On walking away from brain surgery

“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”  Winston Churchill

My brother Jack is home from hospital, and apart from the gash on his head, he seems completely unchanged as a result of his midnight brain surgery. 

Jack told me today that while he was in surgery, his son sat with his mother surfing the net on his mobile learning about the effects of sub-dural cranial haematoma.  He wouldn’t let his mother read what he was learning on the grounds that if her husband was not going to be able to walk or talk or think coherently, she didn’t at least have to envisage the prospect for the first time between one and six am in a hospital waiting room.

The euphoria is palpable.

Some mad woman on the phone

I have the dubious ability to hear the ring of a telephone at great distances.  I know when our neighbours’ phones are ringing, I hear them incessantly on the street, and in other people’s cars.  Today as we were arriving home from the supermarket, somebody’s phone was ringing.  I suddenly realized it was ours.

I could only think it was a call from the States and that Jack had taken a turn for the worse.  I rushed to the door with my key, and then dashed to the phone begging whoever it was at the other end not to hang up.  When I reached the phone, I picked it up and screeched “Hello!”   A small little voice at the other end said very politely “May I please speak with Phillip Schmidt?”  I took a deep breadth and tried to sound sane:  I think you must have the wrong number.

The caller apologized and hung up.  But I think she must have been relieved.  It must have sounded as if she had connected to a seriously disturbed wrong number.

Jack’s display: suddenly it’s all different

The call came on Saturday out of the blue from my sister in Chicago.  Our brother Jack collapsed last night as he was helping clear the table after dinner, sending dishes, scraps of food and the family cat flying across the room before a final flourish during which he knocked over the table.  He didn’t lose consciousness, though, and said he was fine, an assurance belied two minutes later when he collapsed again on the stairs.  His wife Mimi refused to be convinced by his theory that his loss of balance was due to an ear infection, and called emergency.

At the hospital they diagnosed a haematoma in the brain, probably resulting from a fall some weeks before.  They prepared for immediate surgery.  But Jack was conscious and insisted on phoning his four children first.  He woke them up individually at about 1 am to tell them that this might be the last conversation that they would ever have together, that he loved them, and to take care of their babies – the various grandchildren who adore him in about the same proportion as he adores them.  Mimi says listening to the phone calls is something she will never forget.

He went into surgery at 3 am.  As I write this he is in intensive care, and says he expects to be back in the office by Wednesday.  The doctors say the best case scenario is that he is going to be in intensive care for quite some time, and will then almost certainly need physical therapy.  How much and what kind is still unclear.  Further surgery might even be required.  But at the moment the prognosis is a good deal more hopeful than it was at 1 am this morning.

I know he’s my brother, but I think it takes some bottle to call up your children in the middle of the night for what might be an ultimate farewell.  It must be something he’s thought about before, although he doesn’t go around talking about dying all the time.  I think it’s a legacy from our mom who talked to each of us quite explicitly when she knew she was dying.

His four children, in the meantime, are trying to come to terms with that midnight call, a once in a lifetime experience they hope never to repeat.  But will always, I am sure, treasure.  Even if their father lives for some good many years to basque in their delight.  We’re hoping he will.

The Obama Roll

The (London) Times had a front page story about the Obama campaign today.  They suggested a problem emerging I’d not foreseen, which is the messianic fervor of some of his followers.

I’ve just begun to be convinced that his voting record and various policy positions showed a welcome political pragmatism and lack of faith-based certainty which offered hope that he could be an effective president.  I’ve seen nothing in his speeches to indicate that he is chasing a left-ish version of the right-leaning Evangelicals, but if they start flocking to him, I can see it could be an electoral handicap.

Alternative lives

I just had an email from a friend I’d not heard from for several years.  She’s about my age, and in between university teaching has been travelling around the world – all over Africa, Russia, Turkey, Crete, China, South America.  It sounds quite exciting too – not the kind of trips where you are kept cosseted from the discomforts of life as real people live it, but in tents, in homes, and with people of quite different backgrounds.

I’m wondering why I am not consumed with jealousy, because it sounds like exactly what Peter and I were planning for our retirement.  We’re not doing a lot of it partly because we don’t have quite the finances to support a life of intense travel, partly because our energy quotient per day is not quite as high as it used to be, and partly because every time we consider a trip, we find ourselves not terribly interested in about 90% of what’s on offer. 

