When you have a disease such as leukemia, which, doctors have told you, is incurable, progressively debilitating as it slowly destroys your immune system, and eventually fatal, it is difficult not to make the disease the focus of your life, to worry about it almost to the exclusion of all else. During the years between my initial diagnosis in 1988, and the summer of 1995 when we were at Summit North, I had taken numerous medications to deal with various symptoms. I had undergone two courses of oral chemotherapy and experienced three hospitalizations, the last one of which, in 1993, was long and nearly fatal. But I had learned, through the experience of cruising and living on Summer School with Nancy, especially during our eight month cruise of Florida and the Bahamas in 1994, the importance of looking outside myself and the value of what we came to call a life-centering passion, which, in our case, was living on a small boat. I was now much less preoccupied with my leukemia and I felt healthier and was taking less medication than I had for years. Though I was still taking drugs to control my hypertension, I had even been able to discontinue all medications for my stomach ulcer, something that had been a problem for the previous ten years. I think that perhaps I had become complacent, that I had been feeling so good for more than two years that I did not give my general health the care and attention it needed. Certainly, it seems that with all the boat work I did in the searing heat of that summer, I failed to guard against dehydration.
Three days after we returned from St. Michaels I awoke at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning with severe pain in my lower abdomen. By 4 a.m. the pain had spread to my back and had become much worse. I was vomiting and could no longer walk. Nancy telephoned 911 and I could hear her trying to explain how to find the marina and how to find our boat, which was at a considerable distance from the marina entrance and parking lot. Then she called the overnight security guard at the marina on the VHF radio, using the Coast Guard mandated stand-by channels 16 and 9, to alert him to our emergency and the arrival of the ambulance. I can remember the confusion and noise when the two emergency medical technicians entered the boat and tried to get me out onto the dock, and I can remember being pushed up the dock on the gurney calling for Nancy, every bump giving me a spasm of pain. My one memory of the ambulance ride to the hospital, which was about 25 miles away, was of one of the technicians trying to start an IV, unsuccessfully, and me telling him not to try, that an IV was hard to start on me under the best of conditions.
Sometime later in the morning I became conscious in a hospital room, an IV needle fastened to my arm, and Nancy sitting beside me. When I had a strong pain she could give me relief with a morphine pump that she could use to inject morphine through the IV tube. She told me that I had been diagnosed with kidney stones, that the diagnosis was confirmed by a CT scan given to me earlier in the morning, that I was being given a lot of liquid intravenously and we were waiting to see if I could pass the stone without using any surgical procedures. Later in the day I met Dr. Mahmood Sadeghee into whose care I had been assigned. He confirmed what Nancy had told me and added that my stone was lodged in the ureter of my left kidney and that, if I could not pass it in about a day, it would have to be removed by ureteroscopy. This procedure was done on Friday morning and I was then able to return to our boat, tender and sore but functional.
I had to enter the hospital again one week later as a surgical outpatient to have the stent that had been left in the ureter removed. When Dr. Sadeghee tried to do this procedure without general anesthetic, the attempt was unsuccessful and caused extreme pain. Finally, anesthetic was administered, Dr. Sadeghee surgically enlarged the entrance to the urethra to permit the insertion of the ureteroscope, and the stent was removed. For days after this procedure it was difficult and painful to walk, and it would be weeks before I felt recovered.
I found this whole experience not only painful, but sobering, even a little frightening, in the arbitrary suddenness with which my life had been changed. Now, in addition to the problems of trying to control my hypertension, the possibility of recurrent stomach pain due to my ulcer, or back pain due to my herniated disc, and of course the continued threat posed by the leukemia, I had to worry about continued problems with kidney stones, for I was told that it was likely that they would indeed recur, especially if I failed to consume adequate quantities of water. The whole experience had been so painful that I found the prospect of recurrence to be alarming. But the most disturbing consequence of this experience was not to be revealed until many months later when I discovered that Dr. Sadeghee had neglected to inform me of the most serious condition that was revealed by the CT scan, the existence of a prominent abdominal aortic aneurysm, an omission that could have had fatal results.
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While I was on the boat recovering from the kidney stone removal we received our telephone call telling us that our furniture would be delivered to our Easton house on Wednesday morning. We had to drive to Easton on Tuesday, supervise the delivery of our belongings on Wednesday, return to the Delaware hospital on Friday morning for the stent removal, and then go back to Easton on the weekend to begin the process of settling into our new home, new town and new life.
