The last go-round

 

The bandana'ed trumpet player pictured above is my son Jack. He is 16 1/2 years old (just had his "half birthday") and on the verge of his senior year in high school.

School doesn't officially start for another two weeks, but parents of kids who do fall extracurriculars know how this works. Jack is in band and runs cross country, both of which have been practicing for a month. His senior year started in earnest four weeks ago.

Terry and I have of course known this was coming for a long time. We've been through the senior experience with our four oldest kids and loved all of it. And we figured we would love it when Jack got to this milestone.

We'll do that, of course, but this time it's different. Jack is our youngest. Just as everything with Elissa was a "first" so many years ago, everything with Jack is a "last." Last cross country and track season, last marching band season, last first day of school, etc.

There is every reason to celebrate what is sure to be a fun 12th-grade year for a kid who does so well in school, plays the heck out of his trumpet, is serving as co-drum major and band president as well as a class officer, and is generally one of the funniest and fun-to-talk-with people I know.

It is, as they say, all good.

Yet there's something about the finality of it that is only just now starting to hit me. For a long time there was always more to come. A Tennant kid graduates? Yay! We'll do it again with the next one. Year after year, we had kids in Wickliffe sports and band.

But this is the final lap. And it's starting to smack me right in the feels.

We've had kids in Wickliffe Schools continuously since 1999. Before that, Terry and I were Wickliffe students ourselves. And before us, our siblings were also Blue Devils, stretching all the way back to 1963 in my family's case.

When Jack walks across that stage and picks up his diploma next May, it all comes to an end. It's not a tragedy or anything, of course, but it is bittersweet.

And I didn't necessarily expect that.

Terry and I are enjoying the semi-empty-nest life, believe me. We've put in much time and effort over the years ensuring that our kids' various activities provided the best experience possible, and that they themselves learned what they needed to learn to become independent, accomplished adults. You never "stop" being a parent, but the idea of moving into the next phase of our lives is alluring.

Yet...as I said, there are seriously mixed feelings.

If I were someone trying to make me feel better about this whole thing, I would say something like, "Hey, you have to enjoy it! No need dwelling on the negative side. Celebrate it! Live in the moment!" Which is spot on, though it doesn't remove the specter of every event, every accomplishment and every experience being the last of its kind for our family.

It's all about attitude, I suppose. And I'm going to do my best to embrace individual moments as they come. "The end" is really more a transition than a full stop. It's inevitable, and it doesn't have to be a bad thing.

It just got here a little faster than I anticipated, is all.

He was my friend

Last night we lost our cat Fred. He had been very sick and was scheduled to be put to sleep this afternoon, but he decided to go on his own.

This is not especially remarkable, I know. It happens thousands of times every day in homes, veterinarians' offices and animal shelters around the world. We're certainly not the first people to go through it.

But that doesn't make it any easier. There's nothing mundane or routine about losing someone who has been part of your life for a long time, whether they're human, feline, canine, rodent, bird, etc.

Fred and his brother George have been members of our family for 14 1/2 years. We got them from the animal shelter in 2007 when our kids were all 13 and younger. Terry and I went out that day saying we were going to get a single female cat, and instead we came home with these two snow white goofballs.

At some point, and I really can't say when it was, Fred decided I was his human. He got along with everyone in the house – every human anyway...I don't think he ever really liked another cat besides George – but for whatever reason, he loved me most.

For years, Fred would jump into bed at night and lay right up against me. He was gone every morning when I woke up, but most of the time when I was falling asleep, he was right there.

When I had Lyme Disease in 2012 and was laid up for the better part of a couple of weeks, he spent most of his time in bed with me.

He would purr (loudly) for anyone willing to pet him, but he always seemed to find an extra degree of volume for me.

In some ways, Fred lived his life in perpetual angst. A lot of that had to do with the other cats who came into our home after him (Charlie, Ginny and Molly, along with the now-gone Bert). But he had his brother, with whom he often snuggled in the winter months so that both would be warm. Together, Fred and George got through everything life threw at them.

There were a few times over the years when we thought we had lost Fred, including once less than a year into his time with us when we were going to put him down before Terry discovered a wad of dental floss wrapped so far around the back of his tongue that the vet had completely missed it.

Suffice it to say, he went through all nine of his lives and probably a few more.

He started to develop urinary tract issues over the past couple of years, and it got to the point that he had to sleep in the basement storage room at night because he couldn't be trusted not to pee in random places.

A few times he started peeing blood, and each time the vet would give us antibiotics. The blood would eventually clear up, but I'm not sure the medicine had anything to do with it.

We had it all but confirmed yesterday that Fred had some sort of cancer. Could be bladder, could be kidney, who knows? He had so much fluid in his abdomen that it was difficult to see other organs on the x-ray the vet took, which we're told is a pretty good indicator of cancer in a cat.

