Today I got a call at 8:00 and it was Sarah asking if I could come work at Dr. David Brown's office this morning. I stopped on the way briefly to have coffee with my wonderful and understanding friend Olga whose father was a pathologist and who lost one brother to cancer and has a twin brother, a psychiatrist who is fighting cancer and other health problems now. Olga and I talked about how cancer is like a roller coaster ride. I had just told her about how upbeat and hopeful Mark was yesterday when I got a call from home telling me Mark had called and his mood was down because his cat scan results were given to him today and he has something odd on one kidney that has to be biopsied. Olga gave me a big hug. Later I listened to the message on the recorder and Mark was concerned this might shorten his "time on earth, " and he said: "It's good you are coming to Bangkok now." I will double my efforts to try to get friends and family and strangers to send him notes of encouragement and I will do my best to encourage him too. He is not ready to give up the fight.
It is odd but off and on all day I have thought not of the trips described in previous blogs but of the MEDICO trips that Mark and I took together and our scuba experiences on the island of Roatan after MEDICO trips. MEDICO stands for MEDICAL EYE DENTAL INTERNATIONAL CARE ORGANIZATION. MEDICO takes volunteers to Honduras and Nicaragua to give care to people in remote and underserved areas. I made 14 or 15 trips with MEDICO and was so fortunate to have Mark on some of the same trips. Mark still wears his MEDICO shirt and heads off in the taxi to chemo wearing it. You will see in the picture of above, he lost a good bit of hair and looked a bit pale but still proud of his MEDICO experience.
One of our more remarkable trips was to the Moskito Coast of Honduras. Our team was flown into the Moskito Coast by the Honduranean Army (arranged by a Rotary International Rotaract group). When we went to board the two planes, Mark and I split up and each went into a different plane. The planes were ancient. One had a large fuel tank in the middle and it was leaking and puddling down the middle of the plane. The other had metal seats down both sides and the exit door said "In case of emergency, use axe" and I didn't see an axe. I yelled at Mark as I boarded the plane: "Spend your inheritence well."
Luck was with us and both planes arrived in the Moskito Coast where our team spent sun up to sun down seeing patients all day long. We could not carry in enough water for a team so we drank river water with chlorine drops in it. Large rats lived in the rafters of the rooms we slept in so no fruit could be left out by the bed or you would awake to the chomping of the fruit by the big rats.
The day we were to leave, we found out our departure was delayed a day because one of the two planes had broken down. We had an unhappy crew. The military base not too many miles from from our clinic put us up and cooked a good supper for us to keep our group happy. The next day our planes came. They landed, but we did not board immediately. The army cooks prepared breakfast for the pilots and served it under the wing of one plane. At the same time, some soldiers unloaded the supplies from the plane: lots of cartoons of eggs and boxes of food and supplies and a coffin of a local woman who had been in difficult labor and flown to the city where she died in labor and was returned via coffin. It was quite a scene, the pilots sitting at a table with table cloth and silver coffee service and formal service by waiters and the cartoons of eggs piled high near them along with a coffin. A station wagon came and loaded the coffin while the pilots ate. The coffin stuck out the back door of the station wagon and when the wagon started to drive away, the coffin fell out.
Finally our team loaded up and took off, our crew not too happy going home a day late. Unlike the rest of our group, Mark and I were headed to Roatan to scuba dive. Mark was diving with one dive master and I was taking a scuba course with a different scuba master. I arrived a day late and had to catch up...immediately demonstrating all skills the rest of the class had taken. The class was three men and myself. The men were all young, muscular, and over six feet tall. On the third day of the course, I was exhausted after 12 days of hot sun working sun up to sun down in the Moskito Coast and two days of heavy duty scuba with jocks. I awoke late and had no breakfast. This day for some reason Mark went with us out on the scuba dive along with his dive master not our dive master (who may have been under the weather and the other students). The water was extremely choppy. I was the first to go in going over backwards off the boat. I had to hang onto a buoy line to keep from being washed away waiting for the others. We went down and were moving along pretty good when all of a sudden I lost all my energy: a result of exhaustion catching up with me and no breakfast...I could not get myself off the bottom with any BC adjustment.
I had not panicked yet but was close to it as I was wondering what I would do as the others had left me behind. While Mark was not buddied to me, he missed me and signaled to the dive master who deputized Mark to stay with the students while the dive master came back for me...When I hit the top I was in bad shape, coughing struggling to breathe, gasping for air and this continued for two or three hours after getting back to the dive shack. It was our last dive of the course. I took the test that night, passed it and passed the course, but the most important thing was that I was still alive. I credit Mark with saving my life. I owe him and it is pay back time.
Sometime I will tell you about our MEDICO trip to the Nicaraguan Moskito Coast where we were accompanied by guards with big guns and slept in a tree house built especially for our team and woke up in the middle of the night in a sideways rain. OOPs I told you a lot of it, but there is more....
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