further adventures in healthcare

I've been working on pandemic flu plans for eight years or so in various jobs. Now its here. I have to confess to a little thrill initially but now its like the volcano - no good will come out of this. And 2009 H1N1 is complicating my vacation plans and plans to see Springsteen back east and to add to everything

I had a dog walking accident Tuesday night and fell and broke my ankle. (You should have seen the little guys run for their lives.)

So far this doesn't look like a big medical expedition. I dragged myself to bed (whimpering) and called the orthopedic office the next morning. (Never go to the emergency room with a fracture unless its sticking out of the skin. They don't consider it an emergency.) At the office they had me in, x-rayed, and casted in about 20 minutes.

This is a walking cast, but my ankle hurts and moving hurts and I spend part of the work day lying on the office floor with my foot up on the desk trying to get the swelling down.

In ten days I'm supposed to be a plane to New York. If the volcano doesn't blow again. I wonder how this ankle will feel after 12 hours flying time scrunched in that little seat. And I can't drive, so I will have to plot complex train, bus, and plane routes to get where I'm going. And what if Albany is in the throes of influenza and Bruce's show is cancelled and there I am in Albany...

I know, I'm whining.

President Obama

Somewhere around 1968 I despaired of this country. Then in 1972 it seemed everything could change - and it didn't. All these years I've plugged away for fine candidates and (usually) watched my worst nightmares come true. The last eight years the worst of my life as a citizen.

By Inauguration Day I had stopped grieving over Hillary. Suddenly everything I had ever imagined stood in front of me.

I developed a new fascination with the transfer of power. I hadn't heard of the tradition of the outgoing president leaving a handwritten message for the new one (subject of a mean and funny SNL routine last night). I though about the children and longed to see Michelle Obama's inauguration dress in the Smithsonian. I hit the White House website at least twice a day.

Now I wake early to NPR and listen for the good news of the day. Guantanamo closing. No torture, no secret prisons. Abortion gag rule gone, Freedom of Information Act restored. Stem cell research funded. Lily Ledbetter's bill signed (and she danced with the president at the ball). The word "science" said out loud. What will happen tomorrow?

It had never occurred to me that the evils of the Bush administration could be undone.

I read the latest New Yorker, clipped the article about Obama and John Lewis, and tucked it inside my own copy of Taylor Branches' "Parting the Waters".

The latest alumnae bulletin came in the mail and I cried over the image of my fellow Columbia graduate, Barack Obama.

In today's New York Times, Bruce Springsteen spoke about the imagined land he had been singing about for 40 years. "And so on election night it showed its face, for maybe, one of the first times in adult life... I sat there on the couch and my jaw dropped and I went, 'Oh my God, it exists,' Not just dreaming it. It exists, it's there, and if this much of it is there, the rest of it's there. Let's go get that. Let's go get it. Just that is enough to keep you going for the rest of your life. All the songs you wrote are a little truer than they were a month of two ago."

And tonight Bruce and the whole extended E Street Band did an entire Springsteen concert in 12 minutes. Nothing missing. It was aerobic - raised my pulse to 160 in a second and kept it there long after the set ended and the fireworks faded.

Everything is differnet now.

Celebration

I cried all through the Lincoln Memorial concert. The mall looked wonderful. Obama looked wonderful - he looked presidential.

The show was beautifully produced.( Except for some awkward moments with eagles. Those of us who have tried to chase eagles out of the garbage cans are not impressed by their close-ups),

.But everyone (well, almost everyone) on stage dressed in winter going to church clothes or dress uniforms. Smiling. Usher, Will.i.am, Queen Latifah, Herbie Hancock, Beyonce, Stevie Wonder standing so tall, proud, and happy. The choruses - church choirs, military glee clubs, kids. The flags. Bruce and U2. I cried because Pete Seegar has lived to sing "This Land is Your Land" today and because Odetta didn't. I cried remembering my first trip to DC, the antiwar rally in the fall of 69, and walking towards the mall for the first time as Richie Havens sang "Freedom".

And now its forty years later and everything seems possible. I don't think I had ever imagined today. Those forty years seem like a moment standing and shivering under cloudy skies. Today I raise my head and look at the present and the future.

Magic

This is the first time I've heard this through. iTunes, thank god, is on eastern time. I can hardly breath for the thrill.

"You're own worst enemy has come to town"

Today I saw the surgeon - she is young and little and dynamic and I love her. She says this pain under my collarbone and along my sternum is neuropathic and not likely to go away on it's own.

And she disagrees with the oncologist about tamoxofen therapy. She thinks it is important. I said the oncologist says there is no survival advantage with it.

"Survival!' she says. "We can keep you alive, That's no problem." For a second it sounds like a threat. Alive, with painful and debilitating slash/burn/poison, until I die of something else.

"Tonight I'm gonna blow this town town".

I don't do why's either

Last week I was talking to someone I don't know well and hadn't seen for about a year. When I told her about the breast cancer stuff she asked, "Were you surprised?"

That question semed odd to me. "No, not really".

"Did you have a lump? Did you think something was wrong?"

"No, there wasn't a lump and I wasn't expecting anything. I was scared and angry but I wouldn't say I was surprised."

Why would I be surprised? What is unusual about a routine mammogram picking up DCIS in a 53 year old woman? Happens all the time.

I don't seem to have a "why me?" reflex or a need to search for causes and reasons. I was attracted to probability theory and epidemiology because I always suspected that many things were random. Even if there is causation it may be impossible to prove it and hopeless to look for it. I know most human brains are programmed to deny randomness and demand links. Mine isn't. Some of the distance I feel with others is my irritation at this basic quality.

Breast cancer discussion boards (and probably those for other diseases) are dominated by this obsessive search. One website is actually titled "Why me?" Women post on their belief that one food causes breast cancer and another prevents or cures it. One woman announces she is turning to an all raw foods diet, another says she has given up caffeine, sugar, and alcohol "because they make the tumor grow". And of course there is the power of the pink ribbon positivity...

Miriam's version in "Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person" is the only one that made me laugh. "I think I caused breast cancer by eating too much cheese." I eat a lot of cheese too. I'm going to eat more cheese.

I've been watching the "Joan of Arcadia" series on DVD. I never saw it when it aired, but Lorraine and I met the show's producer at the Springsteen symposium two years ago. A very nice family is struggling with life and God starts appearing to the sixteen year old. In human form. As a hunky high school boy, a lunch lady, a four year old girl in pigtails. In many episodes, Joan is asking for answers. God explains, a little impatiently, "I don't do why's."

Again!

The new disc in October, the new tour about the same time. With the whole E Street Band. Rock this time.

How lucky can we be! I remember waiting for Darkness, just hoping for one more album and one more tour. All the nights at Meadowlands when I wondered if there would ever be another show.

Now we are old and the music just keeps coming. This part of the long walk home might be the best.

Thanks Bruce.