Expanding My Horizons, Literally

On Friday I picked up my new pair of prescription glasses.  I’m gradually working up to wearing them all day.  There’s a noticeable difference in how well I can see with them on.

They’re tinted, which cuts down on glare inside as well as outside.  My eyes are just that sensitive to glare.  A couple of years ago, I started wearing sunglasses when using the computer.  I’ll probably have to continue doing that, because the new glasses are bifocal and the line is right where I look when I’m writing.  That’s OK, I use Zoomtext, a magnifier program, and would still need it even with the glasses.

Yes, even with correction, I still can’t see normal.  But, I can see better than I have in eight years.  I’m starting to walk with a little more confidence.  It’s easier to read numbers on my cell phone.  Who knows?  Maybe I’ll even get to start using the address book instead of keeping phone numbers in my head.  A little less clutter in there would be a good thing.

The little bubble of isolation I’ve lived in since 2003 has grown larger, encompassing people at a greater distance.  I can see faces, expressions, and recognize people that last week would have been beyond the veil of blurriness I’ve come to know and despise.  Social situations have sometimes been painful and awkward for me since my vision unexpectedly worsened in 2003.  It’s just harder to connect with people when you can’t make eye contact at a distance more than two or three feet.  It has made me feel alone in a crowd more often than I care to think about.

Several times today, I lowered the glasses just enough to peer over them, to measure the difference in what I can see.  My vision isn’t quite at the pre-2003 level, but it’s improved. 

So, this marks a new era in the never-ending, constantly-changing saga of Jim’s Vision.  Now, I’ll spend the next several weeks (or months) getting accustomed, once again, to a different level of eyesight.  This time, it’s an improvement, so the adjustment period will be full of positive discoveries and surprises.

I always love it when my world expands.

Next on the ‘to do’ list: shopping for a car and planning that cross-country road trip to the west coast.

Just kidding. J

A Bittersweet Symphony--That's Life

A few minutes ago, I was brought back to peace by a song I heard on Pandora.  In my book, I mention several times when I heard a song at a low point in my life and it turned me around or even lifted me up.  Maybe I should make a playlist on my computer of all the Top 40/Pop/Rock songs that have inspired me or spoken to me in a meaningful way.

It’s been a tough week.  That’s why I’m a bit late in making a post.  On Monday, I had a much-anticipated appointment with an eye surgeon about a fairly new procedure that would implant a lens into my right eye, the one that was severely injured eighteen months ago.  At the initial exam a couple of weeks ago, an assistant held something in front of my eye and I could read the 20/100 line.

I know that doesn’t sound very good to most people, but that’s better than that eye has seen in almost twenty years.  My hopes soared, in spite of the little voice in my head warning me not to get my expectations too high.

The surgeon had serious doubts that the procedure would help and that there was a high risk of it failing bad enough to lose all the sight in that eye.  He looked into my eye and described the damage that occurred in 2003, when my vision got much worse.  It reminded me, once again, of how much easier my life had been before then, even with 20/200 vision.  It was easy to walk around, recognize faces, read, and so much more.  Most people couldn't tell just by observing me that I had any vision problem at all.

Since 2003, I have to struggle on a daily basis.  Now and then, the struggle just gets to be too much.  I let my mind travel to dark places, like despair.  As much as I have to deal with, I give myself permission to go there when the circumstances lead me there.  But it’s a temporary visa, with a very short expiration date.  “You don’t have to go home (the status quo) but you can’t stay here.”

The doctor wants me to try a pair of glasses that will help my vision.  I have mixed feeling about this.  Until I was about fourteen, I wore Coke bottle thick glasses due to being severely nearsighted.  Without correction, my vision was much worse than what I have now.  But, kids can be cruel, and they were.  I was relieved to finally get contacts and the ugly duckling story became a part of my biography.

The glasses I’m going to get won’t be nearly as thick as those monstrosities I wore in the 1970s.  And they’ll be tinted.  When I used the lenses in the doctor’s office, I could see faces at more of a distance.  That alone is reason enough to try them.

My spirits have gradually refilled with helium this week, slowly rising, defying the heavy gravity weighing them down earlier.

And today, I heard a song from the late 90s.  I liked it well enough at the time it was a hit, but didn’t pay particular attention to it.  In 2000, I caught the movie Cruel Intentions on HBO.  It’s basically the same plot as Dangerous Liaisons but set in a modern-day New York prep school. 

