Cocoon mode,* day 18: Deemed hopeless by her would-be surgeon, the blond lady battles her cancer and makes amazing progress; dirty mirror, missing pet noted at accident scene

Maybe two weeks ago, I was pedaling down the Seldon Road bike trail when I spotted a familiar-looking biker coming towards me. I thought I must be wrong, because it looked like Patti, the fit, blonde lady who was supposed to be Outside, undergoing surgery for a deadly cancer.

But it was her, and she was pedaling hard and fast. She was intent on moving and did not want to stop for anything.

"I thought you would be Outside!" I shouted as we drew close.

"No!" she shouted back as she zipped past. "I'm doing something else now, it's better."

I did not see her after that and the other night I walked up by her house and all the lights were out, so I thought maybe she had gone Outside, afterall.

Today, I took a short walk before I went bike riding and as I neared her home, I heard a sound that I could hardly believe. A lawn mower. Someone was mowing a lawn - her lawn, it sounded like.

Last night, it had been snowing and raining at the same time and while there was no hint of snow on the ground this morning, everything was wet.

But it was Patti, mowing her lawn. She saw me coming, shut down the mower and walked over to chat.

So I asked why she hadn't gone Outside for her surgery. Her answer was most dismaying - the doctor who was going to do the surgery looked at all the data, and declared the cancer to be beyond treatment, hopeless, there was no point.

"But it turned out to be a good thing," she said. She continued her chemo-therapy, took up naturopathic therapy and resolved in her mind that, whatever the damn doctor said, she was going to beat this.

And guess what?

Her cancer markers have dropped, she told me,  she is improving, experiencing remission.

"What the doctor didn't know is that I am too mean to let this cancer beat me," she said.

"i've never thought of you as mean," I responded. "Tough, but not mean."

"I'm mean on cancer," she emphasized. "I tear cancer apart."

And she is not experiencing the usual side-effects of chemo therapy - no nausea, she has all her hair.

"Tell your readers I am a miracle woman."

I guess if I'm going to take pictures through the outside rear-view mirror, I ought to keep it clean. As you can see, the autofocus on the pocket camera latched on to the dirt on the glass, not the image of the people.

Oh, well.

Margie has been so miserable these past few days that I had not been able to get her out of the house - until this afternoon. She and Kalib came with me on coffee break. Kalib fell asleep in his car seat so we took a long drive and happened upon the aftermath of an accident and witnessed paperwork being filled out.

There were many more people than this standing around, but this was the view that I had in the one second that I was stopped at the red light. The accident was not the only sad thing marked here. If you could see this image full-size, then it would be clear that someone has a missing "baby" named Socks.

I am not certain if Socks is a little dog or a big squirrel or maybe a kitty, but I will keep my eyes peeled. I know how much it can hurt to loose a furry friend.

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.

Bike ride, part 1: Kalib throws a big rock; the blonde lady battles her cancer with optimism

Later in the day, I got on my bicycle and pedaled away. Jacob and Kalib had taken off walking nearly an hour before and so I figured they would have looped around and been half-way through the march by now.

So I was very surprised to turn the corner and find them playing in these puddles, a mere few hundred yards from the house.

Jacob was holding this big rock over his head and was about to throw it into the puddle. This put me in a bit of a predicament, because I wanted to catch the splash but I knew that if I did, the water water would likely splash upon my pocket camera. I did not want to get it on the lens.

So I snapped the photo just when the rock reached the water and then jerked the camera away, but still the splash got on it. Big, ugly, gritt, drops of dirty water landed right upon the lens.

I had no lens cloth with me and so had to carefully use my t-shirt to clean the lens. Even so, I did not totally succeed and it would diminish the rest of the pictures that I would take on this ride - perhaps ever again with this pocket camera.

Kalib then picked up the rock again, with Dad's help.

Then his dad gave him a smaller rock and he threw that. If I would have had my motorized DSLR, I could have got the full series of him throwing and the rock splashing, but the pocket camera is slow and limited in this record.

But it is easy to carry and when you are riding a bike, this is important.

Kalib hefted this rock all by himself. But it was too heavy for him to raise much higher than this. Still, I was most impressed.

