LIVING WITH MCL

After completing the 109 miles of El Tour de Tucson, 2 weeks ago, you might recall my post about unbelievably managing to down 4 pints of Guiness . Well, while I was downing those 4 beers, I was having a discussion about lymphoma, with the coach and 2 of the participants, when I was asked what I thought the reason I had been fortunate enough not to have needed treatment for the past 5+ years. My immediate response was, I just felt it was the luck of the draw, and that there really isn't anything one can do to prolong the inevitable. Now whether that is true or not would certainly spark a wild debate, were that to be the intention for this post, which it isn't. After all I'm not even sure I believe it totally. Else why would I continue to ride my bike as much as I do, and have not had a hair cut since my diagnosis. (We certainly can't forget the story of Sampson?) In fact, I do believe those are two contributing factors, along with a little bit of luck and avoiding an...

As if enough things haven't been turned upside down enough this year already, so it must have been destined for Thanksgiving this year to be different as well. Every year for the past I can't recall how many years, we have had Thanksgiving dinner, at Edie's nephew's home in the Valley. But this year, Edie's nephew decided to go back home to Ohio, and spend Thanksgiving with his mother and family there, leaving us to fend for ourselves. Now it's not that I love spending Thanksgiving in the Valley with Edie's family that much (it really is a love hate relationship, I dread the 50+ mile drive), I have sort of grown accustomed to the routine. So this year instead, we had a Thanksgiving day brunch at Mr R's Grill in the Long Beach Marriott hotel, with Edie's niece (who also lives in the Valley), her husband and two boys. It was nice, the food was good and plentiful, Edie got to spend some time with her family, and best of all I didn't have to drive ...

This was a tough ride, despite the fact there was only about 2700 feet of climbing, and is about the best way to describe how I felt after completing the 109 mile El Tour de Tucson bike ride. The toughest part of the ride were the two dry river bed crossings, one at the 8 mile mark, and the other at the 46 mile mark (conservatively estimated at 200+ yards each), which had to be traversed on foot, carrying your bike on your shoulder. [Fortunately my bike weighs less than 16 pounds.] Plus, by 11 AM the temperature was in excess of 84 o F, making the ride that much more difficult. Still, we (I was riding with a group of 5 other Team in Training participants) managed to complete the ride in 7 hours and 12 minutes, which doesn't take into account the fact we didn't cross the start line until 15 minutes after the official start time. (This is a mass start race, and there were about 4000 cyclists in front of us at the starting line.) So when you take in to account the two river bed...

Before I head off to Tucson for the 109 mile El Tour de Tucson tomorrow, with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training , I thought I'd leave you with this picture, which incidentally won 1 st place in a recent photo journalism contest in Ventura, CA, depicting one of the manufacturing units, and it's crew, where I work. To be clear, I'm not one of those guys you see there (back in Pittsburgh, we used to call them mill hunky's) doing the back breaking, dangerous work. (As I've described it many times to others, I'm an educated mill hunky! :) I'm the one, standing in the [distant] background (who you can't see), that tells manufacturing what temperatures the parts need to be heated to for forging, among other things. The unit the crew is working on is a 50,000 pound hammer. Just picture an old time blacksmith making horse shoes using a hammer, then multiply that by 50,000 times, and you'll get the picture. I think it's amazing...

Well today was Edie and my anniversary! It's hard to believe that it's been 33 years since we were married. Apparently it was so hard to believe, it didn't even dawn on me, until Edie reminded me a few minutes ago. Oh well, I guess I've just got too many other things on my mind. At least I hope that's my excuse. I'm not sure I can come up with a better one. :(

Being I had 3 relatively intense bike rides this weekend, and I'm not planning on riding today, I thought I'd take this opportunity to update everyone on Edie. But before I do that, I wanted to apologize to any subscribers who may have received duplicate and/or triplicate notifications of posts. There was a glitch in my Subscribe2 plug in when I upgraded my blogging software. I have since fixed that problem, and you should no longer receive duplicate and triplicate notifications. Of course, you may not receive any notifications, so this post is also a test of that fix. Ok, enough with the administrative stuff! Last Friday, Edie had her catheter (the one for her dialysis) removed. She had been resistant to this prospect initially, since she was concerned her kidney problems would return, requiring her to start dialysis again, and she didn't want to have to go through reinserting it. Apparently inserting it was somewhat painful. The nephrologist was concerned that if th...

Last night, sitting in front of the TV watching Ghost Whisperer and Womens Murder Club, there were all sorts of things running through my mind. Mostly I was thinking about how just about everything seems to take on more significance since my diagnosis. I've certainly become more passionate about social issues, mostly health care, but now I'm even in support of illegal immigrants as well. I just want everyone to contribute their fair share for the services we all require, instead of allowing some in society to leech off the hard work of all the law abiding citizens and non citizens in this country. Immigration reform is the only way we're ever going to solve the health care crisis, and other vital issues confronting this country, and is the one thing George Bush may have gotten right. But I digress! Last night after installing a new RSS/Atom feed reader , which aids the reading and reviewing of other peoples blogs, I started reviewing a few blogs, several of which I hadn...