HIT BY A BUS

Friday the 9th was interesting in the same way a crime scene is interesting—lots of details, no good outcomes, and everyone involved pretending this is normal.

I went to the oncology consult. The doctor was excellent, which is to say calm, efficient, and completely uninterested in lying to me for the sake of my feelings. He skipped the pleasantries, skipped the hope, and went straight for the jugular.

“It’s a matter of time.”

Not if. When.

That’s the kind of sentence that doesn’t echo. It detonates. Yeah, charlie is coming back. The rat bastard isn’t dead—he’s just been waiting in the alley, smoking my cigarettes, checking his watch.

Here’s the recap, in case anyone missed the earlier chapters of this slow-motion mugging.

I had uveal melanoma. Cancer. The fancy kind that doesn’t need a second opinion because it makes itself painfully clear. That ended with the enucleation of my right eye — medical Latin for “we scooped it out like bad guacamole with a dull spoon.” Old news. Covered territory. I already paid for that experience with pain, recovery, and a lifetime of bumping into doorframes. What’s new—fresh out of hell—is the classification.

Class II. PRAME-positive.

PRAME-positive sounds like a marketing term. It should come with balloons. It does not. It’s a red stamp that says this thing plans to come back armed. High-risk recurrence. Over 50% in five years. Over 40% in three.

Those numbers aren’t statistics. They’re a loaded gun on the table.

The genetic testing says there’s a good chance charlie shows back up in about three years, like an old enemy who knows your address and doesn’t bother knocking anymore. Not my first rodeo, but somehow it still feels personal. Deeply. Aggressively personal. We talked. We reviewed. We “consulted.” The kind of conversation where everyone nods because no one has anything better to say. Then I walked out.

And that’s when the bus hit.

I wasn’t bleeding. Nothing was broken. But my brain was flattened. Pancaked. Reduced to a dull ringing where ambition used to live. I’ve got a timeline now. A short one. A ticking clock that doesn’t care about plans, goals, or whether I was finally getting things figured out. But now I find myself dazed, disconnected. Operating on some strange autopilot where time feels both extremely limited and aggressively pointless. I’ve got a window now — I'm waiting for the next event — like a countdown clock ticking in the background, a Geiger counter you can’t shut off.

Long-term planning feels ambitious. Almost rude. But—miracle of modern medicine—we do have a plan.

The plan is surveillance. Relentless, paranoid, Big-Brother-level surveillance. Scans. Lots of scans.

Scans Every 3 months for the first 2–3 years Scan Every 4–6 months for the next two years Scans Every 6–12 months out to 10 years and beyond

That’s what I’m talking about. Ten years and beyond. Gotta love the optimism.

We’re talking CT scans with contrast. No PET scans. We’re watching the lungs and liver like hawks—charlie’s favorite places to squat, like a disease-ridden Airbnb guest who refuses to leave.

So now I’m left wondering what the hell the point of “living healthy” was supposed to be. Did it matter? Did it help? Or was this just the universe’s way of saying nice try? Maybe the yoga crowd is onto something. Or maybe my decades of enthusiastic misbehavior finally cashed in its chips and sent me the bill.

Hard to say.

Either way, the universe has made its position clear. And I’m still here—one eye short, statistically compromised, and deeply unimpressed.

So I suppose I just keep on keeping on. Because what the hell else are you going to do?

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

That's my plan

Getting up to Speed

Previously on this cheerful little blog of bodily malfunctions and administrative sadism, we left off with me circling the runway like a doomed commercial flight whose pilot is just a clipboard with teeth. All my medical appointments—all of them—were scheduled for February or March, which is the healthcare system’s way of saying: “We acknowledge your suffering and would like to schedule it for later.”

Am I the only one who sees the need for speed? Because apparently the rest of the world is content with a timeline that moves like a constipated sloth dragging a mattress uphill.

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Day 8 of the New Year

The calendar flips and I’m summoned to the service that’s going to provide me with a glass eye.

