, I (intentionally) left my car and just about everything else behind in Alabama. Driving a couple thousand miles across country in a mad rush wasn't so attractive. My stuff - that which I didn't rent out with my house or box up in long-term storage - rejoined me, for the most part, in early June, once I had an apartment here. But my car remains down South. I won't use her much, here, but the mobility will be nice. And besides, I miss her.

So in early September, I'm taking some time off work and setting out on a road trip for the ages, stopping to visit friends, places I like, and (mostly) places I've always wanted to see, viz.:

Mobile, AL
New Orleans, LA
Baton Rouge, LA
Shreveport, LA
Port Arthur, TX
Houston, TX
Austin, TX
San Antonio, TX
Roswell, NM
Albuquerque, NM
Canyon de Chelly, AZ
Mesa Verde/Durango, CO
Salt Lake City, UT
Lake Tahoe, NV
Yosemite, CA
San Francisco, CA

Altogether, about 3500 miles and 11 or 12 days. Most days, around 7 hours of driving, with plenty of time for sight-seeing both in and out of the car. I'm aiming to stop at the kitschiest motels along the way, pick up some unique and unusual souvenirs, and in general, indulge my Bad Girl of the Open Road.

If you live along the route, I'd love to stop by and say hi; just let me know. If you have recommendations to enhance this Classic and Epic Road Trip, I'm open to those too.

The fun kicks off shortly.

With catlike tread

2008-08-16T17:14:00.000-07:00

This radiation has made of me an idle and indolent feline.

On days I work, I: get up early and go to treatment, commute to work, work from 9:30 to 4:30, commute home, sleep, wake up for dinner, then go to bed and readily fall back asleep, until morning.

Still a thin crust of industriousness. But the days I don't work are much more indulgent: sleep in (on Tuesdays, at least), go to treatment, come home & snack, lounge in the hot tub, curl up in the sun (radiated area carefully covered), stretch out inside for a nice long nap, rouse myself for dinner, & then once more to bed for an early night's sleep.

I can't help but feel a little uncomfortable about all the snoozing, dozing, and otherwise quite restful hours of slumber. Shouldn't I be doing something?

I'm a little past 25% of the way through the radiation now. Other than the machine breaking 2 out of the 5 days, the mask being extraordinarily tight, and the receptionist rarely arriving early enough to check me in, I guess it's going okay. So far the only real symptom besides the inescapable urge for a good deal of quality REM is a lot of soreness and aching of my lower cheeks. At first, I couldn't move my jaw to chew, or turn my head at all. And anything involving saliva production - drinking water, chewing gum, even just trying to swallow - evinced incredible pain. Although that symptom's somewhat faded the past couple of days, it's been replaced by a constant thirst. The doctor said she'd be nuking my salivary glands - they still seem to be working, but I'm thirsty nonetheless.

yawnnnnnnn

Time for a little more shut-eye.

Childless in SF

2008-08-12T21:37:00.001-07:00

There's no shortage of information out there about cancer treatment and fertility, particularly women's fertility (more potentially usable sperm can be generated, but more eggs can't; what you're born with is all you have, and when you run out you're done). In general, chemo fries your eggs, and anything left over, the radiation further scrambles. This generally causes your periods to stop, at least temporarily, and also often causes premature menopause. Note to self: hot flashes suck.

Most women who get cancer succumb later in life, so fertility is less of an issue. But for the under-30 crowd that gets treated, preserving fertility is apparently their primary concern. At least, according to most of the websites that address the topic, many of which bear titles resembling "How to have kids after cancer".

There are ways to dance around the issue, including freezing eggs (doesn't work very well) and freezing embryos (much more successful, but you have to fertilize them first). All of this entails the risky, expensive, and body-intensive world of fertility treatments down the road.

With my permission, my doctor opted for the more experimental (and unproven) method of shutting down ovary production during the chemo and radiation months. This is supposed to protect your eggs somehow.

But truth be told, I'm really not all that depressed about losing the chance to get pregnant. (Sorry, Mom.) Is that such a horrible, anti-woman thing to say? I'm relieved I don't have my period. I'm happy I don't have to worry about getting pregnant. (Plus, no body hair!) I've not worried much about timing my career to fit in kids, because I've haven't been that dead-set on having any.

Not that I hate kids or that I revel in a selfish career- or party-focused lifestyle. I loved being a camp counselor when I was younger. I did my share of babysitting as a teen. I've eagerly volunteered in some tough schools. I've helped fund kids' education. One of the most rewarding experiences of my adult life was helping to raise two amazing kids for a few years. I'm always glad to take care of (or take in) someone else's kids if they need it, no matter if it derails my career plans or my personal life. And foster parenting is extremely attractive to me, although for the kids' sake, I'm waiting until I'm out of the "military-operational-single-mom" category.

What I don't get is the assumption, whether by the media, by well-meaning friends and family, or by religion, that not wanting to pass along my personal genetic material somehow makes me unworthy of my estrogen. "It's such a shame," they whisper amongst themselves. "I'm so sorry," they say out loud.

I'm not. I'm relieved I got an easy out on this one. Now I can say the reason I'm not having kids is because my eggs were cooked. But should I have to have such a terrible excuse?

Fried

2008-08-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

Early-morning radiation appointments mean getting up, well, early. I was up at 5:30 Monday morning to leave at 6 to walk down and catch the 6:35 shuttle to get to the hospital at 6:55 for my 7:15 appointment.

I arrived in the basement of Mt. Zion to find a dark and deserted reception area. Even the fish in the waiting room aquarium floated around bleakly in their unlit greyness. The roll-top shutters on the reception windows were closed and locked tightly, like concession stands in empty stadiums. No one was in sight.

I took a seat in the waiting area and caught up on the Sunday paper, trying not to glance at my watch. Was the reception always closed in the early morning? Should I have taken a later shuttle bus? And eventually...Should I forego the check-in process of scanning my bar-coded card and proceed directly to the dressing room?

At last, at 7:12, the shutters rolled up and the lights flickered on. I asked the bleary-eyed receptionist eagerly, Can I scan in now? My appointment is in three minutes. I'm sorry, she said, I have to boot up my computer. It will take several minutes. Just go in and put your gown on and tell the doctors know you're here. (That's the function of the bar-coded scan card.)

After gowning, I realized there was no way from the waiting room to contact the doctors and techs, so, gowned from the waist up, I briefly snuck back out into the reception area to scan my card. A few minutes later, the tech poked her head into the waiting room, surprised to see me. Your receptionist only just arrived, I said. Really? said the tech. I had no idea. She said something about the carpets being replaced over the weekend, I answered, glancing around at workmen still moving furniture back into place.

After "assuming the position" on the radiation table, my neck torqued by the plastic neckrest, my face clamped down by the net "mask", I waited motionlessly and uncomfortably through some 10 minutes of whirring and buzzing until the tech reappeared to tell me I was done. Except she didn't. My computer crashed, she said. It will take a few minutes to reboot.

Luckily, the tech removed my mask and plastic neck-creaker and replaced them with a nice, hard pillow. After the computer got past its BSOD (blue screen of death...), I was put back in the vise and the process repeated. Now I was done, right? No.

I can't get the machine to work, said the tech. I'm calling an engineer in to fix it. You'll need to go back in the waiting room while I see if we can use the machine in the other room.

I made one too many turns trying to navigate through the maze of corridors en route to the waiting room, which ended up to be a good thing, because they were able to take me right away in the other radiation chamber. This time, the procedure went off as planned, although I staggered out with a serious crick in my neck.

My voyage to work also was not without adventure. I opted to forego waiting for the Muni bus from the hospital to the BART station, walking instead. It ended up being a pretty sketchy and colorful two miles of town. The train ride was without incident, but upon arrival at the East Bay station, I patiently read my book for about twenty minutes before remembering that the base shuttle only stopped at that station during the morning & afternoon rush hours. By the time I'd walked to the other station where the shuttle did stop, it had just come and gone...and it would be another hour before it reappeared. So it took a while to get to work, where inevitably I was greeted by all the work I haven't done lately.

Hopefully next time, the process will go a bit more smoothly.

Respite

2008-08-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

This timely, but busy and all-too-brief, interlude between the onslaughts draws inevitably to its close: tomorrow I start radiation.

Appointments will be early each morning, freeing me to work afterwards on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays; Tuesdays my appointments are a bit later and followed by checkups with my radiation doctor. Friday afternoons are reserved for R&R.

The timing of this cease-fire was fortuitous, encompassing several ship movements (=Port Services), a multitude of special events with high-ranking, VIP guests (=Parking, Base Security), my predecessor's promotion ceremony, our base's change of command, and to cap it off, a unit celebration at Six Flags and a wetting down (at which, for the first time in quite a while, I could actually drink something more potent than water, now that water tastes like water again). Also in these busy days: a visit from my aunt, uncle, and cousins (coupled with a dual-birthday party) and a visit from my mom (carefully timed and coordinated).

Of course, amid the détente, I parleyed with the medical professionals more than once: three pre-radiation appointments, a PET/CT scan, bloodwork, and a shot of blood-cell-boosting Neulasta broke up my "lazy days" of summer. (I realized today that for the first time since I joined the Coast Guard, my May-through-November isn't being spent on some sort of alert status for Atlantic basin tropical storms, leave only stringently granted and always recallable, ready to deploy teams or get underway, my internet homepage set ominously to the National Hurricane Center.)

My body has been quick to shake off symptoms, though my hair's still too scared to grow and I could use a few good sessions at the gym. Most of all, I'm dreading breaking the news to my aggrieved bones, skin, and internal organs that twenty exciting days of rigidity and radiation await them. I'd much rather focus on work, deskbound as I am, where my increased presence over the past couple of weeks has only highlighted the areas under my responsibility where I so urgently need to focus. The attention I patch on the problems during my all-too-brief appearances only briefly buoys the issues, raising them to bob desperately above the surface, while the barnacles of a hundred daily shortfallings keep dragging them down, ever so slowly.

Cancer treatment is a hell of a way to get out of meetings and paperwork.

They that go down to the sea in ships

2008-08-09T19:27:00.000-07:00

One of the many hats I wear at work is that of Port Services Officer. This entails responding to LOGREQs (Logistics Requests) from ships mooring up or getting underway from our base, or from piers in San Francisco - the latter of which are a bit trickier to manage.

Recently, in addition to a few standard operations for locally homeported ships, we also handled EAGLE's presence at San Francisco's Festival of Sail and BERTHOLF's first arrival at her new homeport - our base.

The folks in my branch have been doing a terrific job with all of these standard and non-standard operations. Still, I aim to be present at all pier evolutions to observe/supervise the event. After all, I'm responsible for the shore-side of things, and it never hurts to add an extra person's situational awareness.

For BERTHOLF's maiden voyage into her new homeport, she stopped first in downtown San Francisco to onload passengers - high-dollar Navy League commissioning ceremony donors, Coast Guard Auxiliarists, and crewmembers' families. Our folks facilitated the parking and transportation from the base to downtown SF as well as security and linehandling at the pier. My friends who are stationed onboard the ship squeezed me onto to the guest list, so I had the privilege of riding BERTHOLF from SF into the base.

It was my first time "underway" since a short emergency ATON trip on CYPRESS back in early April, just after I was sent home from TAO school and shortly before the medical transfer orders finally came through. Even then I felt like a passenger. I stood watch, but with mid-watches, you sleep through half the day's work. Fully qualified, there was no need to train me further as a conning officer or Ops officer - I was going to drive a desk and manage medical appointments for the near future. Relieved of all collateral duties, I instead spent my time trying to ensure my knowledge and experience had been passed to the next crop of junior officers. For once then, I had the time to go sit on the bow and watch the waters of the steamy Gulf glide by us; to gaze up at the stars dropping brilliantly out of an inky sky; to observe a string of ship's evolutions without being called to some duty or other.

On BERTHOLF I was unmistakeably a passenger. It was an odd shift of perspective to focus so intently - from the ship's flight deck, no less - on the pierside linehandling. During the two-hour voyage up the bay, I roamed restlessly on the "visitors'" flight deck. After talking with my friends stationed onboard, I eventually gravitated to an ideal vantage point just aft of the bridge wings. The bridge, to my disappointment, was (of course) restricted to crew-only. As we approached the pier, I listened carefully to the conning officer's commands, feeling and timing the ship's various reactions beneath us, silently rehearsing (as always when I'm not driving) my own set of shipdriving commands.

BERTHOLF is an impressive ship, incredibly quiet in operation, and (from what crewmembers say) a very smooth and stable ride even in heavy seas. The brief taste - particularly as I had to head straight from disembarking the ship to my office, filled with unanswered emails, voice messages, stacks of paperwork, and endless meetings - was to remind me yet again how much I miss underway life.