Then he grabbed a smaller rock and was able to raise it high.

Father and son.

Dad threw a rock into the grass. Kalib went to look for it, but he did not find it.

I got back on my bike and pedaled away, but turned for another look and this is what I saw.

I had not gone very far at all when I spotted Patti, walking on the trail towards me. Patti is the blond woman whom I referred to last week, when I met her almost in this same spot and she informed me that she has cancer on her liver.

I did not name her then or show her picture, because it seemed to me that she had enough to deal with. She says it's okay, though, so here she is.

She looks much better than when I saw her last. Despite the diagnosis that would give her from months to just one year to live, she is walking, eating, thinking about riding a bike and she is determined to beat it.

I told her that was good, because for decades now I have been seeing her on my walks, bike rides, and ski expeditions and that was the only way I could imagine it. And if I didn't?

"It wouldn't be right," she said. "It wouldn't be right at all. So I'm going to beat it."

We all know of people who are told they have terminal cancer, but who beat it and live. So fight, Patti! Just like you are doing.

As I visited with Patti, here come these three.

Patti was glad to see Kalib, but Kalib was feeling shy. Muzzy was not shy.

Patti, who has always kept herself physical fit. This week, she will learn when she will go Outside for surgery.

How precious is one month? I walk, meet a friend who has discovered that she has a deadly cancer, but is determined to beat it

I passed these chickens as I walked, and thought of the day two years shy of four decades ago when I shot a pig between the eyes and then cut the heads off 76 chickens. It was a great feast, held in honor of a man 13 months dead, and it happened on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, not far from the new bank of the dammed Missouri River.

As I walked further, I saw a blond lady walking in the opposite direction, coming towards me. I had not seen her for a couple of months, since just before I left for the Arctic Slope in June. Over the past two-and-a-half decades, our paths have often crossed either on foot, on bicycle or, in the days prior to Serendipity, on cross-country skis.

Before Serendipity, these path-crossings happened mostly on trails, deep in the woods, but this cannot be anymore. Always, when we meet, we stop and visit for awhile.

"You're back!" she smiled. I noticed that she seemed more thin, more gaunt, then I had ever seen her. I attributed this to increasing age, and yet it seemed like too much aging to have happened in just two months.

She asked me how things were so I told her about Margie, and her fall. She listened and offered words of sympathy and consolation. Then, after a couple of minutes of this, she asked, "do you want to hear my story now?"

She had been suffering some abdominal discomfort for awhile and then had finally been able to go in for a cat scan. Immediately afterward, apparently before examining the cat scan, the doctor took off on a two-week vacation. 

Immediately after he returned, she received a call. Right after that, she checked into the hospital and got her gall-bladder removed.

During her surgery, the doctor discovered that she has cancer on her liver. Now she plans to see a specialist in the Lower 48. If that surgery goes well, then the odds are fairly good that she will have another year of life ahead of her. Without the surgery, or if it does not go well, she has only months.

"This is not right," she said.

"Can I give you a hug?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

I wrapped my arms around her and she her's around me. She squeezed hard. It was a long hug. "It's hard," she said. "It's so hard."

She is a strong, tough, lady who has always kept herself physically fit. "If this had been done right," she said of her medical care. "I could have had months more." Months doesn't sound like long, but when you get down to counting in months, then how precious is even one month?

"I'm going to beat it," she said. "I'm going to."

Before we parted, she told me to pass her condolences along to Margie. "Tell her I hope she heals soon."

Margie just received some good news from the doctor. The original diagnosis - that there was no break but almost certainly ligament damage which might or might not require surgery, was completely wrong.

The break, as I have already noted, was not in her knee but on the outside of her femur, where it joins the knee. Now she learned that her ligaments were not damaged. She will not need surgery. Just time for the femur to heal.

So all that pain that we thought was due to ligament damage that really wasn't there was actually due to the break that we thought she did not have.

I told her about the blond lady. She cried.

She is a good woman, my Margie. 

And my daughter-in-law, Lavina, napping there on the couch beside her?

She is a good woman, too.

