A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-August, 2002
Monday, August 12, 2002
8 PM. In addition to all the other stress I have, in the last half hour I’ve developed a throbbing toothache in my upper right back molar.
God knows when I’ll be able to see the dentist. I hope the pain subsides. It’s such bad timing.
But why should it be different from everything else that’s gone wrong in the past year?
At 10:30 AM, I left the law school and went over to the Imaging Center to have the ultrasound.
They had me take off my pants and underwear and put on a hospital gown, giving me towels to cover my lower body and my penis, as the technician, in what must have been an unpleasant job for her, placed a wand on my testicles after I smeared them with some goo.
I lay facing the ceiling and tried to keep my legs from shaking. When the technician left the room in the middle to see if the pictures had been printed, I sneaked a peek at the image on the screen but didn’t know what to make of it.
Checking out, I was told that I could pick up the pictures on Wednesday – of course I can’t do it that day – and that the radiologist’s report would go to Dr. Ginter that day, but God knows if I’ll ever find out anything from her.
It’s unnerving to think that I have to wait another ten days before finding out if I’ve got cancer or what, but maybe I’m better off not knowing for another period of time.
Last night I took an Ambien, so I slept a little better, but I was awake before 5 AM, feeling a lot of anxiety – though about work, not about the testicular mass.
After so many months, it’s going to be hard to adjust to the academic year starting so soon.
I sent an email asking the teaching assistants about a training session on Saturday, August 24. A few of the TAs can’t make it, but I’ll have to pick a definite date soon. Since a number of them are on law review, I’m just waiting for word on when their law review meeting is to pick the time of day for the training session.
I know that in the past, they’ve had all-day training sessions, but I envision a session under three hours with some follow-up meetings throughout the semester.
I also booked a lecture hall for Mondays at 3 PM to do weekly skills workshops. I’ll wait for my TAs for the evening class to pick the times of their sessions before I settle on a time for my own evening skills workshops.
I probably don’t need to do this weekly – let alone twice weekly – but I’ll see how it goes.
I don’t have things planned very well, but everything’s on hold until I find out about my diagnosis and the results of the bar exam.
I still don’t know whether I want to remain as ARP director beyond December or beyond this academic year, but I am living up to my agreements with Dad and Dr. Koncsol to stay on the job for a year. I’m two-thirds of the way there.
Obviously, if I need cancer treatment, I can’t be without health insurance.
We’ll see how stressed out I get during the fall semester. If I do have cancer, I know it probably wasn’t caused by all the stress – which did cause my sciatica and GERD and also aggravated my anxiety – but I can’t help feeling that the job did make me physically vulnerable.
Yes, I’m lucky I was covered by health insurance, but if I didn’t have the job at Nova Law, maybe I wouldn’t have needed to see so many doctors.
This year’s health care costs probably equaled what I spent on medical care for the entire previous decade.
Today we had three sessions – at 9 AM, noon, and 5 PM – of incoming students coming in for laptop training.
I tried to be helpful, talking to students and serving as a doorstop as they left with the big boxes filled with their new computers and the junk that came with them.
I’ve got to remember that the first-year students are more nervous than I am. I wonder if orientation will overwhelm them – and maybe I think that because I know that the kind of orientation we’re doing would have overwhelmed me as a new 1L.
I wish I had my diary from 1991 with me to see how I felt starting UF Law School. In memory, it seems as if I wasn’t nervous, but perhaps I’ve forgotten what it was like.
I can only recall UF Law School as being a safe place for me, both when I was a student and when I worked there at the Center for Governmental Responsibility.
Libby and Ronna replied to my emails.
Ronna obviously doesn’t check her email very often, and she just wrote a brief note saying she felt certain everything would be okay. She said she would ask “our resident physician” for his opinion.
Libby said she was worried for me. They had a good trip up to Washington State – and the kids were relieved to see their grandmother, who said she was glad to be living in a nursing home.
They’ll take a few more weekend trips with the RV, all within California, before school starts.
Lindsay had a bad accident, dislocating her knee at the gym in April. Although she had to give up gymnastics for good, she can resume diving soon, and I think that she’ll excel in that sport as she moves to the Junior Olympic level.
Wyatt was a credited stunt double for Lil’ Bow Wow in the film Like Mike, and he was in a theater group production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Next they’ve signed him up for a Shakespearean acting class.