Spoiler alert: At the end of the movie, the good character, who was the intended victim of two mean characters, is triumphant.  Not only is she unscathed, but happy, and best of all—at peace.  In the final scene she's driving away, suggesting she's leaving all the pain behind her.  The song Bittersweet Symphony is playing.  Since then, whenever I hear it, it makes me think of good overcoming evil, or the peace that comes after overcoming anything bad.  I hope you listen to it and remember it when you’re on your way to recovering from one of life’s tough spots.

I haven't given up on the notion of some medical procedure improving my vision one day.  That day just hasn't arrived--yet.  But I have faith that it will happen.  Something good will happen and I'll triumph over the loss.  Until then, I can still be at peace.

For Dad

Sometimes I wonder if I would have become a writer without my father’s influence in my life.  I certainly wouldn’t have developed the skill and desire to read at the level or quantity that I do.  When I was seven, my dad read Tom Sawyer to me every night after supper.  Second-graders didn’t have much homework in those days.  It’s a nice early memory I have of him.

Now that he’s retired, he has time to read several books a month.  He also refinishes antiques, paints houses, and keeps an immaculately landscaped lawn.  Did his joy of working with his hands contribute to my artistic ability?  Hard to say for sure, but that craftsman’s eye influenced me for sure.

One reason why I write humor is because I inherited the smartass gene from him.  From what I’ve gathered, I come from a long line of them.  From Dad I get the ability to find the humor in almost any situation.  That’s a trait that has served me well in dealing with vision loss, failed kidneys, organ transplants, cancer, and hundreds of less serious situations I’ve faced in my life.

This past winter—one of the coldest on record—my dad had his hair cut to a very short buzz cut after chemotherapy caused most of my hair to fall out.  It showed me that I wasn’t going through it alone.  Not that I had any doubts of both my parents’ love and support through that crisis.  I ended up staying with them for several weeks because I was just too frail to be on my own.

I took over the recliner in the den—“his” chair—though he’s never been as territorial about it as Archie Bunker was.  It’s where he reads, watches TV, and naps (sometimes all at the same time).  But, it was the only piece of furniture in the den I was comfortable sitting in for any length of time, even sleeping there when congestion from a never-ending cold kept me from sleeping in bed.

He shared it willingly, never complaining, and kept the fireplace next to it roaring and stocked with extra wood on the coldest days. 

And when I’d gotten so weak I could barely walk, Dad literally caught me when I fell. 

The most impressive accomplishment of his took place over several decades.  He worked, supported his family, didn’t drink too much, and made sure my brother and I had a stable environment while growing up.  Those are all things he wasn’t fortunate enough to  have as a kid.  When it comes to fathers, mine did a much better job than the one he had. 

Somehow, he gave us so much more than he was ever given—but not too much.  He taught me that I couldn’t expect the world to just hand me everything I wanted, that I would have to work for what I wanted out of life.  So, when the health problems began, I’d already experienced enough hard to work to keep trying, no matter how much of a struggle it might be.

Thanks, Dad, for being part hardass and part smartass.

Surviving Youth

Today it’s been 10 years since my friend Joe was killed in a motorcycle accident.  It’s so hard to believe it’s been an entire decade.  In that time, 9/11, two wars, a severe recession, a devastating oil spill, and a bunch of other things—good, bad, and mediocre—have occurred.  I guess if there was a decade to miss out on, that would have been the one to pick.

But, of course, he didn’t get to pick.  No one does.  He was the image of health and had only been married less than a year.  He’d turned 30 a month before.  He had every reason to stick around.  A collision with a pickup truck on a rural highway killed him instantly.  I still remember that punched-in-the-gut feeling I had when I found out.  Of all the people I knew, Joe was the last one I would have predicted death at an early age.

He had a positive attitude.  We would work out together and at the start would say, “Tell me something good.”  Sometimes I had to think for a minute, but Joe could always name half a dozen right off the top of his head.  I learned a lot from him—about the right kind of attitude as well as how to lift weights to my best advantage.  A positive influence like that leaves a huge hole in your soul when it’s suddenly taken away.

In last ten years, I’ve had a kidney transplant and cancer.  There have been a few other non-life-threatening health issues mixed in with all that as well, including emergency surgery to save a badly-damaged eye.  But I’m still here.  The randomness of survival boggles my mind, even at my age.  I guess it always will.

A few years before Joe died, a buddy from high school was murdered at a fast food restaurant where he was a manager, closing up at the end of the day.  Someone cut his throat so deep it nearly severed his head.  But he survived a few more days and required dozens of units of blood. 

