Everything is looking pretty good these days, except for the very large sword hanging over my head by a single hair from a horse's tail.

Just about fourteen months ago, a bright young oncologist met with one of his new cancer patients (and the sick guy's beautiful wife) to explain just how serious a case of cancer this was, and how slim was the likelihood of the sick guy's survival.

This post is a sequel to the post of February 7, which was added to this blog just prior to the surgery that I have learned to call my "liver resection" (which makes it sound like some sort of a liver repair although it was actually more of a liver removal.)

I called the post "Less liver. More living." Today, about sixteen weeks since the "resection," I blog again on the same topic. I could have called this one "More liver. Less living," but instead I turn for a title to one of the poems of A.A Milne.

Last week, I met once again with the surgeon who late in February performed my liver resection, removing three cancerous tumours, and about 70 or 75% of my liver with them. Accordingly, for two weeks in the hospital and then for the remaining two weeks of March, I lay around (the hospital) and then staggered around (the house) [like some sort of physical wreck], looking forward to recovering from this second cancer-related surgery, which I had come to call "Thing #4".  Late this April, I met with the same great surgeon for a second post-operative check-up, during which I was told to stop comparing this most recent surgery to the surgery of last Fall. "Removing such a large portion of the liver is a much bigger deal with a much longer recovery period," I was told. Good to know.

Today, the fiftieth day since the liver resection of February 26, I break my blogging silence to report on what happened at today's long-awaited appointment with the oncologist. Thanks for your patience, but this most recent surgery, "Thing #4," has turned out to be way more taxing and exhausting than I was expecting it to be. As a result, for seven weeks now, I have been mostly sleeping and napping and dozing (often with a really good book open on my lap).

What's been lolling about in my brain these last couple of weeks is the question of what if tomorrow I DON'T die before I wake.

As it turns out, surgeons prefer patients with thick blood. (Something about no one in the Operating Room bleeding to death.)

And now it's time for Thing #4, in a series of things that we were told from the outset "all have to go very well." Turns out my surgeon has a somewhat higher view of what was accomplished by Thing #3 than does my oncologist, who you may recall, considered Thing #3 only semi-successful. This last Monday we met with the surgeon to hear whether or not he is willing to take on the "resection," that is, to take out a chunk of my liver. Turns out he is.

Sometimes the winding turns are as unexpected as the actual destination. And sometimes all that is really unknown about the destination is the timing.

Late this Thursday afternoon, in the oncologist's examining room, last week's "Cloud of Not Knowing" was lifted, to reveal that in the first place, the cancerous lesions that have been loitering in my liver all through 2013 are still there, still just hanging around, despite the four Invasions of Intravenous Chemical Warfare that I signed up for in November and December. The Good News is that the lesions haven't grown. The Not-So-Good News is that neither have they shrunk.  Meanwhile, my New Bad News is that a pesky blood clot has managed to make its way into my lungs, and so I now am also a man with a Pulmonary Embolism. In my right lung. "The plot thickens." And what's that sort of man to do?