In my neverending quest to finish up magazine articles I've started, I picked up a (few months) old Esquire this morning and completed reading an article started back when the magazine issue was new.  The article was called "Stories My Father Told Me" and it was written by Tyler Cabot.

Cabot explored several things in the course of the finely written article: his ambivalence about his father's chosen profession of defending large corporate clients as a litigator, his father's choice to represent one of the detainees at Guantanamo, and the ways in which our choices shape us.

At the end of the article was this elegant quote:

"There are inflection points in the life of a man, or in the life of a country.  That is, there are points beyond which things will never be the same.  Once you've taken responsibility for someone's life and freedom in a challenge to the authority of your own government, torts and contracts and product liability might lose a bit of their urgency.  Once a man has changed, it can be hard to reconcile his old self with the new.  Once a country has changed, it can be unrecognizable to those who thought they new it best."

In a few short sentences, Cabot captured exactly what I was feeling during much of the Bush administration's pursuit of war in Iraq, in its detaining without counsel, charges, trial dates or judicial oversight of "enemy combatants," in the way the "war against terror" seemed to trump any niceties like constitutional rights or obligations under the Geneva convention.

it may seem like the time for reading this article is past.  Bush is out of office, Guantanamo is slated to be shut down, the Obama administration is figuring out how to best prosecute the detainees that warrant prosecution out of the hash they were handed. 

But I found the article timely for two reasons:

1.  It reaffirmed why I voted for Obama instead of McCain (and why I never voted for Bush).  --and here's where Steve can begin shouting-- I believe that there are some lines that Obama will not cross.  That transparency is truly his goal and that he's young enough at this game not to compromise our core principles for consolidation of power and the illusion of security.  I didn't recognize our country under Bush.  I'm starting to recognize it now.

2.  As someone who has profoundly changed due to my life being turned inside out/upside down within the space of a few days--I find that there was a great deal of resonance for me in the idea of inflection points.  There are changes that shift us to our core.  Where some things are just not interesting anymore (zombie movies in my case) and others become more profoundly important (family, friends, a day in the sun, birds, butterflies...I could go on.)

Bravo to Tyler Cabot for writing the article and to his father for representing the "unrepresentable" pariah--an enemy combatant.

Mom #1 (aka Charlene, Charmom, Chuckie in days of old) forwarded me an article about the outsourcing of copy editing and page layout from various newspapers around the globe (including the Orange County Register's stable of local publications) to a group in India.

Which triggered the Sunday Question:

How do you view the current state of flux and reconfiguration of our nation's print media?  Is it a good thing, and if so, why?  Or will it be the dumbing down (even futher) of our news sources and hence our society?

There are piles of papers, magazines and books in my office.  No matter.

There is a full laundry basket waiting to be washed.  No matter.

There are cards to be written, emails to be returned, plants thirsting for water.  No matter.

I am having the day off.  That's what matters now!

As many of you know, there was good news on the colon cancer front today.  It appears that I will be heading for liver resection surgery at the end of July or the beginning of August.  The surgeon expects to remove about 90% of my tumors while taking about 50% of my liver.

Thanks to our Creator for making us with regenerative livers!  After my liver regrows, we will revisit my status to see if a stage 2 resection of the remaining 10% of the tumors make sense.

Interesting liver resection fact #1: They don't just take out the area where the tumors are now...they take out the areas where the tumors showed at diagnosis.  So while I have shrunk the number of tumors and the volume of remaining tumors by half (thanks to God, prayers, chemo, diet, visualization and good fortune), they still take out the chunks that used to have tumors there. 

Interesting liver resection fact #2:  They'll also be taking out my gall bladder at the same time.

Interesting liver resection fact #3: (For those who've had hemocolectomies, stomach resections and/or been at bedside for people who have)--NO TUBE DOWN THE THROAT!  Yaay!

So...now to what I'm asking YOU to do.  One of the sites that I find most useful in this fight (C3--Colorectal Cancer Coalition)...and coincidentally the site where I first ran across my second opinion doctor, Heinz-Josef Lenz, is part of a contest to receive a $25,000 grant to upgrade their social media capabilities.

I'm asking folks to support this by voting for C3 to receive the funds for two reasons:

1.  Colon cancer is the 3rd most common form of cancer, yet it lags behind in awareness by a significant degree other forms of cancer (breast, lung, prostate to name a few...heck, since Ruth Ginsberg and Patrick Swayze are both fighting it, we probably lag behind pancreatic cancer in awareness).

2.  Colon cancer is highly preventable if caught early, during screenings.  Social media will be critical to getting younger folks (20-40) to recognize symptoms that could lead to screenings and save their lives...literally.

So please click on the link below to C3 help get the word out.  If you twitter or have a Facebook account, there are other ways to help, listed below.



§If you haven’t voted for C3 yet, do it. Now. Click this link, fill in your email address and submit. MindComet will only use your email address to make sure all votes are unique.

§If you have a Twitter account, then copy/paste this message into a tweet and post. Each tweet counts as an additional vote (only the first tweet counts, no ballot stuffing).

RT to help Colorectal Cancer Coalition Inc. win a 25K social media makeover http://ow.ly/4pcs @CommuniCause #cause2455

§Post about this to your Facebook wall, including this link which will automatically fill in our organization name: http://www.communicause.com/2455. Your friends and family probably already know that colorectal cancer matters to you. Let them know that their support of this campaign is important to you too.

