Brooklyn, Here I come

Neither rain or thunder or red eye flights or lack of sleep or my own absent mindedness (forgot to take my meds yesterday for only the second time since my diagnosis- talk about being out of touch with the present) or just general travel fatigue can keep me from the Marriott by the Brooklyn Bridge for the North American Educational Forum on Lymphoma in Brooklyn.

It is the right thing to do, I will sleep a bit on the plane, and should sleep well Saturday night at the hotel. so I push on.

Maybe just maybe, I can get to a vegan poorboy sandwich at Blossoms or something more elegant at Candle 19 in Manhattan

Though it would much easier to just walk down the street to Juniors, Bill Clinton's old favorite, for the most amazing cheesecake. Parish the thought.

I will probably just have a salad at the hotel and eat the nuts and snacks I always bring along to ensure I don't go hungry in the badlands of NYC or Peru. The trials of a vegan voyageur.

The symposium will give me a chance to reconnect with old friends, and reinforce critical treatment information as I move forward.

Plus I am looking to develop a second career as a reporter for other primary care health care providers on the cogent material at these specialty conferences. That could be both fun and important work.

Let me share one last reflection on this needlessly tortured decision.

Everything has a cost/benefit ratio. Everything has unknowns in those ratios. You can spend considerable time analyzing and fact gathering to lower the influence of the unknowns and can insure at addition cost against some of the risks, but neither risk or unknowns can ever be fully eliminated from the equation. While this was a relatively trivial decision, it does reflect my process. Here I measured the potential long term upside clearly outweighed the short term risks and costs. And it will be sweet to see old friends.

Same process on an entirely different scale that lead me to an early transplant. And same way I will decide on the timing of the second one.

Look for me in New York.

Before October is over, I will have ridden a mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, hiked vortexes in Sedona, and done another one night stand in Dallas.

And somewhere in there I will catch some shuteye.