Blog post

     Here I am thinking I had all these cool words and cool insights to share with you, but really, I don't feel so great at this moment. Day 81 of sobriety, and I had a birthday yesterday which my wife forgot! So, I'm one year older and feel none the wiser.

     For this blog post, I would like to give you, dear whoever cares, a little snippet of my past. The year was 1999. I had a promising career at a fantastic company called Intuit in Mt. View, California.  You know the Turbo Tax, and Quickbooks company.  Although I was a temp, I was a great salesperson in the call center environment I was in at the time.  The management of the company were impressed and converted me and another guy into full time Intuit employees; a big accomplishment that made me so proud.  I was excited about the Internet era humanity had just started.  Widespread use of the Internet was taking off, because after all the Internet was barely three or four years old.  To top off the cream so to speak, I met this Jewish girl, and we started dating. But life threw a curveball, as it often does. My ex, the mother of my daughter, won a nasty custody battle, and I ended up paying what I felt was a massive monthly child support payment.

     The solution?  Resentful and weary over all the legal shit, I quit my job at Intuit and started drinking more.  I was drinking daily large bottles of rot gut Olde English malt liquor and the occasional bottles of hobo Thunderbird wine. Emotional immaturity at its finest! So, at thirty-one years old, tired of all the legal hassles, and the hatred coming from my ex-girlfriend's family.  My new girlfriend at the time was a data analyst for Cisco Systems in San Jose, California.  She had been homesick for quite a while, and since she had family in the Fort Lauderdale area, I made the brilliant decision to move out to Florida with her and her two kids.  My family, friends, and my ex-girlfriend thought I was nuts, and well, you know, I was nuts. Ready to charm the socks off her family? Spoiler alert: I wasn't even charming enough to charm a pair of Florida alligators.  I came off to her family as an abrasive, strange person.  Needless to say, the relationship did not last very long. 

     During that time, in January of 2002 I was diagnosed with kidney cancer.  It was strange how it happened.  I was playing basketball with a guy I knew at the time.  He was a good friend of my newly ex-girlfriend's brother.  Well, this guy didn't like me too much.  To this day, I don't know why we were even hanging out together.. Anyway, I went up for a jump shot and was instantaneously seized with a sharpest pain I have ever felt in my life.  I fell down on my side and was helped back to my apartment.  I was in searing pain throughout the rest of the night and the next day.  Nothing relieved that pain.  At around three in the afternoon on a Friday, I got a ride to the hospital from my ex's brother, whom I worked with at the time.  That was an awkward ride!  At the hospital the attending ER doctor thought I had a kidney stone, so he ordered some x-rays, and said he would be right back.  I ended up waiting for over four hours in the ER.  As it turned out the doctor reached out to an oncologist on call, and they looked over my x-rays.  I will never forget the expression on the doctor's face when he came back to my room. With a deadpan voice, he said, ‘Sir, I reached out to an oncologist. We think you have a tumor in your kidney.’ In my mind, I responded, ‘Well, doc, how about we play a game of ‘Let’s Make a Deal’? I’ll take what’s behind door number two.’ Second spoiler alert: There was no door number two.  I felt the gates of hell closing on me with a clang.  I was admitted on the spot and ended up staying over the weekend.  On Monday, I endured an excruciatingly painful kidney biopsy that confirmed the doctors suspicious.  It was cancer.  I was then transferred to another hospital in Miami.  Two weeks later, in February of 2002, I underwent a radical left nephrectomy surgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.  I don't think laparoscopic surgery back then was even in existence yet, so the surgery was done the old-fashioned way.  The surgical procedure involved knocking me out with Propofol, cutting my mid-section wide open, pushing my internal organs out of the way, fishing and cutting out my left kidney, cauterizing the renal artery so I wouldn't bleed to death, and finally the team of surgeons finished it all off with one hundred and thirty-two staples reaching across my abdomen to the middle of my back.  All told the surgery was over six hours, and I lost my entire left kidney.  After that, I stayed in transitional care (TCU unit) recovering for about two weeks, hitting the morphine drip every hour I woke up and getting sponge baths from these two hot nurses. Talk about highs and lows in healthcare! 

     After all that, I was alone in Ft. Lauderdale but was fortunate to have my family come out from California to care for me at my apartment.  I did eventually recover; the staples were taken out and it was a done deal.  After that ordeal, my life had more ups and downs and follow up visits with the oncologist.  The tumor the surgeons took out was a spherical mass about ten millimeters wide, half live cells, half necrotic cells and attached dead center in the wall of my urinary channel.  The oncologist went on to explain that my body had been fighting the tumor for well over a year.  That explained why I felt so tired all the time!  He also explained it was miraculous that I even felt pain at all prior to my cancer diagnosis, as there were no nerve endings in that area.  Had I not had the basketball incident, I would have not known until it was too late.  God was definitely watching over me.   

     To recap this little ditty, I gave up a promising career, I had broken up with the mother of my child, hooked up with a Jewish girl, moved to Florida, broke up again, made some more enemies, and got cancer all in a span of two months.  Sweet huh?  My next blog post, I'll blog about a lucrative self-owned business I created in Florida, and the large amount of money I made and lost all the while high on prescription drugs and alcohol.  Until then my fellow misfits, farewell, stay sober, stay clean, and stay busy, love Gabriel O.