operation date set

Not that it can hold a candle to the U.S.' ramping up of combat operations that were supposed to be on the wane in Afghanistan, but this week, a call from the doctor's office fixed the date on which I will have an operation on the nodule on my right lung -- a nodule whose exact cause cannot be named, but must be labeled cancer even if no one knows for sure.

Dec. 1 has been set for the "procedure" which is an operation with a nice name. For four or five weeks, there have been tests for this and tests for that to make sure the heart and body can take the stress involved in the operation. Now, although the heart is less than it might be, the decision has been rendered to take a wedge-shaped bit of lung, together with the nodule which can only be biopsied after it is removed:\.

There is no need to open the entire chest, as I understand it. The tests that preceded and kind of danced around the actual problem are now pretty much over and I am grateful: The downside of having the specific operation (statistically I gather it has a 95:5 life/death batting average and I gather it hurts a bit) begins to pale when I go for one test after another without actually going after the offending arena. The scariest part, to the extent that there is one, is any time I have to spend in the hospital, a place I have come to see as exerting a negative effect on anyone's spirit.

"Comparisons," the old saw once had it, "are odious," but it is hard not to somehow compare my life with the life of those who are in the line of fire at the whim of governments and politicians that can see the upside of perpetual war. It is hard not to indulge in a bit of odiousness.

Oh well, maybe a shower will help.