Pain – Lessons from a Stone

Backing Down: Not on my Worst Day!

Recently, I was forced to relearn an important lesson, a lesson that originated from within my DNA and reinforced many times over from numerous life experiences. I am sixty-four.

It began innocently enough while my wife was out walking our three dogs on a trail we’ve made that follows our fenceline on all four sides. She came in and told me of a fellow who was mowing the property just across the road. I had just had abdominal surgery to rid me of an undiagnosed infectious mass of fluid that had been growing behind my liver and had hospitalized me several times over the past two and a half years. I was just getting to the point where I could walk around with a cane but I hadn’t been able to walk outside for over a month and was unstable and still in a lot of pain.

Some Context Leading Up to That Day

The surgery I am referring to was the last stop on the train to resolve a serious illness that I had been battling for over two years. To say the least, it was an invasive surgery and involved shifting my organs to look for more infectious material, some of which had to be cut away. I lost a liter of blood and required a transfusion, both things unforeseen in anything the surgeon might run into while being able to finally view the extent of the problem. I did not know how it would have been possible for me to acquire such an obscure illness unless it was connected to an emergency gall bladder surgery that I had gotten several years before.

The gall bladder surgery was performed at one o’clock in the morning, sometime back in 2019, and not by a surgeon qualified to perform that type of surgery. After weeks of trying to get me to go, I was literally on death’s doorstep by the time my wife was able to get me in the truck and en route to the closest emergency room. It was only then that I learned of how bad off I truly was. My gall bladder had turned necrotic and the surrounding area was gangrenous. This led to an advanced case of sepsis. I didn’t know who or where I was and couldn’t name the president of the United States. After that woefully messy surgery I was hospitalized for nine days until my blood was cleared for release. As bad as the surgery and overall experience had been, I was thankful. There was no doubt that they had saved my life. It was my fault that the problem was allowed to progress to such a state.

Not long after returning home from the gall bladder surgery, there had been some signs that my innards were still in distress and my wife called the hospital surgeon’s office on a number of occasions to inquire about the pain and bloating I was experiencing again and was told that those were normal symptoms after a surgery like mine. After six months had passed, the pain had lessened but the bloating gradually continued until it looked like I was pregnant in the week leading up to an emergency, twenty-one day hospitalization in January of 2023. That stay included pumping four liters of nefarious, infected puss from my abdomen and then an “all hands on deck” rush to diagnose the root cause. By the time I went home, my blood had been studied ad nauseum, a cornucopia of cultures had been grown, I’d undergone every type of imaging there is, and still, I remained without a diagnosis. In other words, it was still with me and would be returning.

I was assigned to a lauded infectious disease doctor and went on a two year odyssey to diagnose the problem and, with some luck, save what was left of my life. Sooner or later , this infection was going to kill me, the bacteria were that pernicious. Without knowing where the fluid was coming from, there was no way to stop it from leaking into my abdomen inviting another round of infection and accelerated fluid buildup requiring three more trips to to hospital to chase down the infection and drain the fluid. At one point, I was married to an external fluid drain (an ugly bag and a catheter) for four months. There were three other drain installations but for just one to three months. During this time but unrelated (I think), I was diagnosed with high-grade bladder cancer. For the cancer, it’s been sixteen months and three surgeries and I’ll be in treatment for what looks like some time to come. It looked good for seven months, but I’d been told of its return just days before the incident.

It is all of this that I was carrying on my shoulders that day.

The Incident

Effectively, I had been unable to attend to our country home and property for about four years. For a perfectionist who’s always taken pride in taking care of my things, I’d begun to lose my mind. Because we have three wonderful dogs and an inordinate number of rattlesnakes on our Central Texas property, my biggest priority is in keeping the grass cut. If I don’t get to it in a few weeks, the brush begins to take hold and the native grasses will grow to three feet. It had been over a month since I’d been able to mow it with the field mower. I was about to bust with anxiety over not getting to it. But I’m the type of person who’s grown highly accustomed to doing virtually anything and everything myself. If you live in a subdivision, mowing isn’t that much of a chore, but on four acres of Texas brush country, it can be. You need the appropriate (expensive) equipment and there are lots of potential hazards to pay attention to.

