The prospect of one-finger typing—along with demanding days at M.D. Anderson and sixteen-plus hours on the road—have kept me away from blogging for a few days. Finally, well into this bright Sunday afternoon, I am fulfilling my self-imposed obligation. The last appointment of my most recent visit to MDA revealed my platelet count was just one “point” beyond the cut-off eligibility for continued participation in the clinical trial. If my platelet count slips just a single point, my participation in the study will be terminated. So, following the advice of the nurse who gave me the news, I am eating foods that “may” increase my platelet count. Those foods include papaya, one of my favor fruits, and lean red meat. When she heard the news, my very helpful sister-in-law ventured out to find an enormous papaya. It was waiting for us on our return, along with some other delightful fruits. And she picked up Phaedra from the temporary imprisonment facility where we left the beast. She delivered Phaedra back home, where the cat was waiting to demonstrate her skills at clawing throw rugs, even after having had her nails trimmed. Our stay at home will be quite brief, which will be the case for each of the next few weeks. Including driving to and from Houston, most days will be spent in connection with the clinical trial. Lots of 8-hour trips…but we’ve decided to split them in two and spend the night half way there and back, plus two or three nights in Houston, where they schedule my days to begin at 7:00 a.m. Our timing of arrival and departure has allowed us to avoid the worst of Houston’s traffic, so far; knock on wood that the good fortune continues.
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Because measles vaccinations do more damage to children than do crocodiles to penguins in the Arctic, measles vaccinations should be optional. That’s the kind of logic that supports two things: requiring measles vaccinations and; mandatory parental licensure.
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Last night, I had a long and puzzling dream; far too tangled to enable me to recap. But I remember parts of it quite clearly: 1) receiving a large, square-shaped piece of artistic molded glass—a gift from a friend during a theatrical festival in Fort Worth, Texas; 2) waking home, lugging the glass gift, from the festival…but in Chicago; 3) being mugged, twice, first by a single felonious criminal and second by a gang of five bullies/gangsters; 3) finally convincing the gang not to beat me senseless, after telling the first criminal he was weak and stupid for trying to show his strength by beating up a 71-year-old geezer; 4) sitting in the roof-top lobby of the apartment building I once occupied in Chicago (but the lobby was not on the roof at the time), explaining what had happed to me to a group of elderly women who had been on a Lake Michigan Cruise; and 5) asking one of the women to call my family to pick me up. That’s the straightforward part. The rest is convoluted in the extreme. It included my oldest brother, who had come to retrieve me, denying to the women that his year in India had anything to do with his dismissal of religion. Somewhere else in the dream I was with a friend and a friend of his; we were touring a hospital. The friend of my friend worked there. He opened a door into an operating room, but quickly closed it because it was in use. An angry surgery ran out of the room and down to a valve in the wall, which he turned to restart the flow of oxygen. He then said all hospital staff receive email notifications when each specific operating room was in use. The notification system had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said. I suggested it might be cheaper and more reliable to simply hand a notice on the outside of operating room doors when in use, saying “DO NOT ENTER: SURGERY IN PROGRESS.” The sequence of events was mixed up. I was mixed up, too.
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The wind is tearing at trees as if they were enemies. The only way to “see” wind from inside the house is to watch trees bend to its force. One can feel the physical force of wind by stepping outside into it. And one can infer that wind is the cause of the horizontal motion of dust scraps of paper and other such light-weight matter—so, I suppose that is similar to “seeing” wind by watching trees bend. Claims of precision sometimes are misleading.
