Observations

    May 27 th  2028   When Mike called me at 10:30pm, I knew something was wrong.  When we were younger and he was still drinking heavily, late night calls- or even showing up at my house- were not unusual. Now that we are both middle-aged and he is a husband and father, he’s much more likely to call mid-afternoon with an assortment of family members in the car.   I knew his mother, Natalie, had been in the hospital having a hard time with diverticulitis, so it wasn’t a surprise when he told me she had died. After years of heart trouble, the additional strain was too much.   I said the things you say when there really is nothing to say, I’m so sorry and I’m here if you need me, words like pennies dropped into a deep black well.   Hanging up, I thought about Natalie.  Mike was my 9th grade boyfriend when we were both 13 year old nerd kids at Stuyvesant, so I have known Natalie for three quarters of my life.  When we were yo...

  ' May 30th 2026 Although the incision is long, running from the lower part of my skull to a point between my shoulder blades, it doesn’t really hurt anymore. The pain that’s left is from the muscles being disrupted during the surgery, creating spasms. Flexeril works pretty well for that but you have to take it three times a day and the pain breaks through when it wears off. Today was an Impeach, Convict, Remove demonstration at Trump Tower. One hour standing still holding a sign seemed manageable.  It was 60 degrees and sunny when I left Brooklyn, fine for a long-sleeved shirt and sandals, but by the time I got to midtown it was extremely windy, and the people waiting to start the action were trying to stay warm.  The police are used to us by now so just one community affairs officer wandered over to talk to Jamie, mostly about his 12 hour shift and all the security preparations for the salute to Israel parade tomorrow. After complaining for a while he asked “how long...

5/29/26  Today was my infusion. When Kayla, my usual nurse, saw the neck brace she was startled and asked me what happened but the nurse she had been training that day said "I remember. You told us you were having a tumor removed." She was the one who put in my IV today and because I had several regular IVs and an arterial line during the surgery, she was struggling to find a spot. She missed the first one, but then she got it on the second try.   It took an hour and a half for them to send the medicine up from the pharmacy. They don’t mix it ahead of time because it costs almost $6000 a bottle and they don’t want to waste it if I don’t show up. After the infusion, I had to get to the Apple Store at Grand Central so I decided to take the 57th St. bus to Lexington and then the southbound bus on Lexington. At the bus stop, I encountered two elderly ladies also waiting. One had a more traditionally grandmotherly appearance- white hair, a paisley shirt, a couple of decorative sc...

    It was 4:45am and I had been up all night anxiously completing last minute tasks when I arrived at the hospital. Told to wait in a chair, I looked around. At that hour everything seems alien, but the front entranceway is an especially odd combination. The floor itself is burnished and elegant with a reception desk that has a light glowing softly from under the edge. Then from about 8 feet up it gives the impression of something hastily assembled and not quite finished.     There are vertical support beams all over with their tops branching out into Ys studded with rivets holding up the ceiling. The ceiling itself looks unfinished, just sheets of plain corrugated metal not even painted. There is also a strange double check in system where the person at the lit desk sends you to someone at a more improvised looking desk further back who checks your ID and then sends you on to the elevator.      The area leading to the elevator is very nondescript and...

May 16th 2026   I really wanted to be at the protest about the government’s attempt to get their hands on trans youth medical records but today is one of my last days is to get things done before the surgery so I had to stay in Brooklyn and deal with a slew of tedious tasks .  I headed out to run errands and when I got to the Arabic section of Bay Ridge, I started noticing large groups of police on every corner at each intersection.  Then as I got closer, I saw more and more Palestinian flags, and then a group of Haredi men standing in a circle. It was 75° today and I was hot in my long pants, but these guys were wearing their fur shtriemels and overcoats. They are the Neturei Karta, a group that believes the creation of a Jewish state violates divine decree and always comes out for pro Palestinian protests.  People were gathering with their friends in groups on the side streets,  getting ready to come to the main event on 5th Ave. and it dawned on me that today...

     Yesterday my "day off" was a marathon of appointments. It started with the radical queer foot doc who barely stifled a curse as she looked at the new swelling in my left ankle. "That’s compensation," she said, "you’re making up for the right ankle." There wasn’t much she could do about it. I can’t even use topical anti-inflammatories right now because they add to the bleeding risk during surgery.  "You're going to have to take it easy for a couple of weeks because of the surgery," she said.  "Maybe that will give your ankles a chance to heal."      From there I had to dash to an appointment near Grand Central and then I had a gap of a couple hours before the MRIs so I got on the crosstown bus to my office.  There’s construction on 42nd St. and the bus was packed and crawling in heavy traffic.   A woman with a cane and wild hair got on so the younger woman in nurses' aid uniform next to me got up to give her the seat. Sittin...