We had five minutes to make the trip which normally takes about 15 minutes. LoveGirl hollered out from the garage, "Are you coming?!? What are you wearing?! It's really cold out. You can't wear short pants! Throw on jeans. You gotta hurry! We're late!"

Since I'm fully trained and fairly compliant, I quickly absorbed the gist of this intense verbal direction from a spouse and meekly turned and ran upstairs to change. And that's when my brain momentarily locked up. Instead of taking off my sneakers, I just dropped the shorts and grabbed the jeans. The last coherent thought that I can recall was something to the effect of  "Hey, I can save time and just pull the jeans over the sneakers!"

Her: "Are you coming?!"

Me: "Uhhh....this is really, really bad, but I need you to come upstairs."

Her: "What?!? Why?!?"

Me: "Ok...this is so bad that I'm telling you now, before you get up here. Just come up. I need a little help."

I can't imagine what went through her mind when she saw the tangled pretzel-like immobile mess that only moments before had been identifiable as a relatively normal functioning husband.  I've never before heard that nearly inhuman sound she started making -- a combination laugh, snort, gasp for air and groan -- while scrunched up trying not to have a #1 accident on the carpet. I'm pretty sure there were tears too.

Me: "Sweetie, I know this is hysterical, but do you think you could give me hand?"

Her: "Hold on, I can't breath"

Eventually, she went hunting for scissors or garden shears because there was simply no way to get the pant leg over the shoe. What we had is what you would call permanent jeans over sneakers lockdown. Can't pull 'em up, can't pull 'em down. Nothing. No movement regardless of direction of pull. 

Even with semi-professional cutting tools on the scene, the shoe was so wedged inside the leg of the jeans that there was not enough room to jam the scissors in place to make a cut.

Me: "This is unbelievable. We may have to call 911 for the Jaws of Life."

Her: "How did you get these so tight!?!"

Me: "I honestly don't know. I was just pulling the jeans on and suddenly everything just clamped down."

Her: "I'm afraid you're going to lose the foot!"

Me: "*Good grief. Even little kids know better than to try this."

So...we ended up voting to shred my Levi's after which the evil pant leg finally succumbed and released the iron grip on my shoe. 

I should probably post a picture and someday I may, but right now, it's all just too much. I need to lie down.

~~~~~

* I didn't actually say "good grief," but since this is a family blog, it's close enough.

While sorting through my mother's picture boxes, I found this one of my sister Joni and I with Mom & Dad. I think we were visiting Marineland. I'm not sure why we are the only people in the stands, but I suspect that it has something to do with the point of this post.

If you know anything of our family history then you know the title is intended to be tongue-in-cheek. Other than occasionally wearing cool sunglasses (by today's standards), we were not what you would call a hip family. We didn't have a TV, did not listen to popular music or go to movies. I never knew what any of the other kids in school were talking about. I didn't even hear my first Beatles song until 1970 -- just after they had broken up. (My fifth grade teacher took pity on me after I admitted not knowing what the Beatles were and she let me listen to Revolution on side four of The White Album in the back of the class through headphones. I was enthralled.)

Much of our childhood time was spent in some part of a half-dozen different church facilities (basements, social halls, etc.) where the preacher's kids were allowed to run and play while my folks attended to one function or another. Or we were cutting up in the front pew during a service as my mother fired laser-like You-Are-Dead-Meat stares at us while she was playing the organ. (She was an early multi-tasker). We must have sensed there was a larger world outside of our little bubble, but we were oblivious to it.

Since then, whenever I've read about the social upheaval and political turmoil of that tumultuous decade, it's hard to believe that I was even alive at the time.

~~~~

Update: After I posted this, I asked Barb when she heard her first Beatles song. She thinks it was I Wanna Hold Your Hand in 1964 -- a full six years ahead of me! She says they came home from church and her older brother was watching them play on The Ed Sullivan Show on TV. Her mom watched a little and began to cry because she thought they must have been on drugs to perform like that.

At least her family had a TV.

Let me just say this right up front:

We love our hospice nurses. No scrap that. We love nurses. Period.

They are some of the kindest and most caring people on this planet. When everyone else is standing around getting grossed out by some perfectly natural problem (pick from the big four: pee, poop, puke or blood), nurses jump in and take care of it without hesitation or complaint.

But they are still human beings and if they've been nursing for any decent amount of time, they've almost certainly developed a treatment preference or two about which they feel rather strongly.

One such preference we've noticed is that hospice RNs seem to fall evenly into two groups: those who are pro-powder and those who are pro-cream. We've yet to meet one that likes both equally. Since hospice protocols are more flexible than in other clinical settings, nurses have more freedom to implement their personal preferences in some situations -- like the skin problems which plague pretty much all hospice patients.

And probably due to nothing more than random coincidence, we occasionally seem to be assigned our nurse from the opposing camp of whichever nurse visited the prior day. So, if we're cream positive on Monday, you can bet we'll be powdering it up on Tuesday.

Powder Nurse: Oh dear, who put this cream on her?

Me: The RN who visited yesterday.

Powder Nurse: Well, it needs air and we can't see the skin. Let's get all this cream off.

Me: <sigh>Okay.

Powder Nurse: Then we'll put some powder on it to keep it dry.

Me: I thought you might say that.

The next day, we might follow with this:

Cream Nurse: Oh dear, there is powder everywhere. Did you put this on?

Me: Nope. That would be yesterday's nurse.

Cream Nurse: Well, I think the powder gets in all the cracks of the skin and gets wet and clumpy. Let's get it all off and get everything clean.

Me: <sigh>Okay.

Cream Nurse: Now that it's all clean, we need to protect the skin so we'll put some cream on.

<long pause>

Me: It's funny how the hospice nurses seem to go back and forth on this issue of cream and powder.

Cream Nurse: Really?! I never noticed. That is funny. I guess there are some who still like the powder, but it seems kind of old-school to me.

Me: Yeah, that's what they said about the creamers too.

In the end, each camp shares the common desire to start with a clean slate and then apply what their experience has taught them is most likely to produce the best outcome. Their only real problem is a smart-aleck family member who likes to make unnecessary and unhelpful remarks and then write about it in his blog.

Update 1: Our nurse today asked what I call the pro-powder nurses if the pro-cream nurses are called creamers. Let's go with Powderinas.

Update 2: Someone made a good point. A male nurse would be a powderino.

As with many of our nurses, we got off to a somewhat bumpy start with Nurse X.

We've learned over the year that the biggest two words in a hospital are "shift" and "change". That first hour on the new shift can be rough on everybody while some poor soul tries to get up to speed quickly and accurately on a whole bunch of very sick and needy patients and all the important events of the previous twelve hours. It's a little like trying to jump in and drive a new car for the first time while it's moving.

Sometimes, you think, "wow, this nurse is the worst ever" and then a few hours later, the seas calm, kindnesses are shared and presto...everyone bonds!

Anyway, on this shift, a nurse we were really struggling to appreciate heard that Steph was pursuing nursing school and immediately offered to let her practice removing an IV from her grandma's arm. Of course, Steph was ecstatic. Her grandmother was bemused by the ensuing scene (she's just too weak to get riled by much these days). Mom and Dad (us) were a little nervous, but thrilled she could gain her first IV experience in a such a memorable and meaningful way.

She did just fine. 

And of course, we love Nurse X.

Sent from my iPhone

Mom: Why do I feel good?

Oncologist: We stopped giving you poison.

Humans are occasionally described as "walking and talking chemistry experiments" and so it makes sense that cancer itself as well as our valiant attempts to stop it are ultimately microscopic wars waged between several major fighting groups of chemical compounds. On the good team are the healthy cells and chemical processes that form the essence of life itself. On Team Evil are aberrant cancer cells whose chemical routines have short-circuited and are bound in an obsessive and endless quest to duplicate themselves––like a copy machine that won't stop spitting out new copies and yet can't be unplugged.

So it's only logical that we would eventually join the fight in this cellular level warfare having stumbled onto our own medical chemistry set starting with Mustard Gas in World War II. Or more bluntly...with poison.

Of course, the goal is to wage war exclusively on Team Evil's cells and avoid friendly fire on our allies, the good cells. In practice, it often does not work out so neatly. Both sides take massive casualties if for no other reason than many of our medical poisons––more soothingly referred to as chemotheraphy drugs––are more akin to bombs than rifles. If you choose to be treated with them, you essentially agree to make yourself sicker than you already were to begin with, at least temporarily. Worse yet, they are applied without any real guarantee you will be cured since predicting outcomes with many of these drugs falls into the mushy realm of statistics and probabilities.

