In search of bold

This blog isn't for whimps, for some reason my web guys think I should be able to use HTML in writing it. I have nearly mastered paragraphs, at least part of the time, now I am on to the quest for bold text and then who knows, maybe I will try italics, and one day might even try posting a photo.

So you think you have it covered

It's been a while since I have posted about how my friend Linda is doing. The great news is that other than her initial seizure she hasn't had ANY symptoms. She has weathered a series of radiation, two of chemo with one day when she didn't feel like getting out of bed, amazing.

She is nearing the end of her sick leave, and getting serious about decisions around things like long term disability, Medicare disability and COBRA.

A couple of years ago Linda and her husband Bob both left their long-term jobs in Portland (well, Bob actually phased out for a while). Linda had spent 30 years working for the Hillsboro school district and therefore was eligible for Oregon's PERS retirement plan. She is a talented school administrator, and moved to a significant new position at a school district in Washington. The plan was that Bob would manage the major remodel of their new house, and Linda would continue her career.

Then along came the glioblastoma, the absolutely nastiest of all barin tumors

Linda has received outstanding care, and has broken all of the "rules" about how things should progress...and things have gone very well perhaps until now.

I have one, you probably do too, a long term disability insurance policy that we think will replace 60% of our current salary if our worst case scenario rears its ugly head. Well, you should probably read the fine print of yours, I did, and found that if I had something like PERS retirement as part of my current income and ended up on disability, my 60% replacement income would be reduced by the amount of the PERS or other retirement plan. We all hope that the language in Linda's policy is different, but be advised, yours might not be quite what you think.

Meltings Goes Hollywood!

Today a friend from my day job got two of my putters for a fundraiser that she is helping to organize. She plans to use one as an auction item and give the other to the keynote speaker--Ed Asner (AKA Lou Grant). If you happen to see Ed don't tell him and spoil the surprise.

On a more sober note, HTML Master Andrew was disappointed with what I thought was great progress on my paragraph stuff, it seems I still don't quite "get it" to his standard...still trying!

Customer Service

Most Saturdays when the weather permits we play golf. In Oregon that means that from July 4 until Halloween, more often than not we can plan on playing once during the weekend without getting soaked. We try a variety of local courses, but our fall-back is Sandelie, a course in Wilsonville, Oegon that is rarely crowded which means we don't have to plan ahead much, and is also reasonably priced. My game also benefits from the extra roll of the harder than usual fairways. The people in the office are friendly and we can usually play as a twosome without feeling like we are holding things up. Our favorite game finds us finishing walking 18 holes in less than 4 hours, and we can often do it there.

We showed up half an hour early for our game the other day, and not only were we able to get off right away, we were told that because we were "frequent players" the round was free. Why is it that the places where we are treated well on a regular basis also ofter the extra special treatment? We appreciated it, thanks Jana.

She walks

I survived! A few weeks ago I signed up for a continuing education class that would finish my required hours to maintain my physical therapist license for two years. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but when the syllabus and pre-work material for this clinical applications of yoga arrived I had serious doubt about the wisdom of this decision. I worked hard trying to master the required poses, got some, but others still elude me.Class was yesterday, my yoga mat and I arrived 20 minutes early, I was encouraged to see that the instructor was built like a linebacker, how flexible could he be? I walked into our assigned conference room, and saw someone splayed on the floor in a position that could only be replicated by one of those chickens that Alton Brown debones on Food TV, except that she had about 10% of the flesh that Alton's chickens have. How can someone be so flat in that shape? It troubled me to watch.

It turns out that the expectations weren't as high as I had feared, I managed to hold my own. I am in the process of renewing acquaintance with muscles whose names I had forgotten, and apparently whose well-being I had ignored. Quadratus lumborum and serrartus, welcome back to the fold.

So if my six hour yoga class yesterday wasn't enough to assure muscle soreness, we spent the afternoon today working on our rental house. It has been a rental for 26 years now, wow, amazing. We have had a few really bad experiences, but on balance it has been a positive experience. In that time I have learned that when people move out they take the toilet paper (I will never understand why, but now know that they will so, when we go to clean and prepare for new tenants we need to take some with us). Other things that people leave/take is a puzzle. The most recent tenants took the hoses (they moved into an apartment), and left a fire extinguisher, go figure.

It seemed like a good idea at the time In one of my earlier careers, my first actually, I was a physical therapist. While it is highly unlikely that I will practice again, keeping my license to do so is important to me. A couple of years ago Oregon (appropriately) joined the ranks of states that require completion of continuing education for therapist license renewal.

I sift through the stream of brochures of course offerings I receive, looking for things that might have some relevance to my life if not my non-existent practice. A while back I got one about yoga for therapy. I've taken a few yoga classes, and in those on cruise ships in the past few years I have actually felt reasonably competent. OK, so the demographics of cruisers is a bit different than the population at large, and the 30 minute format pretty much limits them to warm up and cool down, or as I now know them Mountain I and Mountain III, I held my own.

As you might have guessed from my new vocabulary about mountains, I signed up for it and started the required pre-reading, finally understanding that this is an audience participation class. There are a host of poses that we are supposed to be able to demonstrate when we arrive at the class, which unfortuantely is Saturday, this Saturday. I can downard dog and child pose with aplomb, but crocodile, eagle and their friend table aren't meant to be done by human bodies. The good news is that my knee and back don't hurt quite as much as they did when I started the adventure. With Saturday just hours away I guess I can play the "but I'm old card", I just don't think it is going to be as fun as I had anticipated.

So maybe it isn't so!

I talked to my friend Linda today, she is undergoing treatment for glioblastoma, the worst of all possible brain tumors. Last week. tests following up after her radiation and initial chemo series showed what seemed to be tumor regrowth, at the rate of doubling monthly. Today Linda got a call from her radiation oncologist who presented Linda's case at a tumor conference today, a meeting where all of the phyicians at a given hospital gather and review the facts of a case and debate the plan of treatment and their assessment of the status of the case. The docs attending all agreed that the plan of treatment--big time chemo beginning Thursday, but had significant disagreement about what last week's scans showed! While some thought that there might be tumor regrowth, others thought that the images they saw could well be scar tissue, blood and debris from radiation filling the space where the original tumors were removed--NOT TUMOR REGROWTH. I'm going with that thought.

Crow Congress

This afternoon we heard a cacaphony of crows. They were assembling in a stand of firs in a neighbors yard. By the time they had all assembled there were well over 100 of them. 100 crows can make a lot of noise.

Arrival of this many crows is pretty scary, some of them are really smart. We saw a TV show about a crow that, faced with a bottle holding a wire basket that contained meat was able to bend a wire to form a hook and use it to pull the basket out of the bottle...and teach another crow how to do it. Apparently there was an article in the Oregonian recently that detailed another amazing crow stunt that I missed.

Makes me wonder what they are planning for our neighborhood

@#!%&$%$!

My friend Linda called me this afternoon. She has been undergoing treatment for the world's worst type of brain tumor for the past 3 months. She had follow-up scans yesterday and today after six weeks of radiation and chemo longer than that. Yesterday's results were inconclulsive so today she had a spect scan as the arbiter. Her tumor is re-growing, they think doubling in size monthly. Monday she will have a port inserted and begin heavy duty chemo on Thursday. Her oncologist is optomistic. @#$&^%$#!@

That's all I have to say.