I took a little sabbatical to take a trip down south. A good friend has a nice home in Florida that he routinely let's me borrow, and he said it would be a good place to recuperate from all that has happened the past few months, a good place to get my mind on other things. He said a lot more too, but I quit listening after "Do you wanna go to Florida?". OK, that's not true, this friend has truly been a rock over the past few months, and our weekly harassing of Cracker Barrel waitresses followed by wrestling over the check (figuratively, not literally, I am still not healed enough for that) is something I look forward to every week.
So, the day after my last blog, I had a million things to do, like remember to pack the computer so I could blog while I was gone (and we see how well that worked). I had to finish my packing while my wife was at work, gather everything up, and being my overthinking, contingency plan making self, I had to prepare for every eventuality that may befall the house and my mother-in-law (mainly the house) in our absence. From fire to flood to volcano I thought of everything....but snow, heck we were going to be in Florida, what did I care? Luckily, she was able to find where I stashed the snow shovels. So anyway, while I was preparing for our trip, I was getting out the fishing poles, bikes, bike rack, etc. which required me to open up my shop. I have been staying out of my shop, mainly because I have managed to hurt myself about every time that I have been in there since my surgery, and I am really not cleared yet to resume hurting myself again (not hurting my incision but my normal hurting myself where I come down bruised or bleeding or missing a limb and can't remember exactly when or what happened). As soon as my mother-in-law saw the doors to my shop opened, she assumed this meant I was well enough to be in there, and therefore brought out the Chicago-phonebook-sized list that she had been waiting to give me. Besides putting me way behind schedule, somewhere around the "T"s of the honey-do list, I felt my incision starting to...well, the best way to explain it is it's like opening a Ziploc bag, except Ziploc bags don't normally result in excruciating pain. As I started to feel the unzipping, I tried to take it as easy as I could and still get through the rest of the alphabet on the to do list. After all, the next day would be seventeen hours of driving, hopefully that would help me to heal.
Our plan was to go to bed really early and start out really early on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, neither of those things happened. We did eventually get on the road and our great adventure began. Walking the dogs on the road was a lot more interesting when one basenji wants to be both Lewis and Clark with a little bit of Sir Edmund Hillary at every pitstop and the other dog is afraid of everything from semis with their engine brakes, to cars with squeaky wheels, to wind blowing through the grass, to bee flatulence (although to be fair, I am afraid of that too, nothing reeks like a stale honey fart). The result is one dog is dislocating my shoulder while the other one is scared shitless, literally, as in too scared to go, which is a problem when the main point of walking the dogs is to for that very act to occur.
This trip was originally supposed to be my 40th Birthday Spectacular, a week long celebration of Tom at Walt Disney World. When I was laid off, those plans were in jeopardy. When I got cancer, those plans were questionable. When we got the hospital and chemo bills, those plans went out the window. And that is why I am so thankful to my friend for offering up the house. We certainly weren't planning on affording a Florida trip right now. But ever since he made the offer, I decided this would be my triumphant return! I am as cancer free as a cancer patient gets, because it's hard to really feel cancer free when the oncologists keep asking you to come back every three months to see if you have any cancer. I had planned to run a 5K, ride on a group ride, go to the beach everyday, swim in the pool everyday, feel better, lose weight, and definitely enjoy one day at the Magic Kingdom. So, that is when I found myself in the dark of night, driving through southern Georgia with my wife and the basenjis asleep in the back seat, when I started to tear up. For all intents and purposes it was over. Yeah, I still have years of tests, and don't know if I have any "swimmers" after chemo (that test is this week, I hope they have new magazines or videos), but the hard part is done, and I won the fight, I won the battle, and I am on the way to winning the war. This was the first time I had let myself even entertain the thought that I was done with this cancer stuff, and the emotions were overwhelming me. I felt like I was finally able to let go of some all of the uncertainty and stress of the past few months, while I was all alone in the dark with my thoughts...and those deer. That's when I snapped back to reality, that although a lot of stress in my life is gone, I am still traveling down the road at night at 75 miles per hour.
The trip all in all wasn't too bad, we even made it through Atlanta fine. Atlanta to Macon is a different story, about extra hour long story to be exact, but we made it to the Florida home just fine, albeit about eight hours from our original target time. We hastily unpacked the car and I walked the dogs and started settling in while my wife got groceries. We had a quick 2am supper and collapsed into bed, ready to meet some friends that live down there now the next day for Thanksgiving.
My wife picked up the last of the items we need for Thanksgiving dinner that morning and headed out to the garage to drive over to our friends' house to help them with cooking the turkey. She comes back in saying there was a small puddle under the car. I had just done an oil change before our trip, perhaps I hadn't tightened something all the way. I walked into the garage and froze. The puddle was not under anything I worked on during the oil change. And the puddle was not the color of anything I worked on. It was blood red. I was thinking, "Please let it be a dead animal, please let it be a dead animal, please let it be a dead animal...", yeah, I know that is not a nice thought to think, but even pulling a half-dead gator out from under the car would be cheaper and easier than what that problem really was...transmission fluid.
I have been in this position before. I travel with enough tools to get myself through most minor emergency repairs. Of course nothing transmission related is minor, but unlike losing a fuel pump on Key West, this time I had a garage, access to a lot more tools, eleven days to solve my problem, and friends willing to cart us around (heck they loaned us their Jeep!). I tracked it down to a transmission cooler, and started reading up on what I would have to do to replace it. The problem, it's Thanksgiving, I will have to wait 24 very long hours before I will find out how much this part is going to cost me and how far away that part is. And I think I will make you wait 24 hours as well, as I will pick up the story from here tomorrow.
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