brain-tumor

My head ached. I was thinking of the pain, and wondering how it was possible for physical agony to be so intense. I had never imagined that such a torture could be endured. Yet here was I, both conscious and able to think clearly. And not only to think, but to observe the process and make calculations about it. The steel circle round my skull was closing in with faint cracking noises. How much farther could it shrink? I counted the cracking sounds. Since I took the triple dose of pain-killer, there had been two more. _I took out my watch and laid it on the table.__ive me morphia,_ I said in a calm, hostile, icy tone.__ou mustn__ take morphia! You know perfectly well. The very idea! And what are you doing with that watch?___ou will give me morphia within three minutes.__hey looked me uneasily up and down. No one moved. Three minutes went by. Then ten more. I slipped the watch calmly into my pocket and rose unsteadily to my feet.__hen take me to the Fiakker Bar. They say it__ a good show, and to-night I want to enjoy myself.__he others jumped up with a feeling of relief.I never confessed the secret to anyone, either then or afterwards. I had made up my mind at the end of those three minutes _ for the first and last time in my life _ that if my headache had not stopped within the next ten I should throw myself under the nearest tram.It never came out whether I should have kept to my resolve, for the pain left with the suddenness of lighting.

Instantly, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I didn't know exactly what I was feeling, but my buddy JD - my best man, whom I had met at Northwestern - has seen his dad go through (and beat) esophageal cancer and explained it to me thusly: "When you have cancer, it's like you're at the bottom of a hole, and you just want to get out. Only it's too big for you to just climb out easily. But every good thing that happens - no matter how small - is like a rock in the side of the hole. You climb up, grabbing one little rock at a time. Had a good doctor's appointment? That's a rock. Feeling a little better today? That's a rock, too. Before you know it, you've climbed out of that hole, one little rock at a time. You just need to find the rocks.

Oh I'd be more than happy to hold, I'll just spend the time working on that brain tumor.

Fidelity is a living, breathing entity. On wobbly footing, it can wander, becoming something different entirely.

There's such an intimate kind of beauty in the act of listening to music being created right in front of your eyes, watching the notes fly off the performers' fingertips, the night enveloping you like a blanket._