I asked Genie to run over and see if the guy had time to swing by to discuss our place when he was done with his current job. I had a pit in my stomach and I hadn’t even spoken with him. It was in the heat of the day and there’s no way I could hobble around and show him everything. The main thing was whether he had a mowing setup that could handle tall grass and undulating, somewhat rough terrain. Though it looks pretty when mowed, it’s not a golf course. His equipment checked out and, since I knew he didn’t have insurance for his one-man business, I asked him “If you’re out there and you somehow have a failure with your equipment, does that come out of your pocket, or mine?”. He said what I was hoping he’d say, “Mine…I would never…”. Since I couldn’t show him the property and the potentially now hidden obstacles, I showed him pics of the various sections of the property so he could see what it looked like just after a mowing. This is where he grumbled something like “I don’t need to see no stinkin’ pictures”. I quizzed him on it and, in an aggravated voice said “I’ve been mowing for ten years” and yada yada. I told him that “that had nothing to do with it and that he’d realize the relevancy after he mowed over one of three old, six inch stumps obscured by the now tall grass…stumps that I had pointed out clearly”. He grumbled some more as he walked towards his truck. I almost put it to an end there. He sat on the tailgate of his truck wasting time. I said, ‘do you want the job or not?” He said yes but that he’d first have to run the few miles down the road to get gas. It was 99 degrees and I could see the signs of heat exhaustion creeping up on him. I suggested that, since he’d just done that job across the way that I’m sure he was feeling the heat and probably pretty tired and that he show-up in the morning, fueled up and ready to go. I asked him again for a price, either a not-to exceed or an hourly rate so I could figure out how much I was willing to spend. He got in his truck to get gas and said he’d give me a price when he got back and drove away.

With the surgery and ridiculously painful recovery, I hadn’t been out in the mid-day heat (approaching 100 deg that day) and I could feel my strength waning, but I think I was the better off between us. I went into the house to wait and it was right at an hour when he got back from gassing-up just three miles down the road. I didn’t mention it, only asked for a price. He still didn’t have one so, without wanting to over-expose myself with this guy, I offered to pay him $120 for three hours and we’d take a look and adjust things if necessary. I showed him my rig and said that it takes me between three and four hours to do the whole property. His machine had a heavy duty deck and actually had the same engine as mine.

After two and a half hours he came back and loaded his machine before we did our agreed upon walk around. He said he was done and had been out there for five hours. This wasn’t the first bald-faced lie I’d heard that day. No one had ever been brazen enough to look me in the eye and expect me to acquiesce to such a lie. That was it. My patience, which had already been tested to its absolute limit that day, left my body and I felt something very powerful take its place: immediate and unadulterated adrenaline-assisted anger. He’d already been speaking to me in a much louder, more aggressive tone for the past twenty minutes. I kept my tone cool and unflustered, with each word being spoken firmly and measured in terms of not elevating the sound of my voice to match his. I kept my wits and readied myself for what was coming. “That’s the third of three seriously bad lies you’ve told me today and all I want from you now is to pack up your shit and get the fuck off of my property…NOW!” He approached me so that his face was no further than six inches from my face. He started to scream something and no sooner than his spittle hit my face, I shoved him so hard that he barely stood, backpedaling at speed to keep from falling until he slammed into the open driver’s side door and crumpled to the ground. The distance from where I shoved him to where he now lay was between twelve and fifteen feet. I don’t know where that power came from. It was a power I had known during my more youthful years but power that shouldn’t have been there before the stitches from my surgery had been pulled and I was still half out of it from the immense abdominal pain which remained. At first, I thought I might have opened the surgical wound or tore an abdominal muscle, but there was no time for that now. I heard “I’d come right back at you if you didn’t need that cane and hadn’t just gotten out of the hospital!”. I replied “don’t let that stop you!” He threatened me by saying “I should go home, grab my gun. and come back and put some holes in you!” I laughed and said “try me! Or, how ‘bout the one that I’m sure is in the glove compartment of your truck, eight feet away.” This is one of the poorest counties in Central Texas, and both open and concealed carry are legal here. You can bet that people of all persuasions either have a gun on their person or, if they don’t plan on being far from their truck, there’ll be one under the seat or in the glove box. He didn’t respond but just sat there, propped up by his truck door huffing and puffing until I walked over to him “Now, unless you want to continue, I told you to get the fuck off of my property!”, but, I added “I don’t ever want to see you out here again, you dumb son-of-a bitch!” After getting into his truck, I gave him $140 because it was hot, and he was very hot, and I was still happy to have the mowing checked off my list for a week, or two. Plus, temporary emotions aside, it was the right thing to do. If he had finished it, I had planned on giving him $200, which is the amount he said he would have changed as he peeled out of our driveway, flipping me off and screaming obscenities as he went. This was a sixty-eight year old man acting no differently than a four year old. Somewhere during the scuffle, he yelled “twenty years ago, me and some brutha’s used to kick serious ass on white boys like you!” I had not wanted to bring race into the conversation, so I let it go unchallenged. But I couldn’t help myself from laughing in his direction.

