On our way to Joya, a restaurant in Palo Alto, this evening, I noticed these ring-shaped bike-parking racks in the parking lot of the new office building at Lytton and Bryant. Linda was sweet enough to wheel us around and drop me in the lot, where I snapped a few pix (readers will appreciate my fondness for light and shadow, and anything else black and white). In particular, I liked how the rings, and their shadows, loop back on themselves.

Which is how the past week or so has been for me. Since returning from France, I’ve noticed some small changes in my left side – I wasn’t typing as well with the left hand, or walking as well on the left leg: and I wasn’t eager to admit this to myself after 18 months in physical rehab had wrested the left side back from useless to some approximation of functional. I finally ‘fessed up to my neuro-oncologist, who hussled me into a procedure called a MRI/MRS that can pretty positively spot a newly regenerating brain tumor.

The good news was that the tumor appears to continue to be quiescent: the bad news was that the area called flair – the damaged tissue left behind by radiation therapy – had changed, perhaps because scar tissue is forming. Given that the area of my brain that controls the entire left side is about the size of a peanut, it only takes a tiny change in flair or tumor to knock a big piece of my mobility or dexterity into the neuronal dumpster.

So, sigh, we’re back maybe 8 or 9 months in the rehab process, and facing up to it – looping around, as it were. I am disappointed, I’m wishing I could catch a break, but, ultimately, this is what I’ve been dealt and I just have to deal with it. I know exactly what I need to do to get this stuff back, and, maybe, this time, it will only take 6 months, if I apply myself. In any case, there’s nothing else I can do… back to strength rehab, tomorrow A.M. at the Page Mill Y…

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