Several readers have emailed me personally, asking that, through this blog, I keep them informed of my cancer treatment and general health.   I suspect that these requests come from a genuine desire to know, from people who I know really care, but I don’t think I can find it in myself to do what they are asking.

Although I try to sprinkle the posts in this blog with personal anecdotes, it has never really been about me.  The majority of the readers of this blog don’t know me personally, so why should they care?   If I felt as though my trials through this treatment, wherever they take me, would be truly helpful for someone else, perhaps that would be a different story.

I continue to work on the blog when and as I am able because to some degree it serves as a distraction.   The root ideas for each post were ideas that came to me a while ago, before this illness, and most of the posts that you will be seeing are simply a matter of editing things I had started in the past.   The simple fact is that many of the readers have told me they enjoy what I do, and I suspect that has something to do with the fact that I enjoy writing the posts.   I have been told that throughout the ordeal of chemotherapy and radiation, I should try to do things of which I am capable and that bring me pleasure.   So, in that sense, writing this blog when I am able is a form of therapy.

And also, frankly, describing the details of my treatment and particularly my response to treatment can be gruesome and depressing.   I am fighting falling into a deep pit of depression and despair every moment, and I don’t want to broadcast that.   I am also ashamed that I feel that I am not better able to handle the situation, or at least haven’t found a decent path through what has been a terrifying wilderness for me, constantly struggling and often losing the battle against feelings of sheer panic and terror.  I struggle mightily to find my “pilot in command,” but he hasn’t shown up too often.  Those are the bad hours, but there are some good hours too, and hopeful I will be able, over time, to increase the ratio of good hours to bad.

So, as is typical of me, I just did what I started out saying I would not do, but I wanted to respond to those who requested updates on my health.   If you know me personally, email me directly and I will put you on a list that a good friend has been using to circulate updates for me.  Clearly, whatever the outcome, it is going to be a long haul, so in the interim I hope you can find some pleasure in the posts that follow.

I do a considerable amount of public speaking, typically on matters pertaining to psychology, and have always said to myself (because no one else was interested) that I don’t like to prepare too much.   Too much preparation leads to an awkward presentation as I find myself trying to remember the information I studied instead of connecting in the moment with the audience.

But at the same time I know that lack of preparation can be deadly.  I read a report the other day of how two pilots took off early in the morning from their home airport, and without having an engine failure or any other obvious problem, the airplane they were flying veered gently to the right and slowly descended into the ground causing a fire and the death of both occupants.   Any guesses?  The NTSB found that the pilots neglected to remove the rudder gust lock prior to takeoff.   The gust lock is something that prevents the rudder from flopping around in the wind on the ground; it is also something that one routinely removes during the preflight inspection.

Over a decade ago, in my primary training, my instructor told me that 85% of accidents could be traced to an inadequate preflight inspection. I didn’t take him too seriously.  It seems as though everything causes 85% of accidents, so I found that number particularly hard to believe.

A typical preflight inspection involves checking the airplane to make sure everything is where it is supposed to be and that there are no hinges missing, no water in the fuel, no leaks, the tires are inflated, nothing is obstructing the control surfaces (such as a gust lock), all the snakes are out of the cockpit—you get the picture.  While technically not part of an inspection, checking the weather is another part of preflight preparation, and I suppose when added with pilots who depart without adequate fuel, the 85% number my instructor recited may be entirely plausible.

When departing anywhere, doing some sort of preflight is probably a good idea.  If my brother remembered to do a preflight when he left to go home the other day he wouldn’t have left his jacket in my car, and if each day I remembered to do a preflight before I left home in the morning I probably would not have to return to the house for my keys or cell phone so often.

There’s an old Hasidic story about how the philtrum (that little crease beneath our noses) comes about.   When we are conceived, the story goes, God gives us all the knowledge in the universe.   When we are born, God touches us just beneath the nose and we forget everything.   We then spend the rest of our lives trying to remember what we already know.

I am not so sure about the part in which God gives us all the knowledge in the universe, but I can sure attest to the difficulty I have remembering any of the knowledge I read in textbooks.  The fact is, I have done an awful lot of homework in my time, read a lot of books, known and learned from my clients and colleagues, and I continue to read and learn new stuff every day.

Perhaps that is where I delude myself into thinking that too much preparation gets in the way of a successful presentation.   In reality, I undoubtedly prepare a whole lot more than I admit, and then “forget” what I know in order to appear to be remembering things spontaneously.    All that preparation is just what you do in order to do a good preflight, and a good preflight just may prevent you from forgetting to remove your gust lock.

—Written August, 2015

We are often taught that the best way to face stressful situations is to face them head on, with both eyes wide open.   That certainly works when the stresses are small, but sometimes life can seem so unwieldy and out of control that “head on” just doesn’t work.   Our bodies adapt to trauma by initially shutting down, becoming numb, and then titrating the return of feelings when we have built up enough strength to handle them.