As in a typical American Civil War battle where each side lined up only a few yards opposite the other and indiscriminately blasted away––creating massive and fairly evenly divided slaughter––the cellular battlefields we call tumors also end up littered with casualties from all sides. As a fighting force, the ultimate victor comes away bloodied, decimated and slow to recover. If our patient is fortunate, the massacre leaves more good than bad cells and the body is able to survive and perhaps even continue the fight on its own. If our patient is not so fortunate, Team Evil may be dealt a setback of sorts, but is able to retreat and recover to attack and fight another day. When this happens, physicians refer to it as recurrence. For cancer patients and their families, it is surely the most dreaded word in the English language. 

For each time the word "recurrence" is uttered, we are again forced to consider chemotherapy's fundamental Faustian bargain: Quality of Life versus Quantity of Time Remaining. 

In other words, do you want to poison yourself again and possibly live longer or surrender the war and accept the consequences?

Or, more succinctly...toxin for time? 

I am now almost certain that we need more radiation for better health. - John Cameron

Without radiation from the sun, our space-rock home would be unimaginably cold (think absolute zero on the surface).

No plants. No liquid water. No breathable air.

No us.

But stoke the fire on our sun-star to just the right temperature and it emits precisely the amount of radiated energy needed to perform one of the coolest magic tricks in the known universe right here on the outer layer of this tiny blue-green sphere...

Us.

As natural born magicians, somewhere along the way we learned to create radiation for ourselves. We discovered that by moderating the amount of energy we fire at one another, we could create miraculous benefits or indescribable damage. In tiny amounts, we get radio and GPS. In larger doses our cells vaporize in nuclear explosions. 

And somewhere just above the setting that gives us microwave ovens, we've found a level that if aimed more or less into our tumors, ruins reproduction for the runaway cells without completely destroying healthy ones and killing us. How ironic that some cancer cells trace their missing self-control to the accumulated damage that accrues throughout our lifetimes from our environment including...of course...from radiation.

It is both our most fundamental lifeforce and our destroyer. Our Birth Mother and our Slayer. And in modern radiation therapy -- for ever so briefly -- it can also be our Healer.

Yet for whatever good radiation does in helping to rid our body of seemingly immortal and malevolent cancer cells, it asks for a great deal in return. Hair, memory, immunity, appetite, strength and vitality must all be offered in sacrifice to receive a temporary reprieve from nature's ultimate Master Force. 

As any cancer patient who has been treated with it can tell you, radiation is a perfect synthesis of good and evil.

While processing this six-shot Autostitch during a pitching change, I couldn't help but wonder how much energy could be saved if they turned the lights down during the hour or so of game time spent between innings and changing pitchers. Seriously, 37,000 people sitting under mega juice-sucking spotlights with the approximate comparable brightness of...the sun...watching one solitary dude dawdle in from the bullpen in left field. Why not turn the lights down, lead the new pitcher in all rockstar-like -- with a penlight -- and then when he's on the mound...bang...hit him with the spots and a cool rap beat.

It'll save energy, help the environment and liven up the game as well.

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When I was in the fifth grade, my music teacher decided that it would round out our early education nicely if all the boys would listen to a Jackson Five record and attempt to emulate young Michael's angelic singing voice during mandatory choir practice. He was one year older than we were and our teacher was convinced that we could sound just like him if we tried hard enough.
 
Of course that was impossible....and deeply embarrassing for pre-adolescent boys doing our best to disguise squeeky high-pitched voices with chin-in-chest attempts to magnify what little bass could be coaxed from our hormonally-starved baby-thin vocal chords. Naturally, the girls just watched and giggled.
 
Later, we all grew up -- all of us except Michael that is -- who was seemingly trapped in some kind of horrible childhood nightmare from which he could not awaken, even with all his talent, success and fame.

For the umpteenth time in my adult life, I have stopped drinking coffee. Though I do not recommend it, I went cold turkey and have been on the wagon for about two weeks now. Candidly, the espresso machine came down with the small appliance equivalent of atherosclerosis and it just seemed like another sign that it was time to move on (again).

Our most recent liaison ran about two years and at the high (low) point, I was gulping down a quad espresso, staring back at the curious and judgmental faces of those around me and giving them my best Cheney-sneering "What?!"

Recently, I talked my non-coffee drinking mother into tasting a straight up espresso. After taking a tiny sip, she gagged, nearly spit it out, made a terrible face and then exclaimed "ick, it tastes like dirt!"

In that same spirit, people will sometimes ask, "why do you like coffee?"  My standard flip answer: "Other than causing brown teeth, bad breath and headaches when you stop drinking it, what's not to like?"

I suppose that defensive response deflects from the deeper truth that I have no idea why I like it. Why do we lay out in the sun, keep our money in banks, talk on the cell phone while driving, eat french fries or watch The Hills?

