Survivor Man!

I like to think that I'm not easily defeated. By way of evidence, I submit that I have beaten cancer twice. One year ago today I was undergoing a gruesome 10 hour long surgery to remove a large tumor from my sinuses. The procedure involved peeling my face down over my chin, harvesting bone from the upper portion of my forehead, and reconstructing the bridge of my nose, my brow line, and bits of my right eye socket. The amazing thing is, not only did I survive the procedure but I still look mostly human. People keep telling me I look great, but that is a relative thing. They wouldn't say it if they didn't know some details about what I went through to survive.

The actual procedure was, of course, a piece of cake for me. I quite enjoyed it. All the attention, the care, the well-wishing and prayers and concern were gratifying. Plus, for the truly terrifying parts, I was sound asleep. When I woke up, I was surrounded by my wife and her sisters, my own sister, and some nurses. I thought I had gone to heaven. It was a wonderful experience. I'd do it again, although I don't think anyone else enjoyed it quite as much as I did.

The misery started the next day. It's been a year, and I'm still not back to normal. I have random attacks of pain and discomfort in my face and eyes. I'm kind of used to it by now. It's part of the new me—the guy who has trouble getting up out of a chair even though he's demonstrably tough as nails. The guy who has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and lived to tell the tale. Happy anniversary to me! Superhero. Survivor Man. I just need a Spandex suit.

Bursting at the Eyeballs with a Creative Impulse

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.

TRUDGING THROUGH THE GRAND MAL FUNK

The Thinker: too much on his mind

So my doctor, the one who told me on Thursday that I have cancer, was supposed to call me on Friday to tell me how bad it is. He was waiting for an additional report from the pathologists. He didn't call.

I didn't call him either, which is what I imagine any normal person would do under the circumstances—call the guy and find out. I don't want to find out. Ignorance of these matters is as blissful as it gets. I'm already imagining the worst I can. Why would I want to find out it's worse still?

Meanwhile, I'm exhausted all the time. Much of this is due I suppose to the fact that I just had surgery. I keep telling myself that it was endoscopic, outpatient surgery, and shouldn't be that big a deal. My doctor keeps reminding me that I was really sick when I first came to see him so I shouldn't expect my recovery to be a simple thing. Bolstering this view is the fact that, after two weeks, I'm still hosing saline solutions up into my head and blowing alien life forms out several times a day.

On the other hand, it may be depression that's making me tired. I was actually feeling better for a few days. I had more energy. I was staying up for longer periods of time. I'd weaned off the pain meds. I was busy conceptualizing a new series of artworks featuring tubas of all things, and feeling a renewed sense of excitement about that as well as writing. Then I found out about the cancer.

Now I'm suspended between feelings of not wanting to be in bed and not wanting to be walking around as if nothing's the matter. I spend a lot of time also suspended between really dark thoughts and trying to manage a bucket list that contains not one item that I can afford. My fault really. I mean I didn't have to load the list up with Lamborghinis, waterfront properties, exotic vacations, and a stable of Triple Crown contenders. What the hell was I thinking?

I'm going to have to trudge through this grand mal funk. I don't really have a choice. I figure it will take a couple of days. That's all it took the last time a doctor told me I had cancer. I've got prior experience, so I ought to be better at this process than some poor schmuck who just found out he's got cancer for the first time. Experience counts for more in living than it does in the current job market where, apparently, it just means you didn't have the good sense to move on when you had the chance.

I've done this cancer thing before. I intend to survive cancer however many times I have to in order to die from old age. Fortunately I'm already pretty old so I think I've got a legitimate shot.

In any event, it's a shot I have to take. I've got stuff to do. The tubas are not going to photograph themselves. Nubile young women are not going to come knocking on my door to ask would I mind very much taking their pictures with gigantic wind instruments.

The several books I have in various stages of completion are not going to finish themselves, even though the characters in them seem determined to do stuff that I haven't asked them to do. The characters may be free agents, but in my experience they just won't write anything down. They certainly don't make my life as an author very easy.

Now that I'm jobless, retired, and mostly idle, I don't have any time left over to be sick and dying. I'm just too busy. It's not easy to save up for a Lamborghini when you don't have any income. You've got to stay focused.