When I originally wrote the above paragraph, and many of the paragraphs to follow, I was thinking about the case of the human eye.   But now, after my cancer diagnosis, the human eye becomes a trivial metaphor for the assaults that we humans can and do encounter.

Once the eye adapts to darkness, a flash of bright light is experienced as a trauma.   Pupils that had been wide open to accept as much light as possible in the dark instantly constrict to protect the retina from damage, and just like an emotionally traumatic experience, it takes a much longer time for pupils to adapt to the darkness and widen after exposure to such harsh light than it took to shut down.

For pilots flying at night, this loss of dark adaptation can be particularly harmful, because it can take up to half an hour for pupils to return to its adapted state.   So pilots learn certain “tricks” to prevent this from happening.   One of these is simply to never shine bright light in the cockpit at night, so pilots use a flashlight with a red lens over it to reduce brightness to a minimum.   And they typically turn all panel lights and anything required to read instruments to their lowest possible setting.

But there is another simple trick that some pilots use when flying at night. When faced with the need to turn on a bright light, pilots will simply close one eye instantly so that they lose their dark adaptation only in that one eye.   Once the source of the bright light disappears, they open the closed eye that has not experienced the bright light.   The pupil in that eye remains dilated, making the re-adaptation back to darkness much quicker and easier.

When I first heard the news of my cancer, it was all too much for me to take.  I have had a blessed life, one that I have clearly become too attached to.   I typically wake up excited about the day ahead of me, because I love my work, my family, and my environment.  But the diagnosis, and the accompanying look in the eyes of the physicians who seemed to stare in disbelief at the tumor in my tongue and throat, was too blinding of a light.  Then, scheduling one test after another, most days brought only worsening news.

I immediately thought of Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief, and it was easy to identify the first stage of shock.   It was all too much for me to handle.  The shock moves into denial, as one or both eyes close.  In the ensuing days, even weeks now, I still retain the ridiculous idea that all these physicians are somehow wrong, that all their tests are being misread, and—as the kind doctor in Armenia told me when I first discovered the lump in my tongue, “it’s only a cyst.”

The shock and denial must eventually give way if one is going to move forward. I do feel angry but I am grateful that anger is the least of what I am feeling.   I am struggling to open up one eye at a time and find a way to face this, to feel the intense love I am so fortunate to have around me.    Whatever the outcome, I am trying to find some dignity, to let go of attachments, to find some grace.

Every once in a while, a pilot nails a really difficult landing.  It’s a wonderful feeling to end a flight with a gentle float above the runway, wheels imperceptibly kissing the ground like a butterfly landing on a cheek.  Doing so can make a pilot feel confident, but confidence can be a double-edged sword.

The most challenging landings come as a result of trying to land in unfavorable weather conditions.   The most unfavorable of these are strong, gusty crosswinds, winds that come at you sideways and try to push you anywhere but where you want to go.   When they are variable and they gust, which is to say that they change both speed and direction unpredictably, it can feel like you are trying to wrestle a frenetic beast that is trying to kill you.

To do it well, you can’t be a brute.  Crosswind landings need to be finessed, for the simple reason that if you over-control an airplane and the wind drops out suddenly the end result can be ugly.  So you push gently, then harder, then relax, and tease and seduce the airplane gently to the ground.

One of my best landings was in Henderson, Nevada.  Winds were measured at about 15 to 20 miles an hour, but they were coming almost 45 degrees from the runway and were gusting to 30 miles an hour.  Strong winds that come right down the runway are typically not a problem, and in fact are desirable (unless they are gusty), because the airplane touches the ground at a much slower groundspeed.  But the larger the angle between the runway and the winds, the greater the winds will push the airplane away from its intended destination.

In practicing crosswind landings, the most widely accepted approach is called the side slip, in which the pilot puts the wing down on the side of the wind and lines the airplane up with the runway by using rudder.   The lowered wing corrects for the airplane’s drift while the rudder keeps the nose aligned with the runway.

The strength and direction of the crosswind in Henderson was such that putting the right aileron down (lowering the wing) couldn’t stop the airplane from drifting considerably to the left of the runway, even though I began my final turn early.   In order to make the centerline, I had to turn steeply and use right rudder instead of the left rudder I would normally use in a slip.   In other words, I had to fully turn into the wind while descending to the ground.   It was as though I had to create a separate runway in my mind toward which I was going to land straight ahead.  In fact, had the runway not been so wide, landing on a taxiway would have been a good option.

