Paging Michael Buffer

It has been a long time since the last update and for that I apologize. Oddly enough, both a lot and a little has happened since the last one nearly three weeks ago.

As a refresher, Michele was in the hospital a little more than three weeks ago due to an infection that developed around the wound in her stubborn right breast. This is the breast that has been taking a long time to heal and we need it to fully heal before we can start the chemo.  Fortunately, the hospital stay was short (a few days) and entertaining (Michele’s roommate was ‘interesting’; I bet after  10 minutes Dr. Phil would have pulled that stunt the priest did in that final scene in The Exorcist).

So Michele has been home resting and healing, albeit slowly but therein lies the problem. Protocols for administering chemotherapy stipulate that 90 days post-surgery is the outer limit on how long chemo can be put off and we are fast approaching that threshold.  The healing has been making good progress and we hope that is far enough along where we can start chemo this week.  Michele has an appointment Wednesday with her plastic surgeon and if the wound is ‘close enough’ chemo will start this Thursday. Michele is very anxious and so am I.  We want to get this started and finished even though we both realize this is going to be a tough grind.  We are blessed with an amazing network of family and friends and we so appreciate all the love and support that has been sent our way.

On that topic of love and support, I was driving home from work the other day and I was cursing myself out unmercifully. What the hell was I thinking? I am the least crafty/artsy person I know and yet this did not stop me from asking family and friends to send me pictures that I would assemble into a collage (or something) to show Michele how many people were standing by her side in her fight against cancer.  It seemed like a great idea in theory but the reality of putting it together and make it look presentable is another matter altogether.  It’s like a bunch of people provided me with world class ingredients to make a wonderful dish and I am an ossified Chef Boy R Dee after a weekend bender in Vegas, hoping nobody actually takes a place at the table.

As I continued to curse myself out during my slog of a commute home, a song came on the radio and I had an out of body experience. Rachel Platten was the artist but the music was in the background.  Drowning out the music was her voice, Field of Dreams style, which was speaking directly to me.  I heard “Hey you” and I thought I was hallucinating but then I heard her say “Mike Giannone, you are a very sexy man!”, and I figured it must be legit. Nonetheless,  I was still stunned when I heard what I thought was  “I want you” but I could not hear her clearly because people were honking their horns at the big shot with New York plates doing Lawrence Taylor in the left lane.  This driver appeared to be singing her head off (probably to Billy Joel), completely oblivious to the people behind her, waiting for the longest time to pass her.   The people that fail to keep to the right have a way about them, I don’t know what it is, but they are the most irritating motorists on the road (this is predominantly a New York state of mind phenomenon). I had the urge to tell her about it and to get her moving out of the left lane, but it became readily apparent that she was unwilling to take action, despite the pressure to do so.  This particular driver made me want to go to extremes and start a fire in the back seat of her car.

Anyway, when the honking quieted down I was able to hear Rachel again. “If you try to make a collage by gluing and pasting, no matter how many glorious pictures you have been provided, your shitty artistic talents will make your end product resemble something that looks like Sloth from the Goonies trying to force a cross-breed between a raccoon and a squirrel.”

And then BANG!, a pot hole the size of an empty Philadelphia Eagle championship trophy case rattled my Durango and snapped my attention back to the road. Rachel’s voice faded away on Route 21 southbound.  Perplexed, I realized this was a sign and Rachel was beyond right…on everything she had told me but there was only one thing that I had the power to modify. I scrambled my brain for a better way to leverage all the wonderful pictures that were provided to me (and to spare raccoons and squirrels everywhere).   Below is what I came up with and I hope you like it but more importantly, I hope it adequately conveys to Michele how she is adored by so many, myself most of all.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_NrHOPYq9L0VTJ2TmZqZEVsWmc