Today is my birthday.
I am 37 years of age, almost exactly. My birth certificate lists 3:52 PM as my time of birth.
That’s 13,514 days, 444 months (if you join the first and current months), about 325,000 hours, almost 20 million minutes, and more than a billion seconds: back around again to a season of penetrating chill, stark sun and shadow, ever-barren trees and oppressive boredom. If my old life had continued, I’d be sizing up my fourth decade, likely with disappointment.
Today is Thursday. I went to work this morning, as expected, though I felt ill. I finished the fifth day of Temodar on Tuesday, but its effects lingered. I felt fragile and disoriented, with a thin film of nausea sealing my appetite.
I planned to wrap up and go home early, but as I gauged my state of being I realized I felt better: stable and more alert. The fog lifted. I sipped my coffee and stayed.
I remembered a similar course of events occurring a year ago, while my brain tumor was growing, unknown to me. In the mid-afternoon I began to feel ill. It was not an “I need more coffee” kind of fatigue, but a penetrating malaise. My bouts with the flu had started this way. I expected aches and pains to follow, and resolved to leave early (spoiling my strictly regimented work schedule). By the time I finished writing an explanation to my boss, I felt better. I felt strangely better, as if I had never been ill. The ill feeling had simply vanished. I worked the remainder of the day.
Deja vu all over again? It’s hard to separate the effects of the treatment (Temodar) from the effects of the illness (brain cancer). Perhaps in the far future we’ll score this state of medicine as barely less barbaric than mercury tonic and bloodletting.
I’m more alert now to the tingling in my right foot — which still hasn’t worsened since it almost completely healed post-surgery — and the other familiar markers: trouble with balance, poor peripheral vision on the left, the failure of my touch-typing instinct, and brief but painful headaches when standing up.
So far, so good. But it’s still only February, and it didn’t take long for my life to fall apart last year as spring unfolded.
I ordered two windsurfing sails today, marked down nicely: a 6.0 meter and a 9.5 meter to complement my 7.5 and handle a broad range of wind conditions. Of course, the windsurfing season is yet three or four months away. The glorious thrill of sailing the bay is hard to ignore, though. I can pack my gear and roll it down to the landing and be on the water in minutes, fiercely alive, cozy as a seal in 7 mm of neoprene, taming wind and churning a bubbling wake and going away, away, away, a speck in the vast blue field.
I considered asking the salesman (a soft-spoken guy at a family sporting goods store) to hold my order for a week, until I get the results of my next MRI. How can I explain it?
If this MRI is bad news then I’ll probably be down or dead for the summer, so…
I didn’t have the nerve. I didn’t want to admit I thought it was possible.
I hung up the phone and joined my wife, son, sister and brother-in-law in the kitchen, where they sang Happy Birthday before a candlelit cake. For the first time in many, many years, I was delighted to welcome a new year of life. The specter of failure broke down into harmless bits of never and floated away. Someone said “Make a wish!” and I leaned in and thought “One more year!” and blew out the candles, and smiled.