Tag Archives: grateful

Six-Month Reprieve

I want to share some positive news. I had my follow-up appointment with my neurosurgeon yesterday. Fear gripped me heading into the exam room because the radiologist’s report detailing my latest MRI included this troubling language: “Unchanged heterogeneously enhancing prominence in the right anterolateral suprasellar area, causing mass effect with deformity and right optic tract and proximal portion of the right optic nerve.”

But Dr. H., who is always sanguine, stepped into the room, shook my hand, and sat down, adjusting his glasses and mask, then quickly put me at ease. “We think we got about seventy to eighty percent of the tumor,” he said. He explained the rest—what the MRI report referred to on the right side—was the membrane of the tumor, similar to what’s left over after a balloon bursts. He said he expects the membrane to shrink and form scar tissue.

Although my vision will never go back to the way it was prior to the swelling of the tumor in recent years, I felt relieved when Dr. H. said we can resume a wait-and-see approach, meaning I need no other treatment besides another MRI in six months.

That reassurance was the best present I’ll receive during this Christmas season. Clean, safe, and grateful are the words that hovered in my head when I left the office yesterday. I believe in the power of prayer, especially the petitions made by Aunt Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun in Florida who uses the term “storming heaven” when referring to her supplications.

I am thankful to have endured my latest medical ordeal, but I also know tomorrow could bring a whole new heap of trouble. That’s why I am trying to honor my good fortune by living in the present each day. Of course, this is impossible to do consistently amid the pressures of work and family life.

But I’m trying.

Here are a couple of photos I snapped recently—two visual gifts the universe offered because I was willing to pay attention in the moment.

Snow on Branches 2023. Photo by Francis DiClemente.

Rain Speckled Night. Photo by Francis DiClemente.

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Thankful For A Mistake

On this Thanksgiving Day, I’m thankful for not always getting what I want. I know, it’s such a corny, trite statement, and you can probably hear a Keith Richards guitar line in the back of your mind, along with Mick Jagger starting to sing, “I saw her today at the reception …”

But it’s true. In this case—I’m thankful for a little bonsai tree I bought for my wife for Mother’s Day. I ordered a pink azalea bonsai from an online florist, only to have the tree arrive with no pink azaleas. It looked like a dull green house plant devoid of color, and it presented no surprise when my wife pulled it out of the box. An online chat failed to resolve the matter, meaning no replacement or refund, and I had to live with the bonsai.

But then a strange thing happened. I began to care for it—setting it on top of a windowsill, exposing its branches to sunlight, using a measuring cup every morning to pour a generous amount of water on the soil and splashing droplets of water on its leaves with my fingers.

My bonsai tree. Photo by Francis DiClemente.

I gave the plant daily positive reinforcement before placing it back in its spot—saying things like, “You’re doing good. We’re proud of you. We love you. You’re a member of the family.” I also breathed on it, hoping my exhalation of carbon dioxide would help sustain the plant.

And the tree remains alive today. This is quite a feat, considering I’m no plant person. I have no green thumb. I don’t spend my summers tending to a garden of tomatoes, beans and corn in a vast plot of land in my backyard. I’m an urban apartment dweller.

But I am proud that six months after Mother’s Day, the little bonsai is still going strong. I’m grateful that it adds a little life to my drab existence. And I do believe if the bonsai had come with blooming pink azaleas, it would have been tossed out in the trash a long time ago.

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