Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was a firm believer that Sundays should be spent at home – for a given definition of home, of course. Should you find yourself on many Sundays spending the day at a Faire with the family of your heart – why, that was home nor were you out of it. I’ve spent a lot of Sundays at home in the oakwoods and the hayfields and the snowy streets of London, and loved them all.

But today I am home from something – to wit, the hospital. Hospitals are good places and I am grateful they exist; I am also grateful I escaped my latest confinement in one. Kimberly came and fetched me home this morning, and I am now happily at my desk – wading through hundreds of emails, typing around the cats, watched balefully by the Corgi, with the parrot on my shoulder. My family has made me incredibly comfy and safe, and I am so GLAD to be home!

Though apparently no one has fed or petted the animals in a week. So they are claiming, anyway.

Recountings of my adventures will be forthcoming: I have a lot of catching up to do! But I am well, easily tired and very sore but doing well. My doctor is amazed at my level of recuperation. I still don’t have the path results yet, so the stage of my cancer is still unknown: but it looks good. Looks very good.

Thank you all so much, Dear Readers, for your patience and good thoughts. Neassa has been a saint. So has Kimberly, who has managed to be with me every day – in violation of several Newtonian Laws, I suspect – and has now successfully sprung me from the clutches of the medical profession. Some of those folks are great, and luckily one of the great ones is my surgeon/oncologist. But some of them are nuts … our last delay this morning was waiting for them to unbolt the central line installed in my jugular for the past week. It’s unnerving to have escaped the Borg so closely.

Stories coming. I am home and healing. Glad to be back, glad to be here; glad to be anywhere, but especially not in the hospital anymore!

The hospital wants to get two more doses of the antibiotic into Kathleen, so Kimberly won’t be able to get her out of there until after 1:30am.

Probably immediately after 1:30am.

I just talked to Kimberly.

Kathleen is healing very fast from the surgery, and the doctor is taking her staples out tomorrow. Kimberly should be able to spring her about noon.

The doctor still hasn’t seen the final pathology report, but her opinion is that if she couldn’t get at the lymph nodes, the cancer couldn’t either.

Kathleen did not escape yesterday because an opportunistic bladder infection took advantage of her weakened state and attacked. This beastie has most likely been lying in wait for years… but whatever they’re giving her for it is knocking it down rapidly.

She has a new and interesting hallucination story to tell – something other than the anesthesiologist this time.

More news from Kimberly. Kathleen’s doing well, in fact, she’ll probably be home tomorrow.

There will be stories.

This is Neassa, and I have Good News from Kimberly!

Kathleen is heading into post-op. Surgery went very well, and there’s a good chance she won’t need chemo. They did not manage to take the lymph nodes, because scar tissue from previous surgeries have them completely blocked from outside access. (She knew *something* weird was going to crop up!) They’ll be running tests in the next few days to see what’s going on with them.

This was the last surgery her doctor will perform before going on maternity leave. She was determined that she was going to be the one operating on Kathleen.

More news as I hear it (such as, what form did her anesthesiologist take this time?)

A very happy Neassa

Kage Baker got ready for trips either days early or at the very last minute – no middle ground. She either ignored the problem until I was practically dragging her out the door, or she had a suitcase packed the week before we were due to travel. Sometimes she packed so early she hid away things she needed before we went, and ended up living out of her suitcase for three days; other times, she arrived at Faire or conventions minus a critical garment.

Though she only once forgot all her clothes entirely. Of course, that was on our way to the World Fantasy Con and then subsequently (two days later) to her own surgery in San Francisco: and there she was with only what she stood up in. We managed to supplement her garments in time for both events, but it was a near thing for a while.

Me, I make  big lists and then pare ’em down as I pack. The trick is to select your size of bag, and then stick to it. You can experiment with all the crap you think you need to see what (and if) everything fits, but never change the bag! You will be forced to parsimony and thrift, and if you are flying you’ll be sure the thing fits in the overhead. Plus maybe including a vew oddities to amuse the TSA …

Going to the hospital has a sparser “need” list than going to a convention, of course. I’ll bring my toothbrush and favourite toiletries, but the odds of my using them is low – I’ll be zonked a lot, and also supplied with nice sterile disposables by the hospital. And clothes? Feh, just enough to satisfy decency – I’ll be in some inadequate cotton number with horrible paisleys on it before I know it. And when I leave, I’ll be too sore to put on real clothes anyway. So I’m wearing and packing clothes just a cut above pajamas.