Details, part 2

2008-08-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

I'd heard the new afloat detailer was due to arrive in mid-July, so after an incredibly impatient waiting game, I dropped him an email at the precise mid-point of that seventh month.

I introduced myself, I explained my situation with what I hoped was just enough but not too much detail, I did a little requisite groveling, and I rather awkwardly tossed in the recommendation from the Ops Ashore detailer to "call me if you've got any questions". At last I unearthed my real questions, which I managed to predicate yet further on a matter of relatively current concern: my "medical support billet" was due to expire in October. While the "active phase" of my treatment - the chemo & radiation - would conclude in early September, and I would enter the 2-3 month "PET/CT scan checkup" phase after that, my UCSF doctors wanted to continue to see me for those scans at least until summer '09, for continuity of care. Then - and I'd checked with them - I could safely transfer elsewhere, and take up residence on a ship for periods of time, as long as I continued follow-up scans with some reputable doctor, somewhere, on a regular 3-6 month basis. (I'm sure it's not a typical response when the cancer doctor, upon dispensing details of your cancer treatment and asking if you have any questions, receives first: "How soon can I transfer to Hawaii and be stationed aboard a ship for months at a time?")

This put me, as I found out later, in an assignment Catch-22. Although orders aren't cut until spring, and actual rotations typically don't occur until the summer months, the "assignment season" technically starts with the submission of e-resumes in the previous fall. My criteria for afloat orders is being medically cleared for worldwide assignment. And to meet the assignment year '09 timeline, I'd need that clearance by this fall, 2008. But...if I were cleared medically by fall 2008, then there would be no grounds for extending my medical support billet through the summer.

Catch-22 indeed.

There were other considerations, as well, other questions. Getting underway for a few weeks at a time on other, locally homeported, ships this winter, to get experience and qualifications. Attending schools that are pre-requisites for the Ops job I want. The chances of picking up an Ops job - and just maybe, picking up an Ops job on the other white-hull ship in Hawaii (there are two, and the rotations are offset by a year).

I was nervous. These were a lot of favors to ask of a detailer who knew me not at all, and was new to his job to boot.

But - the detailer was incredibly helpful, incredibly friendly, and incredibly eager to get me back out into the fleet. He confirmed that as soon as I was done with radiation, with my command's support and as long as my doctors didn't object, I could get underway with local ships to gain experience and qualifications. He said that as long as I had finished the "active" phase of my treatment (i.e., chemo & radiation) by the time the fall assignment season started (October), I would be eligible for reassignment this summer. He hinted that I'd have a very good chance of picking up orders for an Ops job again, and when I mentioned my top picks, he encouraged me to list those choices on my e-resume (Coast Guard's method for people to list their assignment requests and reasons). He was very excited that my initial post-chemo scan was negative. He extended my medical support billet through April '09. And his parting words were, "I've done my part in extending your billet; now you do your part and GET BETTER so I can get you back out into the fleet!"

I guess I needn't have worried quite as much after all.

Details, part 1

2008-08-03T11:06:00.001-07:00

Back a month or so ago, the Officer Roadshow came to town. (Roadshow: presentation by a detailer consisting of 2/3 "demystifying the process by which personnel receive assignments" and 1/3 "ask me your questions and I'll give you a blurry and entirely noncommittal answer)

I went, not because I hoped I might learn the sleight-of-hand tricks behind the Penn-and-Teller assignment act, but on the longshot chance that I might ferret out some clues to my chances of picking up something this coming year at least faintly resembling the orders I received last February, a lifetime ago.

My chances weren't all that great, of gleaning any helpful information, that is: the assignment officer putting on this particular roadshow was the Operations Ashore detailer - in short, not mine (Operations Afloat). I subscribed to the convenient fiction that all the detailers up at HQ led very "siloed" or "stovepiped" lives, immersed in moving around their personal sets of color-coded chess pieces, only speaking to each other with message slips and runners when a single candidate was pulled (or fell through the cracks) between two detailers.

I sat patiently through a few dozen PowerPoint slides of accession rates, promotion points, assignment timelines, and Officer Personnel Management wire diagrams. From all that I learned only one important point: that there was a new afloat detailer. That was cause for worry - the previous detailer had taken a tremendous chance on me, gave me my top pick, then facilitated the process as those orders so despairingly vanished and new ones at last appeared in their place. I worried about explaining my situation to a newcomer. I worried he might not be so amenable to indulging my career hopes. And I worried that, like some detailers but thankfully not all, he might be of a rather imperialistic demeanor, flush with his power and uncaring toward his minions.

After the general Q-and-A subsided, personnel lined up to ask the Ops Ashore detailer one-on-one questions - questions specific to a personal situation and unsuitable for group discussion. I was third in line. The two people ahead of me introduced themselves formally to the detailer, one by one asking him their I'm-unbelievably-stressed-about-my-oh-so-unique-common-problem questions. Detailers are not all that high-ranking, but they hold a lot of power, so you better believe you're going to be polite and deferential to them. I didn't even know where to start with this detailer. I started silently rehearsing my story, editing here and there to fit someone who didn't know my background.

It was my turn. Before I could even get out a "Good morning, sir," the detailer smiled broadly and said, "Heather! How are you doing? Good to see you here!" I was quite taken aback, pausing for at least a few moments while I quickly chopped the first section of my speech (and recast the rest). Is it good or bad for a detailer who isn't even yours to recognize you so easily? "Nothing to worry about," he reassured me. "We all discussed your case quite a bit. Just give the new afloat detailer a call once he's arrived later this summer. If he has any questions he can always ask me for a passdown on you." Now I was really unnerved. All the detailers at HQ sat around and discussed my case?? Infamy is never cause for celebration. It's like the vice principal in grade school calling you in to say, Yes, I've been discussing your case with all the staff members; we're quite familiar with you...

I uneasily waited out the weeks for the new detailer to arrive. (to be continued)

Reconnaissance Fair

2008-07-29T19:44:00.000-07:00

Today was my second pre-radiation appointment (the first, a week ago Friday). The initial appointment was a meet-and-greet with my radiation oncologist and her trusty resident sidekick. Today's was termed a "simulation", where they sculpted me into position for treatment. For the next ten days, the scientist eggheads are busy calculating how much nuking I can survive while still killing the little cancer guys. Then there's one more pre-appointment appointment, next Thursday, before I start radiation on August 11.

I will have 20 days of radiation, daily Monday through Friday, which works out to four weeks...finishing just in time for my epic September road trip. (More on that later.) Each appointment will be relatively quick, about 10-15 minutes of radiation plus prep time on either side (undressing, dressing, check-in, etc.). The real time-sucker is transportation...walking to the shuttle, riding the shuttle, walking from the hospital to the commuter train, commuter train to the East Bay, shuttle to work. They take appointments starting at 7 am, but they're first-come-first-serve, so while I'll try to schedule early mornings so I can get to work later if I need to, it's a bit of a crapshoot. I definitely won't be schlepping to work every day - my goal is a couple days a week, with remote logon from home always an option.

I won't glow, the radiation won't be contagious if you get too close, and most disappointingly, I won't be able to reheat food by holding it near my upper chest. But there is good news: while I'll need to keep my radiated areas covered, I can catch rays elsewhere on my body - no need to fill my closet with burkhas. And I won't have to choke down any medications before, during, or after the treatment. But a trip to the dentist is in order - they might end up nuking one or more of my salivary glands. As I well know from my dental office days, lack of saliva leads oh-so-rapidly to rampant gumline cavities. Hopefully gallons of tasty fluoride will stave off that possibility.

So enough with the preliminaries; let's get to today. Today I went to the basement of Mt. Zion, a much nicer UCSF facility, where all of my radiation treatments will take place. I stripped from the waist up, donned a monstrously large hospital gown and robe (basically a second layer of hospital gown put on opposite from the first one), and sat in increasingly colder rooms to await my simulation appointment.

First, I met the two radiation techs who laid me down on a long thin hard table, placed my legs on a cushioned, form-fitting knee lift, and had me scoot into a hard clear plastic neck lift. Very uncomfortable, and the rock-hard table didn't help. With my knees up and my neck corked around the plastic neckrest, my entire body weight rested on my coccyx, that small and entirely uncushioned tailbone. I stared up at a strange screen with a green laser outline of my head and shoulders on top of my shadowy, reflected form. A green laser cross-hair bisected my face. I felt like I was on the wrong end of range target practice.
The thin bench-like table slid back and forth under me as they checked my position. They kept stopping and torquing my torso left and right, nudging me this way and that to get me precisely positioned. It was quite uncomfortable, as I was strictly cautioned against moving in any way, so when they tweaked my spine one way and then the other, I could do nothing but throb in pain from the cricks in my neck and back.

Eventually they had me where they wanted me, and they stretched a warm, sticky, wet netting over my face and shoulders, locking it down around me and pressing it to my face. This was to create a mold which they will use to get me in just the right reproducible place every day for my treatments. The mask was more hole than string, but it still felt strange and claustrophobic as it dried to my skin. My doctor came in to argue for a more chin-lifted position (so as to better avoid those pesky salivary glands) and the techs pushed my head this way and that to try and meet her expectations. I wiggled into the perfect position for her, by using a much lower neck lift and tilting my head back, and it was reasonably comfortable as well, but the techs insisted on the higher neck lift - the smaller one (and the awkward position) resulted in a small gap twixt neck and lift. So we went back to the higher one and they snapped down the face mask - MUCH tighter than before. My chin and nose were being squeezed down through my face. I could barely move my lips and facial muscles to squeak out, "It's very tight!"

The techs sighed to each other, "Oh, we never should have removed the mask while it was still drying - it shrinks." "No, it's MUCH tighter!" I insisted. They frittered around for a few moments until finally one of the techs realized she'd put an extra layer underneath the neck lift, raising it even higher and thus tightening my face mask. Ahhhhh. Much better.

They marked up my face and sternum with permanent marker (which washed off later into a strange purple tinge), and then decorated my mask with masking tape and markers. You think a quick whiff of Sharpies smells bad, try marking them on your face...on a surface that stays right by your nose, with the chemicals lingering just below your nostrils. All of this created a nice box on my body for the radiation to zap.

That finished at last, I was passed next door for a CT scan. Much less involved than the one 10 days ago, this was simply to test the "box" and the positioning to make sure they'd zap what they intended. And other than the condescending CT tech who spoke very SLOWLY and LOUDLY to ensure I knew EXACTLY what she was SAYING and who figured dismissively that I either had to be a history buff (not quite) or a student (it's been over eight years since I was last in school, lady) to be reading a well-worn copy of Churchill's history of WWII while I waited for her, it was a rather pleasant visit, all things considered.

A few last notes. I took a post-chemo blood test last Wednesday, and although my radiation doctor was deeply disturbed by my low hemoglobin counts...my oncologist was excited. "No, that's a good number for her," he told my taken-aback radiologist. "They're going up."

And also today, I finally got the results of my post-chemo PET/CT scan taken a week ago Friday. With the important caveat that PET/CT only picks up cancer cells larger than a millimeter or two - and those little critters can be microscopic, hence the need for "clean-up" radiation - the scan showed me completely cancer-free.

Hooray for the chemo.

Cancer couture

2008-07-28T20:46:00.000-07:00

Going through chemo, you develop some interesting fashion habits. And no, I'm not referring to the often ridiculous head coverings marketed to us follicularly challenged females. (Although I did learn how to tie a turban.)

To start with, there's the layered look. A brisk walk to the shuttle in the morning, a chilly seat during infusion (despite the warm-from-the-dryer crochet-style blankets they drape you in), a bone-chillingly windy wait atop Mt. Parnassus for the bus, and a sunny, hot walk back home - not to mention an internal body temperature thrown haywire by the drugs - these days of personal microclimates call for a flexible outfit.

And, your clothes need to be accessible. By that, I mean that tubes, needles, and deadly drugs have to make their way through your precious duds without ruining them. So the layers have to be carefully planned. A long-sleeved Henley for the bottom layer? Not so much - can't poke a needle in your arm. Any type of t-shirt collar? Nope - can't get to the port without stretching the neck of the shirt. Sports bra? No way - puts tons of pressure on the port (as well as covering it up).

And you realize, on those mornings off work when you lay in bed trying desperately to sit up and realizing that flexing your abs takes more strength than you can muster, that everything you wear has to be washed, and dried, and folded, and ironed. So you gravitate toward the easy-care items that hopefully still that fit the aforementioned criteria. A button-down shirt is great for accessibility, but scores abysmally low on the "maintenance" scale (wrinkle city). Long-sleeve knit undershirts are warm, low-maintenance, and great for layering...but not accessible in the slightest.