In the last couple of weeks, he had been lethargic and not eating, and the bloody urine had come back in full force. He was miserable, and there's no doubt it was his time. Putting him down would have been the right thing, had he not beaten us to the punch.

Because even when it's hard, that's what you do for your friend.

To those who don't have pets or who have never been especially close to an animal, it probably sounds silly to talk about a cat as your "friend." After all, apart from his very expressive meows, I did most of the talking in our relationship. There wasn't a lot of dialogue there.

And yet somehow I think there was. I loved him and he loved me, and that was pretty much all that needed to be said or understood.

You know the day will come when a pet will be gone, but you're never quite ready.

I wasn't even sure how to say goodbye. I think he already knew I was a big fan of his, but I told him so anyway, just to make sure.

A proper sendoff is the least I could give the poor guy.

After all, he was my friend.

I just wanted to pop in and tell you some of the non-icky details of my colonoscopy

(NOTE: This is a very long post. I'm not sure I would endure the whole thing if I were you, but I at least wanted to warn you up front.)

Hi, it's me. One time my Cleveland Foundation co-worker Jennifer Cimperman described me as "earthy," which is a word her mother apparently uses for people who aren't shy about sharing personal details. I am proudly earthy.

I should also mention that the headline is a lie. There are no details of a colonoscopy that aren't icky, but I hoped you would read the first couple of sentences before deciding whether to soldier on or bail before things got messy.

So, if you're still with me, here's how it all went down...

First, let's establish that I am a couple of weeks away from turning 52, which means I was nearly two years late when I underwent my first screening colonoscopy this past Monday. Actually, if you go by relatively new guidance from the American Cancer Society that such screening should begin at age 45, I was seven years late.

Either way, I should have done this earlier.

I didn't put it off because I was scared of the procedure, though. On the contrary, I am weirdly fascinated by new medical experiences. When I got my first root canal a few years ago, the endodontist had to politely tell me not to ask any more questions so he could actually finish the procedure.

As my wife will confirm, I was really into the specifics when it came to my colonoscopy and the associated prep.

Because of course it's the prep about which everyone has horror stories. And rightly so, given what's involved. The whole goal is to completely clean out all 5 feet of a decidedly unpleasant part of your body: your large intestine.

To do this, you abstain from all solid food the day before your procedure. You're limited to a "clear liquid" diet, which I found out doesn't mean you can only have clear-color liquids. Permissible options include broth, popsicles (no red or purple), Jello-O, sports drinks, black coffee or tea, and water. Or at least that was the stuff I had.

That in itself was a bit of a challenge, though I was never as hungry as I thought I would be.

You also have to ingest a certain amount of medicinal liquid designed to really get things moving, if you know what I mean.

It used to be that this liquid was an unpleasant, chalky potion that in and of itself was nauseating. They have apparently advanced the technology, though, because all I had to drink were two 10-ounce bottles of something clear and watery called magnesium citrate.

Now don't get me wrong. You don't want to drink magnesium citrate if you don't have to. It's not especially tasty. But I mixed it with ginger ale and it was fine (apparently the bitter taste is masked well by ginger ale or lemon-lime soda).

You don't drink this stuff all at once, either. You take in 2 ounces or so every 10 minutes, and the two bottles are consumed six hours apart. You also swallow four stool softener pills along with the first bottle.

That's all easy enough, but I still managed to screw it up. After you drink magnesium citrate, you're supposed to also drink a large amount of clear liquid, ideally water. At least four full glasses.

I forgot that part. After I finished the first bottle of magnesium citrate and took the pills, I sat back and waited for something to happen.

I waited four hours for something to happen. And nothing did.

Then I remembered the part about the water. Once I drank that copious amount of H2O, things did in fact happen.

Oh, they happened.

This is the part where I'll try and skip the icky, but suffice it to say that the sheer physics of the process are horribly illogical. And by that I mean the input/output ratio makes no sense. I think there were traces of Thanksgiving dinner 1981 that passed out of my digestive system.

What comes out way, way, way exceeds the amount of food you've taken in over, say, the past week or so. I still can't understand it.

They tell you you'll be spending a lot of time in the bathroom, and they are correct. I was up until midnight doing what I had to do to get my colon nice and clear.

SPOILER ALERT: As it turns out, I did not do a good enough job with this, and I blame the four-hour delay in drinking the water. This oversight would come to have longer-term consequences for me, as we will see below.

Anyway, there were some small aftershocks the next morning, but the bulk of the work was completed the previous day.

My procedure was scheduled for 1pm, and you're supposed to stop eating or drinking four hours prior. Which meant I was finished ingesting anything (even a breath mint) by 9am.

