A Hostage of Right Brain Disorder

Yesterday marked one month since this ordeal began. This week will be my first back at work. Time to shake things up around here.

First things first…should I change the name of the blog? Comments are welcome to my email…which you can find in text form in an earlier post. It pays to pay attention, folks.

Yes, normal…back to work. I’d been back 3 hours when I had to deal with a problem client. Eeeeeesh.

Although there are parts of my job that I truly love, there are others that make me want to chuck it and walk away. This one falls into that category.

In better news, I finished the bike stand that I started on Saturday. When you own a bike that is as odd as mine, you can’t just go to the bike store for an off the shelf bike repair stand…I built one from scratch custom fit to my bike. Now all I need is time to actually work on the bike…or ride it, for that matter.

It’s funny, that thru all of this I’ve been remarkably upbeat. There was no major fear, nor foreboding over what was taking place. The pain meds have mostly wiped out my memory of the last three weeks. It’s funny how time has been bent for me and it manifests itself in such odd ways. Take this morning, for instance.

I typically get up and turn on the Weather Channel for a minute to see what the day holds. There is one weathercaster on the morning show that is expecting a baby…she usually wears tight fitting clothing, so that wasn’t hard to figure out. This morning I flipped on the TV and there she was…HUGE!! In my mind this happened overnight…I simply couldn’t fathom how fast the change had happened. Then I thought about it. It’s been almost 4 weeks since I had last seen the show and a lot can take place in four weeks late in a pregnancy. Again, my mind thought that I had seen it yesterday, but somewhere a lot of time has passed…passed without me in it.

Now that I’ve been off the pain meds for about a week, I can honestly say that the fog in my head must be emotional. I guess I’m due some emotional fallout from such a trauma as this, but I sure wished that it had happened while I was in that month that seems to have vanished.

Not now…I just can’t fight it effectively at the moment.

For those of you who seek pleasure at the discomfort of others, or if you just like to see cool weird stuff, here are a couple of images of my “little critter”. The first is of the x-ray that started this long, strange trip.

If you look closely, you will notice that this thing is almost as large as the upper part of my lung.

The next image is from the CT scan that was done on Thursday prior to the surgery. Although it’s huge in this image, the single image simply does not do justice to the sheer size of this thing…it goes on at this size for frame after frame in the CT series. I wondered how I was able to breathe with this thing in there.

I cannot believe how incredibly blessed I’ve been in this whole ordeal. The tumor was benign, the nurse for the surgeon lives 3 doors down the street, business is stable, everything is way ahead of plan for recovery and Dr. Briggs says my chances for it returning are aboutt the same as they were for it growing in the first place…a long shot.

Now all I have to do is sort out how to move forward from here.

…and if you have any questions as to the title of this post, then you simply need to go back and read some of the earlier posts…’nuf said.

Well, yippee…Dr. Briggs said that I’m released…free to return to the real world…whatever that is. I’m not sure that I know what is real anymore. I have nothing to go back to at work as Paul has done a superlative job of keeping things running while I’ve been out. I cannot remember a time ever that I did not have a large pile of stuff to do hanging over my head, so I’m not quite sure what to make of things now but I’m sure that I will get through somehow. Also, Katy has insisted that I stand in front of a mirror for an hour a day and practice saying “NO”…maybe this will allow me to keep my head above water. I do tend to be a pushover when folks ask me to help out with stuff…which explains why I’m the President Elect of my local CSI chapter, a regional Vice Chair for CSI as well, the Secretary of my ASIS chapter, on the Leadership Counsel of my BOMA chapter and the President of the Band Boosters.

Add that to my family and church activities and my plate can tend to be a little full. And then there’s the business…the biggest time soak of them all.

As I said earlier, it’s going to take a while for me to figure out what this all means and how I should respond to this “wake up call”…I’ve got some ideas. As always, more to come.

Well, today is the litmus test…I visit the surgeon for my follow up. Hopefully he will like everything he sees and clear me to drive again. Once that happens, I’m really on the “road” to recovery.

Continuing on the deep thoughts of yesterday, I’m still in a minor funk about just what to think about this whole strange trip. The fact that I feel as good as I do only add a pinch of guilt to my thought process. Yes, I dodged a bullet…sort of…it just happened to saw me half way through as it passed…but “it’s only a flesh wound”.

My initial reaction is to simply throw myself back into my work and let that erase my thoughts, but that would be doing a disservice to everyone that has prayed so hard for my very miraculous recovery.

I could chuck it all and go sit on a mountain top and meditate over everything to try to put it in prospective, but that wouldn’t help anyone else and that goes against my core beliefs.

The real answer lies somewhere in between. I have to come to grips with what happened and what I should change because of it, but I can already tell that this is going to be a very long and arduous process. Stay tuned.

Normalcy …I repeat, we have normalcy.