Most of the people I meet over the next week are going to end up more familiar with my navel than my face, anyway.

I had to get poor Kage up at the crack of dawn to get her in to the City in time for her surgery; and poor Neassa, too, who accompanied us as my support system. We were staying in Santa Rosa, and had a long drive in through the vinyards and pumpkin patches and leafless cottonwoods. Kimberly and I get to sleep to a decent hour, as I don’t have to be there until 11 AM – so much nicer. I hope it’s indicative of good luck all around.

It’ll be a few days before I return here, Dear Readers. However, Neassa and/or Kimberly will post updates so your kind hearts are not troubled. Most of them, I have no doubt, will read: Kate’s asleep. Or: Kate’s talking nonsense again. Or: Kate got bored and we sneaked her out.

My Kindle is charging, and is jam-packed with goodies I have not yet read.  I’m gonna go pack a knitting project now – I don’t really expect to knit, but if I don’t bring one I practically guarantee I will be alert and bored out of my mind at some point. And I would rather rest.

In fact, Dear Readers, my plans for the next week are simplicity itself. I intend to sleep and walk to and from the bathroom. By the time I am engaged in this strenuous activity, it ought to be as complicated as an EVA in orbit. That’ll keep me amused.

Talk to you later, all!

Kage Baker would have been delighted. Friday the 13th, no matter what it’s historical overtones in general, was always first and foremost a Walt Kelly day with us. Having it fall on an actual Friday was always therefore a mark of good luck in our personal liturgical calendar – all the Freemasons in the family notwithstanding.

I am taking it as a good omen, certainly, what with surgery waiting on the other end of this three-day weekend. The fact that Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a double good thing for me this year – it means that Kimberly will be off work and not have to take a day off  or scramble in order to get me to the hospital. Her husband and son will also be off from their respective schools, and the whole enterprise will be much easier for her.

It’s the folks waiting, the support crew, that has the worst time of it on occasions like this. Me, I’m gonna sleep through most of it – and even when I do technically wake up, I’m going to be in the Twilight Zone until Tuesday or so. I am confident that I will have no duties more onerous than standing up and walking 10 feet for the next week. Poor Kimberly gets to wait through the surgery (which always takes longer than you think it will) and then deal with me off my head, and anxious friends, and God knows what else afterwards.

I at least had company for Kage’s surgery. The ever-lovely Neassa was with me, keeping me sane. I know we ate something – I don’t remember what. I know I had a book – I don’t remember what that was, either. And I know I knitted, making so many errors in my increasing hysteria that the garment was never finished. And it never will be, unless I am moved to rip out most of the back and start over …

This time, I have no worries.

Neassa has sent me a gorgeous box full of entertainments, though, for my hospital stay. A book, and licorice, and a stag mobile (stags are special to me), and a string of amazingly lovely batter-operated lights shaped like dragonflies! I love special lights, and tend to decorate wherever I am with them: these will cheer me up no end. When Kage was ill, I put pirate ship models strung with lights in her room – these dragonflies will adorn my desk, visible from my bed while I recuperate.

In many ways, I am having a pretty good time. And I mean to squeeze all the entertainment I can out of this, too. If attitude really does have an effect on one’s healing, then I am set. I’ve got attitude to spare.

Kage Baker was fond of the saying, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” She thought it was a lie, a whining excuse – but she had a black admiration it for its enormity and its universal abdication of personal responsibility.

“If the spirit is willing, you can summon up the damned flesh,” she would say. And as she got older and more fragile, she’d add:  “or at least you can suborn someone else’s.”

