It's been a long time since I updated my blogs. I feel like I have a
pretty good excuse. Apparently it takes a long damn time to recover
from 9 and a half hours of open craniofacial resection surgery.
Who knew?
Everyone says I look great. This is mostly because I have taken great
pains over the years to surround myself with people who are kind. I
may look pretty good for a guy who had his face peeled off and
stitched back on, but that's a relative thing. That's like saying a
woman looks good for her age. Everyone may agree, but the woman
herself will not be pleased that you have noticed the ravages of time
and qualified your assessment of her beauty accordingly. Relativity
sucks.
I have an incision that runs across the top of my head from ear to
ear. It is thick and pink and hairless and scary. It's also the only
conclusive physical evidence that I've had major surgery. When my
hair grows long enough to comb over it, no one will know the troubles
I've seen unless I tell them. I'm trying not to be that guy...you
know...the guy who burdens everyone else with his problems. (Writing
about them in my blogs doesn't count. My blogs. My rules.)
I also have a mohawk now. It's not full blown because it starts well
back on my head. It's more B movie interpretation of a Mongolian
horseman than Mr. T. It's much duller than the one my granddaughter
sports on occasion.
A friend of mine said the look combines the best aspects of Genghis
Khan and Frankenstein, so I've taken to calling it the Genghis Stein.
It's good for some distracted stares when I'm out in public, but I
can't help noticing small children circling back to hide behind their
mothers' skirts. I can't recommend it, no matter how many people tell
me I look great.
How I look is really the least of my problems. More important, at
least for the time being, is how I see. Not very well, although it is
getting better.
The cancer had eaten away a lot of bone in my forehead and in my
right eye socket. It also attached itself to my right eye. The
surgeons had to remove significant amounts of bone and some eye
tissue to establish what they call clean margins—that is tissue
in which the pathology lab couldn't find any more cancer. They replaced
some of the bone with bits of skull that they harvested from the top
of my head. This still left my eye socket misshapen and my eyeball
swollen.
Since then I've had a lot of difficulty getting my right eye to
operate in concert with my left. The result is double vision,
especially when I try to read or drive or even watch TV. After a few
short minutes, the pain and discomfort from trying is more than I care
to bear. The upshot is that I'm not getting anything done that I
would call productive.
I've got picture frames to build to hold some of my latest large
images. Operating power tools without depth perception or clear focus
seems ill-advised. I've got blogs to write, a novel to finish, and
new photos to take and edit. None of these thing are possible until
the healing process has got my vision closer to normal—or the new
normal, whatever that turns out to be.
Meanwhile the most productive I can be is to catch up on my reading
via audio books. I'm into some science fiction just now. When I'm
hard at work, you will see me lounging in an overstuffed chair,
staring out the window at the squirrels and painted buntings in the
back yard, ear bud wires tangled around my neck while Ben Bova and
Poul Anderson transport me to worlds and times where existential
crises result from stuff a lot more frightening than mere cancer.
It's okay, but it doesn't feel like creativity. I need to be making something. Not being able to is as bad for my soul as radical surgery is for my eyes.