This afternoon I carefully gathered the pile of get well cards, folded them into a neat stack and carefully placed them into a large cardboard box. I disconnected my temporary workstation setup and then folded up the TV trays that have constituted my “office” for these last two weeks. I boxed up all of the accumulated notes, pens, pencils and other small accoutrement that have been growing like mold in that small corner of my bedroom that has been serving faithfully as ECC east during my recuperation and prepaired to move it on out. Having disassembled the equipment and packed everything up, I moved it all downstairs into my home office and prepared for my life to return to normal.

But what is normal for me anyway?

I mean, I’ve owned and operated a very successful business for the last 21 years, I’m happily married with three kids, I play music at the professional level in my permanent gig at the church, I do my all of my art & metal sculpture things and now I’m getting involved with this crazy bunch of folks that can’t seem to ride a “normal” bike.

Almost any single one of the above could be considered on it’s own to be a bit “odd” but doing all of the above simultaneously must border on the insane…not that I’ve ever thought of myself as sane anyway.

Yet tomorrow morning I’m going to begin the process of getting my life back to normal. I’ll get up at the normal time, go through my normal morning routine, walk into my normal office…although anyone that has ever seen my home office would comment that there is absolutely nothing normal about it…and begin to act like my entire life did not completely go insane for the last three weeks.

Now that I’ve been off of the pain medication for the better part of four days, the fog in my head that comes with powerful pharmaceuticals is beginning to clear and the immensity of what has just transpired comes rushing in to fill the void. I cannot begin to put into words what it is like to stare the prospect of imminent death in the face is like. But though all of that I had a remarkable peace and calm about the situation. My doctor, who is also a close friend, came to my house on the evening that we had discovered the tumor to discuss the prospects for my future…that in itself is unbelievable, but that is also living proof of how great a human being Wes Dean is. To say that it was surreal to sit in my own living room listening to my doctor describe what was about to happen to me is an understatement and a half. To say that it happened without me completely falling apart is simply another indescribable event.

Yet here we are…tomorrow marks three weeks since surgery. The surgeon said to plan for four to six weeks of recovery time before resuming anything close to a normal work schedule, but I think that I could make it through one of my abnormal workdays if I was allowed to drive…and that should happen Tuesday. I played drums last Friday…drums, as in marching snare with some of my old students in the Powell drumline…with the big heavy marching sticks, no less. No pain…none…you could have knocked me over with a feather, as I was waiting for my arm to fall off as soon as the stick made contract with the drumhead. Yesterday I cleaned out the garage, welded up a really cool workstand for my bike, rode said bike up to Eddie’s house and back (about a mile) and went to my father-in-law’s birthday party…there is no way that a typical workday is going to be any more intense.

The problem is that I don’t know how I should feel about this.

My friends seem to be all amazed that I’ve stared death in the eyes and come back in half the time that I should have, yet I don’t think that I’ve done anything special at all and I get tremendously embarrassed when they bring it up.

As a matter of fact, my current point of view on the last three weeks is that it was all a strange dream. Not a nightmare or anything shocking mind you, just one of those odd little dreams that you have every now and then about riding a green horse on a carousel that is suspended in space by no apparent support while snacking on spicy escargots and chocolate-chocolate chip Hagen-Daas while wearing your electric purple silk vested zoot suit and worrying about what the weather is like in Timbuktu.

You do have dreams like this, don’t you?

Or is it just me? More to come…stay tuned.

Well, sports fans, today has certainly been interesting. I started trying to return to normal…whatever that is. I changed the two-and-a-half week old message on my cell phone to something remotely up to date. I also went out…out, as in: to see a client about a project that we are working on. After that I convinced my somewhat reluctant driver to run me by to meet the president of the Recumbent Bike club and we had lunch. Yes, it was shaping up to be a really great day.

But then it happened.

We got home and Katy left to go run some errand. I sat down at the computer to get some work done when, out of nowhere…

Ah…ahhh.. ahhhhhh …sscccccchhhhhhhiiiiittttttt!!!!!!

Or something like that. Yes, I sneezed. Or cursed…or both.

Now I used to be quite a fan of Harry Callahan movies. You DO remember Dirty Harry don’t you? The big honkin’ 357 magnum revolver,”Go ahead, make my day” Dirty Harry. I often wondered what would happen if he ever failed to hit his target dead square…since he never missed, unless it was on purpose (which proves to you DH fans out there that I am a rabid fan since you will remember the scene where he borrows a fellow cop’s gun to practice…and misses the target on purpose so that he can go back later and retrieve the slug…proving once again that he hits exactly what he aims at)

Today I found out what it felt like for ol’ Harry to miss by about 6 inches. Yes, my left shoulder instantly felt like I had a hole blown through it by Harry’s cannon …instantly …before I even finished my sneeze. The rest of the afternoon was spent curled up in bed sucking my thumb and whimpering. Of course, you realize that I had absolutely no pain medication on board. I’m trying to “get back to normal”, so if I feel ok, I don’t take pain med. Ooooooosh. Talk about bad timing.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Well, the last two weeks have certainly been an emotional roller coaster. I’m doing much better…I was up and around as much yesterday as I had been in the entire last week. On the down side, I found out Friday that my father has an early stage of prostate cancer. The good news it that it is early, but it’s still an emotional downer. Please be in prayer for him and my mother as well.