It was only the last year that she admitted she may have rushed to judgement on this one. I think it was that horrible Christmas Eve when we both collapsed on the bathroom floor – I dropped her, by then too weak to walk unassisted, because I had fallen victim to a truly horrendous stomach flu … after we had cried and laughed and taken counsel and called the paramedics, Kage allowed that maybe there did come a point where the flesh would not serve.

“Take me to the knacker’s,” she advised, leaning on me where we sat on the bathroom floor. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is royally screwed.”

I could only vomit in reply. Which at least set us both off laughing again.

So. The point of this tale is not to make anyone feel bad – remember, we were still laughing! – but to explain that my plans for lots of work today went down the drain. I slept late – got up for two hours and then fell asleep for another 4 hours – and am considering gluing my eyelashes to my eyebrows now in order to stay awake. Dinner hit a stumbling block when the white sauce failed – creamed ham with peas (Yum!), but the white sauce went sour, and now poor Kimberly is off chasing down cans of Aunt Penny’s for an emergency substitution.

Spirit may be as exhalted as the heavenly choirs around here today, but the flesh has faltered flat on its face.

So sorry. I am like a balloon with a slow leak right now, vaguely wrinkled and leaning over sideways as I deflate. Or like a pumpkin about a week after Halloween – you know, when all the edges of its features start to shrink and curve inward, and the inside is breeding new life forms … apparently my body has given up, smug in the knowledge that in three more days it’ll all be someone else’s problem for a while. You know how it is when you really, really have to pee and you finally find a bathroom – and those last 10 feet are the hardest to get through while retaining bladder control? That’s me and consciousness right now.

I don’t feel that bad, mind you. I am just exhausted past all my prior experience. And that experience includes three day weekends at Renaissance Faires, and vigils with labouring mothers, and 12 hour drives through dubious lands, and the year that Southern Faire ran straight into Northern Faire with no gap and we ended up doing a 26-week event. Man, we all went into October about dead that year …

Anyway, Dear Readers, the interesting news about tortoises and manganese and pistol shrimp and such will have to wait a day. The world is so full of wonders that my limited strength is, at the moment, overwhelmed.  Neither the spirit nor the flesh is especially on the ball right now, I’m afraid.

At least I’m not throwing up. If I were, I’d be in danger of drowning, because I would most certainly fall asleep on the bathroom floor and topple into the toilet. And I don’t want to achieve my 15 minutes of fame by virtue of a ludicrous demise.

Back tomorrow!

Kage Baker didn’t trust many people. Oh, she was polite to all the hundreds of people one must be, when one moves about out in the world – she had a public persona with exquisite manners, and was always a perfect lady. In fact, you had to be an intimate friend to see her in her relaxed, at-home mode: when she could be hilariously vulgar, ferociously witty, and disarmingly silly.

Some of you, Dear Readers, knew that side of Kage. Friends who worked Faire or conventions with her; people she grew to trust via safe emails; people who could stay up late drinking rum, until she came out of her shell like a grinning hermit crab and began to assign cave-person names to everyone around the campfire … she was Bunga of the Jungle. She told hysterical and outrageous stories about the young men who went out hunting, and the unlikely things they found.

But one only got to see that face of her if you were a very close friend. One of those is Athene (of whom I have spoken before), the grey-eyed goddess to whom Garden of Iden is dedicated. Athene was not only instrumental in getting Kage’s work in sufficiently good shape to catch an agent and a publisher – she is one of our oldest friends, a boon companion since we were all on the far fringes of adolescence and trying out our adult wings at Renaissance Faires. She was the third voice in Dame Fortune’s Privates; she knew all the sacred Cow Songs and could translate Waterman songs from Yorkshire into English.

Athene has seen me at my worst, and driven me home from Marin County in a truck with a dying alternator. She doesn’t suffer fools or even minute amounts of bullshit. She’s someone I can talk to (easily and even incoherently), about Kage and my own health disasters – Athene has seen both Kage and I, in our times, through any number of weird diseases and accidents. I don’t think she’d be too surprised if I really did turn up with an alien in my chest. She drove Kage to the hospital for her tonsillectomy, when I got benched with gall stones. She brought us ice cream in various recoveries. She has been lecturing me sternly about behaving myself during my post-surgical travails – and I will behave, because Athene will come around and whack me upside the head if I don’t.