Head coverings - marketed as the great care and concern of cancerously bald women - are, by far, the least complicated part of my dressing game. I haven't desired to venture into the complicated and often pricey world of wigs. On the occasion I do wear a hat, I've stuck to my existing, limited millinery - if it's not part of a uniform, it usually doesn't get worn. An old nautical standby, my black knit cap is good for our typical summer days here - windy, overcast, foggy, and cold.

But all these are rarely worn. Pretty much my standard headgear is an old bandanna, black or blue, tied around my head. The uninformed passersby can't even tell for sure if I'm bald - maybe I'm just being uber-conservative by covering my head. The bandanna is also a highly adaptable, multi-use accessory. I can pull it down over my eyes to catch a quick fatigue-induced catnap. Or clutch it during a moment of pain, or mop up sweat occasioned by an overtaxed heart and lungs. The best part, though, is that particularly with sunglasses, it looks totally badass. Well, maybe a little too badass. I thought my best friend's trip to the principal's office in high school for wearing her ever-so-modest "kerchief" was an isolated and silly event (apparently it was "gang apparel"), until I was corralled this weekend for special airport screening for daring to wear my terrorist bandanna while trying to fly. (Good thing I didn't try out the Chemo Chicks' cancer turban.)

In truth, I go bald a lot. Nothing is quite as comfortable or as liberating as a freshly shaved, baby-smooth pate. At work, I have to go bald if I'm not outside, which induces its fair amount of confusion among personnel not in on the game. (Although, to be fair, they're just as gender-confused, if not more so, to run into the ball-cap-clad me.) In fact, outside of uniform constraints, I really only cover up for basically one of two reasons: (a) to keep my glaringly white head from sunburning brutally; or (b) to keep other people from being embarrassed. Yep. Head covered, no one gives me a second look; but bald, I'm stared at, or worse - not stared at, that uncomfortable certainty that people are trying very hard not to look at you.

I am curious to see the peculiar fashion fetishes that radiation treatment may induce.

Pills-Be-Gone

2008-07-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, one week after finishing my chemo regimen, I at last could shut down the pill factory. The prednisone I bid a welcome adieu to last week (a bit earlier than scheduled, mainly because the long-drawn-out withdrawal process was too unbearable to stretch out any further), but the rest of the supportive medications I still swallowed on a twice-daily basis. No longer.

My body, she rejoiceth that I'm no longer pumping poisons into her. (I refer more to the chemo than the supportive drugs, although the latter has also affected me adversely, though to a lesser extent.) The disorienting dizziness returned not long after last week's emergency transfusion, but this week, my body's back to producing its own red and white blood cells, platelets, and hemoglobin. It's amazing how much easier it is to climb hills, climb stairs, and even climb out of bed when your heart has some blood to pump.

Ever so slowly, I am starting to regain my sense of taste. Water still tastes funny, but less so; and more of the foods I eat actually taste somewhat like what I remember. It's somewhat like a picture gradually coming into focus, which brings me to another waning side effect: the prednisone did wonders at wrecking my vision, but now that I'm off it, my eyesight's gradually returning to the only slightly myopic.

The nausea's mostly gone (only to return with radiation), but I still don't have much of an appetite. I'm sure that will change once I start working out more - now that my immune system isn't suppressed, I won't be so scared to hit the germ-lurking gym; and it's a lot easier to jog or run instead of walk when your heart and lungs have some function. Hair loss and fatigue will take longer to remediate...probably a month to three months, and the fatigue at least will only increase with the month of radiation treatments. The nurses said it could take up to a year to feel fully free of the symptoms, but I feel a lot better already. Maybe some of it's psychological.

There have been many developments over the past week, which I'll share shortly. I had a PET/CT scan last Friday, just after I met with my radiation doctor. I have another pre-radiation appointment this coming Tuesday, at which I'm hoping to find out the scan results. I also ran a blood test two days ago, the results of which I'll get on Monday - it should show that my body's starting to make its own blood again, unmolested by the chemo drugs at last. And, I got good news from my detailer about job prospects over the next year. More on all of this in the near future...stay tuned.

I have this theory, that if you cut off all her hair she'd look like a British man

2008-07-22T16:50:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, as I was standing bored, waiting to check in for my last and final chemo appointment, the youngish woman sitting down in front of me, checking in, caught my attention.

Normally I don't give all that much concern to the other patients, particularly in the check-in area, where patient privacy is paramount. So it was actually her perky, me-me-me voice that first caught my ear. She was about my age, give or take, and looked like she'd just stopped by from jogging the dogs through her upscale neighborhood. Short, straight, highlighted hair pulled back in a ponytail. Name-brand track jacket, cropped yoga pants, trendy running shoes. Makeup carefully applied to look like it wasn't there. French-manicured nails around a tall cup of fancy-ccino. She was talking hurriedly, excitedly, caffeinated-and-ready-to-go. She had just gotten married to this awesome guy. They'd just moved into this great new house. Her life was full of Activity, of People, Places, and Events. She could barely get through all 40-odd check-yes-or-no boxes on the Symptoms Form before bubbling over with something else she was busy Doing in her Amazing Life.

The overworked receptionist just smiled wanly at her, slapped the roll of patient-identification labels onto the sheaf of forms, and pointed her to the lab, for vitals and bloodwork. Next!

I couldn't help but feel sorry, somewhere, for that woman. Newly married, and young, and facing potential infertility. Attractive, and losing her looks, at least for a while. Fit and healthy, and being unable to work out much for weeks, heart and lungs damaged by the drugs, scared of the germy gyms.

But I also found myself desperately squelching a smug satisfaction desperately reeking of those teenage "Mean Girls" days. You think you're hot now, huh? Mmm-hmm...I want to see what you look like in eight weeks, b****!!

The gift of life

2008-07-17T21:02:00.000-07:00

Thursday, my blood counts were scary-low. So low, in fact, that I needed to have a blood transfusion. I was terrified, but the nurse practitioner assured me that the blood supply was very safe...except for things like the newest strain of hepatitis, "E", for which they don't have a screen yet. Thus, the sheaf of release forms thrust at me.

I've been unable to donate blood my whole adult life, since I lived the better part of three years, starting at 17, in Europe, during foot-and-mouth disease. (Though it's rather ironic - I've been a vegetarian for some 15 years and there's no possible way I could have been infected.) But I'd like to thank all those who do donate, since I was dependent on two pints of someone else's Thursday.

I got my very last chemo infusion first, while they took a couple hours to find me a perfect blood match, then make triple sure (a) the blood was clean and screened; and (b) the blood really *did* match mine. Of course, they don't have screens for all the possible diseases, and there's always a possibility my blood's antibodies will try to fight off the foreign blood cells. It's still dangerous, but I've been lucky, I made it all the way to the last week on my own blood-power. The nurse practitioner said most patients on Stanford V usually have to have at least two transfusions.

All of the feeder lines between the blood bag on the IV stand and my port were quite long, and watching the blood creep ever-so-slowly along them, gradually turning the clear tubes red, was quite unnerving. Like climbing up-up-up on a tall rollercoaster. You look down: holy crumb, we're up high...you look ahead: and we've got a hell of a long way left to climb!

But nothing untoward happened. It was a very long day - 8 hours at the hospital plus an hour or so commute each way...and the shuttle drivers were on strike, so it took a bit longer to get to and from. I have to say though, it was terrific not to feel blackout dizzy every time I stood up; or for my heart to pound painfully with every flight of stairs, no matter how small.

So the chemo is over. I read the other day in an AP article that Sen. Arlen Specter, who was diagnosed three years ago with Stage IV Hogkins (the most advanced stage, with only a 50% survival rate), and went through chemo and radiation then; whose cancer went into remission only to return this spring, and who just finished up three more months this summer of chemo, has been putting in full days of work throughout. He was about to celebrate by drinking a martini with friends and family, before he started radiation. Now I don't necessarily support his politics, but this guy - nearly 80 - is one tough nut. My hat's off to you, sir.

Pursuit of Busyness

2008-07-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

NOT, of course, that I've been pursuing the breathless life. Rather, that it's been chasing after me with relentless fervor.

At work, I'm tremendously short-staffed: we'd be overwhelmed even under our normal workload. But on top of that, we face (a) losing a huge chunk of our budget and our personnel in a month or two, with no decrease in the level of security or services we provide; (b) a large security capital-improvement project; (c) several ships coming and going ("Port Services", which my division provides); and (d) the commissioning of the Coast Guard's first National Security Cutter, for which I'm providing security. We're expecting over 2000 guests, some very high-level. Oh, and I'm scrambling to update a couple of manuals before our commanding officer rotates in a few weeks.

So at work, where I "only" work three days a week, I'm constantly tied up in meetings, or putting out fires, or doing the work of the petty officers I don't have, working from around 7 or 7:30 am to around 5 pm daily. That doesn't count the commute, which including walk, train, and shuttle, clocks in at around an hour each way. At a meeting yesterday, another attendee asked if I could meet up with them today. I said, "Sorry, I have chemo." They paused, then asked, "How about Friday?"

Now normally, Friday is a recovery day. Where I don't work. But this Friday, I have two appointments - with the radiation doctor to check in, and then for my PET/CT scan (hopefully cancer-free!). Yeah...like I'm going to go running off to work to clock in somewhere in the middle of all that. Then the person asked, "Is there anything I can do to help out?" I felt like responding, "Yeah, don't task me with anything!" I ended up having to take a few projects home, where I was up working for about 3 or 4 hours after I got home Wednesday night, until 10:30 pm.

It's been impossible to keep up with my mail, my voicemail, my emails, my laundry or ironing, or even trying to eat the food in the fridge so it doesn't spoil. (It doesn't help that I either feel sick, or the food tastes waxy, or "off", or I just have no appetite. On the other hand, it makes for a very effective weight-loss program.)

And, I just found out yesterday that my roommate's moving out. She loves sharing a place with me, but she's between jobs and found another place nearby for $500 less. I told her she had to manage the whole process of finding someone new - I'd just make the final selection. So we have an open house this Saturday.

All of this would, of course, be made much easier if I weren't losing hours each day to feeling totally terrible. For example, Monday, where upon my arrival at work I had to curl up on my little (very hard and uncomfortable, prison-industries) sofa in my office, still in street clothes, clutching my knees and praying hard that I wouldn't puke. For an hour. Then it took another hour in the bathroom in my office before I was finally ready to face the world.

I'd be a hell of a lot more ready to take on the world if I weren't sick at the same time. Yeah. That was a bit of wry humor...

The wall

2008-07-11T16:13:00.000-07:00

Runners talk about hitting "The Wall". Most of the race is behind you, but you're still too far to sprint to the finish line. Your body's done for, and it's up to your mind to talk you through to the end. That's the theory behind training for longer distances than you actually race.

Usually I'm not competitive or under-trained enough for it to happen, but I've hit the wall a couple of times in road races. The first was just a 5K, a distance I ran almost daily at the gym. But gyms are air-conditioned, and after running the first kilometer at my normal pace on a hot, humid day outside, I nearly collapsed. Even walking the rest of the distance, drinking cold water, and sitting in front of a fan afterward didn't prevent a mild case of heat stroke.

The second time was a bit more memorable. Having successfully completed a leisurely marathon six months earlier - and feeling great at the finish line - I decided a half-marathon at a faster pace was well within my reach. I trained carefully, indoors and out, for several weeks.

Then, Katrina hit.

For a week, I worked 18-hour days, was woken from fitful sleep every couple hours each night, had no time to exercise, subsisted only on a large daily bottle of orange juice (trying desperately not to get sick), and was under tremendous stress. Sunday, the day of the half-marathon, was my first day off.

The first 10 or so miles went great. It was wonderful to be outside, running, free of stress and job pressures, able to think through some of the issues I'd faced, nothing but me and the pavement and the sky and a rock band at every mile marker. I was way ahead of my pace and feeling fantastic.

Then I hit the wall. My body just stopped. No problem, I told myself, I'm ahead of schedule, I can walk. So I fast-walked one mile, two miles...I kept nervously checking my watch, but every time I tried to step up even to a jog, my body rebelled instantly. At last I knew that if I wanted to make my goal time, I'd have to run the last bit. I was on the boardwalk. The finish line was in sight. I started to run. My body screamed at me. I kept going. I felt terrible. Never has a mile seemed so long. Even a few steps from the finish line, I wasn't sure I'd make it.

There's a great picture of me clutching my stomach and my face (to keep from puking on the volunteers) as I cross the finish line. Just under my goal time, by the way. (The clock in the background is misleading - we had staggered "corral" start times.)

