All posts by Mike

What is it about me and France?

Personal stuff, Tdf trip planning

First things first; my wife’s operation to rumove a tumor from her lung last Friday was successful, although she had to spend two nights there instead of one, because the lung operated on didn’t reinflate as quickly as hoped. But Sunday I got to take her home and she’s doing pretty well. A bit sore on that side, but in her own view, better than expected. We’ll be meeting with her Oncologist a month from now after another PET scan to see what the future looks like.

Now the France thing. How can you not like a place where one of the best places in town to eat is all about PAIN? You’ll sometimes see a Maison du Pain, which a half-translation comes out to House of Pain. The truth is that pain, in French, means bread, so when you see “pain” you can generally think of awesome pastries and sandwiches at reasonable prices.

The place in the photo is in Lourdes, in the Pyrenees foothills. You can view it in Google Maps here. I travel with my son Kevin pretty much every single July to see the Tour de France and ride up the toughest mountains on offer. For fun. Wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if not for the great food though.

We have two places we normally stay, one in Lourdes (adjacent to the train station) and the other in Grenoble (again, close to a train station). Why close to train stations? Because we get around either by bike or bike & train, using local trains to extend our reach. I try very hard to avoid having to rent a car and deal with all the hassles that entails. This past July was unusual in choosing Annecy as our base. We’ve visited Annecy previously but never stayed. It worked out surprisingly well this year. Next year could be tough though; the route will actually be announced today, with rumors that there really won’t be any central point you can see many stages from. Lots and lots of travel between each stage, which might require using a car.

More shortly; getting pretty late (12:46am). –Mike–

Finally getting somewhere; Karen’s surgery at 3pm today

Personal stuff

Hard to believe it’s been such a long time since my wife was diagnosed Stage 4 breast cancer, and the journey that took us on as I very quickly figured out the questions and sought answers and a path forward. I was frustrated by things taking mere days to figure out, and getting the hook-up with the specialist at Stanford, an essential part of the process of getting the best-possible care, almost didn’t happen. But things did pull together, rather quickly actually, and we had a plan. Even though Stage 4, which means the cancer has “escaped” and is now likely to pop up anywhere at any time, it was determined that there was, at this point in time, just a singular instance, a small tumor in her lung, and it made sense to remove it surgically. There was, seemingly, very low risk of this quickly becoming a whack-a-mole thing in which surgery makes no sense.

And that was… a long time ago. The gap between then and finally getting that darned thing out seems to have taken forever. Delay after delay, then the Kaiser strike which messed up scheduling when it looked like we finally had a date. And the information came in bits and pieces, sometimes contradictory. The October 20th date was revealed in a side-conversation with my own Oncologist and didn’t appear anywhere in Karen’s medical info then, or for the next 3 or 4 weeks. We just didn’t know for sure.

What we did know is that there was a firm “No flying for 30 days post-surgery” (probably because it’s her lungs involved…makes sense) and that this thing wasn’t going to be shrinking while we waited, because that’s not what cancer does. And the #1 priority was not our vacation plans in December but getting that thing out of her ASAP, which meant we also had to be a bit cautious in how we presented things. Karen’s health is the priority, not the vacation, yet we had these plans in place… but you sure didn’t want the health care people thinking we wanted to surgery taken care of because it would be inconvenient to delay and have to change our plans.

It’s 12:02pm Friday; we leave in 18 minutes for Kaiser Santa Clara. She gets signed in at 1pm, operation 3pm, should take 1-2 hours (fairly quick surgery). She’ll stay overnight and will be back in her own bed tomorrow night. Yay. About time.