A couple of years ago, heeding the words of a mentor suggesting we all have a book or two in us if we’ll just be quiet and listen to the chatter in our heads long enough, the mythological thunderbolt of a book idea hit me one day in the shower.
It took a bit longer than it should have to wrap cerebral arms around the concept and a (if I may humbly submit) pretty damned compelling storyline, though it’s been impressive how much writing gets done over time with a simple 300 word per day goal.
The storyline is built around a (youngish) middle-aged, fly-fishing-crazy protagonist finding out one day he has a year or less to live due to a medical condition and how he approaches the journey to what will at some point be his last fish.
It’s actually coming together nicely and very well could even be the next iconic fly fishing movie…who knows, right? Michael Keaton would be a lock for the lead.
The Ironic Part
Approaching three weeks ago, getting up to stretch after an unusually fruitful, coffee-fueled, early morning writing session, another thunderbolt of sorts struck.
Standing in the bathroom taking a leak, mumbling through a particularly clumsy portion of dialogue I’d just penned, I looked down with a start to see what appeared to be a stream of blood where my pee stream should be.
Being a physician in my other life, I knew intellectually that it doesn’t take much blood to make pee look frightful, though within seconds I’d conjured up a differential diagnosis list (the options of what it could be) that induced a cold sweat and what Patrick McManus used to call a ‘modified stationary panic’.
Ironically, I’d toyed with using this very scenario to ‘get things rolling’ in the book.
The Kinda Sucks Part
Fast forward through a few weeks, with the attendant pokes, prods, imaging tests and a prickly encounter with a biopsy needle – as it turns out, I have, through the luck of the draw, been diagnosed with a Renal Cell Carcinoma, a potentially bad actor that’s been caught early enough to be eminently treatable.
We’ve shed our tears as a family and are now chomping at the bit to grind through a procedure or two in the next month. We’re certainly not the first family to frame a least a temporary vision of our future in terms of 5-year survival rates, though I wish with all my heart we could be the last.
And I still plan to expire in another forty years or so, somewhere north of 90, having just hiked into the headwaters of the Yellowstone in YNP, after teasing embarrassingly innocent rainbows and cutthroats to my hopper all afternoon, attended by a bevy of sun-kissed mountain maidens.
The Rest of the Ironic Part
Writing a story about life-changing events is one thing, watching your life-changing story evolve is real time is quite the other.
While I wouldn’t recommend anyone get there via this path, a jolt to sharpen one’s approach to living every day a bit more intentionally isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The plan to fish and family more and dribble time away with useless tasks (tech, television, etc.) less is a no brainer, as is the plan to create more and consume less.
And my book just got a lot better.
Borrowing a line from an old friend, see you on the river in six weeks or so.