Because the woman at church who Libby worked for is undergoing cancer treatments, Libby has been hired to run the Children’s Ministry program through at least Christmas.
“I love the work, and I enjoy having extra money to save,” Libby wrote, “but it’s exhausting.”
Both Lindsay and Wyatt are apprehensive about starting their new schools in the fall.
Elihu’s email had the subject line “Be brave.” He said that Roger has gone back to work at the hospital, but in a different job.
The hospital eliminated Roger’s old position while he was out on disability, but the union stepped in and made sure he got another job.
As president of the St. George Tower Co-op Board, Elihu has to disclose to shareholders any time a board member is in arrears, and one guy was late with his payments. The man has threatened to expose Elihu as a “child pornographer” if the Board reveals the information.
“If he does [that],” Elihu wrote, “I will have to defend myself, tell the entire building about my interrogation by the FBI and my innocence, and then sue the hell out of him for defamation. Who said life is boring?” Not I.
Sat Darshan said that Simon the cat has been missing since he didn’t come home after he left the house on Saturday night, and she is frantic: “I can’t loose [sic] another pet this year.”
Tonight David called and said he’s trying to forget about the bar exam for now: “If I passed, it wouldn’t surprise me, and if I failed, that wouldn’t surprise me, either.”
David found the MBE hard but not terribly tricky and said that before his flight home on Wednesday night, he met other bar exam takers, and all of them went to the airport bar and drank a lot before boarding the plane to Miami.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
5 PM. It’s been a long day, but I just wanted to write a few words before I head off to the Signature Grand for the orientation dinner.
Last evening I read that a tumor in an older man’s testicles is more likely to be a lymphoma than testicular cancer, which sounds just as bad or worse.
When I left work, I bought a flashlight at Walgreens because I read that if you shine a flashlight on a cyst in a dark room, you can see that it’s translucent, whereas a tumor is solid and opaque.
I spent a long time with my flashlight and my scrotum in the walk-in closet with the light off, trying to figure out if I’m just seeing what I want to see when I think I see light coming through the mass.
If I have a hydrocele or spermatocele, I might not even need any treatment.
I emailed Dr. Ginter, asking her to let me know if she gets the radiologist’s report.
Although orientation today was a little disorganized, the prep program sessions really seemed to go well.
I subbed for Tony Chase and teamed with Kathy Cerminara early this morning, and this afternoon, I took over for Jim Wilets with Billie Jo. Pat seems relieved that everything went okay.
*
9 PM. I’ve just come back from the Signature Grand, where I tried to be a good host for the six Section 3 students at my table. (Cleveland, their advisor, didn’t make it to the dinner.)
Although it’s been a very long day, I survived and did it without any discernible anxiety about my role at the law school.
I don’t have that much to do tomorrow, so I might go over to the medical clinic in the afternoon.
I got a postcard saying my blood and urine tests were normal and that I should make an appointment after my ultrasound.
There’s a lot more I could write about this long day, but I don’t feel like it now. I do think this went pretty well for the first-year students.
Thursday, August 15, 2002
9 PM. I don’t have cancer. Dr. Ginter told me that three times, and I guess I believe it now.
I have either a spermatocele or an epididymal cyst, and because I am in a little pain, I may need surgery – but I’ll deal with that when I have to.
For now, it’s one day at a time, and the last two days have been like a novel.
As much as I feel apart from NSU Law, I cannot deny that I also – and I didn’t intend this easy pun when I began this sentence – I also feel a part of it.
That is, I’m a part of the community, and there are people I feel a kinship with, whether students, faculty, or administrators.
So I’ve got my big ultrasound picture that I can’t make head or tail of, and I’ve got the report of the radiologist, which gives the exact dimension of my testicles (the right one is “grossly normal”) and of the cyst (1.8 x 1.7 x 1.4 centimeters).
It’s definitely not malignant, and I told Pat and Thelma, and I called Dad, Aunt Sydelle, and Josh, and I left a voicemail with Teresa.
I wrote to Alice, Libby, Sat Darshan, Ronna, Patrick, Mark Bernstein, and Mark Savage: the people who I bothered with my kvetching.
Alice is off to London with Peter. Mark Savage, who’s going there for the first time with Janet, said what I have is “small potatoes” compared to cancer.
