Bob Massie

One thing I learned watching a LOT of movies during my unintended seven year Hep C sabbatical is that there comes a point in almost every American film – usually about two thirds through – when we are subjected to a “passage of time montage.”  (I also learned this from Roger Ebert and Nell Minow).

At the beginning Drums Along the Mohawk, Henry Fonda meets and marries Claudette Colbert, they move to the Western Frontier (the Adirondacks) they pick a place to set up a farm, and encounter the evil English agents lurking around.   After a hopeful few months their farm is torched.   But, full of pluck, they move to a new farm, rebuild, pull together with their neighbors, and erect a local fort to boot.  

That’s where the montage comes in.   You don’t actually see them planting and sowing, felling and chopping – you see short snippets of footage in which tedious activities are summarized in a few shots of sped-up time.

In other film montages, pages fly magically off of calendars, businesses rush from the first gusher to huge fields of oil wells (Giant), progress rolls by rapidly marked by new furniture, stylish clothes, and general invigoration.

In films like It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey’s five-and-dime bank grows, several babies are born and Donna Reed, with her hair tied up in a kerchief, single-handedly scrubs and paints the old Granville house, where kids used to throw rocks to break windows, into the Bailey’s dream home.

In a date movie, we see the couple going to the movies, and a restaurant, and feeding a horse in Central Park, and getting caught in the rain, and then maybe moving boxes into a new apartment.

I thought about this last night when pondering my own slow and uneventful progress after the liver transplant.     Several of you have written and asked us how things are going.   The first days were exciting!   What news since then?   My first thought: I need a passage of time montage showing me progressing in leap and bounds.

Unfortunately, as we know, this is not the normal pace of life.  I am making progress but it seems tediously slow.   In one sense, I am being absurd: August 10 marked the ONE MONTH anniversary of the transplant.

My liver numbers – the key indicators of whether the liver is growing and doing its job coping with the hepatitis C that is still in my blood stream – are sliding around, sometimes happily, sometimes in slightly never-wracking directions.   More tests are coming up to get a better picture, including a liver biopsy.

 But there is not much to report each day.   On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday Anne and I go in for clinic and I have blood drawn.  Then we often see a different kind of specialist. 

 Many of our discussions are about how to reduce the drugs I am already on .   This is like to trying to rebalance a mobile in a steady wind.   If the anti-rejection drug goes down (Prograf), you have to give more, which gives you tremors and strips electrolytes out of your system, which triggers horrific, red-hot-poker-through-the-thigh cramps, which requires pain killers. 

So I try to push up the hydration and the electrolytes.   But some electrolytes, in excess, can make me tired.   Eventually that settles down, but in the meantime my legs have sometimes taken to swelling to twice their normal size, so I look like the Michelin tire man from the waist down.   

 I often have to sleep on my back with my legs pointed to the ceiling and and during the days I sometimes wear the tightest support hose we can find (a little uncomfortable in the Georgia weather).   And while I am feeling tired I am supposed to go for walks wearing the support hose to teach the legs to absorb the fluid.

Oh, and did I mention the 45 minute bouts of hot flashes and itching in the middle of the night? 

I am leaving out the really annoying symptoms that afflict the intestinal system, as my stomach, bile, liver,and intestines, decide whether they are going to work out a decent relationship or simply go on various kinds of rolling strikes for better working conditions.  

Of course I am still on a huge boatload of painkillers, which I must lower very, very gradually.  If I run into too much pain, I have to take some additional “breakthrough” meds that help in the short term, but which slow down digestion.   So then I take medication to loosen everything up, but I hope that this doesn’t loosen me up too much and thus make me dehydrated (see red hot harpoon problem, op cit.). 

So you see, most our imaginary passage-of-time montages would be less than charming.  The Bob-and-Anne-and-Kate-wait-for-the-liver to heal sequences would wobble down the line between humorous and disgusting. 

In the meantime, the doctors want to make sure that I get plenty of exercise and eat a lot of different kinds of foods, especially proteins, in the form of meat, fish, cheese, whey powder, or whether my finicky stomach will accept.  

Which is why I am sometimes up at 4:00 AM trying to decide if three bites of left-over General Gau’s chicken, combined with a teaspoon of Lactulose to loosen things up, would be the perfect combination to give me enough energy tomorrow to go hobbling around in my support hose?

For Anne, this means lots and lots of trips to the washer and dryer in the basement, and for Kate the whole process is understandably disturbing.   Last night, in a perfectly legitimate fit of unhappiness, she said “I thought that after the transplant you are going to be a lot BETTER and that we would be able to do a lot more FUN THINGS and instead Mommy is having to take care of you ALL THE TIME.”  

She is absolutely correct: our expectations were a little out of whack and it has been particularly challenging for her.   Every single person she meets asks her how I am doing, and for an eleven year old girl – even one who loves her father – that is tedious.   (Hint to those who see her: "so Kate, what fun things did you get to do this summer?  And wow, sixth grade starting this fall … you must be looking forward to a bunch of new activities!")

During the day Anne makes her daily pilgrimage to the local pharmacy and the swims her daily half mile; Kate practices going off the high diving board; I take three or four naps; and we enjoy meals – as I have energy – with the Gunnemanns, the Willises, Bessers, the Sandlins, and others.   Some good friends, like the Newmans and Knechtles have oddly selected the end of August for their vacations!

I think this will give you a complete enough picture as to why I have not been writing more frequently. 

Two nights ago Anne, Kate, and I watched Ground Hog Day (which Kate had never seen), and in this movie, with its wei
rd premise that Bill Murray wakes up every morning on February 2, we find some slight parallels to life at Mason House.

During Bill Murray’s time among the good-hearted people of Punxatawney, he adopts different strategies for breaking the spell, but none of them works until he recognizes the reality – one that St. Augustine could have taught him — that time is a kind of illusion, and that is only when we think about the kind of life we are living within that time do we become free from it.

That being said, we are still hoping that over the next two weeks or so we will reach the end of this unusual and important summer, say goodbye to the wonderful people who have taken such good care of us, and return to our home and to our new lives in Somerville.  And to our cats, Harriet and Whimsy, whom we miss very much.

And, now, if you wouldn’t mind if I stepped outside to cue the upbeat “Mason Guest House Passage of Time” montage….