Category: Random Thoughts

Updates from Limbo – Decision Made

Still traversing this expanse of time between diagnosis and colectomy surgery. It’s been about five months which which seems crazy. The length of time is partly on me — hopping providers and looking for options— and then due to crowded schedule of my surgeons.

This window of time—before the event and the after of the event—has a limbo-like quality. I’m living my day-to-day life in a completely normal way, but also I’m distracted by the waiting. I appreciate this time, because I feel good now, and I might not feel so good after. But also, there’s an element of wanting to get on with it — to get to the other side of the uncertainty about how life is going to be.

But the time has also given me time to process, and even change my mind about stuff. For instance: After much consideration, the ovaries are going to stay.

When all of this is behind me, I have no doubt that I look back at these months that have produced absolutely no screenwriting and wonder “what the hell did I do for all that time?” I will state for the record that I spent many hours researching, both statistics related to my specific situation, and menopause in general. (This is deserving of its own post that I’ll hopefully write in the future, but in the meantime, read or listen to this book.)

Then I had a meeting with my surgeon where I cried twice while presenting my various facts and figures, and neuroses. She was super-nice, saying that there were valid reasons for either keeping my ovaries or removing them and she’d support whatever decision I wanted to make. She was also super-smart in giving me a deadline for a decision. We both wanted her to be able to give her surgery slot to someone else if I wasn’t going to use it — and she could probably see the likelihood of me digging a research hole into the center of the earth if someone didn’t stop me. She told me to let her know in a week and I agreed.

During that week, I talked to two women, both friends-of-friends, who have gone through surgical menopause, and they shared their experiences. During this time, I’ve been so inspired hearing from people who have gone through their own unique struggles and emerged on the other side. I’m repeatedly amazed by people’s strength and resilience and their emotional generosity in sharing their stories with me just because I ask.

Both of the women I talked to noted that my decision, in the end, would come down to “trusting my gut.” This is difficult, because my gut and I have a long history of communication problems. Is it that I’m not a good listener I’ve wondered, or is my gut a little dysfuntional? (Since my soon-to-be-removed colon is part of my gut, I know there’s some kind of metaphorically snarky comment just asking to be made here, but I don’t know exactly what it is.)

In hopes that my gut would pull back on giving me the silent-treatment, I decided that on decision day, from the moment I woke up, I would not speak to anyone, not look at any screen of any kind, not read or even write until I made a decision.

I woke at about 7:30.

A little after 2:30, I turned on my computer in order to message my surgeon with my decision.

The seven hours in between were very… interesting. Interesting and a little boring. Elongated and super-slow, but also not slow. A relief, but also mildly excruciating.

I don’t know if my gut ever shouted, but in the end I felt happy with my decision—or happy to have it made. And my half-day experiment gave me a tiny sample of a new adventure I am planning, with both anticipation and dread… a 10-day Vipassana course.

(Ummm, yeah, this is is also worthy of a separate post in the future— stay tuned!)

Argentina (Part 2) – Birthday in Bahia Blanca

BIRTHDAY TRIP TO BAHIA BLANCA

Once A and I arrived in Buenos Aires, we needed to get to my ASR “magical birthday spot,” Bahia Blanca, a small city south of Buenos Aires. It takes about eight-hours to travel to Bahia Blanca by car, or just over an hour by plane. We chose the plane. Planes from the smaller local airport in Buenos Aires to Bahia Blanca depart twice a day— in the morning and in the afternoon. Bahia Blanca is the kind of place, where, when you tell Argentinians you need to go there, they look at you perplexed, and ask “Why?” We only had a week in Argentina, and since I really only needed to be in Bahia Blanca at 1:29pm (local time) on my birthday, I considered flying in the morning, hanging out in the airport, and returning in the afternoon. But this plan contained some risk: If anything went wrong with the morning flight, there wouldn’t be any other options and I would have traveled all the way to Argentina only to fail in my mission! In the end, we decided to play it safe and take an afternoon flight on the previous day to make double-sure I was in the right place at the right time.

Upon arriving in Bahia Blanca, we took a cab from the airport into town and found it about as it had been described to us, which is to say, very average. If I was to pick an Argentinian version of the town I grew up in, it might be this. Probably a pretty nice place to go to work, have a family, pay rent, go to the grocery story… but not exactly a cultural or aesthetic mecca. Which was not really a disappointment. We were still dealing with jet-lag and happy enough not to feel obligated to rush to any famous museums, etc.

We did, however, accomplish a rite of passage for Argentina, in that we found a place that would exchange our money at the “blue market rate.” The blue market rate is almost double the official exchange rate. Swapping bills at this rate is not illegal, but not exactly legal either, so you need to find a partner and a place either by going to someplace like the reputed exchange hotspot of Calle Florida back in Buenos Aires, or by “asking around,” and finding someone trustworthy. After a couple of misses, we lucked out asking a staffer at our hotel. It probably didn’t hurt that A_ tipped him generously in American cash when he helped with our bags.  He gave us the address of a small shop whose primary business was something other than a money exchange. Discreetly counting out our bills at the counter felt, as A_, put it, “a little shady,” but it was safer and nicer than Calle Florida would have been, and much less time-consuming. It felt like a victory as it helped me stretch my travel funds for the rest of the trip!