My first experience with death of a friend near my age was in 1985.  My friend, Terrance, was killed in a car accident.  He was riding with one of his fraternity brothers after a party.  They were drunk.  It was his 24^th birthday.  And it happened only two weeks after my grandfather died, so for me, it was an extra layer of death.  But, my grandfather was 70 and had fought cancer for six months.  It was expected.  Someone told me Terrance had been killed over the weekend while some of us stood in the hall at the U of A before class started.  I just walked away and wandered around campus for a while, not able to think.

It’s hard to imagine Terrance at nearly 50 years old.  I’ve known others who died at a younger age than I am now.  They’re in suspended animation.  One will always be 36, another 39. 

Yet here I am, in spite of the odds.  I’ve been told more than once, “You’ve already dealt with more than most people do in a lifetime.”  I think they mean an average lifetime lasting 75 years or so.

What is it that causes males to check out early?  At conception, more than half of all fetuses are male.  From then on, males die at a higher rate than females.  Maybe testosterone makes us crave danger and leads us into all kinds of risky behaviors.  Being male means dodging bullets—literally and metaphorically—while watching our buddies run out of luck.

My luck has held out longer than I thought it would.  I wish I could have shared that luck with all of my friends.  Here I sit, in middle age with surgery scars I wear like medals of battles won.  Those friends I mentioned will always be young in my mind, because youth wasn’t something they survived. 

Funny thing about youth is we rush through it, sometimes so recklessly some of us don’t survive it.  Then it wears off and we’re wiser and more cautious.  We wish for the chance to be young again, knowing that if we experienced it a second time, we might not live to see the end of it.

Austin Revisited

Twenty years ago this week, I started a new job in Austin.  There was only a 3% vacancy rate on rental property at the time, so I had to stay with my friend Randy and his roommate, Peggy, until I found an apartment.  They lived in a small house near the airport.  Every day, dozens of jets flew over, making the whole place vibrate.  Conversations were put on hold.  Parts of TV shows went unheard.

After weeks of looking every afternoon after work, I finally found a nice place not far from downtown and the Colorado River, which dissects the city on the southern edge of downtown.  The tall buildings were reflected in the water.  To get to work, I took

Riverside Drive

to the western part of town, got on a highway, and then off at

Bee Caves Road

, where I worked.  I thought that was an interesting name for a city street and wondered where the caves full of bees were.

My job was sales representative for the Kinko’s in that part of town.  It was one of five in the city.  At the time, Kinko’s was moving from the college market toward a business-based clientele.  I called on businesses in the southwestern part of Austin, which is where the Texas Hill Country begins. 

I was doing outside sales (again), living in a funky, offbeat college town (again), and best of all, I was in the hills again (though not as green as the Ozarks).  I felt right at home.  It was like Fayetteville, but with all the big city amenities.  I was moving there from Dallas, so that was important.  And after living in Big D, Austin seemed quaint and small by comparison.

Austin and I have been through major changes since then.

Years earlier, Austin had been described to me as a “bigger version of Fayetteville.”  That turned out to be quite accurate—even down to how the city was laid out.  The downtown was closer to the southern—and less affluent--end of town, a street running east-west lined with bars, restaurants, and shops connected downtown to the university campus.  A bypass highway looped around the west side of town.  Farther to the west was a lake, just a few miles out of town. 

In May, I had used my employee flight privileges with Southwest Airlines to fly to Austin from Dallas.  It was only a 45-minute flight, but a three-hour drive.  I wanted to be fresh for the job interview and didn’t want to get up at the crack of dawn and risk truck troubles on the way there.

It would be an understatement to say I was optimistic.  It was a base-plus-commission salary, which meant unlimited income and even at the minimum it was more than I was making at Southwest.  I was excited about living in a more laid-back, offbeat place that reminded me of where I spent most of my childhood. 

At the airport, I rented a car.  I don’t remember the make and model.  I do remember it was nice, newer, and cleaner than my truck.  The stereo sounded good, too.  As I pulled out of the airport, I heard a new song by Lenny Kravitz for the first time.  “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmENMZFUU_0)  And I I thought.  Over?  This is a new beginning.  I’ll get this job.  I’m meant to be here.

They called and offered me the job on my birthday, which was on a Friday.  “Can you start on Monday?”  I told them I could, without knowing how I was going to pull it off.  But, just like I have a tendency to do, I found a way.

While staying at Randy’s those first few weeks, my route to and from work took me past The Texas School for the Blind.  More than once, I patiently waited while teachers helped blind kids cross the street and I felt grateful for not having to grow up blind.