I reached the ground without experiencing the typical ground effect that would normally cause the airplane to float above the runway.   In fact, the main wheels touched down firmly over the centerline and the wind immediately pushed the nose on to the centerline, at which point I fully deflected the rudder to keep the airplane rolling as straight as I could.

I imagined the folks in the control tower watching the whole thing and applauding, which I am sure didn’t happen.  Neither of my passengers were pilots, so they seemed to have no idea what I had just accomplished, but the little Greek chorus of pilot homunculi in my brain were thrilled.

Now, that was a situation in which the controls were neither wrestled nor nudged.  It was the pilot version of Jonathan Swift’s “Carve to all but just enough, let them neither starve nor stuff.”

The deeper truth is that a large part of what occurred was plain dumb luck.  Winds were gusty, and a falling out of the gust at any point just above the runway could have really ruined my day.  The wind stayed steady enough for just long enough for me to make it to the runway.   I was not monitoring my ground speed, but I kept my airspeed up just in case the wind dropped out.   Because the winds were so strong, I undoubtedly touched the ground at a very low groundspeed, which made the landing much smoother.

The lesson in all of this, I believe, is to not be seduced into thinking that skill is operating when in fact it is luck.   I had control of the airplane, but so did the wind.   I was confident in my ability to land that day, but without recognizing the contribution that the momentarily steady crosswind made it is tempting to overestimate my own abilities.  Every landing is different because every wind is different, and while I do believe that each of us are capable of inching toward mastery, there can never be ultimate mastery of the thing we cannot control, that thing that Shakespeare called the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the thing that for purposes of this post I will considerably less poetically call the crosswinds of life.

     If I were born with the name Clyde Cessna, I might consider naming my airplane a Cessna.   Works a lot better than calling it a Clyde.  If I were named Walter Beech, I might choose a name such as “Beechcraft” for my wings.   William Boeing did fairly well naming an aircraft company after himself, as did Howard Hughes, James McDonnell and Donald Douglas, and a few others.

But if my name were Alan Klapmeier I might prefer to choose a name such as Cirrus for my airplane, which is what he did.  And if my name were Wolf Hoffmann, I might choose to call my airplane a Wolf.   Instead he was bold enough to call his company Hoffmann Flugzeugbau, but the aircraft he manufactured he called the Dimona.  To better suit North American tastes, he switched two letters and added one more, thus changing the name of his airplanes (and his company) to Diamond.   I guess he thought Americans liked Diamonds.  Perhaps he was right; I bought one, and so did a lot of other people.

My father was a salesman most of his life, and his territory covered the South.  There are a couple of different versions of the story, but the one I remember was that his boss said to him “the first thing you need to do is change your name, because no one will be able to remember it and no one will ever call you back.”   So he promptly traded his first name—Morton, for his last name, and contracted his last name to “Hal,” and never looked back.   My very first social security card, as a matter of fact, reads “Ira Morton.”

If I had ever doubted the veracity of my father’s story (which I did), all that disappeared when I became a graduate student in Murray, Kentucky.   I had changed my name back to its original “Heilveil,” but southern politeness prevented the undergraduates from referring to elders by their first name.   It was excruciating listening to them try to pronounce my last name, and I am convinced to this day that it is impossible to pronounce with a southern dialect.  As I listened to the students struggle, I kept begging them to “just call me Ira.”   But rather than appear disrespectful they preferred to courageously go down trying, ending up mangling the name altogether. Eventually I became known as “Doctor Hao….” which then trailed off into a mumble that sounded as if they were speaking a Chinese dialect of Hindi.

Now, it turns out, some researchers in the U.S. and Australia, publishing in the prestigious Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, have performed experiments in which people with more pronounceable last names, such as Sherman and Jenkins, were judged more positively than those with difficult-to-pronounce names, such as Farquharson and Leszczynska.    They could have easily have used “Heilveil” and come up with the same results.   They also found that people with simpler names were more likely to be voted into political office, and that lawyers with easier sounding nameswere promoted faster within law firms.

Part of the reason I switched my last name back to its original tongue-twister was because I had not only been made fun of as a child for my crazy last name (most of the kids called me “havalaval,” which for some reason they thought was funny), but I really took it on the chin when the name was changed to Morton.   Although changing ethnic-sounding names was a common practice back then, kids look for anything they can find to tease, and so my father was accused of being in the witness protection program, or trying to escape the reaches of the law, by changing it in the first place.   Stories about my dad being a salesman in the south didn’t fly.

Had my dad been alive for me to tell him the results of the recent research, he would have really appreciated it, although he seemed to wear his business name quite comfortably.  Or, more likely, upon hearing the advantages of having an easier to pronounce last name, he probablywould have smiled and said, “Tell me something I don’t already know!”

Perhaps, if I were ever to invent my own airplane (who knows?), I might just call it a Morton.   Not too shabby, eh?