Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

 

The sun hung high and mean in the western sky like a crooked cop leaning on a blackjack. Eighty-seven degrees in mid-February—an atmospheric felony if there ever was one. I was out there working the forest compound, sweating like a whore in church, mostly because sitting still leaves a man alone with his thoughts—and those are dangerous company.

I’m playing the waiting game these days, which is the lowest form of sport known to mankind. No rules, no scoreboard—just a slow, grinding stare-down with the unknown. So I keep busy. Chop this, haul that, rearrange the deck chairs of my own restless mind. Anything to keep from staring too long into the medical abyss.

Every little twinge in the machinery makes me pause. Is that it? Is the rat bastard back?
Hard to say. The body has developed a whole orchestra of minor complaints now—creaks, pops, mysterious electrical impulses that feel like someone flicking the wiring with a greasy thumb. One thing is certain: I am not as young as I once was, and the warranty expired sometime during the Reagan administration.

Still, the calendar is filling up like a booking sheet at a crooked casino.

First up: the Prostate MRI on the 14th, followed four days later by the grand unveiling of the results—like waiting for a jury verdict delivered by radiologists. Ten days after that comes the Freckle Census, the annual dermal inspection where a professional squints at every square inch of my hide looking for signs the rat bastard charlie might be planning a sneak attack through the skin.

Then a month of uneasy truce before early May, when the labs and the CT scan roll in like federal agents kicking down the door—looking for evidence the rat bastard charlie might have planted roots somewhere in the territory.

This, apparently, is the new rhythm of life:
Looking. Waiting. Worrying.

It’s a tedious business. Tires a man out fast.

But the sun still burns down on the ranch, the woods still need tending, and until the next medical telegram arrives from the front lines, a man might as well keep moving—if only to confuse the enemy. 

And anyway, that begs the question, is a moving target harder to hit?

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

 

A Moment in the Campaign — Gonzo Dispatch

 

Yep. It’s like that.

The war against charlie grinds on, a low-budget jungle operation with no theme music and no goddamn medals. No artillery barrages lighting up the sky—just the long, paranoid shuffle of a campaign that refuses to end. Weeks of uneasy quiet, then a flare in the brush. Not enough to call in air support. Just enough to remind you the enemy never signed a treaty.

This wasn’t D-Day. It was Tuesday.

Another checkpoint. Another slog through the bureaucratic swamp—appointments breeding in the calendar like mosquitoes, paperwork stacked in sterile white towers, waiting rooms humming with the soft mechanical purr of machines that look like they were designed by cheerful Nazis. No smoke. No gunfire. Just fluorescent lighting and the smell of disinfectant. But don’t kid yourself—the vigilance is real. You never stand down. Not when there’s always another scan circled on the horizon like a distant artillery coordinate.

So I went in for the first scan. Recon mission. Easy on the throttle. A cautious stroll into the fog, telling myself this is just the beginning of a long road. And in this campaign, a long road is good news. A long road means you’re still breathing dust and cursing the map.

But dread is a faithful companion.

Five days of it. Not hysterical, not frothing—just a low electrical buzz under the skin. The kind of hum you get waiting for a verdict from a judge who doesn’t know your name. Each day stretched thin and brittle. Each night wandering into speculative madness. By day three I was pacing. By day five I was sick of hauling that invisible question around like a duffel bag full of bricks.

Then today the report dropped.

Clean.

No sign of the rat bastard charlie. No tracks in the mud. No smoke on the ridgeline. Just a crisp clinical communiqué from the front lines: Not this time.

No parade. No ticker tape. Just a bureaucratic sigh and a new date inked at the beginning of May. A reprieve stamped in twelve-point font. Breathing room. The jungle goes quiet, but nobody holsters their weapon.

And now—because the campaign must expand—another practitioner of the medical arts enters the theater. I’ve been referred to a dermatologist. A new specialist in the relentless hunt for insurgent freckles. Annual inspections. Another arena. The rat bastard has forced us into amphibious operations.

