Mom, Irascible, Continues Recovery, Insists on Hiking

Like in the Rocky movies, right after he hits either a physical or emotional downturn in mid-movie, Mom is back in training only days after leaving the hospital.  Cue the Training Montage, staple (in fact) of all fight movies, from martial arts and boxing films to wrestling, cheerleading, and dancing movies.  (My favorite scenes are of Stallone and Carl Weathers sprinting, on the beach).

Mom hasn’t quite figured out how to blog here, so I’m reposting her Facebook posts (at which she has become expert).

Yesterday:

Remember the old joke that the brain was not the most important organ?? It’s been 5 days without BM and I don’t think that’s a correct statement –I KNOW SO!Stopped the drugs all together. I think, one incision opened. I feel like I’ve been ‘filet’. Little buddy came with beautiful flowers as did other friends. Those bird brains have not called about pathology. Letting me wait the whole freakin’ weekend.

One of Mom’s friends told her that if she had an open incision, she should get to the hospital!

Mom:

I’m not paying Emergency room fees on top of those inflated ICU rooms. (You’re a good nurse. You come and see. :-)– I’m going hiking tomorrow. Maybe not Black Canyon but nevertheless…

Three or four days after surgery, Mom is ready to train again.  Can you believe it?

Today  6:02a.m. Mountain Time:

Hard rain most of the night. Great smells and sounds except for the huge Thunder. Came out of my bed (injury and all) like a shot and hollered ‘Holy Crap!!’ Dog ran under my bed and whined. If I could’ve, I would’ve followed. Going for a long walk at the park. Bored to tears at home.

It’s been gushing rain for days, in the form of thunderstorms. Mostly at night. Sleeping with the window open, there’s no better smell nor sound.

On the Coincidence of Spaniards Met in Brussels en Route to Israel

Back in May, my good friend (and partner at Charles River Recruiting) Adam Weiss and I traveled to Israel.  A problem with fuel in Tel Aviv, by various machinations no one could adequately explain, left us stranded in Brussels.  “Neat,” Adam said.  “And second prize is two days in Brussels.”  But Brussels has its charms, especially the Grand Place (French for “the Grand Place”), not to mention that while we were there we met an irrepressible Spaniard named Julio, who was also stranded en route to Israel, and who accompanied us on our second day of drinking in the sunny, French-accented Grand Place.

That night, we were back on our flight, and just after midnight we all said goodbye in the Tel Aviv Airport.  Julie stayed on in Tel Aviv, and Adam and I took a taxi to Jerusalem.  We toured the great old city for a few days, took a train to Haifa, then a bus to the mystical hilltop village of Tzfat.  And it was there, about five days after we’d arrived in Israel, that we ran into . . . Julio.

Now, at this time, I had no knowledge of the Camino de Santiago.  “Santiago,” I have learned, means St. (Santo) James (Diego, which is how the ancient Hebrew Ya’akov ended up being rendered in Spanish).  My acquaintance with the term “camino” was limited to the following:  (1) my mother’s 1972 2-door El Camino (2) my 1992 study of Spanish for an aborted trip to Patagonia – “camino” means “way” or “path” and is frequently used as English speakers use “road” or “street”, and (3) the Gipsy Kings’ dreamy, meditative “Caminando por la Calle”, or Walking in (or down) the street, which, interestingly, turns the camino or “path” into the gerund for “walking” itself – caminando (and, probably so as to avoid the repetition of “caminando por el camino”, substitutes calle for street).  It deserves your listening to’t:

So anyway, who does Julio turn out to be?

* a Spaniard

* who lives near the Camino de Santiago, in Bilbao, home of the world-famous Guggenheim Museum,

* and is the most experienced walker I have ever met.  In fact, he was in Israel precisely to walk from north to south, a distance of several hundred miles. He does these long walks several times a year.

And now he is not only offering advice on the Camino, he is walking parts of it himself, right now.  What are the odds?

Here is his latest:

Hi Cameron,

I´m still in bilbao, we suppose to move to Pyrenees already but problems last minute … always women problems … we´ll probably start next week.

Suggestions : In my opinion the most beautiful part is the begining , means one side of the mountain Saint Jean Pied de Port (France Basque country ) o Roncesvalles ( other side of the mountain , spanish basque side ) from here you walk to Pamplona , now huge fiesta going on – San Fermín – Bull fighters on the road , and many people injured because they are extremely ” brave pepople “.

From Pamplona to Logroño still nice, we are talking about Rioja´s heart.

After Logroño, temperatures in summer are a little bit like Death Valley, you must start every day really early otherwise , you risk of ” melt ” , dry part of Spain… from Logroño you could get bus to Burgos, beautiful cathedral, place to sleep pilgrims fifty yards from cathedral, you could get bus again to Leon , less than two hours, again another beautiful cathedral; the way out from Leon is disgusting, pick up the bus again and depending of how you feel , you could get near Santiago or few kilometers away.

Information concerning buses can be provided all around places where pilgrims spend nights, some people get the bus to Sarria, only 100 kms away from Santiago and that way you could get your ” title ” … you deserve the diploma , and only waiting a funny queue at
the Pilgrims Office in Santiago, you will be very proud of it.

How to decide, It depends how exhausted you are after walking under the sun.