Interestingly, I didn't feel especially tired or weak at that point despite my meager diet of the previous 30 hours. I was actually pretty active that morning. I went and got an e-check on my car, then drove to the BMV to renew both my license and registration. I also spent an hour cutting our grass, then broke out my work laptop and did Goodyear stuff up until almost the moment we left for the endoscopy center.

You have to have someone drive you there, by the way. There's a chance you're not going to be in any condition to drive yourself home after the procedure, thanks to the anesthesia, so Terry had to come with me as I checked in so I could prove I had separate transportation.

I won't go into the boring details of how they get you ready for the actual colonoscopy other than to note the following:

• You have to remove all clothing except your socks and put on a gown that, of course, opens in the back. As I told the nurse, "Oh yeah, that makes sense."
• Speaking of the nurse, she was very pleasant. She and I share a birthday. She stuck some sensors on my shoulder/upper chest and forearm, and also inserted a needle into my hand for the IV. Nothing especially unpleasant.
• Once she left me by myself in my little hospital bed, I had to wait a long time. Or at least it felt like a long time. I thought I would go straight into the procedure room, but it was 30 minutes before they came and got me.

There were a couple of assistants in the procedure room along with the nurse anesthetist and Dr. Khatami, who served as captain of the S.S. Roto Rooter that day. They were all very pleasant despite the fact that they do something like 35 colonoscopies a day (I asked).

We made small talk for a couple of minutes before they instructed me to turn and lay on my left side and bring my knees up toward my chest, which better facilitates the procedure from an anatomical perspective, as you might imagine.

I asked the nurse to fold my pillow for me so I wasn't laying quite so flat, which she did. And that's the last thing I remember, because that was the point when I went night night.

Or at least I think that was when I went night night, since it's definitely the last thing I remember. It could be that we had more conversation and they had me count to 10 or whatever, but I don't recall anything like that happening. If it did, the memory of it was wiped out by Propofol, a wonderful anesthetic often referred to as "milk of amnesia."

I woke up back in the same curtained-off area where they had prepped me. I felt wide awake as the nurse told me my procedure was finished and asked me a couple of questions. I guess I answered them, but then, despite how I felt, I went right back to sleep.

Then I woke up again and she asked if I wanted water, and I said yes. She brought me water, I drank it, and again I fell asleep.

I woke up a third time with the empty water cup laying at my side, and this time I stayed awake. I can't describe how suddenly sleep overtook me those two times after the initial wake-up. I clearly had a good amount of Propofol still in my system.

But then I guess I was fine, because I was able to stand up and get myself dressed. I felt a little tired, but nothing too terrible.

After another wait, Dr. Khatami came by to debrief me. The good news: Everything he could see looked fine. No concerns about anything he came across while touring my colon.

The bad news: My clean-out the previous day had not been as thorough as he would have liked, even though I insisted I had followed everything to the letter except drinking that darn water. But that was apparently my downfall, because there was still a lot of "stuff" in there that prevented him from visualizing my entire large intestine.

The result? Instead of being told I was good to go and to come back again for another screening in 10 years, I was instructed to come back "in 3-4 years" so they could take another look. And, adding insult to my injured ego (I thought I had been a model patient), next time I will have to undergo a two-day prep.

Two days.

I should have known this prep had been too easy. So many other people describe the experience as miserable and exhausting. For me it had just been inconvenient, though certainly very active in terms of restroom trips.

I was even given a few photos of the inside my colon, and in a couple of them you can see areas where waste material covers what should otherwise have been the easily viewed inner lining of my intestine.

Graphic evidence of my failure as a colonoscopy subject.

Oh the shame.

We'll try it again in 2024...

This blog is on hiatus until I get the itch again

I never actually came out and said this, but when I resurrected 5kids1wife.com last November and started blogging every day, it was never meant to be a permanent thing.

I brought it back because I had a list of topics about which I wanted to write, and a few specific things I wanted to say.

Over the last 10 1/2 months, I've covered all of those topics and said every one of those things.

So now we're giving it a rest.

This sort of pause is well known to the maybe five people who have read the blog since its inception. It's what I do. I go on a blogging spurt for a year or two, then I stop.

I start doing it again whenever inspiration hits.

When that will be, I can't say. But as always, I plan to keep the domain name and occasionally check in with a random post or two as life events dictate.

Then, at some future time, I will pick it up again.

Much like playing the saxophone, I blog in fits and starts (I'm currently on a sax hiatus, too.) My focus right now is on my family, my health, my job and my PA announcing, probably just about in that order. There simply isn't time for much else.

I am grateful for the regular readers and frequent Facebook commenters. The blog gets, on average, around 300 page views per day. I honestly don't know if some of those are "bots" or other artificial/electronic views, but there are enough humans checking in that I get to hear all the time from friends, family and co-workers about how much they enjoy 5 Kids, 1 Wife.

