The Loss Of November

 

I basically wasted three weeks in November.  I planned for doing seminar in Adelaide, the perfect excuse to finally go to Australia.  I set up side trips, coordinated hotels, and flights.  Then I got back an "abnormal" stress echo test result and had to cancel everything.  Well, truthfully I could have just said "Fuck you guys, I'm going", but when it was pointed out to me that I could very well be the guy that had a cardiac event five hours into a fifteen hour flight, it didn't seem logical to push it.  "Sorry everybody" would not have smoothed everything over on a jumbo jet filled with people having to make an emergency landing at the US military base in Guam as I heart attacked my way off the plane.  

The procedure itself that I had wasn't that debilitating.  What killed three weeks for me was the dread and racing mind that came with not knowing what was about to happen after they got into my veins and monkeyed around.  It's all well and good when you are sitting in a doctor's office playing it cool when they say, "Well, we will get in there and see what's going on, and if I see something I can fix, I'm just going to fit it, OK?  And if it's really fucked up, we are just going to wheel you right into surgery."  Meanwhile I'm sitting there nodding my head along like "Mmmm hmmm.  Yes.  Mmmmm hmmm." like we are talking about some kind of gutter repair at my house.  This situation was not in my plan.

Now I'm not an idiot.  My body is a car with a lot of mileage on it.  The car is going to need repairs when it's over 100,000 miles like mine.  I get that on a conceptual basis.  However when someone is saying "you got a problem with your heart and you can have a heart attack" that has a direct impact on your Master of Wine study habits.  I found it to be impossible to do any of the tedious shit in the program like worry about volatile acidity prevention and plant diseases when this little voice starts to whisper in my head "Psst.... they are going to look at your circulatory system and it's going to be REALLY fucked up.  You're going to get a horrible surgery where you'll have 100 tubes coming out of you and a wound across your chest like you took a battleaxe in a Crusades skirmish.  Why are you pretending not to think about that instead of this wine shit?".  

I would spend four hours on a one hour essay trying to keep focus long enough to write a couple paragraphs before googling "life expectancy after XYZ diagnosis" as I ran through every potential scenario.  By the time I finally wheeled into the Clinic I had already gone through all the stages of grief and just wanted for the fucking thing to be over.  The event of the procedure itself was nowhere near as bad as my obsessing over it on the lead up.  Now I am a week past it, and it's like it never happened.  Logically I knew that was the likely scenario, but I still couldn't power past the inner voices to make progress over the last few weeks.  Just like that, I lost a month.  

One of the things that this whole ordeal did leave me with is a much more laissez faire attitude about the MW as a whole.  Leading up to the exam last year, all I wanted to do was not embarrass myself.  It was an anxiety based study plan.  I'm in a totally different place now.  I'm all about filling holes in my knowledge now more for me than anything else.  I'm taking on essay subjects where I feel like "Hey, I don't know very much about that.  I wonder how that works?" as opposed to "Holy fuck I'm going to look like an asshole if I get a question on that in the exam."  I am going to do the best that I can, and if I fail the test, who the fuck cares?  It's only a wine exam put forth by the English Wine Education Establishment who have different values and markers for success than I do.  Don't get me wrong, I want to pass it.  It's just that if I don't I'm not worried that it marks me as some sort of failure.  

It's cold, snowy and shitty and it's only December 2nd.  This has the makings of an Old School NE Ohio soul crushing winter.  If I get the stamp of approval on my doctor's appt tomorrow, the first thing I am going to do is book a late winter flight to Australia so I can wander around Barossa, dive with Great White sharks, and knock back some Claire Valley riesling while somebody calls me "mate".  I'm stuck going to Napa for seminar now.  Well, Santa Rosa actually, which makes it a little worse.  I'll head out there in February, Australia in March and somewhere interesting in April.  I'm not going to be around forever, and I'm not going to get too many shots at this exam.  Time to hit the books again.  I better make the most out of everything.

Cheers.