Did Harry Caray have ADHD?

I grew up in a northwest suburb of Chicago.
My paternal grandfather was a die hard Cubs fan, and he turned me into one as well. Sometimes, we’d take the Skokie Swift to Wrigley to catch a game.
And this was back in the day when Harry Caray was broadcasting live from Wrigley for WGN, and as a little girl, I always thought he was the craziest dude I’d ever seen or heard. He was weird, hilarious, not threatening, but . . . there was always something about him that made me feel a little . . . unsettled? Years later, when Will Ferrell started doing his recurring Harry Caray impersonation on SNL, I was delighted because Ferrell’s impersonation embodied exactly the “weirdness” I sensed, about Mr. Caray, as a kid. Not a “dark weirdness” just a random, unpredictable, consciousness weirdness. Feels familiar to me, somehow . . . (I’m smirking because, like, inside my brain, I am totally Harry Caray a la Will Ferrell.)

Hi, reader! How are you?

I have a PET scan bright and early tomorrow morning that will tell me if my cancer has spread or not.
I sure hope not.
I have had PET scans on a regular basis since December 2019, when I was first re-dx’d with breast cancer but unlike the first time I was dx’d with breast cancer, this time I am “incurable.”

But what, really, does this word “incurable” mean?
I am sitting up, breathing air, enjoying a cup of coffee on my day off from work.
I am just fine, reader.

And frankly, not to ruin your day, but if you’re reading this, you’re incurable, too, because you are mortal.

(To all my ghost, demigod, and undead readers, Buenos dias!)*
It just all makes me very nervous, ya know?
I’m a nervous girl. I was born nervous. Just ask my ma.
No seriously, you could ask her this, and she would say, “Yes. Allison (for she does not call me “Gruber”) has always run anxious.”
My mother also told me that when I was a baby I would inexplicably leave change (as in coin currency) everywhere, and I still do this now but less “inexplicably” because I’m a grown-ass-adult with a paycheck.

I don’t know what any of this means.

*I have seriously been trying to incorporate a little Spanish-speaking into my daily life. As much as I can, really. I want to learn this language so badly and the only way I’m going to do it is if I use it. Also, last week, a little girl tried to teach me a few Spanish phrases and then got tired of my inability to roll my r’s, put her little hand on my arm and said, “It’s okay, Grubie. You’ll get it someday.”

Fear has always been my main problem.
Even in times when, looking back, I had nothing to fear.
And what’s odd is that I can (by-and-large) manage my fear where it concerns the “brass tacks” matters of my life — PET scans, seating arrangements for kids living through a pandemic, that writing project I’ve been putting off . . .
And yet I simply cannot get a full and ever loving grip on the fear I feel toward the many unknowns. What will happen after this school year? After today? After the PET scan?

In a few weeks, I’m getting a full behavioral health “work up” on the advice of my doc. Old Me would have been appalled and offended by the very suggestion, “What? What? You think I’m crazy?!” New Me is just like “fine. Do it. I dare you. Figure out what is wrong with my brain marble. I’d really like to know at this juncture, too.”
Friends who’ve undergone a full behavioral/psych health eval (a surprising many) say it’s grueling but helpful.
Basically, my behavioral health docs are trying to figure out what my “primary” psychological issue is. They want to sort the PTSD from the capital-A-Anxiety from the ADHD.
And I’m sure they’ll find out something else is wrong with my brain.
Like “Oh, guess what, Gruber? You’re a bi-polar schizophrenic with acute tourettes. Here’s a script for you to take to CVS. Wear a mask. I heard it’s a real COVID circus up in there, and you do have stage iv cancer in addition to being schizophrenic.”
I’m not making fun of schizophrenia. Or tourettes. They both suck. I’ve known and loved people with these conditions. Some died of the former.
I think schizophrenia is the cancer of mental health disorders.
Schizophrenia is worse than breast cancer. I really believe it must be.
And I really know I do not have schizophrenia so all of that was hyperbole, but you know, reader, as well as I do they’re going to tell me some unexpected shit like “Did you know you have a rare clinical depression called . . .?”

Let’s just hope the PET scan doesn’t tell me some unexpected shit.
And if it does . . .
I will find a way forward.
I always do.

Saturday, I hung out at a friend’s house and watched birds (seriously) and she burned Copal for me. I did not know what copal was until I was Saturday-years-old.
And my friend wanted me to make clear, when I wrote or spoke of the copal, that she burnt real honest to God copal. I think it was . . . sap? Copal sap? Whatever it was, she brought it back from South America when she went there in the Old Times (pre-covid). And reader, have you ever smelled actual copal?
Ho-lee shit.
One of the best smells on earth.
Right up there, for me, with coffee and rain.
One of those earthy, subtle scents you can feel in your solar plexus.
New Me loves things like copal. And watching birds. And Wordle.
I’m not being flip.
Wordle is the shit.
Readers who aren’t in the know: WORDLE.

I did not miss a single goddamn day of work in the first two weeks of the new year, reader.
This is an accomplishment given the fact that the last two years my life has been a slo-mo plane crash . . . it’s been a dumpster fire.
No, that’s not true. It has not been a dumpster fire.
It’s been a gigantic fuselage burning and blacksmoking on the tarmac, about to blow, and this fuselage is my actual human existence.
Anyway!
I did not miss a single goddamn day of work in the first two weeks of the new year (my PET scan, tomorrow, will break my attendance streak), and I was proud of myself because I had, in fact, been trying new ways-of-being that might make it easier for me to do what I loved (teach, write) without actually killing myself (spiritually, mentally, physically).
And while there was teaching that happened in those first, surreal, two weeks of the new year in school, most of what I did, I think, was simply shepherd young humans through a Time No One Really Understands.
Rolling absences.
All covid-related.
Three kids fell ill, at my school, in a single morning.
And those were just students I personally witnessed falling ill.
My God. My God. My God.
I own “fun” KN95s now.
Like, I have a stash of differently patterned KN95s all over my home office . . .