That makes me profoundly happy.

So hey, while we're apart, do whatever you need to do to make sure that you and those around you are happy, healthy and fulfilled. Tell those people you love them, and don't forget to tell yourself every once in a while how awesome you are.

Because you really are.

Take care.

Sports remain a big part of my life but don't mean as much to me as they used to...which is just fine

One way or another, I find myself watching or attending sporting events all the time.

Some are cross country meets, where I get to see my son Jack compete. Others are soccer and volleyball matches I'm announcing, or football games where the Wickliffe Swing Band performs at halftime.

And of course there are the professional sports teams here in Cleveland whose games I will occasionally listen to on the radio or watch on TV.

The key word here is "occasionally."

For various reasons, as I approach 52 years of age, sports have changed for me in two important ways.

One is that I don't "do" pro sports to the level I once did. This is not so much an intentional decision as it is a function of a busy schedule and the fact that weekends are often devoted to catching up on the stuff I missed during the work week.

I know many people who have walked away from pro sports for political reasons. I absolutely respect their decision, but I am not one of them. My lack of engagement is just a lack of time.

Case in point: I'm typing this post early on Sunday morning, September 26th. My Cleveland Browns will take on the Chicago Bears this afternoon. I am almost certain I will watch zero minutes of the game.

In fact, do you know how many quarters of Browns football I have watched through the first two weeks of the NFL season? The answer is a fraction of one quarter. It's more accurately measured by the number of individual plays I've seen.

Again, this is nothing against the Browns, the NFL, or sports in general. I just have other things that are more important right now. (Trust me, I've been rooting for the Browns for decades and continue to be an ardent fan, as I am of the Indians/Guardians, Cavs, and my beloved Cleveland Monsters.)

Which leads to the other thing that has happened to me in recent years when it comes to sports: When I do manage to watch, I don't get as emotionally invested as I once did.

As Terry will tell you, I have been known to scream at the TV and at the world in general while watching a Browns game. Not so much anymore.

For one thing, it's silly to get worked up over a sporting event, particularly if it doesn't involve your child or a close friend. I am a big believer in the power of sports fandom to be a social connector and a fun hobby, but that should be the extent of it.

Writer Terry Pluto often tells fans never to let the millionaires ruin their day, and he's absolutely right.

Again, none of this means I'm no longer interested in sports. The sports section of the two newspapers to which I subscribe is the first thing I read every morning. And heck, I announce several dozen high school and college events every year. It's not like I can get away from them.

But I think about sports differently now. I have gone from the being the guy who could earnestly write about the nobility of sports fandom (you can read that blog post from December 2011 here) to someone who is maybe a bit better equipped to put athletics – professional or otherwise – into their proper perspective.

I'm not sure whether that means I've matured or am just a boring old person. Either way, I've got a family to spend time with and chores to do, man. Ain't nobody got time for the rest.

Facebook has put a big dent into class reunions, and maybe that's not a bad thing

One of the biggest mistakes I made in high school was running for and holding a class officer position.

I was treasurer of our class for, I think, three of the four years of high school. This turned out not to be the best move because (a) I wasn't especially dedicated to the job, relative to the other activities in which I participated, and (b) It came with a lifelong commitment to organize class reunions of which I was wholly ignorant.

There are high school reunions that get planned and executed by non-class officers all the time. But more often than not, I would say, the officers are at least involved if not outright leading the effort.

Thus, once every five years I start hearing from classmates asking if we're going to have a reunion for that particular post-graduation milestone. I think we've done something, formal or informal, at every 5-year increment since we left Wickliffe High School in 1988.

The last one we did was our 30th in the summer of 2018. Attendance was so-so, but those of us who were there had a great time.

There are many reasons why people don't attend reunions, not the least of which is that they didn't particularly enjoy their high school years or their classmates, or both. Others really don't like the way they look or have other motives for staying away, which is obviously perfectly fine.

The most common thing I hear is, "I keep up with the people I want to keep up with and don't really need to see anyone else."

Which, again, is completely fine.

Another big factor in lackluster reunion attendance is social media, and here I'm thinking specifically of Facebook.

At least half if not more of my 160+ classmates are on Facebook, and those are generally the people whose lives I know the most about.

I enjoy the opportunity to sit down and talk with them face to face, but it's not like I need that time to find out if they're married, if they have kids, what those kids are up to, where they've living, where they're working, etc.

For the most part, I already know that stuff thanks to Mark Zuckerberg's online creation.

If people want to continue having face-to-face get-togethers every half-decade, the other class officers and I will continue to arrange them.

But if we get to the point that everyone decides they've had their fill of the folks whose photos are next to theirs in the yearbook, I'll admit having one less thing on my plate – even if it's very occasional – isn't the worst thing in the world.