After all was said and done, I went inside only to have my wife castigate me for “losing my cool”. I told her that I wouldn’t consider myself a man if I hadn’t. My insides were churning over what had just happened. She hadn’t been able to hear my voice but had heard his as she watched from the front door. I said “that ought to tell you something.” When he got so far into my personal space, yelling at the top of his lungs, that by itself was enough for me to legally defend myself. He obviously didn’t realize it, but getting that close to me had put me at an advantage and being up against my chest gave me numerous options and some strong leverage. The danger had grown to be imminent and there was no more time for thinking, only acting by giving him the hardest shove I could muster in the condition I was in.

As a younger man, even into my fifties, I’d had more confrontations than I can count. A few were pretty serious, but, because of my back problems and health issues like I just described, my body has paid a steep price and I had lost more than half of my strength and mobility. For an athletic, forever on the move, and well conditioned guy, this has been very difficult to handle. There is no way to describe what your body and mind go through in the seconds before an imminently dangerous encounter with another human being. Every fiber of muscle is receiving all the adrenaline your adrenal glands can pump out. Primal chemicals are released from your brain and mind and body come together in a vastly heightened state, so much so that it would be impossible to not react with all the resources you can render. For me in my condition, I had no choice but to hold my ground, dispense with the cane and repel this person, hopefully hard enough to put an end to things and “defuse” the situation. It had been a long time since I’d experienced that kind of adrenaline rush and it felt damned good to feel so alive and in control! I actually told him as much and thanked him for his contribution.

After things settled and the house quieted, I told my wife that I was proud of the way I handled myself and wouldn’t change a thing except for listening to my gut during those hours earlier and asking him to leave before he even got started on the job. This was the lesson I was reminded of that day and will be my only regret from the day of the incident. After collecting herself and hearing me out, my wife apologized, said that she was proud of me, and thanked me for protecting our home and family, particularly in the condition I was in. Our family is comprised of she and I and our three wonderful dogs, whom I’m sure would have been only too pleased to have gotten a piece of this guy. All I had to do was call out to my wife to let them out. They would have heard the entire thing and been chomping at the bit the entire time. It never occurred to me because I’m sure I was wanting to keep them out of harm’s way. If there were a time for him to go for a gun, which I am certain was just a reach across his seat away, that would have been it.