Sat Darshan said she prayed for me, both in and out of the gurdwara. Ravinder got her and Kiran tickets to India in November.
Teresa called me back and offered to come down and stay with me if I needed surgery. She said she enjoyed her trip to Philadelphia, but she can take only so much of Deirdre’s crazy family.
Last night I ended up sleeping well; I think my testicle hurts less when I’m in bed. Dr. Ginter said I need an athletic supporter and shouldn’t sit that much.
I slept till 5:30 AM, exercised, and got to the law school at 8 AM as the 1Ls gathered for today’s orientation program.
I went to the big session at Miniaci Auditorium, where Allison Smith was kind enough to acknowledge me and ARP.
I had forgotten how self-congratulatory law schools can be, but I now remember the way UF used to always praise itself, its graduates, and the legal profession.
Still, when Joe Harbaugh quoted something Tony Chase had quoted in Movies on Trial, the monologue by Tom Hanks as the AIDS-stricken lawyer in Philadelphia about why he loves the law (in the trial where he’s suing his old law firm for wrongful termination), I teared up a little.
I wasn’t anxious while I was teaching those sessions with Kathy and Billie Jo yesterday or doing anything at the law school today.
I had lunch with 80-year-old John Anderson, the presidential candidate I voted for 22 years ago, and with a 24-year-old 2L who says he plans to run for the Florida legislature within the next five years.
We had pizza, something I ate for the first time since I developed GERD. I was fine with Pizza Loft’s good, non-oily slices in my stomach.
I think orientation went really well.
Tomorrow’s the beach cleanup, and Pat said we don’t have to show up back at work afterwards.
I had some students I know come to see me in my office, and I went out and met more of the incoming 1Ls. I also talked to my ARP teaching assistants.
I did sort of feel I’m part of a community; maybe it’s the first time I’ve felt that here. So that was good. Also, I don’t have cancer.
Tonight I did laundry and went to Publix and read two days’ worth of newspapers.
Friday, August 16, 2002
8:30 PM. I’ve just spent more than two hours in my office, working on my Authors Guild website.
I’m not going to publish http://www.richardgrayson.com for a while, as I’m only just learning how to use the Guild’s “easy” website builder.
I’ve been linking stories from webzines, and I can also enter text, like my book titles, with quotes, but it’s very unsophisticated.
It doesn’t bother me that I’m “giving away” my recent stories – at least half of The Silicon Valley Diet – because I’ve never made any money from my writing, and I don’t ever expect to. Hell, I don’t even know how to get people to visit my site.
Last night I didn’t sleep much, and I probably won’t do much better tonight, as I had too much caffeine today, starting at Starbucks at 7:45 AM.
It was fun to go to work in the 2002 NSU Law Beach Cleanup t-shirt, shorts and sneakers, and to see other people, like Pat, really dressed down for the first time.
I drove myself to John U. Lloyd State Park, which I can’t believe I’ve never visited after passing it so many times over the past 22 years.
It’s a weird place, the only really pristine beachfront left in South Florida, and it’s eroded badly in recent years along with a lot of the other Atlantic beaches.
We all got latex gloves (I can still smell them on my fingers), and half of us were issued black trash bags before we split up into four main groups and then smaller subgroups.
It was hot, of course, but it also was mostly cloudy and a little breezy, which moderated the oppressiveness.
I paired with Alison and several other students. It looked like at least a hundred of the 1Ls showed up, as did many of the staffers from Student Affairs and Services, Career Placement, Alumni, and the Clinics.
Lunch was delivered by Shorty’s Bar-BQ.
Nothing was really hard to deal with, especially after some of the boys – usually the ones with the nicest bodies – took off their shirts.
Lisa Jaffe, who works in Student Records and went to FIT, expertly tailored her t-shirt and Nicole’s to fit their slender bodies.
I enjoyed chatting with Kathy, Meg and Jeri (whom I gave a copy of today’s Times rave of Hairspray since she’s friends with the show’s creators).
You know, yesterday I stayed at school after 5 PM talking with Mark Friedman, and I didn’t realize where the time went.
That reminded me a little of how I started hanging out at Brooklyn College when I was an undergraduate or how I hung out at UF as a law student.
If Nova could be that kind of place, of course, it would be the best thing that could happen to me. But it seems like too much to hope for.
