Mapping the Brain

Friday morning, as I was waking up, I became aware that it was raining.  This is a pretty unusual event in Boulder -- maybe a 1/2 dozen times per year, in most years.  Having grown up in the mid-west, it's usually a comforting sounds, one that warrants rolling over and snuggling in for a bit.  While that was my very initial reaction, within minutes, I found myself bolt upright in bed.  I ran to the basement to ensure that we weren't getting any more flooding.  (Of course, we were not.)  Even though we did get a 1/2 inch of rain Friday, which in a normal September, would be a heavy precipitation event.  Not this month, though.  One of my friends (Linda, from Ladies Night), attributes this to what she calls "community PTSD."  We're all traumatized by what happened and are all reacting in abnormal ways.

Friday's radiation was # 8 of 25, so almost 1/3 of the way through.  By next Friday (5 more treatments), I'll be just over 1/2 way through.  Seems good, especially since I don't yet have any side effects.  My graft is pretty red these days, but it doesn't hurt.  And, maybe it's pink from growth, as opposed to red from radiation.  I'll say the former given the absence of pain.

I ran into one of my former employees today hiking on Sanitas with Val.  He isn't reading the blog, and isn't a friend on Facebook, so he knew I had cancer but not much else.  In giving him the short version, I realized that, because I can't imagine really being disabled, I have decided that I shouldn't -- and won't, try.  Rather, I will talk only of a future where, a year from now, I'm living the same life I live now, and where the idea of having had sarcoma seems as distant as the idea that I was once married to someone other than Bill Goelz.  But what's truly amazing about the human mind is that I can hold this thought equally in my brain as another synapse secondarily works on a more dire scenario.  Such an amazing tool we have! 

Last night, we had sushi with friends and then went to see the movie Rush, which is Ron Howard's new film about a big rivalry in the world of Formula 1 car racing in the 1970's.  Needless to say, neither Susie nor I had ever heard of either the men in the rivalry -- or anyone in the movie, other than its passing reference to Mario Andretti.  On the other hand, Bill leaned over at one point and whispered to me that he's been at the race they were showing on the screen.  It's always amazing to me that Bill and I are the same age; we both went to college in New Hampshire; we both grew up skiing, and we have so many commonalities.  And yet, the maps we carry in our minds of the important historical events of our parallel childhoods, never mind the personal events, are so completely different.  I wonder whether that's still true -- that the maps we are creating in our minds from the last 18 years together are just as different, even though the events are shared.