What is that old expression, “all’s well that ends well”. That’s what it had boiled down to. Of course, it crossed my mind that he could very well show up at any time only this time it would have been with sons. buddies, or both, But, in the course of our not-so-friendly dialogue, I had left him with something to think about, and that was that nothing would make me happier than for him to come busting through my front door on the darkest of nights. He knew damned well that I’d be lying in wait with my own arsenal and dogs at the ready. I never mentioned having guns of my own. That wasn’t necessary. Everyone in these parts is well-armed. On top of that. I grew up around guns, hunting, and shooting. We were taught to never let-on about the family guns, even to good friends. There was no reason to and it only provides fodder for that information to fall into the wrong hands and gives those of the criminal sort a reason to break in and steal what you’ve got, and what they want. In the 70’s, long before people would do anything to get their hands on prescription drugs, gun theft was the root cause of many a break-in.

It’s over now and with any luck, I will never again have to deal with such an event. We live a quiet, extremely rural life and I intend to keep it that way.

High Country Cabin Near Minturn, Colorado

Originally Posted on Quora

Circa 1997 Canon Digital Elf 3.2

One of Colorado’s more obscure backcountry skiing destinations, this cabin is located about twenty miles from the historic mining community of Minturn, Colorado. Four friends and I made the nine mile ski into the cabin for four days of fun and fellowship. It had been snowing on and off throughout our stay, making for some prime deep powder skiing. We skied all day everyday and were ready for some hard earned rest.

We hadn’t seen the sun in three days and, just as we were headed out (you can see our telltale single file trail), it magically cleared as if the snow gods were bidding us goodbye. I looked over my shoulder and waited a moment before snapping this pic. It was cold and sunny for the ski-out to the trailhead and our awaiting vehicles below.

Leaving Colorado

“Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to”

As an eleven year old boy growing up in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains of Northern New York, my father took my eight year old brother and I “Out West” to experience the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. More than fifty years later and my recollections are as if we’d headed West just yesterday.

For much of my adult life, I have romanced the trip in such a way that, in my mind, it bears a strong resemblance to some lauded period piece using a masterfully directed “coming of age” manuscript. The time was the early seventies when much of the world was still fresh and new.

My dad was a NYSDOT engineer in Albany, but both he and my mother were from very small towns in the heart of the Adirondacks. Just before I was born and before settling in Albany, my parents spent a period of roughly five years traveling the country but spending most of that time where my dad worked as a young project engineer in Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico. It seems that “wanderlust” is in my DNA.

By the time my sister was born in 1964 to the Albany region, my parents and I had moved twenty-two times all over the country. My brother would be born the following year and we would spend our youths about twenty miles north of Albany and ninety minutes from the childhood homes of our parents, where much of the extended family lived. The Adirondacks are gloriously beautiful and I learned the ways of an “Adirondacker” along with hunting, fishing, and skiing, from my father and grandparents.

During those twenty -two moves when my dad was chasing his own wanderlust, I was born in Oregon and for a few days, it was just my mother and me. Later, when I was just two or three, I have memories of our homes in Tucumcari, New Mexico and Wheatridge, Colorado. I think I fell in love with the West at about the same time I was learning to walk.

When that special summer came along and we did our trip West, my eyes were never so wide open. I feasted on the trout we’d catch each day and drank in the mountains, taking sustenance from the different landscapes we encountered. Every few days we’d head into a town to clean up, grab a room at a little hotel, and scope out a diner where we’d ask to have a supper of our own fish, cooked up on the grill. My dad had the trip planned out to include remote places like the Madison River near Ennis, Montana and the Wind River, near Lander, Wyoming. He veered from the beaten path and we’d backpack into sections of river he wanted to try, and fish remote beaver ponds with mountain backdrops so beautiful that a person might forget to breathe!