In my case after this delay, we suppose to star walking next week, i dont feel confortable if i depends on other people decisions…  thisis going to be an ” special case ”

Well, let me know what you decide and make sure if i am around we´ll share a couple of San Miguel´s ( one of the most popular spanish beers “)

In the meantime, keep fit.

Hasta pronto,
julio

860-year-old Guestbook of Way of St. James Disappears

I’ve lived four-and-a-half decades without having come across the tiniest bit of news about the Camino de Santiago or its ultimate destination, the soaring cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.  In fact, when Mom told me about the pilgrimage, I said, in the manner conveyed to us in the sitcoms, “Say what?”

And yet, two days after I created a blog for my journey there with my mother, my PDA presented me with a BBC article reporting that the 12th century Codex Calixtinus, a priceless guidebook for pilgrims, disappeared yesterday afternoon from its seemingly secure storage at the cathedral.

This is either total coincidence or it’s looking increasingly as if Mom and I are being called to go all Da Vinci Code on the folks over there.

Musings of The Son as the Mother Lies in Hospital

An attitude of gratitude. That’s what I am trying to cultivate today. Generally speaking, I 2010-10-13 14.38.10am nothing but annoyed – an attitude of ingratitude, I might point out – by nifty-sounding phrases like “attitude of gratitude”. But the rhyme clothes an important and skillful way of being, one often overlooked by people who wonder, as a result, why they’re not happy. More on that later . . . For now, I am simply cultivating these positive, grateful, appreciative thoughts that, by definition, crowd negative thoughts off the stage:

I’m grateful that Mom came out of the surgery without incident. (As I write this, I still haven’t heard from her personally, so she’s probably still woozy; I know what I know from Monica, one of the members of the Montrose Deutscher Posse).

and

She’s such an inspiration to so many people.

There’s no one with an attitude of gratitude like a cancer survivor. We ignore at our peril the elixir of life with which they emerge from their hero’s journey, telling us, in so many words: This matters. That does not.Guess what “this” and “that” are.

A Cancer Survivor (yes, first caps) is what Mom is, about ten years strong. But cancer is something that’s never entirely gone from a survivor’s life. For a decade now, she’s lived with the tests and the doubt and, more happily, the new and healthy ways of thinking and eating.

In fact, it’s ways of thinking and eating that work that are among our interests here, in this blog.

She had cancer in three places a year ago: pelvis, stomach, lung. (It is the measure of the power of a son’s denial that I cannot call up these locations with any confidence). She put herself on a gourmet cancer-killing diet (and if that sounds like an oxymoron, then my mother has a new definition of ”gourmet” for you), lost over fifty pounds, saw one cancer spot disappear, another get smaller, and the third stay the same. We cheered her success.

Over half a year later, it appeared that one of the spots might be getting bigger – it was hard to tell. Cancer tests, especially after one has had cancer and the resulting floaties – a technical term – remain in the blood, are notoriously unreliable. She was disappointed, bowed, but unbroken. And she still had no desire to put toxic chemicals in her body ever again.

So one spot was operated on today, in a pretty routine procedure. “It’s not the surgery I’m worried about,” she told me on the phone this morning, “it’s what they tell me afterward.”

Camino versus Chemo

I’m hoping they will tell her she can do the Camino. That’s the Camino de Santiago, a thousand-year-old path that stretches from western France across northern Spain, and that’s the Way she wants to travel this September, in lieu of the dread chemotherapy. The Camino, or Way, is said to lead to the bones of St. James, apostle of Jesus, who, like other friends and family of Jesus, is claimed to have left Israel and made his way into European lands more convenient to Catholic churches. In any event, the legend is a minor detail; neither of us is religious.  Mom, after an upbringing that prominently featured violent Catholic nuns, hasn’t any Catholicity left in her.  So it’s not a religious journey. But it is one in which people can, and do, find their own meaning, and I’ve read that it quite often becomes a spiritual journey, as anything does when we do it mindfully.

I know the last thing in the world she wants to hear is that she needs chemotherapy. I’m hearing of more and more people who have endured the horrors of chemo and who refuse ever to do it again – the horror! I hear Kurtz saying, in “Apocalypse Now,” a movie about the Vietnam war that prominently features chemicals that kill. The horror!

Over the last year, whenever Mom has tried to talk about chemotherapy, she’s begun to cry. It’s one of the freshest ten-year-old wounds you’ll ever see.  “I can’t do it again,” she says. “I just can’t.” So she has turned the power of that emotion into the passion with which she exercises and disciplines herself to a super-healthy, natural diet in a world of fake food and other gustatory gimcrackery.

The Purpose of the Camino

About two months ago she got the idea of the Camino from a documentary, and that idea burgeoned into her new purpose. (Researchers into all manner of illness, and even longevity, will assure you that it’s a sense of purpose that separates the happy from the less so, and the healthy or long-lived from the sick and early-dying.)

So she bought herself some hiking shoes and began to “train” for her pilgrimage through Spain on the trails around Colorado’s Black Canyon – at nearly 7800 feet high, that’s more than enough altitude for the 5000-foot Pyrenees.

“Instead of doing chemo,” she reported thinking a few weeks ago, while she hiked near the Canyon, “I’m walking the Camino.” Now you know why this site is called what it is, or at least the limits of my imagination.

What will the doctors tell her after the biopsy on the removed mass? Will they say “Chemo”?

And if they do, will Mom respond, with a shake of her head, “Camino!”?