So will this breakup last? Who knows. Last time I kicked, I pretty much stayed clear of arabicas for three or four years before the shiny new (supposedly self-cleaning) espresso machine lured me back to regular and possibly excessive consumption of...ok...dirt juice.

In the meantime, it looks like the interim official drink of the Stream Pool is now our old standby...Green Tea. Antioxidants, you know.

It probably goes without saying that 2008 was not kind to the so-called retirement calculator--what I refer to as the Formula of Despair (FOD)--that has overshadowed the working life of anyone who has entered the workforce sometime in the last 30-some odd years. During that time, we've been repeatedly admonished that Social Security--if it survives the crush of Boomer retirees at all--would provide insufficient benefits upon which to depend and would therefore require us to significantly supplement our retirement with our own savings and investing genius.

Unfortunately, the companies I worked for in the 80's and early 90's did not offer 401k plans or any type of pension benefits, so I did not get started building my 401k until my first opportunity in 1994 at the age of 35. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had already lost the key decade--my 20s--in which most long-term retirement plans are made or broken (think 40 years of compounding). Even so, when our little company introduced the 401k program that year, I was very excited and remember enthusiastically reviewing each and every piece of paper in the Welcome Kit. Of course, the excitement abated substantially when we all found the part of the kit--the FOD--that showed we would need a minimum of a million dollars by the time we retired if we were to have any hope of outrunning inflation for the subsequent 20 to 30 so-called golden years. I can remember thinking, I would be happy if I could just earn a million dollars in that time let alone save and grow it.

Yet, for the next 14 years, I did exactly what I was supposed to--contributing the maximum amount allowed in the account every year without exception. Along the way I learned about diversification, compounding, dividends, pretax contributions, matching, vesting, compliance, noncompliance, top-heaviness, discrimination and safe harbors. My account balance grew and grew and everything seemed on schedule until one day in 2005 when I decided to run the numbers and assess my progress. I built a spreadsheet in Excel (something I do regularly in my job) to show where I was and what I needed to do to reach the "goal." To my stunned amazement, it was evident that I was nowhere near where I needed to be in spite of having contributed the maximum allowed by law and receiving a generous corporate match. Worse, without achieving twenty plus years of extraordinary market-beating returns from that point forward, I had no chance whatsoever of reaching a million dollars--nor even half of that. Now, if you think having a few hundred grand in your 401k is going to do the trick, you need to perform the calculation for yourself to discover what kind of income you will have after a few decades of hungry moth-like inflation eat away at the purchasing power of your account. I'm confident you will concur that something is horribly wrong with the basic assumptions of this whole "comfortable retirement" ideal we've been sold.

The Great Crash of 2008 has exposed the most readily visible part of the retirement charade that assumed you (and your employers and your government) could set aside enough money during your pre-retirement years, safely preserve the principal, consistently earn impressive returns, wisely adjust your diversification strategy at exactly the right times, miraculously avoid any major hardship withdrawals caused by illness or job loss, and nimbly skirt around any financial market collapses--thus sustaining your "standard of living" or something close to it for the extraordinarily long time period (twenty-plus years) between your retirement date and your actuarially-projected date of death. And no less improbable, that in accomplishing all of that perfectly executed money management, your company, industry and country could remain competitive in the global economy and lastly, that our government and major financial insitutions could manage not to turn our entire financial system into a giant Ponzi scheme.

But that's not even close to a complete reckoning of the cozy retirement farce. For that, we need to take it a step further and look to the very meaning of the word "retire" itself. Here's a list of synonyms I found on dictionary.com:

I don't know about you, but that list of synonyms doesn't describe anything that I'm interested in for more than a few days--words and phrases like depart, go away, regress, seclude oneself, and sever connections. It's no wonder we always add the word "comfortable" to the front of our description. It seems like the least we could ask for is a warm fire in all that cold hard-earned isolation.

Now don't get me wrong, I intend to keep saving and investing and stuffing as much as I can in my 401k for as long as I am able because that's probably still our best bet to build wealth over time. And further, after my work expiration date comes, I sure don't want to be foraging through garbage cans for breakfast or imposing my basic needs on my children. But for my remaining time on this planet, I intend to work on some other more meaningful long-term goals because this endeavor to sprint a frantic work marathon in order to fund some sort of mildly pleasant dreamlike withdrawal from the work community just doesn't interest me anymore. It's not real and it's not going to happen.