almost time…

“hi, my name is John.  I’m going to Turkey in a few days …. for a heart operation.”

My public presentation of “things” has been morphing lately.  It started three weeks ago when I visited Martha in good ole Marin County.  As luck would have it Vinyl was playing a show on a funky old grounded houseboat in Richardson Bay in Sausalito, which sounded like a pretty sweet event, and it was!

But it brought up a small issue, how to present what’s going on to old friends such as the Vinyl boys and the dance floor folks, who I feel quite close to from the Marin days.  I don’t see them very often, so it would be downright rude to not tell them I have something BIG going on within the month, but on the other hand, it is kind of a downer to toss major surgery into the middle of a happy “catching up” conversation.

So I found myself doing the – “I’m going to Turkey“, pause a couple of beats, as the “oh how cool! why now? why Turkey?” kind of comments start to form, then step on it with the “for a heart operation“.

It’s worked charmingly well that night and since, for all except one unnamed friend who paused, looked up at the patio we were in and said “oh look, they’ve put in new lights.  … will you be going to the Beer Crawl this month?”  To which I replied “noooo, I’ll be in Turkey for a heart operation.”   I’m striving for the charitable interpretation that this friend has a lot on her mind, but really… when I’m dumping out serious life issues, the least you could do is listen!

My plane tickets are locked in and paid for. For the record, this is how things are supposed to happen:

• May 20 – Reno -> Los Angeles -> Amsterdam -> Istanbul
• May 21 – arrive Istanbul 8:50PM -> hospital
• May 22 – chill at the hospital for a day – my room has wifi and looks to be all around sweet!
• May 23-24 – pre-op – not entirely sure what this will involve, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be fun
• May 25 – the operation – yikes!
• May 26-June 1 – recover at the hospital
• June 2-8 – hang out at the Hotel Suidaye
• June 8 – final interview with the Doctor
• June 9 – depart 6:55AM (small yikes) -> Amsterdam -> Seattle -> Reno, arrive 5:10PM

As I write this, it is Friday, five days before I get on the plane to Los Angeles.

The event is so close now, I am likely to blurt the whole thing out to anybody – the cutie who seated me at Silver Peak asked what I was reading, it was a book about the Byzantine Empire, so off I went.

I told the kid standing next to me at the bar getting a beer last night, because … well because he worked at Starbucks, and Starbucks offers health care, and I don’t have health care, and I’m going to Turkey because I don’t have health care, so off I went again.

I’m starting to get excited. Maybe a little scared, but mostly excited. The only scary thing is going under and not coming back, and if that happens I won’t even know! As the actual process gets closer, I think a little more about un-enjoyable were my two days in St Mary’s last November, but I’m pretty good about boxing up unpleasant thoughts and putting them aside, … so mostly I’m excited!

And the really exciting thing is that by this time next month I will be back home and “fixed” (whatever fixed will turn out to be…).

Fixed?!

My main day-to-day symptom of all this stuff is breathlessness.  As I have learned, lung-wise I am in fact breathing just fine, but because my heart is very inefficient, I’m not getting nearly enough oxygen to my parts, so my parts are sending fairly urgent “more oxygen please” messages to my brain, hence breathlessness.

As I remember it, I’ve felt this ever since moving to Reno.  For lack of a better model, I thought that it was simply because I moved out of my Mill Valley comfort zone, to a harsh high desert (4,400′) climate.  So for whatever reason, the whole moving thing had caused me to make a quantum leap in aging – yuck.

But now, my hope is that those sensations – gasping like a beached guppy on the basketball court, can’t chase down tennis balls – will be gone or as least better as part of being “fixed”, I’ll have enough breath to get out there and represent on the courts when I get back.

So with my new, improved model, being really “fixed” will mean that my greatest danger will be that I feel so good I will tend to party too much!  Oh the irony….

I am planning to document the f— out of the whole process.  So far so good.

Turkey Fun Facts

Turkey is relatively mellow politically right now – they haven’t had a military coup since 1980!, but it is in a tough neighborhood.  Starting immediately above Istanbul and going clockwise, its neighbors are:

• Bulgaria – Ottoman Empire sucked the life out of their Orthodox Slavic heritage for 500 years (1300’s to 1800’s), plenty of bad blood.  But the current hopeful trend is the modern notion of “forget all that stuff, let’s just all make money”.
• Greece – same as above, plus mutual ethnic cleansing in early 1900’s – 100,000’s of Turks were kicked out of their homes in Greece and sent back to Turkey, and while 100,000’s of Greeks were forcibly sent the other direction.  As Constantinople, Istanbul was essentially a Greek city for like 800 years until the Turks finally got it for good in 1453, so there is a depth of historical angst that we cannot begin to understand.
• Aegean Sea and Mediterranean – really kick-ass beaches and ancient ruins and SoCal climate – there’s more Greek ruins on the coast of Turkey than in Greece.
• Syria – some bad blood here also, Turks and Arabs have not historically been buddies.  There’s a little piece of coast that the “Great Powers” gave to Turkey instead of Syria that they are still pissed off about (thanks again Great Powers for the great way you divided up the Near East – see Kurds below).  The Turks are Sunni, I think the Baathists that run Syria are (like Sadaam’s Baathists) also Sunni, but there is a oppressed Shia sect hanging around the border called the Alevi.  Oh, another fun fact – the “whirling dervishes” are Sufi, another Shia sect that the secular government tried to suppress for a few decades before they became such a big tourist attraction.
• Iraq – brings us to the Kurds – in a perfect world, there would be a country called Kurdistan plunked over this corner of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, but alas there’s not.  As we know from Iraq, the Great Powers went out of their way to draw  country boundaries to break up ethnic groups, so they wouldn’t get powerful.  So much fun for the 21st century.  Terrorism and ethnic supression is ongoing.
• Iran – Turks and Persians have a lot of historical issues.  Turkey is aggressively secular while time Iran is aggressively religious,but I think these guys are just trying to make money also.
• Azerbijian – teeeny little border … these guys are ethnic Turks, so I think they get along ok.
• Armenia – maybe you’ve heard of the Armenian genocide – 100,000 of these folks cleansed back in the early 1900’s.
• Georgia – best thing about this is that it keeps Turkey from having a border with Russia.  I think it’s safe to say that country no bordering Russia sleeps well at night (figuratively speaking).
• the Black Sea – as I do my research, I’ve become sort of obsessed with the Black Sea.  If you’re lucky I’ll do another post on the history of all the oh-so-interesting countries that border it.  The NE corner of Turkey – Trabzon, former Empire of Trebizond – sounds like a happy little Mill Valley, lots of trees and rain, tucked between the sea and the Pontic Mountains, so most of the major invasions kinda passed them by.  It’s where Jason and the Argonauts went for the Golden Fleece, and in fact there used to be gold in the streams, and they would use fleeces to filter out the particles. I wanna go there.