WHERE LESS IS LESS

So yesterday I felt great. I even posted a tweet that it was the first day since my sinus surgery that I felt better than I did before the surgery, which was proof enough to me that the surgery did some good.

Today I went to the doctor for a follow-up. He had the pathology report finally. Turns out they found some cancer cells in among the other gunk they scraped out of my head. I was afraid that might be the case, but was hoping for the best. Still hoping for the best. It's hard to get satisfactory resolution any more. Everything wants to drag on forever.

Too bad really, since now I'm in a race with the Romney/Ryan campaign and the Republicans to get as much done as possible before they overturn ObamaCare and take my pre-existing condition insurance coverage, which I pay for btw, away from me. I tell you Romney/Ryan, or as I like to call them, Voldemort/Vader, will never be mistaken for compassionate conservatives...whatever that means.

More Surgery

Having some surgery tomorrow so I'll be out of circulation for a week or so...you know, undernourished and over-medicated. Probably will be feeling like crap so it's best that I don't try to engage anyone on a social level. While you're waiting for my return you might want to read some of my former exploits in the hospital. I'm already practicing pick-up lines to use on the nursing staff.

Day 199 - The Only Good Thing about Doctoring

           Nelson is alternately afraid of, happy with, or mad as hell at the people who provide his care on a daily basis. He seems consistently pleased only with Anne, even though she most consistently gets him involved in stuff he doesn’t want to do. Anne likes to arrange outings and adventures to keep Nelson engaged. She wants to keep him active and interested in the world around him. He hates these outings—or pretends to. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

There is almost always an argument about whether or not he will go on one of these jaunts. Nelson protests that he doesn’t feel well, and the rest of us should just go without him. Anne tells him that we are not leaving him home alone. Then he gets mad about that. I think his real frustration is that the rest of us can’t have a good time without having to drag him along. There is some nobility, I think, in his feeling that way, but it still means we have to play out this big scene before we go anywhere, even if it’s just out to lunch. The curious thing is that as soon as we actually get him into the car and committed to the outing, he starts enjoying himself. For all the grief he gives her, Nelson loves Anne with all the capacity he can muster. He should.

The rest of his care team is a different matter. He thinks the daily caregiver is stealing from him—well not so much that she is, but that she would if we don’t make a concerted effort to nail everything down and lock everything up. He can’t stand the physical therapist, Ben, who comes twice a week to make him walk up and down the street.

Nelson thinks that Ben works him too hard, and yet he seems actually to be getting stronger and more sure-footed as a result of the work. Nelson hasn’t noticed this part however, or if he has, he has attributed it to a natural return to his former vigorous self rather than the result of a slow and laborious rehabilitation.

There is also an occupational therapist that comes once a week. Nelson likes her because she is cute and vivacious and they seem to have a lot of fun together. That is Nelson tells her stories of growing up in rural Kentucky and building radar and communications installations in the South Pacific during World War II, and she listens and asks questions. Then they play ball. She bounces a soft rubber ball at him and he catches it. The purpose of this exercise is to improve his eye-hand coordination and his balance. Apparently this is a lot more fun than walking with Bill.

In spite of Nelson’s obvious preference for the occupational therapist, however, he spends the two days before her arrival worrying about the visit, hoping that she will cancel, trying to get Anne or my wife to call and change the appointment, and generally telling anyone who will listen that he just isn’t up to any more of this therapy nonsense and why won’t we just let him sit in his chair and watch TV in peace.

          In addition to the two therapists, Nelson gets a weekly visit from at least one nurse. The one who usually comes functions as a kind of case manager, and her job is to monitor all the aspects of his care and his health and report back to the doctors anything that seems to require attention. She also draws blood once a week, which is sent off to the lab to determine whether they need to adjust his medications, especially his Coumadin. Nelson likes the nurse because she is attractive and friendly and spends a lot of time with him listening to his complaints as well as his stories. But, like with the occupational therapist, he spends an inordinate amount of time dreading the nurse’s visit even though he seems to enjoy it quite a lot when she is here. He told me that she reminds him of one of his daughters. He means by this not that she is particularly like one of the four girls he raised, but that she could easily be a fifth. She fits into his world that well. He just can’t stand the thought of her coming over until she gets here.

