Riverfront Park

A series of quarry ponds leading to the Russian River was our destination today after picking up Kathy our good friend/Pilates instructor/physical therapist at her house and driving to this nearby park.There are some beautiful redwood groves next to the ponds and the Russian River...nice and  cool in the heat of summer, but a bit chilly on this autumn day, so we opted for a gentle stroll along the sunny track to the river,

Kathy is recovering from what her doctor referred to as the 'Super Bowl of abdominal surgery.' Unlike her surgeon, who told her beforehand that her recovery would be six weeks, her internist just told her that it would be more like a year. Kathy and I discussed the fact that the surgeon seems to be treading a fine line line between revealing every last possible complication and side effect (á la the drug commercials on American television) and the old family doctor who patted you on the back in a fatherly way and assured you that everything would be ' just fine'. Kathy admits that if she had known how bad it was going to be, she might never have done it.

She was told that without the surgery to remove it (and a fair number of other parts of her insides) a benign cyst had a 70% chance of becoming malignant. I can't help thinking that there are more and more instances in my life that seem to reduce serious decisions to the level of the odds in a horse race, or getting a winning hand in poker. And who makes those odds? Seems a strangely unreliable way to make life and death decisions.

It was nice, however,  to have a little walk in the sun and to help Kathy make her first moves back toward 'normalcy', whatever that is. I imagine what she is learning is that it is certainly a moving target.