The early seventies were an excellent time to experience life on the road. I clearly remember being in downtown Ennis when it wasn’t much more than a ranching community and spotting a girl who appeared to be my age, perhaps a year older, making a call from a phone booth I was approaching. My father and brother were still at the restaurant we’d just eaten at and while they ordered dessert, I went out to reconnoiter the town. Just as I was coming up on the phone booth, the girl ended her call stepping out onto the sidewalk as if a meeting between us had been predestined. I asked her if she’d like to join me and a moment later she was showing me the sites. I’d never before met a girl from “Out West” and could immediately tell that she was different from the eastern girls I’d encountered. Very pretty, with long, flowing blonde hair and a strong sense of independence. I hadn’t yet had my growth spurt, so we were about the same height. A year or two later and I’d have been over six-feet. We’d been together for just twenty minutes, or so, when I spied my father and brother walking toward us. I knew that once the girl and I parted ways I would be in for a good razzing from my dad and brother who was not yet old enough to appreciate the fairer sex. I survived the rousing and, I don’t know why, but we never again brought it up. I think my dad knew that for an eleven-year old boy, fast approaching twelve, I’d had a special experience. And I did. I’m 62 now and still, on occasion, think of that girl and how I’d decided then and there that my someday wife would be from somewhere out west. Twelve years later I met my first wife in Colorado. True to a promise I’d made with myself after that trip and upon graduation from college, I’d taken everything I could squeeze into my little red Honda Civic and with $1,800 in my pocket, I drove West and landed in Denver. Like me, my wife was from the northeast and, again, like me, skiing had become the most important thing in her life. She’d just graduated from the University of Colorado that year and was working in the ski industry as a marketing rep for Winter Park Resort. Before our divorce some eleven years later, we skied all over the Western US. What is it they say …”all good things…”.

I would remain in Colorado for another twenty years having a robust career in the oil and gas and mining industries. The first thing that came to mind upon waking each morning was just how fortunate I’d been to see my boyhood dream of living in the Rocky Mountain West come to fruition. It wasn’t easy maintaining a professional career and chasing the lifestyle of a mountain athlete for over almost three decades. Along with finding success in my work, I’d become an elite cyclist and skier and wanted to continue chasing the dream I’d created. For thirty years, I was up by five AM and worked long hours, capped-off by a ride or long run on my way home each evening. I had little time for anything else. I remarried a few times and ultimately realized why I wasn’t such a great mate. It takes two to make for a successful marriage and I can’t blame every disastrous result completely on myself, but I was extremely hard working and hard playing, with a strong desire for solitude, individuality, and independence. As my current wife, and the one I’ve known the longest will attest, I simply never found the right girl until she stepped into my life fourteen years ago. She was right!

About six months after she’d left her job as an engineer working on the Space Shuttle program in Houston to be with me in Colorado, we found ourselves immersed in the carnage of the “Housing Crisis” recession, which impacted people from all sorts of professions – including mine in the field of natural gas pipeline and facilities engineering and construction. I lost a very good job as a project manager in Cortez , Colorado, overseeing operations on opening the new Paradox Basin play. Though I was well connected in the industry as it exists in Colorado and New Mexico, I concluded that I could only be out of work for six months and that this job search could take that long. I dug in for the most important job search of my life and, after four months I’d had a couple of interviews in the Denver area, about a seven hour drive to Durango and a couple of interviews in Salt Lake, which would have kept me within six hours of my daughter. But times were hard for a lot of people. After not landing any of those jobs, I’d searched the last two months as they rolled by, still hugely averse to moving out of the area, I was at the end of my rope and I took a job in Pennsylvania and hoped for the best. There was a new shale gas play that pulled engineering types from all over the country, some of whom I’d known well and some were just acquaintances. This helped because I then didn’t take my job loss so personally. Being laid-off had happened to so many of us and so many of us were forced to leave our Colorado homes. Combined with lifestyle reasons, I was vehement about never leaving my eleven year old daughter behind. Doing so was the most difficult thing I’d ever have to do, and I knew it. I was at war with myself while making the decision to move so far away.

