Writing and Life

My search and rescue team, and more specifically, one of our most capable and dedicated members, got some great press in this article. If you live in New England and are interested in volunteering with a search and rescue team, check out the Central Massachusetts Search and Rescue Team!

Last Friday, my dad performed the last surgery of a career that has spanned over thirty years. By my conservative guess, based on a minimum of two scheduled surgeries per week plus countless emergency room calls, his total career count would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 operations. For the obvious reason that I have no place in an operating room, I never saw his work first hand, but I have looked over his shoulder at the never-ending x-rays of anonymous reconstructed knees, hips and hands. To me, they were bones and screws, plates and stitches. To him, they were his craft, his passion, his profound responsibility.

Got this idea from drama_kween - here’s a quote from each of 15 different movies that I like. I’ve picked some fairly obscure ones (movies and quotes); good luck with your guesses. When you’re out of guesses, you can follow the links to the movies on IMDB. We fascists are the only true anarchists. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing. I’m not in the business. I am the business. Look, I don’t know nothing about you; you don’t know nothing about me. I don’t know if you’re stupid, or some kind of genius. All I know is that I need to get out of here, and you got the gun. So I’m asking you, for the second time, let me go my way here. Look at this. Look at what they make you give. I call it performance art, but my friend Ariel calls it wasting time. History will decide. Love humiliates you. Hatred cradles you. I gotta hold on to my angst. I preserve it because I need it. It keeps me sharp, on the edge, where I gotta be. What do I think about the U.S. involvement in the war? We should win it. This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and well be lucky to live through it. I’m trying to understand our world. I dont deal with petty materialists like you. Well I, for one, am v-v-very interested to see w-w-what’s going to happen next. Mr. Singer. What an appropriate name for a man who can’t shut up. Death is… whimsical… today.

Thursday morning we discovered serious water damage in our living room ceiling, directly below the upstairs bathroom. Annika called the insurance company and they had their emergency response crew out to assess the damage around 5 on the same day. They did an exploratory look around the damage area and brought in some serious dehumidifiers to dry out the wet portions of the house. The response crew then told us to get a plumber in, and the plumbing crew gave us the lowdown: All of the old, cast-iron plumbing between the fixtures in our upstairs bathroom out to the road has to go. The source of the leak was the soil stack itself, which has a half-inch hole rusted through it.

Elena passed away at 12:55 this morning. She was surrounded by her family and close friends. She stayed with us long enough to see her sister Maria who had, at Elena’s encouragement, followed through with plans to make a two-week trip to Africa. Maria arrived back at Logan Airport at 10:30 in the evening and set foot in the house at 12:30 a.m. I dreaded the notion that Elena was fighting to stay until her sister’s safe return, but we are all thankful that the family could have that chance to be together. My heart is broken for all of the people that Elena has left behind. I am honored to have known someone who could face such a horrible disease with equal measures of grace and dignity. I’ll post again when I know more about further arrangements. Thank you to everyone who has reached out to me, to Annika, and to the Nilson family.

(This post is about Elena. Shes not doing very well. I invite you to read this, but I don’t want you to have to.) I am sitting on a couch. In the center of the room, my wife and her parents are gathered around Elena’s bed. Home and Garden television has been droning on for hours at one end of the room; we are all interior design experts now and we barely notice anymore. The sun outside is bright, but the breeze is surprisingly cold. Elena has been burning up for days, but today it is cool enough that we don’t need to run the AC in her window.

Elena is out of surgery now. The surgeon said that the procedure went very smoothly, and that the tumor was very easy to identify and remove. She’ll spend 24 hours in ICU, and another day or two in the hospital; after that, it’s her call as to when she leaves. I saw her briefly in ICU and she looked pretty good for someone whod just had her brain operated on. Thanks to everyone for the kind words of support!

I have been lax in spreading this news, probably because the fac’t hasnt sunken in for me yet. But to tarry further would be a great disservice to this insanely complex phenomenon that, if all goes well, will be our second child. She (if you ask Linnea) or he (if you ask Annika) is due on or about the 13th of June. We are planning on bringing this new child into the world at a birthing center affiliated with Cambridge Hospital. This will afford Linnea the opportunity to be present at the birth (just as Annika was present at the births of her siblings). So many things have changed since Linnea was born (as much because of her as not) that this second journey feels like a completely new and different experience. Annika and I both are in better places in our lives. My gut feeling about fatherhood is still apprehension, but there have been so many indescribably great moments in the past three years that I can put the hard stuff aside and enjoy a little slice of optimism. Sadly for Annika, this means a glögg-free Christmas. On the up side, she was not eager to repeat a pregnancy through the summer months. At this rate, the child will be with us in time for Midsommar (like another young fellow we know). So–the adventure continues!

Jane Immelheim leaned against the wall of the situation room, her face a picture of zen-like calm. Her hands were wrapped around a coffee mug, and the mug in turn was wrapped around a viscous, day-old sludge. She sipped absent mindedly as she watched the semi-organized chaos around her. After a few minutes more of the buzz of people and machinery, one man glanced up from his computer screen. “Got him. ST-7, near the midtown line.” Jane smiled.

After some consideration (and paranoia about the direction things seem to be going on the web), I decided to reign in control over my own ideas (unoriginal as they are). So thats why I’m blogging under my own steam now, despite the excellent tools afforded to me by the likes of LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, and Blogger. I’m also syndicating my blog via RSS so that folks with aggregators can read me without actually coming to my website.