This week, in a much different context, my body hit the wall. Tuesday in particular, on the way home from work, I felt so sick I sat down a couple times right where I was - a city street, a BART station - and clutched my knees and clenched my teeth until the waves of nausea at last passed and I could stand up without hurling. I wasn't sure I'd make it home. All week I've done little more than sleep, work, and go to the hospital. My last shreds of appetite have long since faded away.

I'm still going, and I'm getting close...one week left, then the radiation starting soon afterward...but I can't guarantee I'm going to look pretty crossing the finish line.

The Routine

2008-07-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

Every Thursday (and one Friday) for the past several weeks, my "work day" has consisted of receiving chemo treatment. The appointment times and specific drugs administered may vary, but the overall routine remains remarkably the same.

I wake up and usually by this point in the week, I'm pretty hungry - my appetite has returned to some degree. But, I don't want to eat too much, because the chemo drugs will mess with my stomach. So I'm careful to stick to a bagel or a fruit-and-juice smoothie instead of scarfing down a large or spicy meal.

Before I leave the house, I put topical anesthetic on a special clear plastic bandage and put it over my port. This helps numb the area they're going to poke later. I pack my backpack with a stress squeeze ball (for when they're poking me), my iPod (fully charged), and plenty of reading material (there is a LOT of waiting time). Even getting dressed takes some special concern: the port (just below my right clavicle) needs to be accessible, so a button-down shirt or a tank top is best, to avoid stretching the neck of a t-shirt. And Parnassus is always terrifically cold and windy, no matter how hot or sunny the city is, so a sweatshirt and hat go in the backpack too.

It's about a 30-minute walk down to the UCSF shuttle bus. Sure, I could take light rail, but it wouldn't cut that much time off, and the exercise feels good. It's another 20- or 30-minute shuttle ride up the hill to Parnassus. At the hospital, after battling an overtaxed elevator system crowded with patients, doctors, nurses, techs, wheelchairs, well-wishers, etc., and waiting in line, I check in with an overworked oncology receptionist who luckily, by now, recognizes me. She slaps sheets of pre-printed personalized labels on a thick stack of papers while I fill out a "how're ya doin'?" form. This form lists a few dozen symptoms, categorized by body system (Endocrine, Neurological, etc.) and you check off "Yes" or "No" if you've experienced them in the past week. I swear nobody looks at this form but I duly check down all the boxes.

They write down your arrival and appointment times and give you two stacks of papers. One stack goes in the "vitals" box; the other goes in the blood draw box. Most patients get their blood drawn in the cattle-car room...but luckily, I have a port, so an RN has to draw my blood in private.

You then take a seat in a long and fairly crowded waiting room next to folks who are, for the most part, much older and frailer than you. They eye you with suspicion as you, bandanna'ed and sunglassed, fire up your iPod and start reading something fairly thick and heavy like a Galbraith economics book or Churchill's history of WWII.

Every few minutes, the techs emerge to shout out somebody's incredibly mangled name. It's often hard to hear, or to respond quickly, because of the long, narrow, and around-the-corner nature of the waiting area. So a lot of repetitive shouting ensues. These techs take your vitals, which at UCSF consists of your height and weight (both metric), your blood pressure and pulse, your blood oxygen (which, for me, has always suspiciously remained the exact same number), and a wrist measurement. Then you are discharged back into the waiting area until your blood is drawn. Sometimes the blood draw happens first, which is rather amusing to me, because the vitals techs aren't aware, and they shout and shout and shout for you while you're just a few steps away with lines sticking in you, unable to respond.

The RN blood draw is a ritual in itself. There is a special tray they bring in, crowded with all manner of needles, gloves, bandages, etc. They open up and spread out several of these packages, one of which has two gloves neatly folded. They remove the plastic bandage and wipe off any remaining topical anesthetic, then swab down the site with a disinfectant. They hook up the needle and the line and poke it into the port. This hurts, some times more than others. They test the blood return (it acts like a vacuum to suck your blood out), flush you with saline (which always makes your shoulder really cold), and take three vials of blood, then they leave the line in and surround the punctured area with gauze and tape.

Then you wait back in the seating area for your blood counts. It can take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour. If it's not too foggy, which is often, there is a terrific panoramic view of the entire Bay Area from the fifth-floor oncology seating area.

Once you have the lab results, you meet with your NP. She discusses what's high or low and what actions need to be taken - shots to increase red or white blood cell production, blood transfusion, delaying treatment by a week, or going ahead with treatment. Luckily, I've been able to avoid transfusions and delays, although my blood counts have sometimes been dangerously low. (One nurse said, You probably know all your blood cells on a first-name basis by now...) This is also the opportunity to ask the NP any questions about your treatment, which I've done a lot of in the past couple weeks.

The NP then gives the pharmacy the go-ahead for your treatment, and you are ushered into either a private or shared, chair or bed, treatment room while you wait for the drugs to be concocted. You receive your "pre-meds" and the nurses offer you a selection of snacks and beverages to accompany them (I take water, on the rocks). More waiting ensues.

A lot of the drugs have short half-lives or other restrictions, so it's very important to mix and deliver them right on time. Hence the waiting. At last, the bags arrive from the pharmacy, menacingly marked with big yellow-and-black poison stickers. Then the nurses use a two-person integrity process to verify that the right person is receiving the right drugs. You have to state your name and birthday, which they compare to the drugs and paperwork. They use a calculator to double-check you are receiving the right dosage for your height and weight. And they read off the labels on the drugs while showing them to you, so you know you're receiving the right drug and dose for the right person.

Some of the drugs are administered by drip irrigation (i.e. the IV), while others require the nurse to slowly inject them via an enormous syringe. Regardless, the drugs are hooked up to one part of your line, and a saline solution flushes you from a second line. If the nurses are manually injecting you, they'll sit and talk to you, which is a pleasant social distraction, but if they're drip-irrigating you then they set the timer, equip you with a "ring-for-service" bell, and leave the room. Some drugs take a LONG time to flow into your system...as much as an hour, which passes very slowly. When the drugs run out, a very annoying timer starts beeping with increasing noise until finally a nurse notices and comes to shut off the drug and start the straight saline flush.

When it's all done, the nurses take out your line, band-aid your port, and pack you off. You might get a shot at this point if your blood counts are low - a quick and sharp poke in the back of your arm. (They offer the stomach as an alternative, but who wants a big needle poking them in the stomach?) And then the commute begins in reverse, usually after a quick stop by the restroom (a LOT of saline solution, i.e. saltwater, was pumped into your system). If you received a colorful drug then your pee might be pink, which is always a bit odd.

A cold and windy wait atop Mt. Parnassus, a sleepy shuttle ride, and then a walk back home, usually with a stop at the library, the grocery store, and/or the bank on the way. (When you are car-less, you have to combine errands!) The whole adventure has taken a good 6 or 7 hours, depending if the drugs that week were "quick" or "slow". At that point, I'm usually pretty tired, so a nice long 4 hour nap (often suffused with strange and vivid dreams) is in order.

And that's the weekly hokey pokey.

Cancer Etiquette

2008-07-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

CNN.com has a front-page article today about what they term "cancer etiquette": how to talk to a cancer patient...and what NOT to say.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/07/07/hm.cancer.etiquette/index.html

There are a lot of other sites out there that also collect silly things that people reportedly have said to cancer patients. My favorite so far is this story, from Chemo Chicks:

I was having some very difficult reactions to my most recent chemo treatment. My husband insisted on taking me in to see my oncologist. On the way a motorcycle police officer pulled us over. At this point I was white as a sheet, shaking, bald and obviously in dire straits. As I reached for the auto registration, the officer leaned into the car, looked me over and said "My dog had cancer. I had to take him to the hospital for treatments and I spent over eight thousand dollars on him. Too bad, he died anyway." As if that wasn't enough, he capped it off with, "Did you know that when a dog has chemo it doesn't lose its hair?"

I've heard my share of silly and awkward comments. I have to say the most uncomfortable question is "How are you feeling today?" I know people mean well, but how do I respond? "Well, I could only sleep for two hours last night, it took me an hour to use the toilet this morning, I feel like I'm about to hurl, my vision's blurry, and my head is exploding in pain. But other than that, I'm doing great. Oh, wait, don't let me forget my gracious smile." Also, referencing other family members, friends, or co-workers who have had cancer is a nice stab at empathy, but not when those stories almost inevitably end in "and then after a valiant battle, he/she died". And it may seem strange, but don't focus your conversation on "chance of survival" or "a very curable disease". Because now my life becomes one of eternal vigilance against the threat of recurrence; and the looming threat of secondary cancers some years down the line resulting from the radiation and the chemo drugs I took in this round.

So what is a well-meaning person supposed to say? Far be it from me to dictate; each person's cancer experience is so unique. But from my limited experience, I'd say to talk about the person and not the disease. Even when I'm busy with other things, the treatment, the side effects, the limitations still percolate in the back of my mind. I really don't need to put them on high heat. I like to talk about my projects at work (although the frequent comment, "So, you must be on a leave of absence" for some reason infuriates me - probably because it implies a life of lounging and leisure, whereas au contraire, I've been putting in three full days and around 30 hours a week at work throughout, managing an understaffed and overworked department and preparing for multiple high-profile events scheduled to occur sometime between my chemo and radiation treatments in just a few weeks...) or my post-radiation plans. Books I've read recently, music, politics, religion, economics - these are all fair game...I'm still me, and any conversation ignoring the elephant in the corner I'm all for.

"Hang in there", books, cards, notes, posts, emails, etc., these are all great. Sometimes it can be a very lonely and isolating existence, going through chemo and wrestling symptoms and lying around trying to recover, staring at the ceiling and unable to sleep, and it's great to know I'm still a person, still part of a larger community, not just in medical limbo. And with a lapse in modesty, I must say that the all-time coolest comments I've gotten yet have been those complimenting my new appearance. Hidden behind Oakleys, bandanna or bald, more than one person has given me the "fierce" or "bad-ass" thumbs-up of approval...even strangers who don't know I'm sick.

Now that I can go for.

Withdrawal

2008-07-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

I've never smoked. (Or chewed, as you seem to have to add if you've been down South.) Never tried street drugs. Don't drink tea, coffee, or soda. Only a social, occasional drinker. Vegetarian, so I don't ingest any of the weird hormones in meat. I try to stay away from too many refined or processed foods, or too much high fructose corn syrup. And as I've mentioned, I avoid just about every OTC drug, and only take the prescribed ones under duress. At the hospital, under the guise of curiosity, I carefully ask the nurses about each of the colored pills in my "pre-med" cup...then discreetly pocket any of the "optional" drugs when they're not looking. The purloined pills are collecting in a pill bottle at home, symbol of a small act of defiance in the face of a forced battle.

As a result of all that, I don't know what it's like to crave nicotine, or alcohol, or caffeine. Or any drug, for that matter. When the soda machine would break down on the ship, after the canned sodas and Red Bulls sold out some 24 hours later, and the entire crew became noticeably crankier...I had no referential experiences with which to sympathize. I guess the closest I've come to a drug craving has been a couple times I was sick and doped up on cold medicine, afraid to space out the doses for fear of stuffing up my head again. And I'm pretty addicted to gum. I've gone on late-night, store-to-store "gum runs" before. Does that count?

But I've never gone through withdrawal. That, in my mind, was reserved for junkies in rehab, washed-up homeless thrashing on cots in a halfway house. So I was utterly unprepared for the fetal-position-inducing malaise that greeted me with unexpected suddenness last night. My whole body ached; I couldn't sleep, even though I was exhausted; my head throbbed; I almost blacked out trying to stand up; and wave after wave of nausea washed over me. In my 2 am state of mental frenzy and physical exhaustion, I tried to parse the symptoms. It didn't make sense: I'm used to unpleasant side effects, but normally the "even weeks" aren't that bad; and even when I do feel sick, it's usually only for the first day or two. This was early Sunday morning already.

Amidst the wracking of a bone-shattering headache, it at last occurred to me that I was suffering withdrawal symptoms from prednisone tapering. Because the body stops manufacturing the adrenal steroid that prednisone mimics, you have to gradually wean yourself off the drug. Otherwise, you risk a life-threatening situation. The nurses put me on a schedule for reducing my doses, and Friday I cut back for the first time by 25%. I'm immensely glad to be getting off this drug, if only because I hate being dependent on anything, let alone little round unassuming peach-colored pills, but my body has become so dependent on this crutch that it's not letting go without throwing a few temper tantrums in response.