Though the parenting arrangement had both her mother and me as working partners, with her mother at least having to make a small monthly child support payment, she never made a contribution. This meant that I was not only paying on behalf of my daughter, but was effectively paying alimony, as well. Though I brought this to the attention of the courts, nothing was done about it and she was allowed to not have a job and use a good portion of my payment to live on. On what I was paying , my daughter should have easily had her needs met. The courts had mistakenly calculated my end to be far (about 50%) greater than it should have been and I had no luck in getting the courts to recalculate the apportionments using my actual income as opposed to the amount that had been used in error. There had been no provision for alimony in the agreement, only child support, but on it went, my paying for both ex-wife and daughter and working 60 hour weeks to get the job done. The only means I had to continue making that kind of money was to take the job in Pennsylvania, so I did. Aside from the hardship of having to leave my home of thirty years, the offer was solid and, for a time, I was able to keep my ex-wife off my back. To say that I was being pulled in diametrically opposed directions would be a huge understatement. Every time I would call to speak with my child, her mother would counter by saying she was unavailable. I tried my luck on my daughter’s cell phone, but by then she was only allowed to use it in the presence of her mother. I had no means of staying in communication with my child so I called the Colorado Family Support office in Durango to file a complaint. I’d tried the courts one last time, but it was clear that it was a waste of time and emotional energy. My ex-wife simply continued to not return any calls from the Family Support office but there were no repercussions for her abuse of the system.

I loved my daughter very much and she’d spent a large chunk of her first eleven years on earth with me. We were pals and I made sure to steer her into the sports and activities that had given me so much joy. I also attempted to imbue my set of values and it all seemed to be sinking in until I was forced to leave. I ended up with a terribly painful ulcer and my back problems became so debilitating that I literally couldn’t keep my mind straight. What a horrible way to start a brand new, high-profile job. I have since had six surgeries to keep me from landing in a wheelchair and haven’t seen my daughter in fourteen years. With my back spiraling out of control, I ran into years of extreme pain and could no longer travel. Like two small ships in a huge, stormy sea, my daughter and I have drifted and my greatest hopes of having her be a big part of my life have been dashed.

I cannot express into words what was lost in that move from Colorado to Pennsylvania. In the beginning, I spent night after night with dreams of Colorado coming so fast, I’d cry myself to sleep. It was as if photos of my daughter were pasted under my eyelids and when I closed my eyes to sleep at night, there she was. I could do nothing but cry a river. Today, my daughter and I are at such odds that we can’t look upon any single issue and see it the same way. I get solace from the knowledge that I had eleven wonderful years with her, and in so doing, taught her my values. She went to college and has made a good life for herself right there in Southern Colorado. This has made things easier as a significant part of what I’ve wished for all these years is that she could continue to grow up and make a life for herself there in the bosom of the Southwest.

Ultimately, my wife and I moved to Texas, where she is from, going to Texas A&M and getting (and paying for) a B.Sc in aerospace engineering and going to work for the following fourteen years at NASA, at the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake. Upon returning to the area, she again went to work for her old employer, no longer reporting to NASA but taking a job in the oil and gas industry for BP, at its North American headquarters just outside Houston, as a technical writer. Three years later, she secured an excellent position with a large engineering firm in San Antonio. We reside in Central Texas where she can work from home and has been for the last four years. She should be able to retire with me in another five years, or so. We have a wonderful home on some property and live a very rural and quiet existence with our three wonderful dogs. I had one surgery in Pennsylvania and had my sixth surgery, here in Texas, in 2023. I still suffer from immense pain and remain as active as I can to keep my back problems at bay. Still, it is a good life full of exercise, working on our home and property, and playing guitar which has helped keep me going after saying goodbye to a lifetime of mountain sports and activities. It is my hope that my adult daughter and I can find our way back to some kind of healthy relationship, but I no longer blame myself for having to leave Colorado so she could stay in it. Her college was paid for and I believe I’ve done everything in my power in attempting to stay in touch. Perhaps the winds of fate will one day blow us together.

That transition from my known Colorado life to Pennsylvania and the unknown was without question, the most trying period of my life. I got through it by the skin of my teeth but learned a lot about life. I don’t know how I did it and, even with all the positives to counter the negatives, I know I could never bear something like it again.

-End