Thanks y'all!

(To be sung to the tune of "Reunited.")

I did a bit of noodling around some interesting political articles today, but don't have the oomph to write about them (or respond to posts) yet.  And I've got questions to write out for the surgeon still.  So this disconnect blurt will have to do.

I did have a productive day.  Met with my sister-in-law Cindy this morning via Skype.  Worked on the first draft of another section of Golf on Monday, Chemo on Tuesday.  Did some catch up on emails.  Had lunch with my lovely Mom.

Now it's off to the couch to write questions, do some reading, and maybe watch some television.  My body's really wanting a break, so I'm gonna give it to me.

Cheers!  Fingers crossed and prayers uttered, please, for the visit with the surgeon tomorrow.

I'm back from my (very mild) infusion feeling a bit loopier than usual with the start of the 5FU.  Maybe it's just that I'm tired after 4 rounds of golf (54 holes total) in 5 days.  At any rate, I am headed to the couch for a little television viewing.

I re-met a wonderful woman in chemo today.  She's two years into her chemo treatments and looks wonderfully healthy.  (She has a different type of cancer but was also stage IV when diagnosed.)  We agreed that positive attitude, exercise, and prayer all play important roles in our battles against cancer.  In my case, I also throw in visualization and yoga.  She does water aerobics and takes trips with her grandkids.

What a blessing to sit with her for the first half of chemo and have her "infuse" me with good energy.

That's all for now!  Thanks for checking in.

There was a very interesting article in the LA Times today about how the drought, combined with efforts to protect endangered small fish, has impacted farming in the San Joaquin Valley.  Farmers are letting fields go fallow (reverting back to the desert status that the valley was before homesteaders and eventually farmers brought water into the area) and thus farmworkers are out of work.  Unemployment in the area is above the California average by 3.9%, but in some towns the unemployment figure is 39%.

A few months back, there was a similar article in National Geographic about Australia's farming community (also located in a former desert and dependent on water from other areas) and its collapse after seven years of drought on that continent. 

It strikes me that there are a couple of fundamental issues that will need to be addressed in this time of global climate change (or, if you are one of the few who don't believe the preponderance of scientific opinion, during times of drought).

1.  Is it the best practice to irrigate former deserts in order to grow our food?

2.  Are there ways of conserving water from non-agricultural uses in cities that demand water (and in Australia's case, trump agricultural water rights) that can help tide farmers over while we are working on #1?

The more I read about these types of issues, the more I realize that we need systemic approaches to problems that we've previously seen as easily addressed through human intervention.  In the case of California, we brought water to the desert, not realizing how that would impact the deltas during drought years; where seawater replaces fresh and kills fertile areas of our wetland ecosystem.

No suggestions for solutions from me...I'm far too new to this.  But it does get me thinking that sometimes our initial solutions cause more problems than the original issue did.

What a wonderful day!  I got the chance to drive down and play golf with Dad and our friend, John Gould.  I say our friend since John was complaining about only having one friend (Dad) and I graciously volunteered to be friend #2.  By the end of the outing, Sally had agreed to be friend #3, but David declined to be friend #4.

One of the things I love about playing with these two fine gentlemen is the camraderie and laughs.  No one gets a free pass from the teasing and yet everyone cheers everyone else's successes.  The highlights of this round were John's birdie, Dad's and my (and John's) multiple pars, and a rather amusing slip of the tongue by yours truly.

I was yanking all of my iron tee shots to the left.  As John and I left the tee box, I allowed as to how I used to always slice the ball.  "But now," I said, "I'm more of a hooker."

Then I put my finger on my lips and said, "Hmmm...I don't think that came out quite right!"  I'm sure I'll hear about that one on future outings for years to come.  The only downer of the day was that we were supposed to be joined by my sister-in-law, Donna...and she couldn't make it at the last minute.  (We missed you, Donna!)

Given that I drove for 3 hours today, I also got the chance to catch up on my podcasts.  On one recent "This Week with George Stephanopolous," Senator Lindsay Graham was on.  George (just easier to type than Stephanopolous...it's not that I know him on a first name basis) asked Senator Graham about his opinions on the healthcare reform bills currently being marked up in the Senate and the house. 

Not once, but twice, Graham responded with the Republican talking points that a public health plan was "socialized medicine" and would lead to a "bureaucrat standing between a patient and healthcare."  Two comments.

1.  I fail to see how a public health plan that allows choice between current health plans and the public plan is "socialized medicine."  Nice buzzword designed to drum up fear of a European style of medical care (a type of care that few Americans bother to research enough to know that even if Graham's falsehood were true, it wouldn't be as bad as the hype).  But it's not true...socialized medicine implies a single payer system where the payer is the government.  And that's not going to happen.

2.  I don't know about you, but I currently deal with a pretty good health plan.  And even so, there's a bureaucrat standing between me and proper healthcare on occasion.  It's an insurance bureaucrat, but it's a bureaucrat all the way.  Again, another bogeyman designed to instill fear rather than a legitimate argument against a choice of the government plan.

As an adjunct, I should mention that I was intrigued by one idea being floated by Senator Max Baucus of Montana--co-op healthcare instead of a government run program.  I'll have to read more, but it seems like it may be a reasonable compromisel 

(See, I'm a Democrat and I'm not for socialized medical care...how can that be?)

Enough.  Off to the couch to rest up after my glorious day of golf.