          I get Nelson. I empathize. He may be a pain in the ass to deal with, but from Nelson’s perspective so are we. I see myself in mirrored in his attitude. I feel Nelson’s flinty disposition crystallizing in my soul. I’m 61. Nelson is 89. Any way you cut it my life is more than half over. You can argue half-full/half-empty if you want. It won’t make any difference to me. Once you get beyond the halfway point, both ways of stating the case are equally unattractive. My life is either way over half finished, or way less than half of it is left. And I’m not ambling into old age amiably either. I’m in freefall, and picking up speed. My cup of infirmities is filling up. It seems over half full already, and I don’t have enough cup left to be comfortable with the pace.

          I’m already unhappy about the things I have to do that I just plain don’t want to do because I don’t feel like it. My feet hurt. My knees hurt. My hips hurt. My back hurts. I know I’m not going to feel better about being dragged out and forced to maintain a semblance of sociability. I may feel better about myself. I may even have fun, but when I get back I’m going to feel worse than I did before I left.

This is where Nelson is. He would be happy to sit in a chair until we get back from our little adventures, and then to continue to sit in his chair while we tell him all about it. That way he’d get all the social interaction without any of the physical discomfort. He’s already got enough memories. He doesn’t need to exert himself to make any more. It would be pointless. His memory is fading. Why tax it with new stuff…especially since it’s the old stuff that makes him feel good. It’s pretty much only the old memories that interest him.

          One of my favorite things to tell people is that, as we age, memory is the first thing to go. After they digest this, I tell them that actually it’s not, but it is the first thing that we can talk about. This always gets a knowing look. I think it’s very funny, but it is only funny because it is alarming. No one wants to know that the first thing to go is the thing you can’t talk about. But no one wants to talk about that either. I did manage to have a conversation about it with Nelson though. I guess he’d already complained about so much other stuff he didn’t think much about crossing the line to the stuff I’d rather not have been talking about.

          At the time Nelson’s list of maladies had not started to expand exponentially. He was not then troubled with Parkinson’s or heart trouble. He was taking Flomax for an enlarged prostate, and he had just had a lens replacement for cataracts. He was already fairly peevish about his treatment at the hands of his doctors though.

He was convinced that the ophthalmologist was bent on punishing him for some slight—this because Nelson had complained about the time and trouble the cataract surgery had involved. The time and trouble as it turned out was because of the Flomax, which for some reason increases the difficulty and potential for complications in eye surgery. Nelson hadn’t known this. How could he? Because he didn’t know, he didn’t tell the ophthalmologist he was taking the drug. The doctor may not have known to ask at the time. The risk was a new thing then. Now it is well known, and my own ophthalmologist asked me right away if I was taking Flomax when we scheduled my cataract surgery.

I was riding somewhere with Nelson one day. I don’t remember where, and to be honest I’m not sure that I was riding and not driving either. Nelson was busy grousing about the eye doctor. When he had exhausted that topic he started in on the Urologist who had prescribed the Flomax. He didn’t like that doctor either, and not because of the trouble the Flomax had caused during the eye surgery. No, Nelson was upset that one of the possible side effects of some other medicine the Urologist wanted to put him on was that he might develop breasts.

“What the hell do I need with breasts at my age?” he asked me.

“Not much, I expect.” I was trying to be agreeable. I wondered what he might need with breasts at any age, but I didn't say anything. It occurred to me later that Nelson may have been making a joke, but if that was the case he promptly forgot what was funny about it.

“Exactly,” Nelson said. “So I'm not taking it. If I did, next thing they’d have to give me would be another pill for that for the breast thing. I’ll be all day taking pills to fix stuff that other pills caused. There won’t be any time left over for anything else. You all might just as well put me in the ground then.”

“Nobody wants that,” I said.

Nelson looked over at me like he wanted to be sure I meant that. “Better do it anyway,” he said. “Otherwise the doctors are going to wind up with everything. I’ve had it up to here with all this damn doctorin’.”

“I can see how you might feel that way.”

“Those doctors got a pill for everything,” he said, “and everything they give me makes something else go wrong, and then they want to give me another damn pill for that. I think they’re all getting kick-backs from the drug companies.”

“Could be,” I said, “but what makes you think that?”

“Cause they’ve always got free samples to give away to get you started.”

He gave me another one of those looks. I couldn’t imagine where he was going with this.

