This has been one of the fine weeks of my life. It started with an extended visit to Lake Powell with two sets of old friends. The first several days I spent on a houseboat owned by a former student, now colleague and dear friend. Four of us fished from our boats in the Bullfrog area for a couple days and had good success with smallmouth and an occasional largemouth bass. The food was excellent: from steaks a la bernaise with asparagus to Usher's ring bologna with sauerkraut to Grayson's bolognese ragu. (Jan also contributed 4 portions of Bon Ton's bread pudding with whiskey sauce for Grayson's dinner.) Then I met my usual fishing partner, who picked up my boat (with me waiting in it!) at a convenient highway junction and we fished the Hite area for the first time in 10 years. That was a sublime experience because it was absent the usual pleasure boaters. Fishing was a little tougher here because so much new ground is covered with water the fish have a lot of territory to hang out in. Highlight: just as we were quitting on the last day and the last hour, 100 yards from the take out, the striped bass began to attack the threadfin shad on the surface. This is known locally as a "boil". During their frenzy these bass will strike almost any shad like lure every time. It gives one a new appreciation for the feelings of our Indian natives to this country when they paired the repeating rifle with buffalo hunting. In a word, it is orgasmic. These fish were up and down fast and I got one, the last fish of the trip--a great memory since timing is everything on boils and I hadn't experienced one for a few years.
Lisa arrives tonight for the weekend and we will celebrate our two birthdays with some champagne in a couple hours and a wonderful dinner prepared by Jan (Rio Grande pork). Then tomorrow evening we go to a gourmet dinner served to people who won a bid for it during a local fund raiser of which we were a part. The purveyor is a local Cordon-Bleu chef who ran his own restaurant for years and is now a successful artisan baker.
Monday morning at 6:30 a.m. I present myself to the Surgical Center at the Budge Clinic for the placement of a port. This is a convenient device that will sit under the skin between the left delt and the clavicle. It is about the size of a half dozen quarters stacked. From it, a tube (a couple mms?) extends all the way to the superior vena cava, into which it will be placed. The port itself has three little pimples on it permitting the administrating nurses to locate it before each infusion. Problems with putting foreign objects into the body are clots, so I suspect I will be put on some sort of blood thinning regimen but that I don't yet know. The procedure will take about an hour with a break for pictures to make sure the tube has ended up in the correct location.
I am still thinking that I might feel good enough to play at the first Kicks rehearsal on Tuesday next, but must ask the surgeon whether blowing my horn will have any impact on the port. I expect not.
Counting down about 10 more days to chemo.
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