Back to the grind

Well, it looks like the proposed philosophical streak has disappeared without a trace. I think I may need to be under duress in order to have deep, existential thoughts. I guess that’s good news for those around me –I don’t know about you, but I tend to find deep and existential people annoying most of the time.

Anyway, I had a great time in Michigan (except for the freak snowstorm but of course that’s MI for you) and was happy to discover that I still felt at home there. It’s amazing how little things can change in 6 months, except for some commercial developments that are taking Washtenaw Avenue from appearing like a piece of 1960’s rural Romania transplanted in the Midwest to seeming kind of hip in that Ann Arbor pinhead way, anchored by the gargantuan Whole Foods (man, I had some vegan chocolate mousse again –YUM!). It was also nice to hang around the department of Anthropology and not have to avoid anyone because I still owed them a paper from 3 years ago. But best of all I got to experience the incredible kindness and generosity of my friends –that was really the best part of things being more or less unchanged.

Unfortunately, any relaxing effect of this vacation wore off pretty much instantaneously when I returned to my mother in the hospital for her routine round of chemo and the much needed, but still overwhelming discovery of the source of the problems with her leg of the past couple of months. After much back-and-forth, the doctors settled on diagnosing two metastases in her spine, one of which is destroying a major nerve leading down the leg. This sort of destroyed the previous good news of no new metastasis in her brain. She’s getting 5 rounds of radiation to the lumbar area of her spine, and will try the second of two available chemotherapies.

There are all kinds of things about the diagnostic process she had to go through to even get to this point which piss me off royally*, but mainly I feel completely thrown back to the drawing board in all aspects of my life. All my plans for returning to Scotland for a while seem totally shot, and I’ve started battling time again, guesstimating how much time she may have left and wondering whether now is the point when I should try to find someone in Wyoming to show her how to drive a 16-wheeler, which is one of her dreams, before it’s too late.

I guess if you know someone who drives a 16-wheel-truck in Wyoming (Montana would do too), please let me know!

* follow this link if you want to know the dirty details http://mpip.org/otbb/bbindex.html, post "Can I just vent?" by Ness