Monthly Archives: July 2010

…is whether the metal valve in my aorta sets off airport metal detectors.

Yes, the family is leaving early in the day for a quiet (two teenage boys, cough cough) week's holiday to a house in a location which if not in the absolute middle of nowhere is at least on the edge of it. But only, promises the rental ad, about 30 minutes from somewhere. Even if it is, we later discover, some 75 feet from the road to the house.

To get there from here will involve a short flight as I didn't feel up to the very long drive we might otherwise have taken. Then we will still have a car ride of some length. The house is well suited, allegedly, for lounging about — something I'm getting quite practiced at. There are supposed to be great views. And if I want exercise, well, the house is on a mountain side.

There's supposed to be broadband, so we may be on the information highway even if we're just on the edge of the paved grid. Or there may not be broadband, in which case there will be very little posting for a week, but that doesn't mean I've had a relapse. Or, there may be broadband and I still may not be posting much.

(As regards the metal detectors, I have this card I'm supposed to give anyone who wants to point a magnetic field at me about the metal inside me. It tells them the safety parameters beyond which the fields can hurt me. It looks terribly easy to counterfeit, so I wonder if the TSA will accept it if I do set off the alarms, or if I'm headed for the back room to show them my scars.)

All this is due to the fact that I'm feeling considerably better than I was, say, two months ago. There is no question that I am recovering, slowly but generally surely. That said, I still have some way to go before reaching normal strength and especially stamina. I can do most of what I used to do — but not nearly as much of it in a day. And a cold really really knocks me out. And I'm not up to doing much work yet.

The docs said it would take six to twelve months to feel 100% and it has been about five (or four if you count from my hospital discharge) so far, so I suppose I'm on track. Teaching starts in a few weeks, and I'm confident I'll be ready to handle the one class I'm scheduled for. Whether I'll be up to much of anything else remains to be seen.

In a couple of weeks, my house is going to be covered with a thing like a circus tent.

Before that happens, I have to take out all the food, medicines, houseplants, and anything else that could end up in a mouth, as that tent is going to be pumped full of noxious toxic gas.

Yes, we have drywood termites. The flying kind. Indeed, judging from the number of tents sprouting in the neighborhood, every other house is infested.

We went through all this about ten years ago, and it seemed amazingly hard, a once-in-a-lifetime mess. A wiser colleague warned me that tenting every ten years or so was just an incident of life in south Florida. I didn't believe him, but he was prophetic. And after hurricanes, teenagers, and the odd medical crisis, it doesn't seem so bad.