It could wear a man down, living life in quarterly installments. Measuring existence in scans and reports and follow-ups. Time reduced to medical checkpoints. But for now, clean is clean.

As the old song says, the lion sleeps tonight. The jungle is still.

And in this war, stillness is victory enough.

 

 

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

 

 

The Road Goes On Forever

Yeah. It does.

No finish line. No triumphant final chapter. Just the same cracked asphalt stretching out ahead, narrowing into a thin gray thread until it disappears somewhere over the horizon—probably right around the bend where they keep all the answers, the closure, and the affordable health insurance.

Last week I officially entered the sacred phase of the anti-charlie campaign:

Wait. Look. See.

The medical world calls it “monitoring.”
I call it state-sponsored psychological torture.

We’re on the sacred 90-day cycle now:

Labs. Scan. Evaluate. Report. Repeat.

Like a deranged subscription service nobody asked for. Netflix at least has the decency to cancel shows before you get emotionally invested. This one just keeps renewing itself automatically.  And I think I know how this is going to play out.

First comes the scan.
Then comes A few days of dread—that exquisite limbo where your brain becomes a 24-hour doom factory, churning out worst-case scenarios with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated intern.

Then the results drop, and you get one of two outcomes:

1. “Nothing to see here, move along.”

2. “Oh shit… more tests. STAT.”

Both are terrible, just in different flavors.

Option One sounds good on paper, but it’s really just the universe saying, “Congratulations. You get to restart the waiting game.”
Like surviving a car wreck only to realize you’re still stuck in traffic.

Option Two at least has the decency to be honest. It’s panic with a purpose. It’s the hospital equivalent of, “Alright boys, load the rifles—we’re going back in.”

And honestly? Sometimes I wonder if that’s better.

Because “move along” isn’t peace. It’s not relief. It’s just a temporary ceasefire while you sit in the trench counting days like cigarettes.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a high-definition prostate MRI scheduled for March—because apparently the universe looked at my medical chart and said, “You know what this guy needs? A whole new subplot.”

The oncologist has pretty much dismissed the old “prostitute gland” as being involved.

Which is comforting.  In the same way it would be comforting if a man on a sinking ship said, “Relax, I’m pretty sure the iceberg wasn’t that bad.”

I wish I had his confidence. Truly. Must be nice to walk around with that kind of optimism, like a golden retriever in a lab coat.

Either way, one or the other has the capability to put a big red stamp on my life in the next few days.

So until then, I roam around here at the forest compound like some half-feral groundskeeper in exile. I take care of business, sure—but only the bare minimum. The essentials. The survival chores.

Because starting a long-term project right now feels like planting a garden on the deck of the Titanic.

Why build anything when you’re not sure if the next scan is going to come back with:

“Good news!”   or    “We’re gonna need to borrow you again for additional suffering.”

So I drift.  A man on a long road with no visible end, watching the horizon like it owes me money.

And it does.

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

 

Eyeball to eyeball.

 

A long time ago—back when the first war with Charlie was still raging and I was young enough to believe in medical promises—a dentist casually informed me that after he removed all my teeth, I’d be getting “appliances.”

Appliances.

Like I’m a damn kitchen.

I was hoping for an ice maker. Maybe a small dishwasher. Something practical. But no. Teeth. Plastic. Regret.

Fast forward to the current campaign in this never-ending war against my own body, and now we’re upgrading the face hardware. Since the removal of the main peeper, I’ve been walking around with a vacancy that needed filling—like a condemned building where the lights still flicker but nobody should go inside.

The eye surgeon, with the cold confidence of a man who has seen things and stopped caring sometime during the Reagan administration, wrote the following in my chart:

“Enucleation with 20 mm Medpor orbital implant, right eye.”

Translation: “Make him a pirate.”