It is amazing what a long and complicated and difficult process it is to relocate, especially to a different state in a different area of the country. The college had already arranged for our electricity and water, but we had to get telephone service as soon as possible, then contract with an internet service provider and arrange for cable television service. Of course we had to arrange for mail delivery and change addresses on everything. We had to locate the usual conveniences such as a hardware store, a dry cleaners, a source of computer supplies, furniture and appliance stores (we needed a washer, dryer and refrigerator), the major department stores (Sears we found across the river in Phillipsburg, NJ). We had to arrange for lawn care and find a source for firewood. We had to get fuel oil delivered so that we could have heat in our house when needed. We had to find sources for beer, wine and liquor, and determine what rules and hours applied. There were several chores associated with our cars. We had to have them registered in Pennsylvania and get new plates, but this, we found, could be done only after they passed required safety inspections, which necessitated locating a reliable and trustworthy car service shop (the TransAm failed and thus had to be serviced). Of course we had to get new drivers licenses, which meant, in Pennsylvania, that we had to pass written examinations (unbelievably, I failed mine on the first try). We had to identify a new insurance agent and get new car insurance. And of course I felt that it was important for me, as soon as possible, to find a new family doctor, identify a drug store that could provide my medications using my drug insurance company, and find a new hematologist or oncologist who could follow my leukemia. It took weeks to complete this process that we began on Monday, August 21, when we moved off the boat and into our faculty house.
We were pleased with this house rented to us by Lafayette. It was a large old brick house, sitting up a steep bank above the street level, with a wonderful covered front porch made of stone, with stone columns supporting the roof. It had old-fashioned hot water heat with radiators in every room, a fireplace in the living room, a formal dining room, a small kitchen, two bathrooms and five other rooms from which we could choose our bedroom and home office. There was a full basement surrounded by walls of stone that formed the foundation (and leaked water during every rain, we discovered), and a shed at the rear of the house that we could use to store our firewood. Best of all was the location on Parsons Street immediately adjacent to the Lafayette campus and only a short walk from the engineering building.
Within two days after we moved into the house, Nancy became immersed in her new job. I too became focused on working for the college because I had agreed to teach a sophomore course in circuit analysis as an adjunct associate professor. Initially we were both excited to be teaching at Lafayette, which was so completely different from the University of Southern Colorado. Lafayette was a much smaller school in terms of student enrollment, which was near 2000. Yet it was much bigger in terms of endowments and resources. The campus was comprised of about 60 buildings spread over 340 beautiful acres with large old trees and quiet walking paths. The college was founded by the citizens of Easton in 1826 and it had established a long and nationally recognized tradition of excellence, being consistently ranked in the top 2% of the country's independent colleges. There were over 180 full-time faculty, about the same as at USC where the student enrollment was more than twice that of Lafayette, and, in sharp contrast to USC, all the regular faculty held their doctorate degrees. Nancy, with her academic qualifications, fit in easily, but I felt somewhat out of place with only a masters degree, though with only one exception, I seemed to be readily accepted by the engineering faculty in my position as an adjunct professor.
As we continued to work on the various tasks required to complete the relocation process we quickly fell into a comfortable routine. In the mornings Nancy would walk to her office in the engineering building while I would drive to the nearby health and fitness center where I had taken out membership, determined not to lose the good physical conditioning I had acquired during the past year. We would meet at home for lunch after which Nancy would return to the campus. Since my classes were on Monday and Thursday nights I had the afternoons free to work on domestic chores or perhaps grading papers or class preparations. At night, though Nancy often had work she needed to do, we continued our practice of quitting everything around ten o'clock to share our thoughts and ideas and experiences over nightcaps before bedtime. Even through the early days of our residence in Easton, when so much was new, the subject of much of our talk during these quiet times, was our boat and the life aboard Summer School that we had learned to live.
On Tuesday, September 12, I found myself in Youell's Oyster House, a good small restaurant on Cattrell Street, the main street on College Hill, which was what locals termed the Lafayette campus and surrounding residential area. The restaurant was only a few blocks from our house. It had excellent food and an intimate and casual atmosphere. On this particular night Nancy was required to participate in a dinner meeting with colleagues and students as part of a "team building" exercise. I used the time over a cocktail waiting for dinner, and over a leisurely coffee afterward, to catch up writing in my journal.
The previous weekend we had stayed on our boat at Summit North, the first time we had been there since moving into our house, and I wrote of our reactions. We both felt such joy and relief to be once again on our boat, going to sleep in our small double bed in the aft cabin. On Saturday we took the boat out for a brief run, the first time we had moved the boat in a month. The feelings of exhilaration continued as we sat up on the bridge, carefully found our way out the shallow entrance channel of the marina and entered the swift current of the canal. We went only as far as Summit Bridge before returning, a round trip distance of only five miles, yet it was enough to bring back a flood of memories of our cruising life. On Sunday we drove the two and a half hours back to our house and jobs in Easton, but our emotional reactions to this weekend were strong and lasting. I wrote that Nancy, especially, was so happy to be once again on the boat, much happier than in her day-to-day life "at home." I wrote that we both felt that our boat was really our true home and that what we needed was to find some way to allow Nancy to retire so that we could live permanently on this wonderful boat of ours. And this was my first hint of the truly fundamental changes that were to come into our lives in the next months.
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