It’s this latter that intrigues me. 

Though I can respect many alternative cultural activities, I am usually more interested in reading about them and trying to understand their roles within the cultures that support them.  Personally participating in them rarely sounds enticing.  Even a garland of flowers placed around my neck by smiling locals, certainly one of the more benign tourist welcomes, makes me want to cancel my reservations.  The mere thought of attending a circumcision ceremony is a one-in-a-lifetime experience too many for me.

Having lived for ten years in Spain and become more immersed in the culture on every level than we thought possible and more than, frankly, we wanted, I tend to see the dark underside more quickly.  The poor also bother me a lot more than they used to, so I can’t do the sightseeing bits without worrying about them more.  It seems unfair that I should be enjoying their heritage when they so often cannot.  Yes, I know tourism is a major part of many of their economies, but that does not make the experience any the more enjoyable or relaxing for me.

On the other hand, I might get over all my high-minded doubts if I won the lottery.  I suspect I will never know.

Life can’t always be perfect

We always enjoy London.

No, let me correct that.  We almost always enjoy London, which is no doubt why we have been there so often for the last 35 years.  Yesterday’s visit failed to live up to expectations.  In fact, although Peter and I have just decided that it does not qualify as the absolutely worst London visit we ever had, it did come in as first runner up.

Perhaps our attitude from the beginning was not up to the required standard.  It was thick fog as we set out to the train station and we debated briefly whether we should actually go.  There was no parking available at the station, so we drove hell bent to the next stop down the line where we got a space.  The train ride was uneventful, but we got to the hotel a half hour before check-in time so we hung around the lobby until the desk opened and we discovered that we’d come to the wrong Travel Lodge.

So we picked up our suitcases and followed directions to the second Travel Lodge a block down the street.  Unfortunately, I misread the street sign so it was about ten blocks walk before we actually got there and checked in.  We settled for a cup of coffee that you make for yourself in the hotel room, and then set out for the Tate Museum where we were having dinner before going to the exhibit.  It was sort of awful:  the ham was boiled and my wood pigeon was tough. 

After the exhibit we took a taxi back to the Travel Lodge where – we thought -we’d been dropped off at the side entrance.  When our key didn’t work to open our room, I thought I must have remembered the room number inaccurately.  They don’t put numbers on keys these days, for security purposes so we went to the front desk to find out where we belonged.  We discovered we were in the wrong hotel.  Travel Lodge seems to have a minimum of three hotels in a three block area, and we’d been in all three in the space of seven hours.

This morning we’d pre-paid for breakfast so we went to the cafe where it was being served.  After jostling for coco-pops and canned beans, we walked out.   We bought a couple of cafe latte’s at a stand at Kings Cross Station, got on the Cambridge train, and came home.

When we got home Peter discovered he’d left his reading glasses on the train.

Still, it wasn’t the worst visit we’d ever had to London. 

Sleep escape

It’s four in the morning and after an hour of sleepless tossing, I finally gave in and got up.   I’m sitting at my computer aware we are going to London today and hoping I won’t be too tired to enjoy my introduction to The Camden Town Group of painters at the Tate Museum.

Why is it that worries in the middle of the night take on an dimension they don’t have in the pure light of day?  Irrational possibilities loom with threatening urgency, small problems become unsolvable, health becomes plagued with serious symptoms suggestive of the last stages of cancer.

Perhaps the irrationality of night fears is a glimmer of what it’s like to be psychotic.  Only without the assurance that life will return to manageable form with dawn.

Oh rats!

It’s not easy sometimes trying to be green.  With the help of a multiplying family of worms, we’ve composted all our food wastes since we moved to Cambridge.  But we discovered today that a rat is trying to muscle in on the worms.  With global warming, rats are an increasing problem here.

Still, I suppose a lot of species have reason to feel the same way about us.  I remember catching a mother beaver with her young ones in my car headlights coming home one night in Westchester, New York.  She was trying to find some place for her family to spend the night after earth movers had cleared the woods next to our property for a new housing development.

