March 31, 2012 Play Ball!

As we approach the beginning of April, I have to admit that my heart starts beating just a little stronger. I have never hid my love for the game of baseball and another season is just around the corner. It was just a little over 50 years ago that I remember my dad talking about the Reds on their way to the 1961 National League pennant. I didn’t really understand much about the game at the time because very few games were on TV and we just didn’t have the money to go to Cincinnati and take in games.

I quickly became a fan as baseball was America’s pastime in the early 60’s. Football had yet to see the explosion after the start of the Super Bowl, the NBA was of little interest to anyone outside the cities that they played and hockey was played in eight cities that were mostly in Canada or the extreme northern part of the US. By the time I started playing baseball myself at the age of eleven, I was addicted. Everything about the game intrigued me. The smell of a new glove or a well used baseball. The sound of the ball as it meets the bat. The sight of the ball throwing up chalk as it hits the foul line. The mental process of deciding who should hit against who. It was the perfect game.

I did everything I could to learn about baseball, waiting patiently for the mailman to show up on Thursdays with my Sporting News. I had every baseball card each year and I would spend hours memorizing the backs of those cards. I would throw a super ball against the brick wall next to our garage so that I could work on my fielding. I would fungo hit 200 baseballs a day because there was no one to pitch to me.

All of that work in the back yard didn’t get me very far as I peaked at the age of 12 and rode a speeding runaway car to the end of my career three years later. That didn’t keep me from my love affair with the sport, however. I watched whenever I could and fell asleep to many ballgames on my transistor radio smuggled into my room hidden under my pillow.

My Reds were not very good at that time, but I still kept a vigil hoping for another miracle like what happened in 1961. Every year it was the same old thing. I would hope for the best in the spring but watch some other team in the World Series. But in the spring it was magical, I could always convince myself at the beginning of the season that there was new life, there was always a chance. It was a new life, a chance to start over with unbridled hope.

If you think about it, there are only a few times in our lives that we get to start all over. I still remember the last quarter when I was attending UC. One of my engineering buddies and I were walking down the hallway after our last finals and he just threw his books and slide rule down the hall in a fit of pleasure that it was all over. When we move from one job to the next, we receive an opportunity to start all over with a clean slate.

The thing about baseball and the new season is that it wipes out what has happened in the past and every team starts out at the same spot with zero wins and zero losses. Any failures that have happened in the past can be forgotten and we can just move on. We, as humans, every once in a while need a clean slate, an opportunity to start all over. It seems that our failures seem to follow us more than our successes. The old saying at work is that 100 “atta boys” gets forgotten with one “Oh crap!”

I guess that I am at one of those crossroads and I am getting a clean slate. I just received my latest results from my blood work and I have zero losses. For the first time since I found out that I have Multiple Myeloma, the level of cancer in my blood stream is virtually non-detectable. My Lambda Free Light Chains are at 1.81 with a “normal” range of 0.57 to 2.63. If somebody just picked up blood work and looked at it, they would likely not suspect that I have a blood disorder.

This is certainly exciting news for me. It doesn’t mean that I am cured. It doesn’t mean that the cancer has gone away. It doesn’t even mean that I can stop taking chemo. What it does mean is that this little combo of chemotherapies and steroids that I am taking is doing the job, better than anything that I have taken in the past. I will see Dr. Mikhael next week and my hope is that he will consider letting me back off the chemo a bit so that I only take it every other week instead of every week. Normally they like to wait four months before such a move, but I hope to use the medical knowledge that I have picked up watching “House” for the last eight years to change his mind. The belief is that the less I use of it now the longer that it will last. Keep your fingers crossed.