“You remember when all my daughters and all you sons-in-law threw that wonderful dinner for our 50^th anniversary?” he asked.

“I do remember that, and you’re right, it was wonderful.”

“Well I was talking to my doctor just before that, the one who stitched up my thumb when I almost cut it off on the table saw.”

“Uh huh?”

“He asked me if I wanted to try some of that Viagra.”

Nelson paused here, I guess to let the impact of that set in. He would have been 78 or 79 at the time he was talking about. I wasn’t about to say anything at this point to break the flow of his story.

“I asked him didn’t he think I was too old for that kind of thing. He said he wouldn’t know about that, but if I was interested he had some free samples he could give me.”

“So you got some?” I asked.

“I did. I never got any more, but I have to tell you, it’s the only time I ever got medicine from a doctor that worked like it was supposed to without screwing up something else.”

“I’ll be damned,” was about all I could think of to say.

He gave me one more look. “Don’t you tell a soul I told you that,” he said.

Day 61 - Tears and Implants

          I had another downtown interview with yet another recruiter today. I think I am going to stop making appointments with recruiters unless they have a real job order that they are trying to fill. This one was a plump little Asian woman. At least she was dressed smartly. She may have been as smart as she looked, but alas she was another youngster conditioned to become a non-reader by a relentlessly digital world.

Personally, I have trouble operating my cell phone. I think texting is a ridiculous waste of time. I do not Tweet. I don’t post daily updates on my activities on FaceBook or MySpace. These young recruiters, however, adept as they may be at brief, digital communications, can’t be bothered to read the very résumé that made them want to talk to me in the first place. Yet they seem to be thriving while I am unemployed. I guess that ought to tell me something about how useful my focused, linear, and structured mindset is in today’s workplace. The world is a very different place than it used to be when it made sense to me.

*****

          When Fische first met Alicia I didn’t even own a cell phone. Even so, looking back, this is about the time that the world started coming off the tracks for me. I’d like to blame the digitization of social interaction for this, but that’s just because I am digitally disadvantaged. Digital media may be linked in there somewhere, but the reality is much more complicated and sinister.

          To say that Fische was fascinated by Alicia is to make short shrift of what in Fische’s mind at least was about to become one of the great love stories of all time. Fische was smitten, mesmerized, dumbstruck—good for him perhaps at the time because he was thus prevented from declaring himself early and derailing the whole enterprise. Instead of falling to his knees and making a fool of himself, Fische plotted a conquest.

A good marine in all things, even Amor, Fische developed an overall strategy. He did reconnaissance. He requisitioned the necessary supplies and resources. He enlisted troops and reinforcements. He planned a series of small engagements. Then he threw himself into the fray with courage and abandonment.

That Fische eventually succeeded appeared at first to be a testament to his marine training. Nothing else made any sense. Where Alicia was young, pretty, engaging, smart, and sexy, Fische was anything but. He was an aging, paunch ridden, intolerant, bellicose mass of overcompensated insecurities. His grey hair was receding faster than an estuary tide, and his nose, viewed from straight ahead, was the approximate shape of the state of California.

Fische started his campaign by ratcheting up the attentiveness. He became Mr. Sensitivity. He made it a point to stop by Alicia’s desk several times a day whenever he was in town. He inquired after her health, her family, her work, and her aspirations. He traded bits of philosophy and what passed for business acumen. He carefully mixed the personal into the work-related. He maintained an air of propriety in these exchanges while continually testing where the border between that propriety and impropriety might lay, and whether the border might shift as he continued to pitch his subtle woo. He encouraged her to think of him as her mentor, ever willing to guide her through the intricacies of corporate life at Quilnutz.

Alicia ate it up. She wanted a champion. She wanted a lot of guidance and feedback. She had told me as much in our interview. Trouble was I didn’t have near as much time to devote to it as Fische. His title was Director of Executive Administration. You figure out what that’s supposed to mean. To me it meant that Fische’s job was bullshit while I had actual work to do. Alicia had actual work to do too, but Fische was eating up an increasingly unreasonable amount of her time. He was in her office constantly, leaning over her desk, chuckling over some insight or some shared intimacy while he helped himself to a view down her blouse. He came to town more and more often. They started taking their lunches together. What I saw as time spent feeding Fische’s libidinous ego, Alicia saw as career development. She was not being naïve. She was not even innocent, not by a long shot.