I do not envy those endeavoring to break a long-held or deep-seated addiction, particularly when "relief" is as near as the closest cigarette, bottle, or coffee cup. It's remarkable to me that just six weeks can cause such a recalcitrant reaction to letting go (actually, your body stops producing the steroid after just 7 days of use), but it only further confirms my conviction not to take any drugs other than those absolutely necessary. Case in point: two of the anti-nausea drugs, which sit temptingly on my counter at home but are, as yet, untouched. They are highly addictive. Why risk it? I'd much rather beat back a grouchy stomach than face days of withdrawal, particularly if that withdrawal would be anything as bitter and clutching as this is proving to be.

Strangely Normal

2008-07-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

Not, of course, that I've ever been "normal" in any sense of the word. Still, it never fails to surprise me how easily I can unintentionally slip across the line into fooling people that I'm not sick.

Over the weekend, thanks to an overcast but moderately warm day, I went bare-headed to the Pride festivities here in town. (I usually cover my head in public as much for sun protection as to control shock value - I really am completely bald. But it's more comfortable, and breezier, without.) Perhaps I should have expected it in such a flamboyant and exhibitionist crowd, but not a single person took my rather untraditional haircut as evidence of illness. In fact, one eager admirer wanted to take my picture; a handful of others commented approvingly on my "bad-ass" look. Too bad I didn't pick up a leather vest while I was there to enhance my credentials.

At work, I've left a lot of folks hopelessly gender-confused: I've been greeted in passing as "sir" too many times to count, and my undoubtedly feminine-voiced "good morning, how are you doing?" reply as our paths cross leaves strange looks hovering in the air behind me. An equal number of folks glance in my office at a shaved head in uniform and knock, "Excuse me, sir...?" only to turn red with embarrassment as a clearly female individual welcomes them in. (I'm careful to be as good-natured as possible with everyone to put them at ease - particularly with the really junior folks, who tend to be the most mortified at their mistake. Which, perhaps, I can understand: we suffered through countless late-night "Ma'am not sir" pushups at OCS as corrective action for accidental sleep-deprived gender mixups in address.) The older, balding gentlemen at work are excited to find an unexpected point of commonality with a relatively young female; the females are uniformly excited to see a military woman who's shaved her head and gotten away with it. (I think we all secretly aspire to be G.I. Jane, but the rather vague Coast Guard regulations class female head-shaving as a potentially "radical" move and thus left to command discretion.)

But beyond this most obvious sign of my treatment (the lumpy port and scar in my upper chest usually hide under clothing), which, surprisingly to me, few openly associate with cancer suffering, I seem to be unwittingly deceiving people into thinking I'm not sick at all, or that my side effects are relatively minor. Perhaps they're just being polite, or embarrassed to speak up. Perhaps I'm too energetic and determined. Normally, of course, I'm overjoyed for people to think I'm not sick. It gets past all the uneasiness and just lets me be me. Nothing's more awkward than someone clasping your hand in both of theirs as they sniff out, "I'm so glad you're making it ok. I'm praying for you. You know, I had an uncle who just died of cancer..."

Where it becomes a challenge is when I feel I can't live up to the expectations being set, expectations perfectly reasonable for a well person but sometimes a challenge when treatment and side effects get in the way. Often I fend it off with directness, with humor: being asked to attend a meeting on a hospital day, I pointed out candidly (despite the company of several senior personnel) that as I attended chemo treatment on Thursdays and Fridays, I'd have to squeeze it in during the first half of the week. But it's quite a different matter when I'm expected at a meeting - indeed, one of the key players - and I'm too sick in the bathroom to make it on time. Or when I can't concentrate on an important conversation because I'm in too much pain. Or when I get exhausted only halfway through a work day stretching from 0600 to 1700. Or, most maddening to me, when I just can't get everything done, because I'm only at work three days a week and just can't muster up enough focus on my recovery days to work from home.

The surprises pop up elsewhere, too. Admitting that I can't taste the delicious food I'm sharing with friends or family. Needing to curl up for a catnap in the other room like a little kid in the middle of the day. Taking a break outside or in the car to fight down a wave of nausea. I want so desperately to be "normal", to blend in as a non-sick person; the lapses are frustrating, the visible lapses so much the more so.

But perhaps I can take comfort in knowing that I never actually was all that normal to begin with.

The Drugs of Wrath

2008-06-28T08:38:00.001-07:00

Every day, twice a day if not more often, I down a veritable pill factory full of drugs. These are the deceptively named "supportive medications" - designed to counter the deleterious side effects of the primary poisons being pumped through my system on a weekly basis.

Daily, I take Acyclovir, Colace, Fluconazole, and Ranitidine. Some of these drugs speak to my suppressed immune system: Acyclovir is an antiviral that protects against herpes simplex; Fluconazole is an antifungal. The other two comfort my disturbed digestive system: Ranitidine inhibits the production of stomach acid and Colace is a stool softener. The chemo drugs kill a lot of the cells lining your stomach and intestines, so your innards aren't too happy (or functional).

On weekends, I take Septra, an antibiotic designed for those with a compromised immune system (originally developed for HIV/AIDS patients). And every other day, I swallow a bunch of Prednisone, a steroid. Prednisone suppresses your immune system, which may seem somewhat counterproductive, but actually serves a useful purpose: preventing the cancer cells in your lymphatic system (part of your immune system) from fighting back against the cancer drugs.

Prednisone is not a pleasant drug. Its seemingly endless list of symptoms and side effects includes weight gain, facial swelling, depression/mania/other psychiatric disorders, fatigue & weakness, mental confusion, blurred vision, abdominal pain, ulcers, infections, painful hips & shoulders, osteoporosis, insomnia, joint pain, cataracts, stretch marks, nervousness, acne, rashes, increased appetite, hyperactivity, frequent urination, diarrhea, and, in the most attractive description of all...removes your intestinal flora. On top of all that, after about a week of taking it, your body stops manufacturing the natural adrenal steroid it mimics, so you have to wean yourself gradually off the drug in order to avoid a life-threatening "Addisonian crisis" - convulsions and other medical emergencies caused by a lack of adrenal hormones.

The pills taste terrible and sit uneasily in my stomach no matter what I've had, or not had, to eat or drink. But I tell myself they're doing some good...right?

New Math

2008-06-26T15:22:00.000-07:00

Halfway. I'd attached myself to it, if somewhat uneasily. It's not the most reassuring word, halfway. Halfway house. Halfway to heaven. Halfway to hell.

Or halfway as its own destination of sorts. Purgatory. When I was a kid, we used to drive from Southern California to Phoenix a lot, to spend time with my grandfather and my uncle and their families. At six hours back in gas-saving 55-mph speed limit days, it was a long drive even for me, a child of the Inland Empire's freeway culture well inured to living life on the road.

Halfway between the states was Blythe, a boiling hot patch of gas stations, fast food, and a prison melting in the desert amidst endless horizons of sand and saguaros. A spartan bathroom, a fresh tank of gas, and a cold drink as you disappeared in a curl of smoke on the white-hot sidewalks. Then you packed quickly back in the car to roll across the shrunken Colorado and start the engine-saving air-conditioner-less slog up the mountains into Arizona. Halfway there.

Halfway's deceptive though. Is it really halfway? Traffic jams. Flat tire. Stops for dinner. Change of plans. Road construction. Detours. It could be early afternoon when we hit Blythe, and late into a dark, steamy August night before we rolled up at my grandpa's familiar stuccoed cul-de-sac. So I touched the word gingerly this time around, unsure. Halfway.

Yesterday marked the halfway point through my chemo. I'd counted out eight weeks of chemo, a week of scans, a week of radiation. Or so said the hand-written calendar given me by the nurse practitioner in week 1.

Today, my uncertainty was justified, as "halfway" became "almost one-third of the way". My chemo is to be followed by a full 28 or more days of radiation - daily visits, 7 days a week, four or five weeks straight. Much more restrictive than my current schedule, which, surprisingly, has proved quite liberating. I was disillusioned and disappointed. I'll find out soon exactly when the radiation treatments will start and end, how long it will take each day, when during the day the appointments will be, and which UCSF facility (out of the dozen or so) I'll visit.

D'ici là, I rework my calendar and re-count the days.

Determination

2008-06-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I visited my dad in Southern California. He misses me a lot (even when I'm not sick!), but with all his independence and good health, he is in his eighties, so it's usually easier to bring the mountain to Muhammad.

It was a fairly aggressive weekend, starting with rushing across town last week to make it from the hospital to the airport in time. The busy, sundrenched schedule of events incorporated two church performances, a twilight, windswept hike across the Santa Rosa Plateau, two very attractive (if unfortunately tasteless) meals, and a whole heck of a lot of road time. Oh yes...and some R&R: transcriptions and compositions, pecking at the piano, playing with a good friend's 7-month old, researching for my fall travel adventures.

The steroids have me so sped up that sleep is short, rare, and restless.

On Sunday, I visited my aunt and uncle. I am very close to them; they have been a second set of parents to me since childhood. Among many other specific and general life lessons imparted over the years, my aunt taught me to cook: not just the mechanics, but the art. That an orange-colored lemon is the sweetest, and that rolling it around on the counter before slicing it makes it that much juicier. To use ice water when making pastry crusts for the ultimate melt-in-your-mouth flakiness. To ask at the meat counter for extra innards to blend and simmer up for the giblet gravy at Thanksgiving. To clean as you go to avoid a big kitchen mess greeting you after dinner's over. The magic of timing all the dishes just right (I still struggle with that one!). My aunt's cooking was legendary, particularly the deftness with which she processed the hundreds of pounds of peaches produced by a single backyard dwarf tree: sliced, frozen, and in shakes, cobblers, and pies by the dozen - one year, she famously mixed gallons of peach filling in the bathtub.

Not long ago, my aunt discovered she had a brain tumor, and went through radiation and surgery to treat it. It took much from her, perhaps more emotionally than functionally, even. Her recovery has been slow, fitful, frustrating. My uncle has heroically and selflessly, unhesitatingly devoted his every waking moment to her progress and care, dueling with insurance companies and hospitals, out-researching the doctors, marshalling a small army of caregivers and specialists, and always pushing, pushing, pushing. He has never stopped believing, even when the family, and my aunt herself, despaired.

I try to sidestep any despair of my own treatment. Dealing daily with the unremitting and unpredictable barrage of my side effects, short- and long-term, it is not always easy. I push myself, sometimes almost too much. I try, I tell myself with success, to distract myself with various flavors of busyness. By scheduling activities I "can't" cancel. By forcing myself to take care of myself - walk to and from the shuttles and trains and buses and not take a taxi; walk or bike to get groceries and not order in; do my laundry and keep my room clean and wash the dishes. And some hours, days, or weeks definitely feel more comfortably "normal" than others.

Sometimes, though, it's an immense struggle just to go from horizontal to vertical. To crawl across the floor to take my morning or evening medications. To force down the nausea and greet people pleasantly, to concentrate in a meeting when my mouth is on fire, to walk the next four blocks when my heart is pounding and my head is reeling, to ignore the lingering pain of an operation scar or metal port under the chafe of a backpack or the cutting strap of a heavy bag.

And yet - as my aunt so aptly put it, "You can walk." For all the mind-over-matter I've employed over the past few weeks - it's only been a few weeks, and my impairment's been limited. She has a much longer road to travel, and her progress is necessarily so much slower. And I cannot express how heart-burstingly proud I am of my aunt, and her resolve, and her progress. Every action, no matter how seemingly small, a firm grip in the morning, an eye blinking on command, a few bites of real food, a trip - via sling and wheelchair and uncle and caregiver - outside, to sit for a moment in the sun - it is a milestone, an achievement thought unaccomplishable just a few months ago. And each miracle only strengthens the resolve and the impatience to achieve the next.

It would be unconscionably arrogant of me to say, If I can make it, then you can. Instead, it is this: If you can make it - you! - then what the heck is holding me back?! What excuse do I have?

This one's for you - both of you. We have so much living left to do...all three of us. I can't wait.

Side effects

2008-06-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

The first few weeks, when I went in for treatment, I was afforded my own private room. Dominating the view in these small cubbyholes is a large green chemo chair, which unfortunately I keep forgetting to capture on film. Designed for comfort, the chemo chair - boxy, overly padded, draped in wires, tubes and controls, bolt upright, and in a bold hue I can only describe as hospital green - welcomes you with all the charm of an electric chair.

