This is regarding my oldest friend who was here at the ranch for five days.  Hope he survived, as I haven’t heard from him since.  No, I am sure he is fine, just resting up.  I did want to pick his brain while he was here because I have been trying to fill in some blanks with my medical history, in the broad sense.  Let me back up a little.

Since my diagnosis in 2011 the hospital has kept extensive records on me.  All kinds of things are recorded and that is one very amazing information stream.  Then this blog which has been going for three and a half years recording a different aspect of me.  It’s all very personal in another way.  In each we are talking about the same individual and his connection  to his surroundings in another manner, through another lens.  These two tracks are related but not necessarily well connected as they appear to be two parallel tracks.

I realized that there is an area between these two tracks that needs exploring and that is one reason why I started this conversation with Jim.  He maybe being able to act as a bridge from one to the other.  OK, that is the background.

One thing that we covered was how diagnosis works.  It is not always a one shot deal that we think that it should be.  We are hungry for answers and want them now.  But a lot of times there is time involved because the diagnosis needs to be made on the evidence of a pattern that has to develop.

Another thing was the way that things happen and we try so hard to match them up cause and effect.  This takes time also to sort out because some things that we think are effects would have happened anyway and just look like it was a result of the certain cause that we had in mind.

We talked about how God has a way of showing up in bodies that are no longer healthy.  Jim had good quotes for a lot of these things but I am repeating  just the meat of the ideas.  This one is so true in my case as witnessed by this blog.  My cancer largely flavors my writings in a lot of ways.  And talk of God largely flavors it as well.  Without the heightened awareness that the cancer brought this whole complex dance wouldn’t have happened.  There is this dance between and amoung Catholicism, Cancer and Camino that we are always working with here at the blog that influences but is not described in my medical records.

OK, that is enough for one day.  Time to get moving, walk time, love you, Felipe.