Things really came to a head when Alicia had breast augmentation surgery. She actually came to me about this. I guess she felt she had to since, technically at least, she still reported to me. She needed a couple of days off for a medical procedure. I said okay. She told me it was a female problem. I didn’t want to know the details. I said okay again. Then she told me it wasn’t a female problem in the way I’d probably thought, but was in fact breast implants. I was quiet for a long time trying not to let my face twitch, and then I said okay a third time. Then she told me a whole bunch of the details I had been hoping to avoid. Her husband wanted her to get the surgery. She couldn’t understand why, but she was willing to be the trooper, the dutiful wife, and do what she could to keep him happy. By the time she had laid it all out for me I actually felt a little sorry for her.

I have to say that the results were spectacular. I had seen women with boob jobs before, and not been overly impressed. I didn’t really understand what all the commotion was about. I think that my problem was that I had never known a woman in the before-and-after context of breast enhancement. Up until Alicia’s procedure, I had only known after. With Alicia the change was instantaneous and remarkable. She went overnight from merely curvy to full-on voluptuous. I have been a big fan of implants ever since.

The first time Fische saw Alicia after the surgery he left a trail of drool down the hallway. If I thought he spent too much time in her office before the implants, I figured he’d need to pitch a tent in there after. I was wrong. Instead he decided to take her out of town.

He told her he thought it would be a good idea for her to travel to the Florida facility for an open house that they were having. It would give her an opportunity to meet the Florida staff, meet some customers, and get a better idea of how things were done there with an eye to what might be worth incorporating into our processes in Arkansas. Alicia was anxious to go. She thought it would be a big boost to her career. It didn’t seem to register on either her or Fische that she would be leaving right in the middle of month-end closing when I needed her to be accumulating and reconciling the costs in our work-in-process and finished goods inventories—the job I had hired her to do.

I told her she couldn’t go. She went to Fische, and he called me and told me I needed to let her go. I told him I wasn’t against her going, I was only against the timing. He said they couldn’t move the open house to accommodate my closing schedule. I told him it wasn’t my closing schedule, it was the company’s closing schedule and it was the same every month. He told me to get over it. I went to my new boss, the vice president and manager of the division that had been Henry’s company. He was an import from another division of Quilnutz, but one who was at least willing to listen to reason. He called Alicia in to his office to discuss the situation. She came in tears and pitched a serious and unnerving fit about my apparent determination to keep her from developing into a fully realized cost accountant. I could hardly believe my ears. All I wanted her to do was stay in town and do her job.

My boss called Fische to impress upon him the importance of Alicia’s presence for the closing. Fische stood his ground. My boss gave up.

“You need to pick your battles,” he told me. “Fische is a director. You are a division controller. You can’t win.”

I was really beginning to hate working for Quilnutz. I had hoped that they would be more orderly, more logical, more businesslike in their decision-making than Henry had been. I had hoped that the combination of their good business practices and our products would create a synergy that allowed us to meet our potential. I had hoped that my one twelfth share of Henry’s company would grow under Quilnutz’s management into a real stake in my future. Instead I got counterintuitive decisions based on the prurient aspirations of venal and stupid men.

Day 35 - Made in the Shades

          Today was lithotripsy number three. It was as successful as the other two. The urologist broke up all the stones in my left kidney, and left another stint in my left ureter. We scheduled a follow up visit for Friday. My wife drove me home.

          It was a bright fall morning. The air was balmy and fresh. The colors were clean and intense. We stopped for lunch at an expensive bistro in the high-dollar shopping district. We paid too much for tasteless flatbreads and snotty service. I excused the taste because I’m on drugs. I excused the service because the waitress was pretty. I forgot my sunglasses when we left, but didn’t discover it until we got home. I did not excuse myself.

I loved those sunglasses. They were the first fashionable sunglasses I ever owned. I had them for two years. I got them right after I had cataract surgery on both eyes. That surgery entailed replacing my cloudy natural lenses with new plastic ones. The new lenses were not just clear. They were calibrated to correct the acute nearsightedness that had plagued me since I was a child. I still need glasses to read because the plastic lenses, being less flexible than natural lenses, do not focus over a range of distances from near to far. The new lenses focus from about 3 feet to infinity, so I no longer require glasses for anything but reading. I can drive, swim, walk, bike and otherwise navigate my world without the thick, heavy, and gawkish lenses I had to wear nearly my whole life.