My past two appointments, though - last Friday and yesterday - I came in the morning. Mornings are considerably busier than late afternoons, meaning crowded waiting rooms, shared treatment areas, cheerier hospital staff...and perhaps surprisingly, faster service (more personnel on the clock, I assume). A crowded waiting room is a noisy one, even the oncology clinic isn't exactly the pediatric ward or the emergency room. Most patients are accompanied by a companion, the purpose of which I can only imagine is to cheer and comfort the patient; but in actuality, these delightful guests seem only to provide (or encourage) sounding boards for endless streams of complaints. A crowded waiting room is also an impatient one. Perhaps the large volume of patients creates an unconscious current of scarcity (though unfounded: there are concurrently extra staff on hand to treat the increased volume of patients). Whatever the reason, the topic on all lips is most frequently, anxiously, "What is taking so long? When will they see me?"

It makes it hard to concentrate on reading a good book.

Shared treatment rooms are another side effect of morning appointments. A shared room has two or three hospital beds, sometimes separated by curtains. Hospital beds are somewhat awkward for me, because I like to sit up, not lay down. My bed yesterday was a particular challenge. I kept shifting around, trying to find a comfortable and at least mildly supported seating position, but every time I'd adjust, so would the bed. It was like a mechanical, time-delayed waterbed, subtly (if noisily) lifting and lowering to match my every move, frustrating my futile attempts at proper posture. Finally, the nurse informed me that the bed was designed that way, for those confined to the horizontal, to alleviate stress on the body and help prevent bed sores. I felt a little sheepish.

Yesterday, my companion across the curtained room was an older woman who apparently was in great pain. She moaned loudly with every breath, tossing and turning relentlessly in her hospital bed. On first appearance by the nurse, she started haggling for heavy-duty pain drugs and muscle relaxers, which thankfully, quieted her down for some time. But later, when the nurse came to take her vitals and ask her to quantify her pain (we all have to quantify our pain, which is devilishly difficult for me: on a scale of 1-10, how badly does it hurt? Um, does 10 refer to being disemboweled and burned at the stake alive? Well...I guess maybe a 1 or 2??), the moaner and groaner only offered up a "3 or 4". 3 or 4?! That's well within the grin-grit-and-shut-up stage for me.

My companions last Friday were an elderly man who spoke little English and had to be led out since he had shown up for the wrong treatment, and a middle-aged woman next to me whining out a litany of complaints from before she even lay down. Now my perspective on side effects is, they happen, deal with it. Chemo isn't exactly a day at the spa. My nurses want me to inform them of my side effects, but I generally confine it to a brief list: what, where, how long. I haven't taken any of the "optional" side-effect-reducing medications, figuring it's better to have my body fight back (and anyway, I already choke down a cocktail of drugs daily in addition to all the IV toxins pumped in each week). A few times, the well-meaning but somewhat overbearing nurses have instructed me to call the on-call doctor if I notice any side effects from week to week, but honestly, unless I'm having life-threatening symptoms, what can they do? "Drink a lot of water, take some anti-nausea pills, call me in the morning." Or even better, schlep all the way across town to the hospital to have them tell me the same thing? No thanks. I'll deal.

Well, this woman, apparently she could not deal. Two solid hours of complaint after complaint, as nurses shuffled by, most not listening. Again, not very conducive to book-reading or music-listening, as I sat next to her, trapped by my IV and a slow-infusing drug. Her eyesight, her toes, her feet, her arms, her sense of balance, her depressive thoughts, her wakefulness or sleepiness...amidst the long and endless list, another woman appeared with a styrofoam take-out box. "Here, I brought you lunch," she said to my companion, and disappeared.

Now, the one undeniable symptom all chemo patients share is nausea. Loss of appetite, strange tastes, a digestive system that doesn't want to cooperate, and above all, nausea - to some degree or another; it never goes away. Even if you're otherwise feeling great...food...it's still not your friend. You find what works for you on a daily, or weekly, basis - a fizzy juice drink, saltine crackers, ice cream bars, popcorn. You never know. It's usually something mild and somewhat liquid.

This woman popped open her box and started devouring a very spicy, very pungent, very large taco salad. Ravenously. In between crunches, she continued to toss out complaints.

I think I see why the nurses don't trust me when I say I'm doing fine.

'Til it's gone

2008-06-16T17:35:00.000-07:00

So, my toes are the ten latest casualties in my private little war on cancer. They're only the most recent converts to a growing list of body parts declaring anarchy from the autocratic rule of my central nervous system. Like early-stage frostbite, or the initial lack of sensation when standing up after sitting way too long in contorted positions, my feet still respond when called, but my toes aren't rogering up. You don't realize how prehensile your toes are until they don't grip the ground anymore.

One of the initial-surge casualties was my stomach - in fact, my whole digestive system. Healthy-eating gurus are always telling people to "listen to their stomach talking". I doubt they'd want to put up with the noise of mine lately. Its speech has been reduced to a single, low grumble, which generally can be translated into one of the following mutually exclusive ideas: (a) "Feed me, I'm starving!"; (b) "What the hell were you thinking, putting food in me?!"; or (c) "I'm angry at the whole world! GRRRRR!!!"

It is a war of attrition: other casualties have included, intermittently, my skin (unexplained rashes and bruises), my jaw (seizing up), the inside of my mouth and throat (symptoms of painful mouth sores without any actual lesions), my internal temperature control (a private Arctic under the beating sun), and with enduring unsettlement, my sense of taste. It is not just that the messages from my taste buds wax and wane in their intensity, or that certain types of taste (sweet, salty, bitter) trip on and off line. Instead, the communiques from my mouth are simply randomly garbled. A bottle of Evian slips past like the foulest tap water. Marinara sauce tastes of Italian dressing. Broccoli like carrots. It is indescribably disturbing to realize, halfway through a delicious and pleasantly sweet-tart apple, that your mouth isn't actually tasting anything like an apple at all. Your brain is just remembering what a good apple tasted like and silently editing the gaps between crispiness and yumminess.

I tell myself my fingertips only ache because of the hours pounding and plucking stringed instruments. But the truth is, they're losing accurate sensation too, placing everything from rapid-fire typing to bike-riding in peril. And one of the last outposts of resistance to the relentless siege, my hair, is gradually losing its tenuous hold on my body.

It is strange to watch your body disintegrate beneath you. To watch as unconsciously, your heart and lungs and brain and muscles summon up their reserves, substituting one sensation for another, altering your gait, your posture, your habits. To sit idly by as the one bedrock set of resources you thought you could always count on - your body - can't, or won't, respond to your commands.

I am war-weary. I can't wait to start rebuilding my forces.

A balancing act

2008-06-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

My new life has assumed a peculiar rhythm. First of all, my weeks begin on Thursday. Day 1 of each new chemo treatment. And not Thursday at midnight either; Thursday at precisely the moment I step across that line into the DMZ on the 5th floor of Parnassus.

After treatment, I take the shuttle, walk home, eat something quickly before my stomach can catch up to the drugs (it's usually been a good 8 hours since breakfast), and collapse in bed. I'll drag myself out of bed around 10 to swallow pills before crawling back horizontal. It's a similar struggle in the morning. The nausea's the worst at first, but it gradually fades from a primal scream to a dull roar.

I sleep a lot the first 24 hours and don't eat much at all. I force myself to drink as much as I can to flush the drugs out of my system, but it goes down uneasily at times. The first couple of days I'm fatigued, tire easily, and find it hard to concentrate on much - even reading a book or listening to music takes a focused effort. My mind gets restless and my dreams are vivid.

Over the weekend, depending on that week's drugs of choice, I start to recover, some weeks more quickly than others. Side effects come and go - muscle cramps, mouth sores, weird tastes, headaches, always an uneasy digestive system - but they're generally at the nuisance stage and I'm able to catch up on chores and errands. My heart and lungs can't keep up with a hard workout, but I do a lot of walking and bike-riding (the happy consequence of no car). Food still tastes funny, if it tastes like anything at all (I'm becoming an expert in cardboard-and-styrofoam cuisine), and my stomach's not sure it wants any anyway.

By Monday, I'm ready to get back to work. I'm still tired - Monday mornings I don't force myself to get up super early - but putting in a full day at work feels good. It's always a race to keep up with, and stay ahead of, the constant information flow at work - partly because I'm still learning the responsibilities of my job, and mostly because I'm only there three days out of five. It forces me to be ruthlessly efficient with my time and, for the most part, keeps me distracted from a nagging stomach or a sore mouth or an aching body. Except when I'm sitting in a particularly long and boring meeting, which I've never liked to begin with.

Tuesday and Wednesday are a blur. I'm on overdrive, not tired, sleeping little, catching up with emails and phone calls and finances and keeping my mail sorted, setting things up at work for the days I'll be out for chemo, making post-treatment plans, working on projects at the apartment, enjoying the outdoors, going out for live music or a club, maybe even eating a triumphant meal out - triumphant because I can actually (a) taste the food, sort of; and (b) consume it without feeling sick, mostly.

Thursday mornings are the worst, particularly if treatment isn't until the afternoon. I feel as well as I'll get for the week, but it's of small comfort: I don't want to eat too much or I'll feel sick later; it's the middle of the day in the middle of the week, so I can't exactly go celebrate; I can't go out for a hike or go to work or just enjoy feeling good because I don't have all that much time before I have to walk to the shuttle and ride up to Parnassus. I charge my iPod, pack a few books in my bag, put numbing cream on my port, and the week begins anew.

It is a brave new world.

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm, and harmony. -Thomas Merton

Odd weeks

2008-06-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

I can do without the odd weeks, I have decided. Last week was so unnaturally...well, pleasant. Approaching normal, even. So few symptoms; plus, I had energy. I traveled, hiked, worked, and danced late into the night at a Tuesday-evening party (just don't tell my doctors!).

Odd-week drugs are not so blithe of spirit. Weeks 1 and 5 I receive mechlorethamine, doxorubicin, and vinblastine; weeks 3 and 7 the mechlorethamine is replaced by etoposide, which can't all be delivered in one day. So after several hours at the hospital today, tomorrow morning, I return for round two.

Etoposide, C₂₉H₃₂O₁₃, interferes with the coiling necessary for DNA replication. It is derived chemically from the Mayapple, a completely toxic plant except for the mature fruit. Etoposide is delivered very slowly via IV, as it can lower blood pressure (mine, luckily, was remarkably consistent today).

In addition to low blood pressure, side effects can include hair loss, pain or burning at the IV site, constipation or diarrhea, metallic tastes, bone marrow suppression (lowered white and red blood cell counts; lowered platelet counts), nausea, rash, fever, and mouth sores.

Odd-week drugs sap a lot out of me. I slept for six hours this afternoon and am more than ready to crawl right back between the covers for another eight or ten tonight. Horizontal is easy - I drift and dream and idly calculate how much longer I can legitimately put off choking down another round of pills.

My white blood cell count was low today; so tomorrow, I'll get a booster drug. I've been warned it will cause severe arthritic-type bone pain throughout my body.

While lingering in the DMZ today, I was hit up by a hawkish, rail-thin woman representing the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I do not doubt they provide very helpful and supportive services to patients and their families, but being plied with personal questions by this overbearing, piercing lady in her dazzling fuchsia satin blouse and overly made-up face while I sat with tubes and needles cascading from my shoulder, awaiting treatment...let's just say, her timing was less than ideal.

To add to the joy, this week's nurse was of the patronizing variety. Just because you are my mother's age doesn't mean you can treat me like a small child. An honest concern and care; straightforward questions about my symptoms; clear and necessary direction for managing side effects: these are, of course, welcomed. But the wide, flat, indulgent smile, accompanied by any comments beginning, "Now, honey...," well, I tend to shut down.

I have no grand closing words tonight. I'm tired and feel yucky. Bedtime.

A song of ascents

2008-06-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

I am a mountain goat. Always have been. Ask anybody who's been hiking with me. Sure, ordinary trails, I might amble along; but give me a good rocky hill to scramble up and I'm looking down before you know to look up. (I'm a lot slower picking my way back down hill, though...)

Chemo does strange things to mountain goats.

One of the side effects of chemo is inhibition of lung function. When Lance Armstrong went through chemo, he had his doses adjusted specifically to protect lung function.

Surprised that this week's treatment left me feeling relatively well, I took off on a last-minute trip to Las Vegas for the weekend, arriving in time for a good friend's baby shower, throwing in a "bonus visit" to see my aunt and cousin. Sunday, with the shower over, the partiers dispersed, and my aunt at work, I headed for the hills of Red Rock, one of my vividly positive memories of Las Vegas from an otherwise awkward junior-high-religious-school-orchestra-tour-to-Sin-City trip, many years ago.

It was a beautiful desert day - warm, sunny, dry, breezy - with the last of the spring blooms still coloring the sandstone. Fondue-dipped in heavy-duty sunscreen (chemo increases sensitivity to light), bandanna for my baldness, and armed with sunglasses and a camera, I set out on a nice, "easy", flat, gravelly, one-mile loop.