Javier sent me a thank-you note from Save Dade/No to Discrimination HQ.
Patrick wrote from Memphis, where last night he attended the outdoor candlelight vigil at Graceland.
Today, of course, was the 25th anniversary of Elvis’s death. I was never the biggest Elvis Presley fan, but he was remarkable, and his songs from “Love Me Tender” and “Hound Dog” to his 1969 stab at social criticism, “In the Ghetto,” still move me.
This morning Sat Darshan got a call at work from a woman a few blocks away who said that Simon the cat was in her yard and wouldn’t leave.
Sat Darshan picked him up at lunch, and although confused, he started eating when she put some cat food in front of him. How to keep Simon from running away again is another question.
I feel pretty good tonight.
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
9 PM. By this time last night, I was already fast asleep – which was why I woke up at 3 AM today, I guess.
The night before I kept listening to the audiobook Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which I thought would be about his studies on peak performance, but it turned out to be a banal self-help book.
Of course it did help me to fall asleep whenever I put the tape on, so I never quite heard the book all the way through.
At 3:30 AM this morning, I put on the audiobook of Liz Smith’s autobiography Natural Blonde, which wasn’t well-written but at least had the sense of a life lived.
It did remind me that this time in my life will pass, too, and one day it will be like my six years in Gainesville or my years teaching at Broward Community College or the summers I spent at Teresa’s apartment on West 85th Street: simply another period in what could turn out to be a longer life than I now expect.
Just as the bar exam once loomed so ominously, this too shall pass. (What a way with words.)
I did drift off for a little while from NPR’s Morning Edition into an anxiety dream about my job in which Pat Jason discovered that I wasn’t working very hard.
Today seemed like a very long day at work.
A major screw-up occurred that made me realize how incompetent at my job I am.
I thought I’d interviewed Josef Fiala, Dobson’s TA, but Joe didn’t even know he was doing the job until Scott Atherton asked me if Joe could take over JT’s place as his co-TA for Shu’s Contracts class.
Well, no real harm done. I met with Joe, and he was going to speak to Dobson, who, after all, should have told him about the job.
I’m better at the counseling part of my job, whether it’s with the second-year students who’ve been on academic probation or with the two women who came in, freaking out with nausea and anxiety, after Wisotsky’s first Criminal Law class. (Hey, I’m especially good at dealing with anxious people.)
While I may be a decent counselor, I stink as an administrator. I’m trying to tell the teaching assistants to plan their lessons, but I can’t even plan our Saturday training session.
I never did lesson plans as a teacher; most of the time I just winged it. Well, Saturday will be over soon.
I can’t be Jane Fishman or Mark Padin or all the dedicated academic support professionals I met in Seattle. For me, my job is just a job.
Recently I came across the phrase “non-career job,” and I think that’s something I’d prefer to what I’ve got now.
But I guess I tried that when I was an adjunct and grad student in Arizona, and that didn’t work out. What’s a writer to do?
I was surprised that C. Bard Cole left New York to become an MFA student at the University of Alabama. He’s got a fellowship, but my God, Bard should be teaching there, given that he’s a good published writer with a short story collection from St. Martin’s out.
I read two pieces by Vincent that I found online: one story at Nerve.com and another he must have written in Spain. Vincent’s such a good writer, too.
Tonight I started Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. I like parts of the book better than other parts, but Foer is a sophisticated writer, something I’m certainly not.
I put the New York Times op-ed piece on the size of New Jersey on my Authors Guild website this morning, and I’ll leave it alone for now.
Nobody will see it anyway. It’s like “publishing” my work in little magazines in the 1970s, except there are no other contributors to read it.
The urologist’s office called. Dr. Marks can’t make my Thursday appointment because he’ll be in surgery, so I rescheduled it for the first available appointment I could get, next Tuesday at 11:30 AM.
The testicle bothers me off and on. I wonder if Dr. Marks will recommend surgery.
I forgot to take Prevacid this morning, but it turns out I didn’t really have any stomach distress without it.
Did I know before today that Jon Mills was stepping down as Dean of UF Law School? Today I read that Chris Slobogin is heading a search committee to pick a new Dean for next year.
On NPR this evening, I heard Jeffrey Davis, my old Contracts professor, talking about Florida’s Homestead Law’s bankruptcy provisions.