The war ahead

Left picture shows the area of action. These are high-contrast MRIs.

Let me set the scene for you. We are floating over the flatlands of Florida. My enemy is perfectly clear about its goals: kill me. My enemy is cancer. plasmacytoma, to be precise. It’s been likened to leukemia in my spinal blood.

I , on the other hand, am not defenseless. As we float over the battlefield, I look down at the fighters I have arrayed on my side. They are formidable.
My primary general at this moment is my oncologist. She has the responsibility for marshalling her forces and bringing to bear some pretty incredible artillery. Dr. Mary Koshy didn’t show up on my radar until I had been sent to Dr. Tiesi, a spinal surgeon. I’d been referred to him after spending six months being is severe pain. I came to fear sneezing because it felt as though my entire ribcage would shatter from the pain that accompanied every sneeze.

He had ordered MRIs on my thoracic spine and didn’t like what the pictures showed - little hairlines of blood intertwined all through my spine. He also saw that an old back injury in my T-6 vertebrae had essentially collapsed.
Dr. Tiesi suggested I go under general anesthetic so he could two things: he had a way to build a superstructure to allow him to rebuild the T-6. And then, while poking around in there, he planned to pull out material from my T-10 that could be biopsied.

The worst part of all this, was the general anesthesia. I’ve long known that this is the closest we get to moment of death. This is where lives hang on a tiny golden thread. And this was pretty debilitating. I suffered with  nausea, along with a complete upset of my bowels and my urinary tract.

After ten days of radiation therapy in which the oncologist 's staff created a customized cradle for my body that locked my torso in place while the great orbiting guns twirl around me, finding the ultra-precise locations for their magic bullets. All I do is hang in my cradle, hopping I'll be able to bring down my arms from behind my head before they atrophy

Way over to the left, I have another key soldier. He will be in charge of my chemotherapy. I have yet to meet him but he will ultimately hold the nuclear attack codes and we bring him and his big guns out at the end. Dr. Koshy, my oncologist, explained his role pretty succinctly. "Think of my role with radiation as one in which I precisely aim my pistol and fire my weapon at individual cells in your body. I can hit targets and blast them back to the stone age. But the chemo doctor will be detonating nuclear bombs in your body. He's very important. He's debilitating. But we won't get through this without him."

My primary care physician is the gatekeeper to keep all these moving parks from grinding to a bureaucratic halt. Dr. Vishal Sharma interfaces with my insurance company and none of these specialists get past his door without his recommendation. He is my advocate and I'm glad he's on my side.

I have a band of angels and foot soldiers strategically positioned all over the world. They are you. I want to tally up those troops because they are so important in the fight. Of course we have a treasure trove of friends in the U.S. and Canada. But there are these special folk who touched my life as Jo and I circumnavigated the globe earlier in our retirement. They are Vietnamese, Laotian, Burmese, Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, Bhutanese, German, Cambodian, Namibian.

My most important general - at the very top of the heap - is Jo. She is the rock where I can think through positions, test assumptions, question and second-guess this maelstrom in which I find myself. She looks at the field with me and sees where all the players are positioned, how we get to them. She manages nutrition and energy. She is a jewel beyond price.

I invite you to come along on this journey with me. I have no ideas if I'll come out the other side without fatal wounds. But I do not fear death for I have lived a spectacular life.

A Birder's Paradise

A bobcat checks out my nature camera in the early morning at Anahuac Refuge.

It's the end of the road for us here at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge in Anahuac, Texas. We leave this weekend after a unique series of experiences. The astonishing – that's the only adjective I can use – number of birds we have seen almost defies belief. The endless, unremitting winds that sweep across the prairie and the rice fields wore on us and flogged the awning above the slide-outs of our motorhome. The joy of meeting birders who make the journey to Anahuac from all over the world – China, the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and many other countries – added to the adventure.

These people, including folks from all over the U.S., of course, had made the pilgrimage here because they are avid bird watchers. They are ‘way beyond casual birders. These folks have a handful of birds they have not yet seen on their “life list” and they make the journey here because this is where their birds are.

I'll always remember, with affection, a burly Texan who came into the center and, after viewing the whiteboard, he asked: "Do y'all have a slot for a liberal Texan to be listed?"

Jo and I often sit in the visitor center and make the visitors welcome with free coffee, while we invite them to list the birds they had seen on their visit on our whiteboard. We counted 131 species on one incredible day. These fragile creatures had all flown in from Mexico, Central and South America – some as far south as Tiera Del Fuego on the tip of Argentina. They soar north at around 6,000 feet, catching the southern trade winds. Their travels are often done at night so stars are involved in their navigation.

When they cross the Gulf of Mexico, however, they sometimes run into a cold front that pushes down from the northern U.S. and Canada. 

This massive change in the wind is like hitting a cliff and the exhausted birds falter.

Stilts stand in the shallow water in Anahuac.

They drop from the sky by the hundreds. Many of those who drop survive when they land in Anahuac. They eat, rest, sleep and then, when the front moves on, they rise up and head inland and north on their way to the central U.S. or even into the Arctic. Others are not so lucky. Last Wednesday, for example, buntings and warblers and hummingbirds hit the cold front wall. They swooped down in an attempt to avoid the “cliff” and 400 of them smashed into a 23-story building on Galveston Island, to our south. The dead birds piled up on the pavement, lured there by the lights of the tall building.

The government has to provide us with trucks, SUVs and hybrid vehicles so we can get around on our various jobs. We live in a little community of six couples in their motorhomes. 

Distances are vast. It takes us 40 minutes to drive to the Visitor Center at headquarters, where we currently are running the center. Virtually everything we do means a 25-45 minute journey. We are not permitted to use the government vehicles for our weekly grocery shopping or to drive around to see the various sights.

Robert pushes through the swamp in search of
wood duck houses in need of cleaning.

The land is billiard-table flat. There are 45,000 acres in the Refuge, much of it under cultivation by the local farmers. They lease the land for their rice crop with the proviso that they sow a second rice crop which is designated for use by the birds. Even though the fields seem utterly flat, they are not. So the farmers bring in a laser measuring device. This permits them to measure down to one inch. Once they plot that, they plough furrows in their fields, creating dams. The field are then flooded and the little dams are opened and closed to control the water so it is distributed evenly across the entire field. Then they hire a pilot and plane to load up with rice seed and that pilot sprays the fields with rice. In a matter of days, the fields have sprung to life with green shoots. At no point do you see young or old Vietnamese women stooped in the fields, stuffing the rice shoots into the flooded fields!

I should mention that we are astonished by the variety of television stations that come out of Houston, 50 miles to our west. Not only are there myriad Spanish language stations, but you can watch Chinese TV, Thai and Vietnamese TV on numerous channels.

Now, we roll on again, this time to another wildlife refuge in Long Island, New York. It'll be interesting to compare the two refuges...and maybe to meet up with the birds we saw down here in Texas.

One of the hundreds of alligators that live on Shoveler's Pond in the Anahuac Refuge.