OK, so it’s been a couple of days since I last updated. Nothing of major cosmic significance has taken place during the last couple of days, so I’ve simply taken it easy and tried to heal up.

It really is interesting how being on pain medication affects your awareness of time. I noticed yesterday that the week that I spent in the hospital is almost entirely wiped out of my personal timeline. Not that I don’t remember the events of the week, on the contrary, I remember a ton of the finer details, but it just seems like a week of time simply ceased to exist.

During my time in the hospital there were a number of specific events that stuck out in my mind. There was Kent Williams, one of the Pastors in our church, who dropped byto visit with me while I was in Pre-op. I distinctly remember Kent, but I don’t remember my mother and my wife Katy who were asked to come back and join Kent just before I went into surgery…pharmacology is a strange and wonderful thing. I remember Marilyn, the charge nurse in ICU who sort of “bent” the rule that I was to only have liquids…by slightly melting some orange sherbet, thereby making it a “liquid”. That sherbet was the first thing that I had eaten in over 24 hours and it was absolutely the most wonderful thing I could imagine. I know that it was cheap, institutional food service sherbet, but nothing you could make with fresh cream and prime ingredients could possibly taste any better. I remember Chas (pronounced Chaz), one of the other ICU nurses, that realized that my pain medication was doing absolutely nothing about my shoulder pain and worked tirelessly to get me something that did work. Then there was Morgan in the COU, the “new hire”, fresh out of nursing school and who really cared about what she was doing and it really showed.

There have been so many thoughts running thru my head that I have sort of avoided doing this update…there simply is too much to write about. So many people have called, dropped by, sent me cards or emails…it’s really overwhelming.

My next task is to try to figure out where to go from here. I really do feel like I’ve been given a new lease on life or dodged a bullet. I’m not sure why the Lord has chosen to be so kind, but it’s a daunting task to try to discern what direction to go off in now. I’ll be posting more later but I need to run along and go meditate on a mountaintop or take a dose of pain medication…whichever.

How my recumbent saved my life.

As I sit here typing and quietly contemplating, I am amazed at the speed with which the last few days have flown by. A week ago last Thursday, the 27^th to be exact, I received the news that I had a large mass in my left chest and that it needed to be surgically removed as soon as we could get it scheduled. Tests, needles, surgery consults, endless paperwork, moments of fear, panic and absolute terror soon followed.

How did all this happen?

A few weeks earlier I had been discussing my poor physical condition and my need for a hobby that would get me outside with my younger brother Brian. He quickly suggested cycling…but he used to be a very serious cyclist that did many, many miles a day. I retorted that putting my overweight, slow and clumsy body on a bike would amount to a death wish at the very least. He responded by asking if I had ever looked into a recumbent trike. Stable, fun and you can actually enjoy the scenery as it passes instead of admiring the asphalt as it whizzes beneath you. To make a long story short, I did some research, made a run to Atlanta to look one over and suddenly I’m a Greenspeed trike owner.

Not wanting to be found on the side of the road dead from heart attack, I figured that a complete physical would be in order. My doctor also happens to be one of my best friends, so getting “worked in” was no big deal. After giving blood, peeing in the little cup, being poked, prodded and otherwise explored (and I actually thought that the prostate exam was going to be the worst thing that happened to me that day) I was sent back for a routine chest x-ray.

I grew up in a family of electrical engineers that specialized in Nuclear Medicine, so I’ve seen a bazillion “typical” x-ray films in my life, but when the nurse turned on the viewer that afternoon my only thought was “WHAT THE F*** IS THAT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY LEFT LUNG??? The nurse’s aide said that it was probably nothing…I’m not sure whether she was being nice or was just that dumb.

My doctor strolled in, informed me that “everything looked fine on the x-rays” and told me he would call me if my tests showed anything unusual. I assumed at that point that I simply must be clueless about x-ray films, because that thing in my chest looked distinctly like that critter in the movie “Alien”. Two hours later I was sitting in CT Scan being told by radiology that the tumor was the size of a tennis ball and listening to my friend/doctor try to explain that he told me it looked fine “to keep from scaring me”. Eeeeesh.

So now I sit here, thankful to the Good Lord that my surgery went well even if the tumor turned out to be the size of a grapefruit, and that it looks like I’ll be fine and on the bike in no time. I bought the bike to help me get healthy…I never realized that it would accomplish this before I even put 5 miles on it.