Happy (but prudent) Friday the Thirteenth, and Happy (but imprudent if you want) French Fries Day.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  I turn 43.  I've decided that the decimal system for calculating age is too harsh, what with the counter's left digit increasing relentlessly every ten years.  The hexadecimal system seems more humane, so I'm going with that.  Dog years aren't very scientific (and who would want to celebrate his 9 and 4/7th birthday?).  And if I used the binary system, the screen would be filled with 0's and 1's, so 43 it is.

My parents must have been prescient in knowing they'd have a francophilic son.  I always loved being in France on le quatorze juillet.  There are parades, flyovers, and a gigantic fireworks displays at the Eiffel Tower.  The French don't call the 14th of July Bastille Day.  A couple of years ago when I was in Paris for the summer, I was watching the French version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."  One of the questions was "What do Americans call the 14th of July?"  The four choices were Liberty Day, Revolution Day, Independence Day, and Bastille Day.  The contestant ruled out Independence Day, because that was the American holiday, and Bastille Day, because that didn't make any sense and then unwisely chose between Liberty Day and Revolution Day losing his chance at being a millionaire.

This year my birthday will be spent in Topeka, but tonight TJ and John will come from Kansas City for dinner at our French restaurant (I have to keep up the French connection).  TJ visited me every single day that I was at KU Med after the surgery on my femur.  Tomorrow afternoon, my Bulgarian friends Ivan and Stefan will come (Ivan is now an American citizen), and then later Scott and his wife Kelly (a pediatrician at KU Med) will come in for dinner.  Le tout Kansas City vient chez nous.  What great friends I have--here, in KC, around the US, and in France.  I'm very grateful to all of them for all that they do for me, keeping my spirits up with bright, lively, and often funny conversations. 

The fourteenth of July is always a little bittersweet, since my father died on that date exactly thirty years ago tomorrow. After a three-year battle with lymphoma, he died in the same hospital in Ames, Iowa, where I had been born 37 (decimal) years earlier.  The experience at the hospital wasn't a good one; the general atmosphere was one of indifference.  It was not only discouraging, but the experience scared my mother.  She had been in Story City's small hospital, where everyone knew and cared about each other, and she thought that the bigger the city, the less caring the hospital would be.  When three years later, she had moved to Topeka and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she was frightened of what she assumed would be an even more impersonal attitude here.  Instead, her few days in the Topeka hospital before her death (three weeks after the diagnosis) were as comfortable as possible.  A couple of the nurses had gone to nursing school at Washburn and knew me, and they paid her extra attention.  My experience at KU Med, where I had my surgery and where I now go for treatments and consultations, has also been as pleasant and reassuring as possible.  Of course having the best, most competent doctors is the primary criterion for treatment, but it's impossible to underestimate the psychogical component of feeling that the doctors and nurses and other staff actually care.  And for that atmosphere I'm also very grateful.

I don't remember last year's birthday very well.  The biggest gifts were Mohamed's presence in my life and the fact that after 46 days in the incredibly uncomfortable abduction brace, it had finally come off.  I remember wondering whether I'd be around this year (the prognosis wasn't encouraging), but here I am, looking forward (with a little help from my friends) to turning 44 a year from now.