Breathing the fresh north Georgia mountain air was just what I needed to clear my head this weekend. I breathed deeply and tried to let the rare fresh air push out the smokey pollution hanging in my lungs from the south Georgia/Florida wildfires. I guess I was trying to do a lot more than push out the bad air, but also the dark test results that hung like murky ghosts in my mind- attempting ever so to fill me with their desperation. (Photo left: Me and my new found friend in North Georgia.)I have written a lot about change lately, most probably because I wish it would come and move me out of this limbo that seems to be my life. Fourteen months is a long time to be tested, probed, re-tested - ever the lab specimen that is poked and prodded as doctors seek answers that seem to evade them. I would have stopped some time ago but they pressed on, driven by something much greater than them. A hunch, an unanswerable question pulling at their intellectual fibers. A hunch turned into reality Thursday when my doctor finally produced numbers - the numbers that affirmed his hunch. After retesting due to lost blood samples, for the first time in a year we had reliable and most accurate data on my diagnosis. To say I was shocked is an understatement, but to my endocrinologist it simply was "I had hoped it wasn't true." A hunch turned into reality.
Good doctors follow hunches through the open doors provided to them. Superior doctors go through windows, army crawl through tight spaces, manufacture the very products needed for results, and tear down the walls of bureaucracy 
and never content...ever. I am within the trust and care of two superior men - one of which has me in his Fav 5 on his cell phone. :) ( Photo Right: AP's Oded Balilty - Pulitzer Prize 2007. For more on the photo see the end.)
and never content...ever. I am within the trust and care of two superior men - one of which has me in his Fav 5 on his cell phone. :) ( Photo Right: AP's Oded Balilty - Pulitzer Prize 2007. For more on the photo see the end.)I am glad Dr. R. didn't listen to me in January when I asked if we had simply enough -- he knew something. My antibodies are at work building walls to mask reality. By pulling away the antibodies, my levels are at 79 not 4.1 or 4.9 that started this whole chase. Much worse than we thought - and very far from the "0" they should be.
Living in times and within a body that encapsulates so much uncertainty makes one either reckon with the reality of life or go crazy.
I wish I could lay out a plan- reveal the steps in a sequential order - but I cannot, nor will I be able to any time soon. I am back at Emory/Winship Cancer Center with a specialist who may either determine this was a fluke or the other extreme - order surgery and radiation. I hang in the balance. This has and will continue to be a long journey. As I can, I will provide updates to this blog, and at the same time seek as much normalcy in my day-to-day.
Pink Floyd/Roger Waters played at Phillips Arena last week. To hear and see "The Wall" performed live is one of the top musical experiences of my life. My career is built around tearing down walls - walls of stigma, bureaucracy, ignorance, violence -- but personally, I am fighting to tear down the walls of uncertainty disease brings into my own life. Through this process, I may find a new sense of purpose and passion.
Last Wednesday, I heard Dr. Jeremy Geffen speak at Piedmont Hospital. A guru of integrative medicine http://www.geffenvisions.com/, he was launching the Cancer Wellness Center at Piedmont Hospital. Still under construction, it is heavily endowed to provide no cost resources for cancer patients on the journey to wellness by combining the best of western/eastern medicine with chemo rooms next to yoga studios, nutrition, fitness, mental health, and cosmetic (including wigs and scarves). I had a personal tour of the Center under construction by the Director and had a glimmer of what my passion/career could be in the future. Expanding my passion for mental health into integrative care, there would be more walls to tear down and maybe that is my purpose. (Photo left: Berlin, 1989. Tearing down the Berlin wall.)
The Cancer Wellness Center has a start; an open closet at the entrance where doctor's remove their white lab coats before entering. A statement -- "no walls" -- "we are all humans and we are in this together."
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Pulitzer Prize winning photo - NEW YORK -- Associated Press photographer Oded Balilty has won The Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for his picture of a lone Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces in the West Bank - alone and fighting the wall of their riot gear. Balilty's photo shows a Jewish settler struggling with an Israeli security officer during clashes that erupted as authorities evacuated the West Bank settlement outpost of Amona, east of the Palestinian town of Ramallah, on Feb. 1, 2006.
