Thanks for all your expressions of concern. I am perpetually mystified by the enigma of the human psyche. I got some eerie messages in the last few days. One person wrote to say she had a dream about me. Three others said that for some reason they had been thinking of me. All of them only later discovered I was in the hospital.

I am back home now. No, the cancer has not returned. No, it was not another heart attack. Something much more pedestrian. I had gotten deathly ill last Monday. On Wednesday I went in and discovered that I had severe neutropenia, a dangerous decline of those white blood cells that fight infection. It is commonly associated with extended chemotherapy and AIDS.

Severe neutropenia leaves you vulnerable to any viral infection that comes along. It has occurred five times in the last 18 months. It is an experience you don’t want to repeat. The infection is like five days of the worst case of flu you have ever experienced. In the first 48 hours, I was awake for about two hours total. Fevers raged to 103 and I took demerol to fight the headaches,chills, tremors, and body ache. Massive antiviral drugs and constant IV fluids finally get it somewhat under control.

I had recently written this for MPR: “I had made my peace with death, when suddenly I was expelled from the land of the dying. It is not easy to return to the land of the living and, once again, play an active role in the human comedy.”  Nevertheless, after 10 months of remission from cancer, I was once again playing an active role with a vengeance. In fact, I had deluded myself into believing that I had won Bergman’s mythic chess match with Death. Once again, this week has been a Memento Mori. He stalks me still. 

“But perhaps that is the point: none of us have anything more than a temporary reprieve from our terminal condition.”