This is unbelievably liberating as anyone who has been a slave to eyeglasses for any length of time will attest. The absolute best part of this for me is that now I can wear cool shades. After nearly 60 years of clip-ons and flip-ups I can finally look as mysterious and intimidating as that prison guard in Cool Hand Luke. I probably own twenty pairs of sunglasses by now—making up for lost time I guess. The pair I just lost were the first shades I bought after going overnight from 20/400 to 20/20 vision. They remain my favorites for that reason, no matter who is wearing them now—unless of course the pretty waitress kept them to augment her tip. She doesn’t need any help from my sunglasses to look mysterious and intimidating. 

Day 13 - The Joy of Surgery

You might feel a little pinch.

          I have 14 kidney stones. Some of them are quite large. The biggest one is about 5/8 of an inch in length and a quarter inch across. That is a huge piece of gravel when you consider where it has to come out. I’ve passed kidney stones before, and I can attest that doing so will make a dancer out of the stodgiest and least rhythmic of old men. My urologist has scheduled a lithotripsy to start breaking them up. He thinks it will take at least two procedures and maybe as many as four to get them all. Modern lithotripsy is a wonderful thing. They use focused sound waves to crack the stones. The doctor doing the procedure can watch the whole thing on a video screen and see how he’s doing in real time. They put you to sleep to keep you from jumping every time they zap you, but there’s no cutting. That’s the best part. I don’t like cutting.

          Cutting was featured last year when I had cancer…and then I didn’t. This is a good story for two reasons. First, at the end I’m still alive…so far anyway. Second, it illustrates why I think that Fritz is very likely a jerk.

I went for a routine colonoscopy at the end of July in 2007. I tell people that I like a colonoscopy. No one wants to believe it, but it’s true. While bits of a colonoscopy are certainly unpleasant, especially the prep the day before, I really don’t mind them. I’ve had several. They give you good drugs, they knock you out for the actual procedure, and when it’s over you get the rest of the day off even though you don’t feel bad at all. What’s not to like? I especially like them now that one has probably saved my life.

I woke up in the recovery room after this particular colonoscopy. My wife was there making sure that I remembered to breathe because for some reason I don’t find breathing all that compulsory when I wake up from general anesthesia. Also it seems I like to profess a profound and abiding affection for the nursing staff while the anesthetic is wearing off, and my wife likes to stay close to keep me from either succeeding too well at fascinating the nurses or making a fool of myself. Anyway we were thus engaged, me waking up, my wife encouraging me to breathe and stifling my other natural inclinations when the doctor came in to the room.

“Well, you have cancer,” he said, just like that, no ‘good news—bad news’ preamble, no greasing the skids, no easing the shock.

Of course I was still stoned, so the gravity of what the doctor had said really didn’t register on me. My mind was busy processing other information such as: did that gasp I just heard from my wife suck all the oxygen out of the room? And couldn’t you have sent a nurse to tell me that—say the curvy little one with the dark hair and the big eyes I just saw pushing the IV pole down the hall?

In case we were still conscious after hearing this momentous news, the doctor also brought pictures he had taken of the inside of my colon. One of them featured a protuberance with an angry looking mass on a stalk. It was quite impressive. Not the kind of thing you’d like to meet in dark alley or a Quentin Tarantino movie.

“I took a sample,” the doctor said. “We’ll send it out to the lab to confirm, but I’ve seen a lot of these. It’s cancer.”

As it turned out, he was right. The lab confirmed cancer. I got hooked up with a colorectal surgeon, and we scheduled a bowel section to remove 14 inches of southbound pipe. I suppose there’s no scarier thing you can hear from your doctor than ‘you’ve got cancer.’ I only suppose this because it seems reasonable, but the fact is that I never got scared. I got mad. I got mad as hell, but I was never really scared. I think the reason for this is that my job already sucked so much that the prospect of a terminal illness represented something like a reprieve from having to go to work. At the very least I was going to get some time off, or so I thought.