You probably do, too, reader, but have you ever thought — as I often do — if you had placed 2018 You in your KN95 room, without context, wouldn’t she be absolutely perplexed and terrified?
I know 2018 Me would have been perplexed and terrified if shown a brief, context-less, clip of her 2022 American Life.
However, had she been shown the clip where she was lying in a chaise lounge looking at birds through binoculars, she would have just been perplexed because 2018 Me would have been like, “Bitch, you hate birds.”
As it turns out, I don’t hate birds.
I just used to say that to be funny and contrarian.
Being contrarian is fine, but can also be a sign of terminal immaturity.
If you are a chronic contrarian, I do hope you grow up.
It’s nicer on the bird side of the street. Especially at this pathetic juncture in human history.

By last Friday, I was feeling rough. I’m getting over this cold (that may have been covid, though I had a “negatory” test last week ahead of a late-afternoon med appt), and I just had an infusion last week, and I’m (FINALLY) back-on-my-‘Brance (which is not to be confused with back-on-my-bullshit, though the two usually do share a correlation).

And I was a little late getting in on Friday because I was on fumes, but I got myself in and when I walked downstairs and turned the corner toward my office/classroom, a little kid handed me a construction paper card (like in the Old Times!) and inside they thanked me for being a “kind” teacher, a “funny” teacher, a “patient” teacher, and a “passionate” teacher, and all the adjectives are in quotes because those are the kid’s words, not mine. And there were drawings that referenced little inside jokes I have with my kids. My students. My kids. One and the same.

Despite the fact that this teaching year has been the most difficult of my career (for reasons personal and political), I still have bonded with my students, “my kids.” Doesn’t matter that everything is weird and different to me. I still love those young humans. How could I not? Imagine being a public school student this year. Now imagine you’re a public school student this year in America. Now imagine you’re a public school student in America in MIDDLE SCHOOL. Junior high (for those of us of a certain vintage). Junior high was my least favorite time in life and education. How about you, reader? I mean, even middle schoolers in Atlantis hated middle school.
(No, I haven’t gone Atlantis-Bigfoot-Nessie ‘round the bend just yet.)
You want to see tenacity, bravery, grit? I’ll show you a middle schooler who shows up in their KN95 every morning to receive an education.

And I love and admire these beautiful young humans for these reasons.
This is hard for them, too. Differently difficult than perhaps this has been for the adults involved, and difficult nonetheless.
And then in the midst of all of this, a kid takes the time to make their teachers a card?
Don’t ever talk shit to me about the youth of America. Really. Don’t.

I am glad I have the day off.
I always get very scared ahead of a PET scan. Not for the procedure itself (all that shit is easy) but for what the scan might reveal. And honestly, reader, I sometimes have to wonder if the PET scans are worth all the emotional agony they cause in me.
And I know it’s to help me. Early detection = ostensibly better survival.
There’s that word again: survival.
I’ve been writing a phrase down in my journals, on the whiteboard on our refrigerator, on my hand: not merely survive.
I do not want to merely “survive.” I want to survive, AND . . .
The PET scan frightens me.
Not the procedure itself.
Last week, I told the lab tech at Ye Olde Cancre Centre that I’m the easiest patient for blood draws because I am so used to it. People have been jabbing at my arms since I was a kid. I’ve been sick on and off my whole fucking life. One frightening (to me, anyway) thing after the next. And I have learned what not to fear: needles, machines, physical pain. Those things are transitory and honestly, if you can feel pain, you’re alive.
There was a woman in Chicago who I knew peripherally through mutual friends.
She died young of metastatic breast cancer, and I think of her often, even though I didn’t really know her at all because she was a force until the bitter end of her unfairly short life. And in an interview I read once with her, she explained how she’d told her oncologist that she never wanted to hear “months, weeks, days to live” diagnoses.
And when I read the interview, I was about one year out from my own first round of chemo for stage ii breast cancer and I was struck, “I can do that? I can tell my doctor what I can and cannot bear to hear?”
And when I met my new oncologist here in Tucson, I said, “Can you please never tell me ‘how long I have to live’?” And then I burst into tears because I am a wreck in doctor’s offices. Seriously, do take a moment to send thoughts up for the poor healthcare professionals who have to deal with my tears and anxiety, and who always seem to deal with me kindly, gently, beautifully. (I’m not talking about you, OptumRx.)
My oncologist assured me she wouldn’t do this to me.
And so I thank my fellow gone-too-soon sister for this bit of advice.
No one gets to reduce me to a statistic. There are things data and PET scans cannot truly predict. There are matters that belong only to God.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and this means something to me, as I hope it does to you, also, reader — no matter from which country you hail. Dr. King was a gift from God. To America, but also to humankind more broadly.
He was a man. A mortal. Not a saint, wasn’t supposed to be, and he was a gift.
When I taught high school and college courses, I always tried to make room for “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Not just because it’s a brilliant piece of rhetoric, but because of the way, in that writing, King is able to effortlessly explain tremendously complex social conditions and make the case, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there are some man-made laws that are simply unjust, and that — most famously — “injustice anywhere . . .” Oh, and perhaps most importantly (at least I always thought so from a philosophical and moral perspective) King articulates, in that text, the true purpose of nonviolent direct action which I know is so often misunderstood by my fellow white Americans. Hey! White Americans! If you haven’t read “Letter from Birmingham Jail” please do that today. This is your homework.

Be good, hooligans.