At first, I assumed the “20 mm Medpor implant” was the device they used to actually perform the enucleation—which immediately brought to mind some kind of surgical golf tee and mallet scenario.

WHACK.

“Hold still, sir.”

But no. The Medpor is just the medically approved space-holder. A corporate placeholder for the hole where your eyeball used to live. I did a little Googling—because in America, you don’t need a medical degree, you just need Wi-Fi and anxiety—and discovered Medpor is high-density porous polyethylene.

In other words: a medical-grade golf ball.

Trust me, I stayed at a Marriott over the weekend. I’m basically a doctor now.

So then came the meetings. Not with surgeons. Not with priests. No, I met with the ocular prosthesis design group, which sounds less like a medical department and more like a secret government team that builds replacement parts for malfunctioning senators.

Their mission: build me a new eyeball.

And here’s the fun part—they’re trying to replicate the only remaining eye, the one doing 100% of the work, like some overworked intern holding together the entire company while management takes a lunch break.

Bad news: I showed up to the first meeting with a hangover.

And not a cute hangover. Not a “haha, I had a margarita” hangover. I mean a real, full-spectrum, bourbon-and-bad-decisions hangover. The good eye looked like it had been through a divorce and lost custody.

So the “model eye” they were supposed to copy looked like it had been dragged out of a bar at 2 AM by the collar.

Not exactly the kind of reference photo you want when someone is custom-painting a prosthetic organ.

The second meeting was the final design session. Thankfully, this time I arrived sober, and they included all the little red veins that normally spiderweb across the whites of the eye. No hangover meant my real eye wasn’t inflamed and screaming for mercy, so there was an abundance of “material” to reference.

Basically, my sobriety provided the necessary aesthetic restraint.

The replacement itself is like a giant contact lens. You pop it in, pop it out. It’s meant to be worn long-term—overnight, all day, all week.

Time is irrelevant.    Sleep is irrelevant.    Reality is irrelevant.

This thing is the Apple AirPod of human flesh. It’s just supposed to be in there forever, quietly judging your life choices.

But then I discovered the fatal flaw: rubbing my eye pops it out.

Apparently, the human instinct to rub your face when it itches is now considered an extreme sport. So I’m learning to rub from the bridge of my nose outward, like some delicate Victorian woman adjusting her glove.

Because if I rub the wrong way, I’ll end up literally “keeping an eye out for you.”

So now I’m beginning to suspect the thing might be defective.

Every morning I open my eyes and still can’t see a damn thing on that side.

But it looks great.

Functionally useless, aesthetically flawless.

A perfect metaphor for most of modern society.

And I can’t wait for family gatherings—especially the ones with small children—because eventually I’m going to get bored, pop that sucker out, and hold it up like a magic trick.

“Hey kids… wanna see something?”

And just like that, I’ll become a living cautionary tale.

Not a man.

Not a hero.

Just a half-blind pirate with a medical golf ball in his skull, traumatizing the rug rats for sport.

And honestly?

That’s the closest thing to joy I’ve had in years.

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

 

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

A Completely Reasonable Explanation of the Situation

(As told by someone who has seen too much but now technically only sees half as much)

      So here’s the deal.

• Yes, this confirms eye cancer — the sneaky, aristocratic kind called choroidal (uveal) melanoma.  AKA rat bastard charlie.
• The entire right eye was removed, like a condemned building, and examined inch by inch by people with microscopes and no illusions.
• The cancer itself was mean, ambitious, and biologically rude — but it was fully removed.
• It did not crawl into the optic nerve, did not escape the eye, and was cut out clean at the edges.
• Unfortunately, it has the personality profile of something that might try again someday, so now we watch. Closely. Forever-ish.

And now  the answers to the questions you might want to ask

AUTOPSY RESULTS  OF A TRAITOROUS ORGAN

1. It was choroidal melanoma — a malignant tumor that starts in the pigmented layer inside the eye. Not skin cancer. Not visible. Not polite. It behaves like melanoma does everywhere else: quiet growth, long memory, potential for distant revenge.