I suppose the degree to which I got angry merits some comment because who I got mad at was God, and when you have a serious disease that might kill you like cancer the usual course is to start sucking up to God in order to cut a deal. ‘Oh Lord if only you take this cancer away I promise I will go to church faithfully every Sunday, be generous when they pass the collection basket, and never ever hit on another nurse as long as I live.’ That kind of thing. My problem, the thing that made me mad, had to do with the Scripture reading and the sermon that went along with it from the Sunday before I got the troubling news about my colon.

You may know the scripture. I know I’ve heard it many times before. It is from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 11, verses 11-13: ‘Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’

I listened and took these verses to heart. I prayed earnestly for a boon from my Father in heaven. I prayed to be delivered from my job. Really I did. That was my fish, the thing I wanted, the gift I needed, the proof that I was loved. ‘Oh, Lord, please get me the hell out of here. Give me something else to do. I’ll take less money. I’ll take a smaller office, harder work, grittier conditions. Just please don’t make me do this any longer.’ Instead I got cancer—a snake, a scorpion, a crumby deal. I was pissed, and I stayed pissed for weeks.

Then an amazing thing happened. Maybe I was just tired of being angry all the time. It takes a lot out of you—staying mad. It wears you down. You lose your edge, your focus. You begin to be open to kinder, gentler thoughts just because it gives you a break from the bile in your stomach. What happened is that it began to sink in that I could actually die, and that if I did then technically my prayers would have been answered. God just might be getting me out of that job by calling me home. When I realized that, I actually began to feel a little thankful. God does answer prayers, but frequently not in the ways that we think he should. When the day of the surgery finally arrived several weeks later I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it, and I was pretty okay with that. The Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn’t He?

So I woke up in the recovery room, and I was thirsty as hell. The nurse was busy trying to make me comfortable. My wife wasn’t there because the surgeon forgot to go tell her that I’d lived. It was just the nurse and me and the sweet freedom to become the fool I ached to be. I asked her for some water. She said I couldn’t have any. I asked her for some ice chips to suck on. She said I couldn’t have any. I told her I just needed some relief. I wasn’t going to rat her out. I promised to love her forever if she would bring me some ice chips anyway. She brought me a whole cup of ice chips. She was overwhelmed by my post surgical charms, which it would seem are becoming legendary.

The surgeon finally remembered to stop by to tell us—my wife had found me by that time—that the surgery had been a success and that I was going to live. He had an amazing tale to tell. The surgery went well. He’d taken out the agreed upon 14 inches of colon. He’d checked the lymph nodes. He’d looked all over hell’s creation for some sign of cancer but couldn’t find any. He’d found the marks that other doctor had left during the colonoscopy to indicate where he ought to cut, but he couldn’t find any cancer. He couldn’t find any polyps. He couldn’t find anything to indicate he’d done me any good whatsoever. My wife found a miracle in this. Hundreds of people were praying for me. God had heard their prayers and taken the cancer away. I had to go through the surgery so that the doctor could confirm the miracle for us. It was plain as day.

I found something else in this. I’m not so easily duped by the Almighty. It may well have been miraculous, but the upshot was that I was eventually going to have to go back to work. My prayers had been answered not at all. I was reminded of my own personal favorite scripture—favorite because it is to me the most apropos: ‘Happy the man who delights in the chastisements of the Lord.’ Apparently I had not yet been sufficiently chastised, and, even worse, now I was going to have to answer for the nurse with the ice chips.

All of this brings me back to Fritz. Fritz had replaced Clive the sweetheart shortly after the company was sold to a private equity firm (not Cerberus) out of New York. The new owners were all about efficiency, urgency, and sweeping change. They didn’t approve of sweethearts. There was no room for sensitivity in their modus operandi. They wanted change agents, fiddlers, proactive thinkers outside the box, buzzword chandlers, and jerks. They wanted the kind of managers who occasionally throw out the baby with the bathwater. They fostered the kind of environment where it doesn’t really matter what gets destroyed or lost in the process as long as you are continually moving forward.

