It Might Get Messy

My throat is becoming noticeably less functional. And pain is more permanent. Meaning it’s time to deal with this baby. That’s “baby” in the sense of the tumor that grows on the shoulder of the guy at the end of “Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr. Except I don’t expect mine to transform into the second coming of Christ, several thousand years and two global nuclear conflagrations after he was due. Of course, neither did the guy in the book, now that I think of it.

Anyway. Where were we? Oh yeah. A week ago Wednesday. A day that began as prima facie proof that, with massive assistance and tolerance of my professional colleagues, I was just about back to functioning at full form. First, an email from the guy running the short courses at the toxicology conference in Scotland this spring. Turns out he got two identical course proposals, one from me and my five-co-instructor posse, and one from an old acquaintance with a competing company. Short course guy wants us to merge our two full day proposals into a half day each. Kicking off a round of call-and-response among my team, the conference guy, and the guy from the other company. Of course, with a deadline for getting the entire act together by Friday. 

Meanwhile, the course we teach at the university had its second class meeting the night prior. Had two students who needed to added to the roster and caught up on the work-to-date, a third on the fence about dropping who needed lots of information, and the administration at the U which needed a ton of paperwork completed. With everything, including Thursday’s class, two stops at the campus personnel office, roster finalized and everybody caught up by…Friday, of course. 

Meanwhile, the projects that my friends and betters have been working me onto are coming to crisis points. One needs sample sites identified and mapped in the eastern swamplands of Louisiana, another needs toxicology thresholds for fish in Montana rivers, another has to have—immediately—a plan and budget to start natural resource damage assessment this year, and then there’s the one that…well, then my cell phone rings.

It’s Dr. H. Explaining to me what’s about to happen. Which is that I am going to be operated on sometime in the next two or three weeks, will spend seven to ten days (and if my experience is useful as a basis for temporal projection, it’ll be at least the latter) in hospital, then will have a period of weeks when it will be touch-and-go between survival, recovery, and drowning in my own oral secretions, then decisions will be made regarding whether to remove the tracheotomy or alternatively my trachea itself depending on how things go. THAT’S not a decision I’m looking forward to. And then there’s months more of recovery.

In any case, I spend the rest of Wednesday cleaning up the various professional messes engendered by the fact that I’m about to drop into the Seventh Circle of health care Hell. Cancel the short course. Transfer the university course. Disengage from active project work. Now I need to get my office clean enough to function without me taking up room at the center of the mess.

In any case, the internet is encouraging, as is the experience of the mom of one of Molly’s friends who’s had the same procedure. I think things are open to conjecture. We’re talking about nastily radical surgery here. In preparation, this coming Tuesday morning I go to meet with the plastic surgeon about the reconstruction. It is perhaps a measure of the time-critical nature of things that he returns from a conference in Europe today, is in surgery all day tomorrow, and sees me first thing Tuesday. I expect he’s gonna look like jet-lagged hell. But he is sure as hell going to have to explain this pot roast theory of tongue replacement to me. In detail. More on that next week, my friends. Hang in there, everyone. Things should get VERY interesting going forward from here!