2. What kind of cells were running the show? Well Over 90% were epithelioid cells. These are the worst-behaved cells. The kind that don’t believe in compromise. The biological equivalent of a room full of lawyers with knives. There were a few spindle cells — calmer, less dangerous — but they were outnumbered and ignored. And you ask Why this matters? Well Epithelioid-heavy tumors are much more likely to spread, given time and opportunity. Which time always provides.

3. And how aggressive was it? Oh, it was busy. Cells actively dividing — not resting, not reflecting, not repenting. About 25% of the tumor was actively growing at any given moment. Hell, parts of the tumor outgrew their own blood supply and died, which is both horrifying and impressive and strangely somewhat satisfying to know. Unfortunately the majority of the cells were PRAME-positive. Which in cancer language means: “Don’t trust this thing.”

4. Did it invade nearby structures? Yes, but not enough to win. It barely invaded the sclera (the white outer wall of the eye). It did not escape the eye. It did not touch the optic nerve. It crept toward the front of the eye, then stopped — like it heard sirens.

5. Were cancer cells found in blood vessels? Yes. Because of course they were. Some tumor cells were found inside a blood vessel within the eye — basically standing near the highway with a suitcase. And this matters because it means the tumor had access to the bloodstream — not that it used it, not that it succeeded, but that it knew where the exits were.

6. Were the surgical margins clean? Shockingly: yes. I’ll take this as a win for me. No cancer at the edges. No cells left behind. No microscopic squatters hiding in the walls. The surgeons got all of it. Which is rare enough to be worth repeating: They got all of it.

7. Tumor size (because size always matters). This thing was large. About .75 inches across. Up to .6 inches  thick under the microscope. In eye cancer terms, this qualifies as “significant”, which is doctor code for “we’re not pretending this was small.” On the bright side – Still  gone.

8. The Genetic Verdict (The Line Everyone Pauses On) The tumor is Class 2.This is the part where the room gets quiet. Class 2 tumors have a higher risk of metastasis.The liver is the usual destination. While this does not mean it has spread. The damn thing likely had ambition. Think of it as a bad Yelp review written in DNA.

WHAT THIS REPORT DID NOT SAY (IMPORTANT FOR THE ANXIOUS)

It did not say that The cancer has spread. It did not say that the optic nerve is involved. It did not say that there was anything was left behind. It did not say that this is untreatable. And It did not say that I’m on a clock (even if it feels like you are).

 

THE BOTTOM LINE (NO POETRY, JUST FACTS)

I had a serious, aggressive eye melanoma. The eye was removed. The cancer was fully removed with it. There is no evidence it has spread. But the tumor had enough red flags that medicine will now keep one eye open — metaphorically, of course.

 

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT (THE SEQUEL NOBODY ASKED FOR)

From here on out, life will  include regular liver scans, blood tests, oncology visits, and Doctors who say things like “out of an abundance of caution”. Nothing dramatic, nothing cinematic, just persistent vigilance in a universe that does not care.

Welcome to surveillance mode. It appears that the enemy is gone. But there might be a few stragglers out there looking to set up shop. The battlefield remains, and the future is untrustworthy.

I’ll be meeting new people, which is to say: I’ll be sitting in quiet rooms with an oncologist, calmly discussing “the plan” — a document that will exist because entropy never sleeps and medicine refuses to look away.

Meanwhile, I’m already working with a proctologist, because nothing says “dignity” like checking whether the rat bastard might be hiding out in my prostate (not “prostrate,” though at this point either feels accurate). I do have a special MRI scheduled for February 5th, dedicated entirely to answering the question:

“Is there another problem, or are we done being surprised for now?” This is all precautionary.
This is all responsible. This is all deeply, cosmically funny in the way only mortality can be.

 

 

 

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler