Friday 08/08/2025
First thing was the usual Friday muffin walk with Joanne. Then I had an hour to work on the AV document I’m writing. Then the Line Dance class.
A neighbor who had become a friend, Pam, has been away for months, living at The Forum and getting rehab from a series of physical problems. She was scheduled to return to our Skilled Nursing section today at noon. She had emailed me asking me to help get her computer set up again. She had a MacBook that she took with her, leaving behind accessories such as her backup drive. So at 11:30 I went to the third floor where her apartment was, and got a nurse to open the door for me, and took all her computer stuff, mouse, keyboard, backup drive, USB hub, from her desk and carted them across to the SN wing. Well, Pam wasn’t there yet. There was no desk in the room assigned to her, but a coffee table that would work, so I set up her stuff as best I could and went away.
Did some more writing and editing on my document, then went back to SN at 3:30. Pam was there, and her friend Judy. So now I could put her MacBook in place and get her complete setup on her coffee table all ready to use, and a backup started.
However she then told me that during her latest operation, to fix a bone in her ankle, they had discovered bone cancer, very likely metastasized breast cancer, stage 4. Not a secret, she said.
This hit me fairly hard. I’ve worked with Pam on organizing events, she chaired the Event Coordinator committee meetings for a couple of years and did that well. Somebody dies here about once a month, but until now it’s never been anyone I knew well — just another in-memoriam card on the desk in the lobby, oh well. Pam isn’t dead but it doesn’t look good for her. She’s debating whether, after a recent series of health problems and two operations, she wants to start the oncology circus of radiation and chemo.
I had an early supper and met with Joanne again at 6:45 to drive over to Stanford to attend a concert by the Stanford Chorus. That was the first time I had been inside the Bing Concert Hall since about 2016 I think. It was a pretty good concert of a variety of pieces by a very large (at least 100 people on the stage) and well-trained group. Joanne, thank goodness, is strong, bright and vigorous, as am I, pretty much. How long, I wonder…
Codgerville 