By-passed scenes from closing days of 2008: After being misrepresented and dissed on the Daily Show, her life moves on; a frightening face; light, shadows and footprints - both human and dog

I am a fan of The Daily Show. Even as this satirical romp makes me laugh, it also brings out larger truths that the real news media - especially cable news media - just flat out falls short on. If the Daily Show must sometimes take artistic liberty and even lie to get at that truth, I can understand, as their purpose is to create satire and comedy, not to report news. Yet, it still seems to me that what they did to Patti Stoll after they sent Jason Jones to Wasilla was unfair. She is not at all the person that one might think after watching the Daily clip on Wasilla.

A day or two before 2008 came to an end, I took a walk and soon found Patti, her hair highlighted by a nice fringe of frost created when her breath brushed her golden locks as it passed through the -24 degree (F) air. She was doing the same thing I was - walking. I have been running into Patti for decades. Before the developers took over the woods now known as Serendipity, tore down down the trees, cut out roads and built houses, I would be going one way on my cross-country skis and she would appear coming the other way on her's.

In the summertime, we would sometimes cross paths on foot as we walked opposite ways on wooded trails originally stamped out by moose. Other times, we would meet as we pedaled our mountain bikes up and down the roller-coaster hills. Always, we would stop and chat awhile. We still do, but now we meet along the road, or on the paved bike trail that runs alongside the extension of Seldon that was so recently punched through the woods to better serve the good people of Serendipity and anyone else who wanted to get to Church Road a little faster. 

I often affectionately refer to Patti as "the fit lady," because she always keeps herself in the best of shape and is not deterred by a little chilly weather. She does some amazing things - recently, she sailed the length of the east coast from the Carribean to Canada.

I asked about her Daily Show experience. She told me she had done a two-hour interview with Jason Jones, who had been very nice and had treated her with respect throughout. He had asked her what seemed to be serious and thoughtful questions and she had answered in kind. After two hours, he suddenly brought up the subject of drug abuse in Wasilla with one the healthiest-minded people in the community. 

The Daily Show editors then ignored the entire two-hour interview and zeroed in only on the drug-use portion, and even that was selectively edited and organized to make both her and Wasilla look as ridiculous, pitiful and foolish as possible. Also, she told me, the incredulous reaction of Jason Jones as he supposedly reacted to her words was taped later, then spliced in to appear as if that was how he had actually responded when it was not. It appears that he really put her on the spot.

And there were other liberties taken. In one scene, Jason Jones is shown walking down the divider between the north and south bound lanes of the Parks Highway while pretending to be walking down Wasilla's Main Street - kind of like placing a reporter in the middle of Highway 95 where it passes through Manhattan while talking about Broadway at Times Square.

Still, the underlying fact is that, to suit her political purposes, Wasilla's former mayor, Alaska's current governor and recent Republican Vice-Presidential candidate also depicted Wasilla to be an entirely different kind of place than it is.

As for Patti, she has shrugged the experience off as just something odd that caught her in the midst. No big deal. Although she may have to travel a little further from her house than she used to to get to it, there is snow to be skiied over and trails to mountain bike. There are oceans to sail.

After I took Patti's picture, I wondered what I looked like. So I turned the camera back on myself. Now I know why little kids scream, cry and flee when they see me coming. 

Also as I walked, just before New Year's, I came upon shaft of light that had traveled down the road known as Tamar. The time was about 1:00 PM, which is just about solar noon here. At its zenith, the sun was high enough to find its way down the road, but not high enough to reach over the tree tops on either side of the road.

I walked a ways up that shaft of sunlight, then turned around to see what it looked like behind me. I saw that the legs in my shadow had become very long, yet my shadow body was very short.

Someone walked through the marsh with a little dog, which perhaps turned around and ran in the direction from whence they came.

I had one more picture from late last year. It is of the insurance adjuster who works for Progressive, the company that insured the vehicle driven by the kid who rear-ended me the night before Christmas eve.

For the past two days, I have been suffering the the misery of shopping for a car to replace our faithful but now totaled Taurus. I have at least one more day of such misery to suffer through. Every now and then, as I suffer this ordeal, I lift my G10 pocket camera and take a snap. So I will photo-blog the experience. I will begin tomorrow, with the picture of the Progressive insurance adjuster.