Fritz was perfect for them. Fritz is tightly wound. Fritz hums with barely contained energy that sometimes arcs out, sparks and fries things around him. He talks in clipped sentences. When he asks you a question, instead of listening to your answer he is already processing the thing he is going to say next. Fritz thinks that when he has everyone toiling needlessly at urgent tasks, spinning their wheels, arcing and sparking just like him, that he has done a good job of managing. You can imagine Fritz as a sea captain on a clipper ship. The entire crew is up in the rigging, hauling sheets, trimming sails, dodging lightning strikes, hanging on for dear life. Fritz is furiously spinning the wheel, port to starboard, starboard to port, only the wheel is not attached to a rudder. There is no rudder so all of what everyone is doing is for naught. There is a saying carved into the bowsprit. It represents the guiding philosophy of the ship and its master: ‘If it weren’t for our sense of urgency, we wouldn’t have any sense at all.’

At the time of my surgery we were working on the annual budget. Deadlines had been posted. The first pass of the budgets had already been done. That is broad assumptions had been made and translated into expected revenue and cost numbers for the upcoming fiscal year. The second pass—a more refined, more thoroughly vetted version of the first was due two weeks after my surgery. I had already done most of the work. I felt I had a week to recover from the surgery and a week to finish up the budget. That would give me plenty of time to do the few hours work that would be required to submit by the deadline, even if I took a few more days to recover than I thought. To me everything was copacetic.

This didn’t suit Fritz. He started worrying about it while the surgical team was probing my bowels on the operating table. I had the surgery on Friday, and was released from the hospital on Sunday afternoon. I went home with a couple of dozen staples in my abdomen and a bottle of oxycodone caplets to ease my considerable discomfort. Monday morning I got a frantic call from the other Ron, the new corporate accounting manager. Fritz wanted to schedule a conference call to discuss how we were going to get my budget done while I was recuperating.

“It’s not due for two weeks,” I pointed out. “I’ll be back in the office next Monday, and the budget will be submitted by the deadline. No problem.”

“Fritz doesn’t want to wait for the deadline.”

“Then why did he publish one? I mean, come on, Ron. We discussed this at the controllers’ conference. We’ve had conference calls since. We all agreed on the gateways and the deadlines based on what was feasible and what the board of directors expected. Why does he want to change it now?”

“I don’t know. He just wants to be able to massage it for a week or so before he sends it upstream.”

I could tell that Ron was very nervous. Fritz had given him a task. Get the budgets in early. Now he was having trouble getting me on board. I wasn’t being a team player, not being flexible enough, not demonstrating sufficient dedication to the team effort. Oh no, I was lollygagging at home with a belly full of staples and a head full of pain relievers.

“Is tomorrow good for you?” Ron asked.

“I have a doctor appointment in the morning.”

“So how’s the afternoon look?”

“I’m recovering from major surgery, Ron,” I say. “I’ll be right here, in pain, on drugs, forcing fluids, and hoping I don’t get sepsis and die.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll try to set it up for 2:00 p.m.”

The call itself was confusing. This may have had to do with the level of pain medication coursing through my system and short circuiting my synapses, or it may have just been the mind numbing drivel coming out of the phone. It was hard for me to gauge at the time. The conferees included Fritz, the two Rons and myself. I spent some time making my case that the budget would be done in plenty of time, that I had planned for being out, and that the budget was under control.

Fritz however, as New Ron had indicated, was anxious to get something early. To accomplish this he wanted me to get someone else working on massaging the budget while I was out. I didn’t want to do this. The budget is a complicated animal. It resides in a huge interactive spreadsheet. Someone who doesn’t understand where everything is and how everything interacts could easily damage it. It is so complicated that it ranks among those things—we all have them—that are harder to explain than they are to do. Fritz wanted me to tell the new Ron how to do it. I knew that this would be harder than just coming in and doing it myself—even on drugs. I also knew that explaining this to Fritz in such a way that he would believe it would be more difficult still.

I began to think that I would never get off the phone. Fritz was going to keep us talking until he got a resolution that suited him. I only had two outs. I either had to die—interesting don’t you think how many of my problems seem to have an untimely death as a viable solution—or I had to lie. I decided to lie. I told Fritz that I would go over the details of the budget with new Ron and get him accumulating and analyzing expense data. I told him there was no reason for all of us to discuss the detail on a conference call. New Ron and I could do it privately after we all hung up. I told him that this way we could have him the second pass at the beginning of the following week rather than the end. He seemed to be happy to have made things more difficult for all of us, which is after all his own personal gauge on his effectiveness as a manager. That he chose to do it three days after I underwent major surgery makes him, in my book, a monumental jerk.