After living in expensive Dallas and making dismally low wages, I was in credit card debt up to my nearsighted eyeballs.  But, I was full of optimism.  My life was on an upswing.  Driving around town, calling on accounts, I often heard a song by the Divinyls titled “Make out Alright.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG8ZhzJteFY)  It could have been my theme song. 

Barely a month into my new life, I learned that my kidneys were failing.  I’d known something was wrong because of all the edema (swelling) in my feet, which gradually moved higher until I looked like an overweight guy from the waist down, and a skinny guy from the waist up.  It hurt to walk (more like waddle), but I persevered.

A thin but comfortable layer of denial allowed me to keep from panicking, hundreds of miles from my family and without health insurance until I had worked for Kinko’s three months.  A song by a new artist named Seal titled “Crazy” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgxpDgSjxkA) gave me a valuable piece of advice.  “We’re never gonna survive unless we go a little crazy.”

To get rid of the edema, the doctor put me on strong diuretics, which made me tired.  The intense summer heat central Texas drained me ever further.  My sales—and income—increased, but I really pushed myself to make it happen.  The easier life I expected wasn’t happening.  Every day, I hid my terror and called on businesses in my territory with polished fake confidence.

I also noticed traffic signals didn’t look as clear as they should have.  For years, my contact lenses wore out and had to be replaced every September.  With money being tight, I told myself I could wait until then if it didn’t get much worse.  It had gotten a little worse.  I discreetly used the copy machines at Kinko’s to enlarge business cards and other printed material I couldn’t quite see well enough to read.

September rolled around and the eye doctor sent me to a retina specialist, who injected yellow dye into a vein and photographed the veins in back of my eyes.  I went home with skin temporarily stained yellow and worried all weekend.  The diabetes had already damaged my kidneys.  Now it looked like it might have hurt my eyes, too.

The following Wednesday, they called me at work.  “You have retinopathy.  If you don’t have laser surgery soon, you could lose all of your vision.”

Even though I was halfway expecting it, it was still a big jolt.  I ran out of my office, jumped in my truck, and drove home to break the news to my parents.  It was time to stop pretending everything was OK.  We decided I would move back to Arkansas and stay with them while I endured whatever was going to be done to save my sight.

On my way home from work one afternoon with the radio on (as usual), I heard a song by a heavy metal band for the first time—“Silent Lucidity” by Queensryche. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LniY0pDQGaE)  It was soothing, like it was just for me, with lyrics like “If you open your mind to me, you won’t rely on open eyes to see.”  The main message of the song was about someone or something watching over you, protecting you in the night.  I guess you could say it was a “God Moment.”  It gave me the first bit of peace I’d known in several weeks.  I had been so distracted listening to the song, I looked up and noticed the light was green.  When had it changed?  The driver behind me never honked their horn, and for that I was grateful.  I continued on my way, trying to concentrate on my driving and the lyrics of the song.

I had a sale and sold most of my furniture and some other things I didn’t need anymore.  My time in Austin had only lasted four months and I hadn’t felt well enough to get to know the place like I wanted.  I knew I had found the place I wanted to stay, even if I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.  In a city like Austin, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I felt defeated, that so much was left undone.  There are still times when I wonder what my life would have been like if my health had held up and I stayed in Austin.   

Happy Birthday to Me--And All the Other Survivors

I rarely call much attention to my own birthday, especially since I passed 40 so long ago it’s almost disappeared from my rearview mirror.  If you count the two transplant surgeries, I get to celebrate three birthdays a year.  Unlike the original one, I can remember those two. 

But, this year is different. 

Last year, my birthday landed on Memorial Day.  It’s something that happens every few years.  It’s a bit surreal having a birthday that occasionally lines up with a roaming holiday like Memorial Day, Labor Day, or Thanksgiving.  At the end of May, cold and flu season is long over.  You don’t have to worry about being sick on your special day.  But, last year, there was some kind of bug going around and I coughed and sneezed all weekend.  I wondered if it was some kind of omen about the year to come.

It turns out that it was.

In the late fall, I was diagnosed with cancer.  It was a highly curable form of it, but it was cancer just the same.  That meant chemotherapy and all the nasty side effects that go with it.  By the time I had been at it for nine weeks, I was cured.  The word that keeps coming to my mind is ‘intense.’  It was a relatively brief encounter with The Big C, but it left me reeling for a few months afterward.

Last winter, I spent a lot of time watching TV.  Beside sleeping and checking e-mail once in a while, it was the only thing I felt like doing.  I saw a commercial in which a woman sang “Happy Birthday” and said it was for everyone who had survived cancer to celebrate another birthday.  First of all, it was nice to see a commercial where no one was trying to sell me anything.  It was a relief to see one that wasn’t so weird and vague that I was left wondering just what the message was.  And it was really special to be honored in such a way.