But the sandstone at Red Rock is irresistible. Up against the rock walls, shaded from the sun, my feet and hands reached for the crevices and footholds and like that, I was up, scrambling, stretching, skidding a bit, balancing. Up, sideways, up, over, always up. My legs and arms throbbed with excitement. My fingers savored the grit of the rock.

My lungs weren't so happy. Neither was my digestive system, which wasn't used to the tumult (abandonment of one's viscera at 3,000 feet is never recommended) nor my heart, which thirsted for oxygen as it sucked at blood thinned of its life-carrying cells.

I had to rest. It wasn't easy. I crouched in the shade and waited for my body to catch up with my spirit, distracted by the excited calls of kids and hikers and climbers echoing in the canyon. At long last, I crawled down from my rocky perch and slunk back by rappellers and picnickers and backpackers. I flopped in the car and cranked the A/C and flipped through the trail map for a long, flat trail, devoid of the temptation of rocky verticals and horizontals.

My second hike of the day was much easier, much flatter...and still a struggle to climb the last gentle slope to the parking area. I tell myself I made it - hiked a couple great trails, kept my muscles limber, my heart and lungs challenged, beat back the turbulence rumbling inside...and I traveled, saw family and friends, ate real food, enjoyed the heat. That I'm surviving. Still, sometimes, it hurts. It hurts to get worn out at a baby shower and have to crash for two hours in a side room like a little kid. It hurts to eat food and not taste it, or find even the purest bottled water tasting like milky Southern California tap-water sludge. It hurts to get winded walking up stairs, when taking a deep breath stings and standing up too fast blacks me out. It hurts to get tired after only half a day at work, and ten hours of sleep before that. To admit that no amount of effort or positive thinking will get me to 100% right now.

I tell myself I will never be challenged beyond what I can bear. And that perhaps, I am only learning the limits of what I can bear. Maybe my strength is yet to be proved.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help.

Week the Second

2008-06-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

So Week Two begins auspiciously. My blood counts were good; I felt (relatively) healthy and well going into my appointment yesterday; my port was hardly painful at all during the blood draws and chemo; and best of all, I'm feeling none of the nausea today that so flattened me last week. (Partly due, I am sure, to the different regimen of drugs I received this week.) I've been able, so far, to avoid many of the "optional" supportive drugs, which I like to believe is helping my body launch a more vigorous response to slaying the cancer cells and getting back in fighting shape.

I'm starting to lay the groundwork, ever so gently, for post-treatment life: plans for collecting my car from Alabama, for various short- and long-term work projects, for vacation travel and other small indulgences.

This week, I received vincristine and bleomycin; but I'll backtrack for a moment and talk about two of last week's drugs, mechlorethamine and vinblastine (since I already explained doxorubicin, the third).

Mechlorethamine, C₅H₁₁Cl₂N, is a type of mustard gas. Its anticancer properties were discovered (or, confirmed) as an unexpected "side effect" of a terrible accident in Bari, Italy, during WWII, where a stockpile of secret mustard gas exploded and thousands of civilians and soldiers died. While the incident was classified until 1959, and covered up for years after that, autopsies of those killed during the tragic event showed that the exposed experienced lowered white blood cell counts, demonstrating mustargen's potential anticancer effects.

Mechlorethamine simulates the effect of radiation on cancer cells, making the double-helix strands in DNA unable to uncoil and separate - and thus unable to divide and replicate. It is, as might be imagined by its chemical warfare uses, very damaging to the skin if it escapes the veins, causing extensive tissue damage and blistering.

Side effects include nausea, vomiting, hair loss, mouth sores, darkening of veins used for infusion, fever, poor appetite, metallic taste, ringing in the ears, loss of fertility, and low blood counts.

Vinblastine, C₄₆H₅₈N₄O₉, is a vinca alkaloid. For the gardeners among you, yes, that means it is derived from a periwinkle plant. Its anticancer properties were discovered when scientists realized that people drinking this periwinkle tea lowered their white blood cell counts.

Vinblastine works by halting mitosis, the process by which a cell separates and replicates its chromosomes for division into two daughter cells. The protein tubulin is needed to fuel this process; vinblastine binds the tubulin and thus starves the cell of the food it needs to produce mitosis. Like mechlorethamine, vinblastine is a vesicant and will cause extensive blistering and tissue damage if it escapes the vein.

Side effects include low blood counts, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, poor appetite, constipation or diarrhea, hair loss, mouth sores, metallic taste, headaches, jaw pain, high blood pressure, muscle and joint pains, depression, shortness of breath, and peripheral neuropathy (the aforementioned and dreaded numbness and cramping in fingers and toes).

Out of the laundry list of symptoms for mechlorethamine, vinblastine, and doxorubicin, I probably experienced just about every one over the course of the previous week, at one point or another. Luckily, the side effects seem to have faded prior to this week's treatment.

Thus begins Week Two.

Though my flesh, it be destroyed

2008-06-02T20:02:00.000-07:00

This was not the post I'd intended to write.

Stirred by distantly sardonic thoughts of new mornings each bringing with them unexpected "new delights", I sought out the famous poet who could best help me encapsulate that utter bleakness of spirit that accompanies every new and unexpected journey through this Scylla and Charybdis of cancer treatment: the ache of the left-hip bone marrow biopsy drowned out by the sharp reminders of the right-shoulder port surgery; the daily tightrope wavered between hunger and nausea, between a full stomach stuck roiling in bed and a productive empty one; the constant cupboard-baring hunt for drinks and snacks that might slip, unnoticed, past a mouth screaming with sores, a jaw locked down, a tongue rippling metallic aftertastes; the twice-a-day ritual of choking down a colorful array of foul-tasting pills beneficial in thought but nauseating in deed; the chilling, inescapable cold closing about me as my blood counts drop; and above all, the fatigue, the enervating fatigue leaving me flat out in bed, mind racing, unable to even focus on a book, distracted and entertained, at last, only by music.

This was the irony I sought to so deftly portray.

But it was not the irony that found me. Turns out the lines of "poetry" lurking about in my mind were instead lyrics, words to a song one rarely forgets, once heard.

Morning by morning, new mercies I see.

In the midst of a crushing devastation, the still-smoking destruction of his country, his people, even his own person, the lamenter still cries out, "It is because of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed...Great is Thy faithfulness!"

All I have needed, thy hand hath provided.

My relatives were tortured and died in concentration camps and gas chambers; were hidden in basements and with strange families; captured by enemy forces and starved in prison camps; pioneered in unforgiving new countries; were massacred and murdered and pogromed; and from the earliest, scraped by on dirt farms, surviving the relentless bad harvests, plagues, famines, droughts, floods, political and religious upheavals, the uncertainties and poverties and bleaknesses, always sacrificing, never knowing for how long their suffering might last or what good it might come to, always with the unyielding hope that just maybe, through all this sacrifice, the next generation might just make it, might just inch a rung higher on that elusive and slippery ladder of societal success.

Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow...

I have eight weeks to endure. Eight weeks, under the care of one of the country's best hospitals; eight weeks, with cutting-edge drugs and treatment regimens; eight weeks, paid for almost entirely by an unbelievably generous healthcare plan; eight short weeks, supported at every turn by the bedrock love and care of an army of friends, supervisors, co-workers, and family. Just eight weeks.

This, instead, was the irony that found me.

Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

Total Assault: Seek & Destroy

2008-06-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

Yo, EA, Take Two, I got this crazy new idea for your next video game. It's called "Total Assault: Seek & Destroy."

You play the warrior, on a battlefield of cancer. Your mission: kill all the cancer cells before they kill your host...or before your host succumbs to a range of debilitating and possibly deadly side effects. Your only weapons are the powerful but undiscriminating cancer drugs, which you can combine in standard regimens or dole out in experimental new doses.

You're on a race against time as you speed through the inner workings of your host's body, peering around every corner for the dastardly cells, cognizant of the declining half-lives and varying efficacies of your weapons. You rack up points for destroying cancer cells, but lose them every time a normal cell is killed in "collateral damage". You also lose points as your host succumbs to side effects like nausea, weight loss, hair loss, low blood counts, mouth sores, or decreased heart and lung function. Your only remedy there is to spend your hard-earned points on supportive medications for your host. Maybe they'll make your host feel better...maybe they won't. Earn bonus points if your host is in relatively good health: the host will be able to help you fight back against the nefarious cancer cells.

So you've gotten all the cells, you think? Made it through the chemo regimen? Well, game's not over yet. Hopefully you have enough points left for the bonus round: radiation. In this rapid-fire round, you only have seconds to memorize the CT/PET scan map and then target your radiation at any remaining cancer cells. OD on the radiation and your host dies. Miss out on some cancer cells in your haste and lose the game.

For a real challenge, Total Assault warriors can test their skills on hosts with a variety of types and stages of cancer. And as an added handicap, warriors will notice their reaction times slowing or increasing along with the relative health of their hosts.

I swear...it will be a total sleeper hit.

Chemical warfare

2008-05-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

Give me an earthquake any day. Short, sharp, sudden, and gone before you even think to be scared.

Not like this looming, slow-approaching hurricane of chemo. The storm gathering ominously offshore, the winds strengthening, the seas rising, the pressure dropping. You, sitting at home helpless, watching a wobbly path that bends slowly and inexorably shoreward: not if, but when. The rain bands start to beat insistently on the windows and the winds tug at your shingles. Eventually the TV is subsumed by snow, the radio succumbs to static, the lights flicker off, the house sits thickly still in a ghostly absence of the hum of fans and air conditioners. And still you wait, hamstrung by the storm, hunkered down, butterflies beating about in your stomach.

Butterflies beating about. I think I'm hardening to the DMZ. Yesterday the blood-drawing tech was having a bad day. She screamed at me to hurry up when I was having my vitals checked by another tech across the hall. Then she screamed at me for putting my paperwork in her box at all, the wrong box for those with ports who need nurses to draw their blood: a blessing in disguise; now I can avoid the grouchy tech.

It took a long time to get going yesterday. My port was in very good condition, but it was still only two days post-op, and it hurt like hell when they poked the IV needle through. That necessitated a long, slow flush with saline solution while they waited for my port area to numb up and the results to come back from my pregnancy test. ("No, I swear, there's no way I'm pregnant...") They filled up the time with visits from nurses and pharmacists, and for once I was allotted the time to ask questions about the timing of appointments and the changes in lifestyle I could expect. After a couple of anti-nausea pills and a shot to shut off my ovary production for a few months, they at last broke out their barrage of pads and needles and syringes and bags and gloves, and were ready to begin.

I was terrified. It's a rather daunting experience. I wanted to read my magazine, listen to my iPod, and toy with my little stress ball, but the nurses had other ideas. This week's treatment came not through a slow-drip IV, but through large syringes that were hooked up to my port and slowly injected, to the accompaniment of a gentle saline IV flow. Watching noxious materials slowly enter your body would be bad enough, were it not paired throughout with the ever-so-helpful commentary from the nurse on all the characteristics and side effects of the drugs I was receiving.

I kept expecting to suddenly break out in convulsions, puke violently, or drop in a dead faint. None of this happened. In fact, I felt fine. It was odd. The butterflies still beat about anxiously in my stomach. After all, they were injecting me with (among other drugs) a form of mustard gas, still one of the most powerful and brutal drugs used in chemical warfare.

I left, took the shuttle, walked home, had dinner, felt fine. Couldn't figure it out. Sure, I was a little cold, but I've always been a lizard, cold-blooded, bad at generating internal heat. I layered up and started work on a couple of projects. Then the anti-nausea drugs began to wear off. Feeling a bit off-kilter, I ingested my daily battery of pills from the pill factory in our kitchen and went to bed.

It was a fairly quiet night, but a rough morning. Horizontal was a decent position, although the gremlins in my digestive tract were doing their morning tai chi. My body temperature was all off: too hot or too cold. I kept frantically checking to see if I still had feeling in my fingertips (peripheral neuropathy, or damage to the nerves on your extremities, is a possible side effect of the chemo drugs and one that I, as a musician, fear most). Vertical was not such a successful position; and even though the floor kept steady beneath me, it was a struggle against rising nausea as I crawled to the kitchen to take my morning pills. The nurses had said to use seasick medicine until I could get a prescription for some anti-nausea pills. It took a few minutes and some concentrated mental effort to reach up even for the trusty bottle of meclizine and swallow the little pink pill. Luckily, that quieted the gremlins enough for me to walk around for a bit and eat breakfast.

