I have been away from Street Prophets for sometime now - as my partner Othniel and I moved out of the big city to rural Arkansas to live for a year in an RV while building a lakeside house on property that had been his family's farm before Parks and Wildlife created a small recreation fishing lake in the 1950s.
About September 2011, the house was pretty much finished and we have mostly moved in - still much to be done - but still having a home again has been wonderful. We decorated for Christmas - I got to back the 1000+ cookies I had not been able to do for a couple of years.
As synchronicity would have it on January 6th, celebrated by some as Epiphany - Othniel's health had an epiphany of its own.
He developed a high fever - so we call the doctor and took him in and he was admitted to the hospital. Pneumonia and pancreatitis - since it had been three months since his last ultrasound of his liver for chronic Hepatitis C, they ordered a routine check while he was already in the hospital. They found two masses - ultimately identified as hepatic cancer. To keep this diary from turning to a medical case history - a brief sketch of the next month and a half:
CT scan, MRI, ambulance trip to St. Louis hospital for biopsy, no biopsy done there, schedule treatment, send him home to get more well from pneumonia and pancreatitis, once home we find that they can do the procedure at the hospital in Arkansas that we usually go to. We are home from St Louis less than a week - another fever develops - back to the hospital, IV antibiotics, I get adenovirus infection during this and am in the hospital taking care of him with a mask on to keep from spreading my germs - then I get a bacterial superinfection and go on antibiotics - at least we both have the same primary care doctor and he could treat me when he saw Othniel each day. (There is lots more General Hosptial material here but you get the gist).
Where we are now: HOME - which is the best news of all. The treatment they did for Othniel is called chemoembolization. They insert a catheter through the femoral artery and thread it up to the vessels in the liver closest to the tumor, inject beads with a toxin to cancer cells and then clot the vessel off to 1) hold the beads in location as long as possible and 2) to cut off the blood supply to the tumor. We won't know fully the effect of the treatment for 3-4 weeks when he returns to have another scan done. We are hopeful that because the ultrasound was done earlier that it would have been done otherwise the early detection may help. Five years is about the maximum range mentioned by anyone at this point and it may be less.
There is nothing quite like an event like this that focuses your mind on what is important in life setting attainable goals. We are working on those now. Othniel has advanced study in theology and had completed a master of divinity several years ago when he returned to the practice of law. We had both had a desire to belong to spiritual community and that aspect had been missing from our lives. Finding a gay affirming church in rural America is more than a small challenge. My upbringing in Church of Christ had nearly completely soured me on any organized religion - still I had left some small longing in me I could never quite identify - which I think was one of the things that drew me towards Othniel as a partner. He helped me deconstruct dogma and internalize type of spirituality that I had not been in touch with before. For himself, he calls that belief his connection to the infinite.
As I have worked on this path I have often considered the development of science over the centuries and how often in the past something was thought to be nailed down as an immutable law of nature, that man had mastered all knowledge of the universe and nothing was left to discover. We may now realize the silliness of the belief in an earth-centered universe, or the idea that earth must be flat because it appears so. It is then I feel the frailty of human perception of the infinite and have come to welcome the wee crack in the door of certainty that, as unlikely as something may seem to me rationally, belief, hope, faith, intangibles, indeed the infinite are things I would prefer to have left open.
We have found an Episcopal church about 40 miles from us that may be a good fit - I think it will give us a place to find some of that contact with the infinite that we have been wanting.
I know there are some that follow our adventures on Facebook - but Street Prophets was the first online community I had ever been a part of and wanted to return to report for those we may have lost touch with otherwise. Othniel's quilt still goes with him to every hospital stay - and we are often asked about it and I read the messages over and over. We are still on a journey.