Now, let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t some classy pirate marble with a sinister glint. No, it’s more like a giant contact lens shell painted to look like an eyeball, because we live in the future and the future is mostly adhesives.

The place—Ocular Prosthetic Designs—is this strange hybrid of medical office and art studio, like if a surgeon and a tattoo artist got trapped in an elevator and decided to start a business. Turns out these things are hand-painted and custom-fitted, which sounds charming until you remember it’s for your face.

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First order of business: unsealing the meatsuit

My eyelids were still sewn shut with those “self-dissolving” sutures that… apparently never got the memo about dissolving. They were just sitting there like lazy renters refusing to move out.

So the guy snips them, and instant relief—like a curse being lifted, or a Netflix subscription finally cancelled.

And here’s the fun part: turns out my surgeon had implanted a clear shell in there already, like an eyeball training bra, so my eye socket wouldn’t collapse into a sad little cave of regrets. Not a fancy painted piece—just a clear placeholder.

Clear or not, I still couldn’t see a damn thing, so no surprises there. Just the usual void.

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Arts & crafts, but make it horrifying

They took a mold—because nothing says “healthcare” like someone making a silicone impression of your face-hole—and told me we’ll meet again in a week to check the tint and fit.

So I might have a finished eye shortly.

Until then, I’ll keep an eye out for you.

Yes, I said it. I earned it.

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In and out — pretty simple

It was quick. Efficient. Almost too normal. In fact, I got first-hand experience with the prosthetic when I popped the shell out while rubbing my eye in his office like a drunken raccoon grooming itself.

So right there, in front of the professional, I got hands-on training re-inserting it—like a live demo of “How Not to Be Your Own Worst Enemy.”

Promised to be careful.

Because yeah… I need to be careful.

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I made it about eight blocks

Eight blocks. That’s how long my vow lasted. Like New Year’s resolutions and monogamy.

I popped the thing out again.

But only once since then.

So basically I’m crushing it.

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HEB: Depth Perception Hell

I parked at HEB and picked up groceries like a normal citizen pretending this is all fine. When I came out, the depth perception problem struck again like a sniper.

I was only halfway into the parking spot. The whole ass end of the truck was sticking out in traffic like I was trying to launch a hostile takeover of the lane.

Daily challenges—keeping me sharp.

Or at least keeping me aware that I’m not sharp anymore.

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Then: the oncology consult

In a semi-miracle, they bumped my oncology consult to 9:00 AM tomorrow, instead of February 5th. Which, naturally, was immediately changed to noon, because hospitals can smell hope like blood in the water.

But hey—still the same day.

Small victories. Tiny crumbs of competence sprinkled across the asphalt of despair.

So tomorrow, I trek once again into Temple to face the rat bastard Charlie (my personal internal villain—some malignant chaos entity wearing a lab coat), and whatever havoc he’s planning to wreck upon my frail and aged carcass.

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BUT HERE’S THE REAL TRAGEDY

The true fear isn’t Charlie.

It’s missing my fiber install.

Because listen: I have spent years crawling out of the internet swamp like a mud-covered lunatic with a modem in his teeth.

• Started with two DSL lines at 5 Mbps
• Upgraded to satellite at a blistering 10 Mbps, when the wind wasn’t laughing
• Graduated to Starlink averaging 75 Mbps, but unstable like a raccoon on espresso
• Now I’m on wireless point-to-point at a stable 50 Mbps
• And fiber… sweet divine fiber… offers 500 to 1,000 Mbps

That’s not just speed. That’s ascension.
That’s leaving the cave. That’s fire. That’s Prometheus stealing bandwidth.

Info power.

I feel like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit—except instead of getting struck by lightning, I got struck by a medical billing department.

Need info. Need data. Need bandwidth. Need the river of knowledge poured directly into my brain.

So yeah, tomorrow I’m fighting cancer bureaucracy with one hand and trying to keep my fiber appointment alive with the other like I’m juggling two live grenades and one of them is made of emails.

 

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler