Yesterday was the green card interview at the Department of Homeland Security in Kansas City for Mohamed and me.  The green card, which is once again actually green(ish) after three decades of being other colors, is the informal name for Permanent Residence.  As a permanent resident, one has most of the rights of a citizen: the ability to stay in the country without further restrictions, to work, to travel abroad, but not to vote.  In most cases, including Mohamed's, the initial green card is granted on a conditional basis with all old and new information reviewed after two years to continue the validity of the card.  The results of yesterday's interview were good: my supporting material was accepted and Mohamed was granted the green card.  But the interview itself was extremely unpleasant and soured--more so for me than for Mohamed--the experience.

Saturday had been in the mid-80s, and the a/c had run full blast Saturday night.  But temperatures had fallen, the a/c had changed to heat, and by the time we drove to KC yesterday, there was snow the entire way.  Luckily, the roads were warm enough so that none of the snow stuck.  We arrived a little after 9 a.m. for a 9:40 appointment.  The waiting room was fairly empty when we got there, but quickly filled up.  Finally, about 10, we were called.  The interviewer was the worst kind of bureaucrat: he made it clear that he was in charge, he wanted no small talk or humor, and he wanted to stay on his script, letting us know that our fate was in his hands.  He said "you was" at least half a dozen times and seemed to resent the fact that I had been a college professor.  When at one point, I asked whether he didn't get frustrated with all the paper work (he had a huge file and was constantly stapling and punching papers), he said it was no different from being a college professor.  Later, trying to make a point that eluded me entirely, he said, "If I was a college English professor and gave someone an F..."  I wanted to say, "If you was a college English professor, your students should change to a different section."

He asked no personal questions about how we met or how long we'd been together.  He asked only whether we knew each other's birth dates (no sweat there) and whether we knew the other's parents' first names.  I knew Mohamed's only because I filled out so many forms; Mohamed didn't know mine, though I did manage to insert that they died in the early 1980s.  When I talk about them, I say my mom or my dad, not Ruth or Howard, so why would Mohamed know their names?  He did go through all the questions that seemed so silly on the written form (and that were already answered): was Mohamed now or had he ever been a member of the Communist party?  did he advocate the violent overthrow of the US government? did he plan on practicing polygamy? 

As he thumbed through all the papers, he said that none of our letters of support had been notarized.  "Yes, they are--all of them," I said.  He looked disgruntled and said "Well, the one from this Carol Miller hasn't been."   "Yes, it has," I said, so he moved on.  He did like the joint bank statements, but didn't seem to understand the concept of electronic bill paying and going paperless.

There had been a long list of documents that we should bring to the interview, but he wasn't interested in any of them.  When I said I had this year's tax returns, which were the first where we filed jointly and which hadn't been available when we made the green card application, he waved them away saying they were "just data" even though the last three years of tax returns were one of the specific requirements of the application.  What I needed to do, he said, was to write the IRS and get a statement attesting to my tax returns. 

The last ten minutes of the interview consisted of his saying that he would consider the application over his lunch hour and either ask for more information or grant the request.  The focus was on all that we had done wrong with this application and how to do it right the next time--either immediately if he demanded more information or in two years.  And then he showed us out.  There hadn't been one moment of any sort of real interest in us or our situation. 

The USCIS website has been very good in updating the status of the application.  Although we didn't really expect any information until today, we kept the site open and kept refreshing the page on the status of our application.  Suddenly at about 3:30, both pages changed.  Mohamed's skipped the two sections on 'decision' and 'post-decision activity' and went right to 'production of documents,' indicating that the production of the green card had begun.  (This morning it went backwards to 'decision,' saying that the application had been granted.)  Mine changed a rather cryptic message, but this morning it changed again to say that my application of support had been approved.

So the news is good, and we can breathe a huge sigh of relief.  Mine, I'm afraid, is still tinged with irritation at how arbitrary bureaucratic processes are and how easily one person could have changed our lives.

For the fourth time in the nearly three years I've taken Votrient, I gave myself a week off.  By ten days ago, my stomach was in such turmoil that I couldn't continue with the routine.  Although stopping the chemo doesn't do anything for the waves of fatigue, the effect on my G-I tract is immediate.  The first day after quitting, I had a rueben panini with pork belly, sauerkraut, and swiss cheese with no consequences whatsoever.  Two days ago, however, I went back on the chemo; we'll see how long it takes for the meds to kick in.

The switch to e-cigarettes is going well.  Mohamed hasn't broken down once--not one real Camel for over two weeks now.  I cheat three times a day, but eventually the stash of real cigarettes will run out.  Going from, say, 25 cigs a day to three hasn't been too difficult.  And when I do break down, the Camels aren't satisfying.  Still, I have those occasional urges to puff away non-electronically.

Topeka continues without Fred Phelps.  There was no funeral, since he'd been excommunicated from his church.  What must he have thought during the last few months of his life--driven from his church and from his home?  Did he still think of himself as the righteous one with all his former church members now among the reprobates?  His was a life that truly ended not with a bang but a whimper.

We have a leased Toyota Venza, and the lease is up on August 1.  It's almost impossible to believe that it's been three years since we chose the car.  I had just had my abduction cast removed and movement was painful.  The temps were in the triple digits, and I had no motivation to go car shopping--no motivation except that the lease was up in a few days.  When we finally chose the Venza, I said to myself that this was the last time I'd ever go car shopping.  We got an insurance policy to cover the lease after my death.  Three years later and I'm still kicking.  We've spent a couple of weeks looking at cars (crossovers mostly) on the road and the last two days visiting dealerships.  So far the Honda Crosstour seems to be leading the pack, but we've got three more months to decide.

We've had six consecutive months of below normal temperatures.  And April has begun on the same note.  I'm ready for spring.

The Supreme Court in McCutcheon continues politically rewarding the rich.  C. J. Roberts argued that unless there's a direct and clear quid pro quo, political contributions didn't lead to corruption--or even the appearance of corruption.  Meanwhile, potential Republican 2016 candidates and tuches leckers extraordinaire made the pilgrimage to Las Vegas to kowtow to Sheldon Adelson.  The most humorous moment was when the supposed bully Chris Christie had to return to grovel before Adelson because Christie had had the nerve to call the occupied territories 'the occupied territories.'

Tuesday was yet another six-week visit to KU Med.  This time it was just blood work, a consultation, and a bone-strengthening shot.  Everything went smoothly except that once I got there, I noticed a large blood stain on the front of my shirt.  Once in a great while, the daily morning shot will bleed a little; it is an anti-coagulant after all.  I had noticed a few drops of blood when I was in the shower, but I'd put a Band-Aid on it.  Evidently that hadn't worked.  But all the results were within normal range, so nothing has changed there.  I don't mind shots, but the expensive one that strengthens the bones sometimes hurts a bit.  This time, the nurse said, "One, two, three," and I waited for the prick but felt nothing.  When I turned to look, she was taking the needle out. 

The physician assistant didn't seem as impressed as we had thought she'd be when we told her that we had stopped smoking--or at least switched to e-cigarettes.  We're using a modular system that satisfies all the characteristics that make smoking satisfying: something to do with your hands, inhaling, exhaling vapor, and tasting.  The system comes with a variety of flavored "e-juices" that soak a wick.  It's not a perfect solution, but it's a step.  The doctors haven't mentioned giving up smoking since the beginning.  One resident mentioned it a few months ago, but then said, "Oh, well, you've got terminal cancer anyway, so I suppose it doesn't make any difference."  So far, Mohamed has been perfect: not one cigarette in ten days.  I cheat about twice a day. 

Obviously, I've lost--temporarily, I hope--the momentum for posting.  The days, especially as winter lingers, are marked more by routine than by excitement.  There's the routine of pills: I get up and swallow 8 or 9 pills while waiting for Mohamed to give me my daily shot in the stomach.  After literally a thousand shots, it's hard to find a place for the next one.  He swabs my stomach with an alcohol rub and says, "Sorry.  This is going to hurt."  It never does (or at least not very much or very often), and when he pulls the needle out, I say, "Thanks, sweetie," and the day continues.  At noon there are two pills, before dinner there are four more, at bedtime two more, and in the middle of the night one last one.  There's also the routine of sleep.  Three hours awake in the morning and then the black curtain descends, and there's 90 minutes of sleep.  Two more hours of wakefulness (lunch time) and then two hours of sleep.  Another couple of hours awake, and from 6 to 7 p.m., one last crash. 

Meanwhile, over the last two weeks, the stomach problems have returned--and there's no routine for them, just complete unpredictability.  More worrisome have been pains in my right thigh and hip.  For about ten days, it was as if I'd strained all the muscles at once.  Walking hurt, standing from a sitting position hurt more, and climbing stairs was worst of all.  The surgeon who had done the operation nearly three years ago was unresponsive to my messages.  A few days ago, the pain started abating on its own.  It's not completely gone, but it's much better. 

So my health isn't exactly an uplifting topic for posts.  We go back to the oncologist next Tuesday, though just for blood tests.

In Topeka, the major news story is the death of Fred Phelps Wednesday night.  One of the disadvantages of being an atheist in this case is not believing in an afterlife.  I'd settle for just a thirty-second one, long enough for Fred to have an oopsie-moment.  While online and in town people debate whether to picket his funeral, the argument is moot, since there'll be  no funeral.  The official WBC explanation is that they "don't worship the dead," but one of his estranged sons has blogged that last August Fred was excommunicated from the church and evicted from his home on church property.  The clan was out yesterday, smiling and laughing, as they picketed on one of their favorite corners.

And now for something completely different: one of the joys of teaching was always the very bright students, the ones whose papers I put on the bottom of the pile when grading so that when I didn't think I could face another essay, there was one I could count on to be a pleasure to read, the ones who made me question whether I wrote that well when I was an undergraduate.  One such student, Melissa Sewall, has kept in touch occasionally via e-mail.  After I wrote that the tumor had grown, but we weren't going to treat either "by surgery or by ablation," Melissa wrote that she found that a particularly poetic phrase and wanted to write a poem using it.  That sounded like a challenge to me, but here's the lovely poem she produced:

By Surgery or By Ablation

for Dr Faulkner

 

Tempus fugit and does not fugit

hour by hour, month by month,

the bones eroded silent

while you gestured   chalk-dusted

Dickinson into existence

It was not Death, for I stood up

 

No point in removing the tumor

by surgery or by ablation,

scapula   femur

cells gleefully propagating new cells

grown from dime to nickel-sized

by hook or by crook

by nausea   by fatigue

And all the Dead, lie down

 

I dreamed you needed me

It was not Night

I moved two couches

organized the clutter

made the flow of space better

I forgave that one B

for all the Bells

let bygones be bygones

wrapped my arms around you

Put out their Tongues for Noon

 

sickness takes you by storm

you lose more weight

there is no hurry

we sit idly

by

 

After my last entry (an unconscionably long time ago), a thoughtful reader suggested that my listing Votrient and luck as what's kept me going was incomplete: Mohamed should definitely have been included.  And who can argue with that?  His first task every morning for literally more than a thousand times is to give me an injection in the stomach.  Three times a day I disappear into a deep sleep--not exactly a fun person to be around.  When it's time to eat, I just sit like a lump on the couch, waiting to be served.  When I wake from my third crash (6-7 p.m.), I often think we should go out for dinner, but it's cold and dark and windy, and it's just so much easier to send Mohamed for take-out.  Without Mohamed I have no idea what these last 3½ years would have been like. 

Last Thursday we drove to Kansas City for Mohamed's electronic fingerprinting at the Department of Homeland Security.  The drive both ways was horrible--winds gusting to 48 mph with a cold, hard rain on the way in.  By the time we drove back, the rain had changed to sleet, hail, and then driving snow.  The workers at the Department, even those who ran the security screening, were almost theatrically friendly.  The waiting room looked like a miniature UN with people speaking Slavic, African, and East Asian languages, many in their native dress.  The fingerprinting itself took about ten minutes, a long drive for such a short transaction.  The next step is the interview, which will take place at the same facility.  Everything should be in order; we've been together for seven years, two of them long distance.  All the financial documents are complete, and we have wonderful letters of support.  But it's hard not to worry that the differences in age, culture, and religion might make us the object of extra scrutiny.  We can check the progress of the application online, but until the interview, nothing changes there.

It's 7º here at the moment with new snow on the ground and more on the way.  Other than the endless winter as a downer, Kimber hasn't been herself.  She has a problem with her left rear leg and yelps when she has to stand or climb stairs.  She's generally lethargic and doesn't have much appetite, though since she'd gained eight pounds since her last visit to the vet, she's going a diet.  She has what we had assumed was a fatty tumor, but before we took her to the vet, I  had begun to imagine that it was cancerous and that because of my tardiness in having her examined it had spread to the leg.  But the vet seemed unconcerned.  The fatty tumor is just that.  He thinks her discomfort is just a matter of age and being overweight.  He gave her an anti-inflammatory.  If I were convinced, I'd be relieved.  But she's still lying upstairs, unable or unwilling to come down.  She hasn't gone out, and her breakfast remains uneaten.  Once outside, she runs around as usual and goes up and down the stairs to the balcony where she can keep an eye on the neighborhood without any seeming problems.  Maybe it's time to see if I can entice her to venture out.

Monday and Friday were spent at the KU cancer center.  Both days were uncharacteristically long, tiring, and frustrating.  But all was worth it once we got the results of all the testing--nothing but good news.  The primary kidney tumor hasn't increased in size, and no new tumors have developed in the rest of the body. 

Monday I had full skeletal x-rays and CT scans.  Just as we pulled into the parking garage, the phone rang.  The CT scanner was down.  Either I could reschedule or be sent to another facility for the scans.  Since I was already there and the x-ray machine was working, there was no point in rescheduling.  While I waited for the x-rays, I drank the two large glasses of "water" (they always assure me that the liquid is nothing but water, but I remain suspicious) that are necessary for a CT scan and had the IV port put in my arm.  There were 19 x-rays from my head (the first time) to my ankles. 

Then we were sent about a mile away to a new, but rather strange imaging center.  The small parking lot was made even smaller by the piles of snow from our 13" the week before, none of which had melted since we hadn't gotten above freezing in February.  Mohamed dropped me off and went in search of somewhere to park.  The clinic was overwhelmed by their own patients and everyone who had been sent from the cancer center.  We waited and waited.  The IV port bled a little when I'd bend my arm, and I worried that the liquid I'd drunk would wear off and I'd have to drink more--and then wait even longer.  But after a couple of hours in the very crowded waiting room, I finally got in, and the tests went ahead with no problems.  Neither of us had eaten (I couldn't eat before the scans, Mohamed because he'd been at school before we left).  Mohamed was worried about me, so we stopped at the McDonald's (I hadn't eaten there for years), and I scarfed down a quarter-pounder with cheese, fries, and a shake.  Mohamed ate nothing.  Once home, I crashed for a couple of hours, while Mohamed had to go back to school and then stop at a grocery store so that we (and in my view especially he, as an ex-English teacher would say) finally had something for dinner.

Friday, the technological problem was with the computer system with only a few of the computers at the Center working.  Blood was drawn, and then once again we waited and waited.  A couple of hours after the scheduled appointment we finally got in--and got all the good news.  The only anomaly was that the CT scan, but not the x-ray, showed a fractured rib--right side, rear, midway down.  Since I've never felt any pain and haven't fallen or stumbled backwards into a piece of furniture and since even if it was fractured, the doctors wouldn't treat it, it seems safe to ignore this one detail.  Otherwise, the good news was, of course, a relief.  I seem to be some sort of outlier among kidney cancer patients.  I can't attribute my status to clean living or to faith and prayer.  But whatever the cause--I'll attribute it to a combination of Votrient and luck--I'm not complaining.

The big news here, as in so many parts of the country, is the weather.  Tuesday we had exactly 13" of new snow.  Every university, school, government office, and church was closed--except Washburn.  Mohamed has an 8 o'clock class, so he, along with a few other hardy students and professors, braved the roads to go to school.  It wasn't long before Washburn realized the foolishness of staying open with ten more hours of snow on the way, so the university finally closed at midday, and those who had attended were sent back onto the roads.  Wednesday the school was more prudent and like every other NE Kansas institution canceled classes.  The wind chill was -18º yesterday morning.  Today we may hit the double digits above zero.  On the plus side, when I looked out the window Wednesday morning, our driveway had been plowed.  Neither of us had heard anything, but it was a pleasant surprise.  (I assume it was the guy who mows the lawn, since he also does snow removal, but he's never done it before, and there was no phone call.)

Three of the complaints about the Sochi Olympics sound familiar to someone who has lived two years in Eastern European countries (Skopje, Macedonia; Sofia, Bulgaria).  First are the missing manhole covers.  In both Skopje and Sofia, I had constantly to watch the ground when I walked, since manhole covers were routinely missing, and the danger of suddenly plunging into the sewer system was always present.  (In Skopje, people were constantly spitting, so I also had to watch out for flying sputum.)  People would steal the covers and sell them for scrap metal.  Once I was visiting a couple who were Fulbrighters in Sarajevo.  They said they had to take a couple of hours out on Saturday morning to attend a funeral of one of their colleagues, who, not watching where he was going, had fallen through a manhole.

Sofia, like Sochi, was also full of packs of wild dogs.  There was little point in putting garbage in the dumpster, since between the gypsies who rummaged through the trash and the wild dogs, all of it was going to end on the ground anyway.  The locals used to mourn the good old days when, because of the Communist ties, there were lots of Vietnamese students who, I was assured, ate the dogs, thus solving the problem.

And then there was the fact that in most places, including the university, you couldn't flush toilet paper and had to put it in a waste basket.  I taught at the major state university in a building which had once been very beautiful, but which was in sorry shape by the time I taught in Sofia.  There were perhaps a couple of thousand students in the building every day.  In the main part of the building, there was a unisex restroom with two stalls (and no urinals) on each floor.  The doors on the stalls had no closures on them, so you had to brace the door shut.  There was a waste basket for used toilet paper.  By the end of the day, the smell was not pleasant.  There was a sink in the restroom on my floor, but the pipes underneath weren't connected, so if you did turn on the water, it just ran out onto the floor.

Skopje, Sofia, Sochi--it all sounds familiar.

When I log into my BlogSpot account to write a new entry, I can also follow statistics on pageviews.  Mysteriously to me, the entry which has been viewed by far the most times is one I wrote on Frost's "Oven Bird" some time ago.  I don't even know exactly where it is in the 220+ entries, and I have no idea how or why other people find it.  There were nine pageviews of that entry yesterday alone. 

Monday we go to the Cancer Center in KC for full skeletal x-rays (it's been a while since they've been done) and CT scans.  We go back on Friday for blood work and the results of the tests.  Usually we can work them all in in one visit, but since Mohamed has morning classes, the consultation with Dr. Van has to wait till Friday.  If I don't post before, I'll certainly add an entry once the results are in.