And since I moved back to Los Angeles, she has been one the people most successful in persuading me to come out of the house. She and Kimberly have coaxed and bullied me into actually going out of doors and doing something –   small, easy, domestic things, like buying tomatoes. But without that prodding, I would have just encysted, like a drought-afflicted virus.

She’s a little rougher on me than she would have been on Kage – she knew Kage well, and knew the inner fragility that underlay all her brilliance and wit. I’m tougher. And often stupider. And a million times more accident prone, so I really need the reminders not to be an idiot.

Athene took me out to dinner tonight, at what has become our favourite haunt in Glendale. We laughed loudly, we gossiped, we recommended movies and television shows to one another. I cried, but I always do since Kage died; but I’m getting better, and Athene doesn’t mind when I tear up over the demitasse cups.

Other than that dinner date, I have mostly been asleep today. Hence the late posting. Tomorrow, though, I shall share with you some more extinct animals that have turned up where no one expected them. And the real reason the Russian craft Phobos-Grunt has failed. And the potential of manganese catalase.

Good night, all.

Kage Baker really applied herself to finding bright spots in her illness. She had never been an especially sunny person – Mamma called her “the sad little pine tree” when she was a child – and she grew up with a wide streak of dark suspicion. At her very worst, Kage was downright dour.

However, the sicker she got, the more determined she became to find  the good stuff. Some of it may have been sheer perversity – at a time when Fate was determined to hand her a pile of unmitigated shit, Kage became equally determined to refuse it. There really was good stuff, all the way to the end; she cultivated joy, hoarded peace, and wrung as much fun out of her life as she could. Every day. No matter what happened.

Doctors’ visits and paperwork are an endless fount of hilarity, you know. The folks who work in front offices are easily confused – a lot of them are fine, heroic people, but all too often, they are jargon-dependent drones who have forgotten how to use the first person singular pronoun and think Doctor is their employer’s given name. There is a high percentage of pomposity in the medical sciences, especially the support functions. Kage had fun sticking pins in their balloons of delusion. I’m learning to enjoy it too.

For instance, I will not respond tamely to the Imperial address – “How are we?” is not a query to which I know the answer. You, lady with a perfect manicure who cannot pronounce any portion of my name, may be fine and dandy. I neither know nor care: but I, personally, am here because I have cancer. How the hell do you think I am? Not that it matters to her, either – until I actually gave my honest answer, she wasn’t listening to me anyway. Only the shock of my not being socially cooperative got her attention.

Today I saw an internist and a psychologist, in two appointments back to back. When I checked in with reception – and again when I filled out paperwork – and yet again when the internist finished with me and turned me loose: each time, the receptionist informed me I was done. But I wasn’t, and I had the confirmations in hand to prove it; even though she denied my second appointment three times. You’d think she’d have gotten tired of my waving my little yellow postcard in front of her. But no, apparently every time I vanished from her sight  I ceased to exist.

Dinosaurs may not have primitive motion-activated vision (though Michael Crichton thought they did). But medical receptionists do.

I finally got the psychiatric exam I was required to have. The doctor was very nice, and even released me back into the wild (I did have a faint worry about that). In fact, looking over my recent history, she said “Oh my! I’d be worried if you weren’t depressed!” So I guess my  Prozac prescription will pass muster with Social Security. And the internist was astonished to discover I’ve been recently diagnosed with uterine cancer, and very grateful that I had brought her a copy of my biopsy report. Hopefully Social Security will okay that, too.

So I am taking as much enjoyment as I can from my little triumphs today. Bullying the receptionist is petty, of course; and as soon as I have any energy to spare, I will be contrite and offer up some penitent prayers. Until then, though, I’m going to continue to correct the pronunciation of my name (How do you get Batelmayo out of Bartholomew, anyway?), and insist on being allowed to keep ALL  my appointments, and refuse to pretend that my scary illness is a minor complaint.

I am not well. I am not happy. I am not very obliging, either. I gotta get my giggles where I can these days. So live with it, receptionists of the world! I’m trying to.