Nevertheless, the rats will have to go.

# One

As I look over my life, I see that being number one, while obviously having its advantages, also comes with limitations. 

From the day I first went to school at the age of six, I loved it.  I got so used to understanding everything faster than anybody else that the two outstanding memories of my grade school days are of the only difficulties I think I ever had.  I remember having a short moment of panic when we were asked to learn to spell the word “surprise.”  I was seven, and I didn’t see how I was going to remember all eight letters, especially in the right order.  When I figured out that the trick was to divide the word up into parts calm return.   After that, even 20-letter words held no terror.

When I went to the New School for Social Research for graduate work, it was like first grade all over again.  I loved it.  After a year of courses,  we crammed for several months before the two days’ of qualifying exams that would gain us admittance to the Ph.D. program.  Fewer than half those who sat the exams usually succeeded and those who failed had to settle for the consolation prize of a Masters and then leave.  I worked hard but not because it ever occurred to me I wouldn’t get through.   I worked because it suited me so well.  I came out number one.

So what’s wrong with that?  Well, first of all do let me admit I was surprised and pleased.  The problem was, though, that I had very little experience of ever being anything but first.  But I achieved this in part by carefully choosing my goals.  If I didn’t think I could be first, I wasn’t interested.  This kind of risk aversion is actually quite inhibiting.  I took myself seriously, and my scope for creative thought was circumscribed by a fear that I might produce something inferior, even possibly ridiculous.

I completed my dissertation research and earned my Ph.D. in record time, and then embarked on an academic career that I found as stimulating and exciting – this will probably sound weird – as sex.  I thrived in the context of the university, and gained as much from the demands of my students as they did from mine.   I thought I had come home, and that I would spend the rest of my life at university.

But at the age of 48 I was faced with a choice I would never have wanted and I left academic teaching.  I don’t think I have ever done anything harder in my life.  The paradox is that the loss has not been without its rewards.  I have lived a life that would never have been possible had I remained within the confines of a purely academic career. 

And I don’t need to be number one anymore.    

Another novel diet: lose $10,000

All right, I know some of you thought my adaptation of the hours of the prayer throughout the day used both by monks and Muslims as a diet support was a little crazy.  It works for me, if slowly, by the way.

But yesterday I read about a more modern approach that might not be utterly wacky either.  It was developed by two MIT (or maybe Yale) graduate students each trying to lose weight.  Each one promised to pay $10,000 to the other one if he did not lose an agreed amount of weight by a specified date.  If they both failed, the one who lost the most weight would get $5000. 

It worked.  So neither lost money.  But, being economists, they thought they might be onto a good thing.  They reasoned that we don’t lose weight, or change other habits like drinking too much or using drugs or gambling or smoking because our short-term rewards overwhelm our thinking about our long-term rewards.  As they see it, the money was a way of adding significant heft to the short-term consequences.

Being entrepreneurs as well as economists, they set up a website where you can design your own “commitment contract” that will impose an immediate cost in terms of a donation to the charity of your choice if you fail.  You can check it out at no cost at www.stickK.com. 

My own assessment of the technique is that it might work for some people.  But I think they have subtracted two significant variables that would have been more important for me than $10,000.   (Because if I had that much to bet, I think I might have been prepared to lose it late one night for a piece of cheese cake.  After all, people have paid $70,000 for a single bottle of wine.  That makes the cheese cake look positively cheap.) 

But what would have stayed my hand was that I was working with somebody else.  Just knowing that I might have to confess that I’d failed to stay on my diet would be a big reinforcer for me.  And the students were in competition with each other as well.  Competition is also a strong reinforcer for some people – especially men.

So my version of StickK wouldn’t involve money.  It would involve telling somebody else how well  was doing.  Which is why I started to talk about my diet on this blog.  I lost another 1/2 pound by the way.  But I’ve been slacking off on the 5 mini-reminder breaks during the day, and it shows. 

I’m determined to get back on track beginning now.  I’m also getting my husband involved in my enterprise.  When I have to tell him about my successes and failures, I am much more inclined to prefer success to cheese cake and chocolate cookies. 

It’s just too embarrassing to keep admitting that one more time I couldn’t resist temptation.