The next day was my birthday, and also “Immaculate Conception Day” or “Day of the Virgin.” I’d read about this before our trip and and had wondered if the day might be occasion for a festival or a parade or something. I can say that, at least in Bahia Blanca, it is not. As we were exchanging our money the previous day, I’d asked the shop-owner what happened on this holiday and she described it as a day where, if you are religious, you can go to church, or you stay home or hang out with family. Nobody goes to work and pretty much all businesses are closed. Kind of like Christmas Day without the decorations. A_ and I enjoyed the fact that we had our hotel to ourselves, went to the little hotel gym, and used the time to figure some travel plans that were changing.

By the magical hour of 1:29pm, we were back at the airport, preparing to board our plane. I felt a little worldlier and wealthier. I wasn’t sure if I felt immediately luckier, but, but that’s mostly a matter of mindset, so I decided I did!

A reader has asked for some pictures. It’s hard to convey how badly I failed as a photographer on this trip, but these will start to give you some idea!

View from our hotel window
Our waiting plane at the Bahia Blanca Airport
Me and A_ at the airport at the magical moment of 1:29pm on my birthday.

 

2021 Year End Recap

Things to be grateful for this (and every!) year: For the warm snoring bodies of the people we love next to us in the bed. For daily walks past people’s yards landscaped with strange desert flowers. For breathing clean air. For rainy days and cars that run. For creative impulses, and the time and ability to pursue them. For family, friends, and random moments of beauty shared with strangers. For sudden trips to far-off places. For the continuation of life. 

2021 in a Nutshell: 

⬆ B got to see old friends in Indiana.

⬆ We both got to see friends again in Los Angeles.

⬆ B took a trip to Argentina – it’s on a whole other CONTINENT, ya’ll!

⬇Paul had his gall bladder removed – it was stressful…

⬆ …but now he can eat Panda Express orange-flavored chicken again.

⬇Some household-maintenance issues that were not fun or short or cheap.

⬆B joined some writing groups and loved having an online writing community. 

⬆Paul was happy to go back to live board game groups, and recordings for his podcast group. 

⬆B achieved a 265-day Duolingo streak. (Como se llama at me, baby, I’m ready!)

⬆Paul and B got our first produced TV writing credit.  

⬆B won a prize for a short story, optioned a show, and got a TV agent. 

⬆Americanish, which Paul produced, won prizes at almost every festival where they played! 

⬇Nobody sold a script or got a job in a writers room.

⬇ Some health stuff that we’ll talk about in a minute… 

But first,

Some Stuff We’ll Do in 2022!

Barrington:  

  • Exploring UX Writing and Content Design as a career path. No idea what this is? Doesn’t matter, just say “something with computers.”  The exciting thing for me is that the more I research, the more I’m finding that the many jobs and side-hustles I’ve juggled over the years have all been training me for a job in this field. Seriously, I might be The Karate Kid of UX Writing! 
  • I’m also committed to some Kondo-level decluttering this year, in my physical space and beyond. 

Paul: 

  • After threatening to start his own podcast for most of 2021, he says that 2022 could be the year he pulls the trigger!  Two potential titles are: Five Ticket Ride (there’s a story behind this one) and Paul Saves the World… featuring Patrick. (I’m assuming his friend Patrick is his partner in crime on this.) 
  • He’s keeping the faith for his various film projects breaking through, looking forward to the pandemic actually being over, visiting friends, traveling and, of course, winning the lottery.

Dumb Health Stuff I Don’t Want To Write

No one knows every hurdle a new year might bring, but in our case, the first one is already up to bat.  In October, I received a cancer diagnosis. It’s colon cancer, like once before in the past, but smaller. Really, so much smaller. It isn’t life-threatening, but there are varied opinions regarding what amount of surgical intervention will be necessary to remove it.  If you know me, you know that in addition to jumping through the traditional medical hoops of doctors, second opinions, etc., I’m also doing all the things like veggie juice, supplements, no-sugar, meditation, etc.

I am gratefully accepting prayers, healing thoughts, good vibes and any and all assorted types of woo-woo energy. If you need a mantra or something to manifest, try the phrase: stage R-zero.

If that’s too short, you can add: and Paul wins the lottery!  (This letter has been edited by Paul.)

Quick Wrap Up

That about wraps up 2021. Despite a few things that didn’t turn out as awesome as we hoped, we really did have a lot of fun times this year. Here’s a picture to show you that we’re still standing:

Proof of Life!

Sending lots of love and affection and our very best wishes for 2022,

Barrington and Paul

Maintenance Sucks… and It’s a Privilege



Sometimes I get really disheartened because I have to do so much side-hustling while the “real job” of being a writer — the job that I’m am trained at, good at and want to do — feels like a shell game.  I keep doing the work, but the target is always moving and it never seems to pay off.

