Checking my pulse

Inquiring minds want to know: Geez, Dave, it’s been a long time since you posted on your blog. I haven’t seen you around CLL Forum or ACOR. Are you dead?

This reminds me of the days when Marilyn and I managed our family’s summertime resort (and I use the term loosely) in the heart of New York’s Borscht Belt. It catered to an older clientele, many of whom had been coming as guests every year since the Hoover Administration. Breakfast was served at 8:30 each morning and one always had to keep an eye out for those who did not show up for it. People in their 80s do not skip breakfast, especially when it is one of three meals included in their rate. One day a guest approached the front desk and told me that her friend Alice was missing. This is how I discovered my first dead person, slumbering eternally in a red rocking chair in her room.

So I do appreciate that those of us who live with life-threatening things, like old age and leukemia, keep an eye out for one another. It is one of the sweet things about our community. I am here to say that I have been distracted, not dead.

First off, most people who are active in the CLL community are either retired or on disability, and Marilyn and I still run a full-time business. We are prisoners of eBay. Perhaps you’ve seen those TV commercials showing happy couples on their sunny decks next to their palatial homes, icy red cocktails positioned just-so next to their laptop computers, with a voice-over that goes something like this: “We made $5,000 last month running our part-time online home business. Next month we plan to make $20,000!” I am here to tell you that the only real thing in that picture is the drinking.

I have also been working on a very long post for this blog with the working title The roar of the engine, or chemo comes closer. As you can surmise, I am reaching some conclusions about dealing with my CLL. As I look at the post in draft form I realize that it sums up how my views have evolved when it comes to managing and treating the disease.

But I am not one to rush things into print. Sure, there are ideas I’d like to throw out now and then, especially posts on topics that are off the CLL reservation: How did we just spend $340 at Costco when we only went in to buy a new phone? Spider catchers: Low tech v. high tech (I may yet do that one). And for my Republican friends, George W. Bush: The truth revealed.

But, alas, I hold myself back, for I believe that to be a good writer you have to be a good editor. And so I will leave you for now with two quotes and a photo that has nothing to do with anything. Let’s call it the summer of my non sequitur:

Shakespeare, of course, said “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Voltaire did him one better and said: “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”

And now for the picture: Below is my brother-in-law, holding my four-month-old human nephew on one side and my 19-year-old feline nephew on the other. Talk about the whole kitten kaboodle. Apparently cats and infants can be carried around in much the same way. I thought it was an amusing picture; it is a reminder that life goes on and that for everyone like Alice who leaves it, another beautiful soul enters into it. We are all one in that circle.