For Ellen

“to live in this world you must be able to do three things to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go” Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1 As a parent,… Continue reading For Ellen

Love in the Time of Cancer

I used to be able to paint my own toenails but that was before age and arthritis caught up with me and these days I can’t SEE my toes, much less paint them.  Here in the land of perpetual sunshine and flip flops one is not allowed to have ugly feet, so off I went… Continue reading Love in the Time of Cancer

A Different Kind of Mask

“I want them to live again to the point where pain becomes art.” Lawrence Durrell,  “Justine” I have always loved masks.  Near sighted likely from birth, a fact which was discovered significantly later, I never minded stumbling around our neighborhood on Halloween, my already deficient depth perception further stunted by my Bugs Bunny mask.  To… Continue reading A Different Kind of Mask

The Glass Is Half Full

A couple of weeks ago my nurse came to me with a request for a consultation.  Since our schedule has been packed full lately, she’s been asking me where I can squeeze patients in.  She said, “I’m not sure about this one—he says you treated him twenty years ago and he wants to see you. … Continue reading The Glass Is Half Full

The Good Books

Where I come from, when most people refer to The Good Book, they are referring to the Bible.  This is not true for my father, because to him, the Good Books are something else entirely.  He describes a scene early in his career as a plastic surgeon, when he had taken his doting mother to… Continue reading The Good Books

When Age is a Relative Thing

I remember when I was a medical student and an elderly patient would be admitted to the surgical service through the emergency room with a bowel obstruction, or a lung cancer, or blockage in the coronary arteries so severe that only a coronary bypass could save him.   The students and residents would gather around the… Continue reading When Age is a Relative Thing

Curmudgeonly Me

I didn’t like my flu shot very much this year.  Some years they hurt worse than others, and I haven’t yet figured out whether that depends on which nurse gives me the shot, or which strain I am being vaccinated against.  This year was a bad one—within 24 hours my arm was so sore that… Continue reading Curmudgeonly Me

Primum Non Nocere

I don’t have much in the way of eyebrows.  They were victims of too much plucking back in the 1960’s and when you do that, sometimes they don’t grow back.  There’s a very nice woman in Solana Beach who shapes and darkens what I have left, infrequently, when I bother to think about it which… Continue reading Primum Non Nocere

Happy Birthday To Me

Ex-marines are some of the toughest patients I ever see, when it comes to dealing with pain from cancer.  And CAREER ex-Marines have the market cornered on toughness.  Take for example, an elderly friend in Kansas who woke up one morning with severe upper back pain, feeling faint, and decided as was his Marine Corps… Continue reading Happy Birthday To Me

The Way I See It

When it comes to surgery for cancer, having a “positive margin” is a bad thing.  It means that when the surgeon said he “got it all,” even though he meant it with all of his heart, likely he didn’t.  For a woman undergoing a lumpectomy for breast cancer, that positive margin means a re-excision of… Continue reading The Way I See It