So then I get doubly irritated when, out of the blue, the equivalent of a third unpaid job falls on me. In September, a bathroom pipe in my condo sprang a leak in the middle of the night. In the morning I was on the phone with tenants, the homeowners’ association, plumbers, water mitigation experts, the insurance company and the (rightfully) very irate downstairs neighbor. And for almost two months, hours of each day was consumed by logistics, and communicating those logistics to all the relevant parties. Because of pandemic-related “supply chain issues,” every two minute visit to the Home Depot website for a part became hours of rabbit holing, scrounging and waiting, and then more hours separately explaining and apologizing for those delays to the tenant, the irate neighbor, etc. It was frustrating.

It was also what what my brother-in-law would call a “First Class Problem.”

Because someone could easily say: “Fuck you… YOU OWN A CONDO IN LOS ANGELES. I’ll take that problem off your hands.”

And that person would be right. I can feel frustrated because maintaining property, is tedious, time consuming, expensive— but I should never forget to feel grateful for the circumstance that makes the problem possible.

Which brings me to the stress and tedium of maintaining my other property — the body I live in. Specifically at this moment, the cancer. I’ve had blood draws and CT scans and doctor’s appointments where we discuss doing things to my body I don’t want to do. I have launched a routine that requires hours each week (if not each day) buying, cleaning, cutting and juicing vegetables, then cleaning the juicer and the entire kitchen which some how ends up covered in a carrot / beet blood splatter. It takes more time to meditate, and read medical journal articles on the internet. I wake up some mornings buzzing with anxiety. I may have mentioned on this blog how I get anxious packing for a trip. I worry about making decisions I’ll regret. What if I bring things I don’t need? What if I don’t bring things I need?  And that’s when I’m traveling for a week. So clearly it’s daunting to decide on treatment options that I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

But, weird as it seems to say, it is also still a first class problem. I live in a healthy-feeling body — which is an entirely different experience from dealing with all this from a body in pain. I’m editing this as I wait on hold to make a doctor’s appointment because I have health insurance and because my work-from-home situation allows it. My cancer was detected early because I have health care.I’m housed. I have a juicer, access to fresh food and information. And I have friends and family who want to help. I am surrounded by generosity.

The world is touching me, and I am blessed.

Health Concerns

“When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.” (Augusten Burroughs, writer)

I don’t believe this entirely (in particular, you have to wonder if the writer had children), but I certainly understand the sentiment. The first time I had cancer, there were so many things I was trying to organize before going to the hospital, things I assumed I was coming back to as soon as the surgery was over.

Once the diagnosis came back, and turned out to be bigger and scarier than expected, I remember being amazed at how quickly all those things felt completely unimportant. Faced with the proposition of losing your health, so many things that feel important fall away with an ease you could never have imagined. Getting a hard health diagnosis is like being confronted by a big guy with a knife. When he starts chasing you at high speed, and you start running, you aren’t thinking about some report you have to turn in at work the next day.

At the same time, living with a hard health diagnosis is like running from a guy with a knife who is moving in slow motion. You have time to eat something, take a shower, and even turn in a report or two — but you can’t really forget that the guy with the knife is coming for you, that at some point you’re going to need to dodge and weave, and keep moving. It’s a different existence from people who don’t have any slow motion knife guys in their lives.

All of this is just the way my mind tries to intellectualize and metaphorize my circumstances.

Like the fact that the doctor came in after my colonoscopy last week to say she’d found a polyp that she thought looked cancerous, and that, due to some scar tissue, she’d been unable to remove it. Her proposal, even in those first moments coming out from sedation, was daunting: Remove the rest of my colon. As in all of it.

It didn’t seem much less daunting a few days later, when we had a video consult. The polyp—the cancerous polyp— is very small, but because of my genetic mutation (Lynch Syndrome), the larger surgery is recommended —I guess it’s the doctors’ way of avoiding the knife-guy — or at least slowing him almost to a stop. But it would entail some big lifestyle changes that I’m not sure I’m ready to embrace. My instinct to opt for something a little less life-changing, even if that means I need to spend more time in the future looking around corners for the knife guy. Because my mutation affects multiple organs, I feel like, knife-guy’s never going to go away completely no matter what, so maybe concentrate on quality of life over quantity.

Working through all this — organizing more scans and conversations, and making some immediate changes to my diet and meditation — has quickly become a preoccupation. Maybe because it isn’t immediately dire (I’ve managed to push any surgery to late December or January), things in my life haven’t dropped completely off my radar in terms of importance in the way that I’ve had happen in the past, but certainly they’ve become smaller blips.

One blip that is still pretty large is this: Paul is having his gall-bladder removed today. It’s supposed to be an outpatient surgery. I’ll be taking him to the hospital in about an hour. In another timeline, where my results last week were clear, this would have been the big headline news, perhaps the only topic of this blog. Indeed, we both have lots of thoughts and feelings around it —what it means in terms of lifestyle, identity, overall health — but for the moment, we’d appreciate all good thoughts just to get through the procedure with no complications.