I'm glad I don't have many expectations for today, though. I feel beat up - sore on my butt from the bone marrow biopsy on one side and the shot on the other; sore on my right shoulder and neck from the port; fatigued mentally and physically from the pain; and my entire insides beat and battered and churning. At least I don't have to swallow down the nausea, brace myself against a lurching ship, and stand an alert four-hour bridge watch.

Give me an earthquake any day.

Top 10 Reasons Being Bald Rocks

2008-05-28T21:56:00.000-07:00

10. Rubbing my head = good luck

9. No more sleeping in curlers

8. I knew my nickname was “V” for a reason

7. Bald goes with everything

6. Hair is so 20th century!

5. No gray hairs

4. Shaves seconds off my swim time

3. Scrunchies are getting so expensive

2. With big, dark glasses and a colorful head scarf, I’ll look famous

1. Three words: G. I. Jane

Tantalus

2008-05-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

Three cheers for the unexpected.

I often take chances (or, "calculated risks"). Today started out rather chancy. I ate breakfast, against the nurses' explicit pre-surgery directions, trusting in a fast metabolism and healthy digestive system (halfway through a 16-hour fast, I was starving). I walked twenty minutes to the bus stop without confirming the shuttle schedule. I didn't write down my appointment room number, trusting to a vague recollection in a photographic memory.

I figured all these chances were small, compared with the towering uncertainties of the sedation awaiting me. So when my meal digested just fine, my shuttle arrived with five minutes to spare, and the receptionist cheerfully pointed me to the right floor, I still wasn't about to buy tickets for the Powerball.

I only half-listened as the doctor reviewed the pre-surgical disclaimers with me. Go ahead, hit me with the big one, I thought. The sedation part. Not a word. "Any other questions before we get started?" the doctor asked. "What about the sedation?" I blurted. "Sedation?" he replied quizzically. "That would be too dangerous, to put you under general, or to sedate you heavily. We'd have to insert a feeding tube and everything. No, we're just going to use local, with some medication for the pain. Do you...do you need general?" "No, no, no...I'll be fine! That's great to know. That's what I was most worried about." He looked confused.

Mt. Zion is a much more comforting facility than Parnassus. No DMZ here. The receptionists, nurses, and doctors were uniformly pleasant, approachable, and helpful. Which was good, because the preparation for the surgery was, in itself, dehumanizing. You strip to the waist and wrap in a threadbare hospital gown (with burn holes helpfully marking the more personal areas), then balance on a towel-wrapped diving board of an operating table. Plastic trays snap in to support your arms and a large roll of blankets elevates your knees. ("This should make you more comfortable!") After the requisite pain of locating a vein for the IV (the last time for a while, I hope dearly), it is time to Prepare The Site.

First they removed the gown ("we're going to expose you for a minute here" - good thing I covered up for modesty) in order to tape down my right breast. Amazons, athletes, or cross-dressing Revolutionary War soldiers - bless 'em all, maybe it gets easier with repetition. It didn't exactly spur me to mount a charge against the enemy.

Then, they inserted the oxygen tubes. This was, by far, the most uncomfortable part of the procedure. Little icicles, burning cold, stuffed up your nostrils; the light-headedness hits you instantly. Why dish out $20 a pop for an oxygen-bar hit? (And how "flavoring" improves the experience, I know not.) They dotted me with sensor diodes and strapped on a blood pressure cuff, which with bomb-ticking precision, every sixty seconds, death-gripped my right arm; meanwhile, on my left index finger, they snapped on a blood-oxygen sensor. My pulse began to beep-beep-beep irregularly on the monitor.

They scrubbed down the site (my left clavicle) with a chokingly caustic orange solution, and taped around the site with towels and pads. They raised my table and lowered the large ultrasound unit. My field of vision narrowed to the blinding lights and an occasional nurse's head bobbing in and out; maybe a bloody glove or two. "We're going to give you something to help you relax..." Yuck. My headache tweaked tighter. I shut my eyes. Beep-beep-beep went the monitor. Squeeeeeeze went the blood pressure cuff. Nurses talked about me in the third person. Doctors circled like vultures. Is this what you feel like, I wondered distractedly, when you're about to die?

Two doctors operated on me; one was clearly training the other. The procedure basically re-threads a vein from your neck into your clavicle for easy access; the ultrasound helps the doctors locate the vein. The lidocaine injections were not pleasant. They never are. The rest of the procedure was fairly rapid, consisting from my vantage point of varying degrees of pressure on my collarbone, punctuated compulsively with the beep-beep-beep and the squeeeeze, strange cold dripping feelings and the nurses' heads in sharp relief against the searing white of the operating lights.

The BP cuff got on my nerves. I started squeezing back. Who am I to lie there in quiet submission? Every time it started pumping up, I'd clench my fist and flex my biceps. Squeeze. Flex. Squeeze. Flex. Flex. Ha. It always gave up first, slowly deflating in defeat. Ha. Me, one; BP cuff, zero.

When it was over, a nurse cautioned, "Don't stand up just yet." As if I could: I was still entangled in a web of towels and tubes and tape, with the ultrasound unit hovering just inches above my chest. Eventually all my parts and pieces were disconnected; I swung my feet around and stood up. I walked to the door. The floor lurched gently beneath me. The nurses were a bit taken aback, too surprised to sit me down. "Are you sure you're ok to walk?" they asked, reaching to steady me. "Sure, I'm fine," I replied, confused. "This is just three- or four-footers. Wait 'til you get in 12- or 15-foot seas. Then things really start to fly."

It was all a bit anti-climactic. My neck has a permanent crick. I can't turn my head more than an inch or two to either side. The non-rate who drove me home (inexplicably, I have to say, as I was not sedated and had no problems walking around: the shuttle would have worked out just fine) took me on a screaming Grand Theft Auto tour of San Francisco, complete with screeching stops and blaring music: probably not the best treatment for someone with recent neck surgery. The lingering headache I always get from local anasthetic is finally wearing off. And I got home starving - dove for the freshly stocked refrigerator - and winced to discover that chewing and swallowing were terrifically painful.

But I have a guaranteed direct line to a vein for the forseeable future. They can use it for labs, and CT scans, and as long as it's flushed at least once a month, I can keep it in.

Three cheers for small miracles.

I'm just here for the drugs

2008-05-25T17:48:00.000-07:00

When I met with my doctor last week, he presented me with a personalized copy of my Stanford V drug regimen - a simple spreadsheet with big unassuming "X"s to mark which drugs I'd receive in which weeks. Simply put, the regimen alters weekly between destroying cells and building them up. Some drugs can better distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous cells; but there are not, as yet, any magic drugs: cells are cells and they all die rather indiscriminately. Hence the recovery weeks.

In addition to the IV regimen, I'll be swallowing a pill factory of "supportive" medications: some daily, twice daily, or three times a day; others twice a day only on weekends. (Go figure.) These supportive medications are aimed at controlling some of the more deleterious side effects of the primary drugs.

As someone who, as I said, eschews even her daily dose of "Vitamin M", I had to research all of these drugs to see exactly what was being fed into my body, tarnished temple of the Holy Spirit that it is. Thus I begin an occasional series of "Meet the Drugs", in which (at the risk of shrinking into the miniscule, rapid-fire disclaimers bracketing all good pharma ads) I shall introduce each of these chemical concoctions, for the greater edification of all.

So, (with a great debt to Wikipedia,) we begin with this week's drug of choice: Doxorubicin, C₂₇H₂₉NO₁₁, which I will take on odd-numbered weeks (1, 3, 5, & 7). Doxorubicin is a widely used cancer drug, which unwinds DNA, preventing the double helix from resealing and thus breaking the replication chain.

Doxorubicin is one of the drugs that I'll be taking which causes hair loss (or alopecia). It can also cause nausea and vomiting, skin darkening, sores on the mouth and lips; and in high doses, cardiac problems such as irregular heartbeats and congestive heart failure. (My cumulative dose will be about 1/5 of the typical threshold for serious heart problems.)

Doxorubicin is sensitive to light, so it often is shielded with an aluminum bag to prevent it from decomposing before it enters the body.

Would you believe...

2008-05-21T09:57:00.000-07:00

It was a great weekend. Three busy, sun-drenched days in Portland, Bend, and Beaverton, where I adhered strictly to the post-biopsy recovery regimen of "pound the pavement incessantly". It hurt to sit, so why chance it? Adding to the weekend's luster was the long-awaited arrival (during my absence) of my hotly anticipated household goods, which I've only just started to unpack. Indoor camping is fun, but it's hard to reject the comforting domestication of dishes, sheets, and a few extra uniform t-shirts.

Leaving my roommate sequestered amidst my cornfield maze of boxes, I headed up to Parnassus yesterday to receive my results and treatment plan. My sunny demeanor immediately vanished upon arrival at the oncology clinic on the fifth floor, which rests securely behind the vast and sterile wasteland of the DMZ - the Dehumanizing Medical Zone.

At the edge of the DMZ, there is no clear waiting area or line; just a sign warning you not to pass, lest you interfere with other patients' protected health conversations. So you wait patiently at the sign, unacknowledged, as four staff members sit at their computers, gossiping blindly amongst themselves. You continue to wait, and wait, and wait. They continue to gossip and mill about. Finally a patient who is not so patient, or perhaps one who doesn't read English (or pretends not to), breezes past you and checks right in with one of the staffers. (Try it yourself and they pummel you, screeching from their guard shacks.)

At long last, after a series of coffee, smoke, and cell phone breaks, they summon you with yawning disdain. You fill out an endless sheaf of Xeroxed forms, identical every time, including a laundry list of symptoms you might have experienced since your last visit. (No, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no....next column...no, no, no...) There were a couple boxes to check if you'd had a biopsy or any lab tests since your last visit. I had started my marathon staging day at Parnassus on Friday, so I figured that section was extraneous. "No," said the receptionist. "You definitely need to write that down." She tucked in a page of pre-printed labels. "505 for the folder, 504 for your labs." "I'm not having labs today," I said gently. "I'm here to see the doctor for my results." "Oh, are you sure?" she sniffed distrustingly. "Yes," I smiled grittily, "we confirmed this on the phone when I made the appointment." "Wait over there."

Having threaded through the snipers, you sit gingerly in a "waiting area", consisting of a thin string of chairs winding around a sharp corner. The chairs are almost all filled. Some come and go quickly; others seem frozen in their chairs, there before you arrived and there after you've gone. It's like the line for visas at the embassy during a war. Sometimes a few words are whispered, and one or two people disappear down a back hallway, never to return. The view behind you is beautiful, breathtaking from your cliffside perch, but the chairs are positioned backs to the windows. Instead, you stare at uniformly tan walls and colorful posters in Spanish for lymphoma support groups.

Aides emerge at times and shout a name, but if you're around the corner, it's hard to hear. About a half hour later, after not responding to a mangled fragment of a last name I didn't recognize as mine, they shouted ever more shrilly until I finally figured it was my turn for vitals. Vitals are taken at every appointment, regardless of type or timing: weight, height, blood pressure, blood oxygen, heartrate, and frame size. Why one's height or frame size changes between appointments is beyond me. Then they tried to shunt me across the hall for bloodwork. "I'm not having labs today," I repeated. "Just go across the hall," they said patronizingly. "I'm just meeting with the doctor." "He will still need labs." "I just had all my staging on Friday. I don't need labs today." And so forth.

By the time you've fought across the DMZ, your originally sunny mood has been replaced by a glowering tornado of anger. I walked into a small treatment room and waited for my doctor. I steeled myself for the possibilities. Advanced Stage IV, incurable with less than six months to live....Would you believe bulky Stage III, with an extended treatment regimen and targeted radiation?...How about a stiff neck and a runny nose?

What the tests revealed, instead, was straightforward and relatively benign: involvement on both sides of my collarbone (left & right) and in my upper chest. Being otherwise asymptomatic, this classified me as Stage II, entailing eight weeks of Stanford V treatment starting Thursday of next week. On Tuesday, I'll have a port installed (a direct line to the blood vessels, obviating the poke and prod of the needle army), necessitating complete sedation, about which I'm none too excited. The sedation, that is.

Appointment request in hand and headed out, the DMZ once again lay before me. It took several minutes of frustrated conversation to communicate to the appointment secretary exactly what I needed. He kept quoting me days and dates that didn't line up. The doctor had very clearly written that I was to return next Thursday. "Ok, I've got you down for the 23rd." "But that's this Friday." "No, in June." "But I'm supposed to start Thursday." "Your doctor isn't free until July." "I don't need to see my doctor." "Cheryl [the nurse practitioner] isn't in next Wednesday." "I'm supposed to come in on Thursday." Too bad a pack of rationed cigarettes doesn't work as a bribe anymore.

It's a good thing I kept my customized body armor.