That commercial was months early for me, but I had faith that I would live to mark another year.  I’ve always loved having a birthday this time of year.  It was always during those first, sweet days of summer vacation from school.  It put the period (sometimes the exclamation mark) at the end of the school year.  Move on to the next grade, then turn a year older.

I share a birthday (May 31^st) with celebrities Clint Eastwood, Joe Namath, Brooke Shields, and writer Walt Whitman.  Now, there’s a mixed bag!

This year, I share the celebration with everyone who has beat cancer and those living with it that made it through another year.  After cancer, life just doesn’t look the same.  We’re part of the same tribe now.  We have a bond.

You know what they say about getting older—it beats the alternative.

I belong to a few other tribes who know this fact better than most people do.  There are the others who had a kidney/pancreas transplant.  There are those who had another type of transplant.  There are the diabetics—that includes the current and former ones (like me).

This birthday will be especially sweet.  The cancer was timed well in my case.  I get to look and feel like myself again on that day.  I’m a year older, but thanks to the cancer, I’m “new and improved” in many ways.  Once you’ve dealt with cancer, everything else seems pretty easy.

And so, to all of us who have survived something intense, whether it was health-related, a natural disaster, or something caused by the malice or carelessness of another—Happy Birthday.  Not matter what day it is.

Hair and Now

Most of the hair on my head fell out a couple of weeks after starting chemotherapy.  There was a short, thin swath down the middle that stubbornly held on.  Otherwise, it was gone.  And it was during the coldest time of the year, too.  I never fully realized just how much even a short haircut kept my head warm.

My last chemo treatment was January 25^th.  About six weeks later, the first sprouts of peach fuzz appeared on the bare part of my once thickly-covered scalp.  Around that time, I shaved again for the first time in three months.  Life was reappearing on my face and head, though tentative and tender.

The weeks passed and I concentrated on regaining lost weight and strength.  My appetite returned, clearing the way for more energy and stamina.  All the while, the hair on my head slowly and quietly increased.  It was barely noticeable for several days.

When it finally grew long enough to really feel it, I discovered my hair was softer than I could remember it ever being before.  Gradually, it grew longer and thicker, but stayed just as soft.

Friends who hadn’t seen me in several weeks remarked on it.  “Your hair is back!”

“It sure is.  And feel that.”  I then removed the ball cap I wear most of the time and bowed my head, offering my newly-carpeted dome for inspection.  Normally, I don’t much like people touching my hair, even though it’s too short to mess up.  Now, it was a trophy of my survival.  It not only hadn’t grown in dark and coarse (as other cancer survivors had warned me it would), it was like velvet.  At first, a little lighter in color than before, but quickly it returned to the shade of light brown it has been for the last ten years or so.

For the past several years, I’ve kept my hair short—in a “buzz cut” or crew cut.  I bought some electric clippers with different sized guards and started cutting my own hair.  At that short length, even a visually impaired guy can get it right.  Part of my choice of hairstyle is that I have a problem a lot of men (and some women) would love to have.  I have too much hair on my head.  If I don’t keep it short, it’s hard to keep my scalp clean or rinse out all the shampoo.  I’ve got a whole bunch of hair.  My recent temporary hair loss was a rare opportunity for me to see how the “other half” lives.  I came away from the experience with a better understanding of what it’s like for guys who lose their hair from natural causes.

I’ve put off cutting my hair again as long as possible out of concern that the fresh, post-cancer hair which bravely repopulated my head was a one-time shot.  If I cut it, would those baby-soft locks be history?  After trying to ignore the hair tickling the tops of my ears as long as I could, I broke down and cut it today.

What’s left isn’t any softer than what I had last year.  I looked at the soft tufts of hair in the sink and felt sentimental.  Realizing I’ll only have that velvety post-chemo hair once (I hope), I scooped up some of it and put it in a small plastic container.  Maybe it sounds weird to anyone who hasn’t had cancer—and maybe it sounds weird to some who have.  Or maybe it’s a “blind thing.”  But, I want a tactile reminder of those early days in the recovery, when my body gradually returned to normal.  That tender hair was as tender as my body and my overall health were.  When I put my hand on it and felt how soft it was, it seemed to be saying, “Hey, I’m back!  And I’m even better than before.”

That’s exactly how I feel about every aspect of my life since the cancer: even better than before.  And just in case I forget, I have a little reminder I can run my fingers through.